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By Christopher de Bellaigue
$27.99
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Flickr / nolifebeforecoffee (CC-BY)
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The Washington Post’s Dana Priest has another phone book’s worth of terrifying revelations about our national security/police/prison state. One that really chills given the FBI’s track record is the “vast repository” the Bureau is building that ... (more)
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Taiwanese satire machine NMA World Edition has cranked out another timely animated play on a story making headlines over here in the U.S., and once again, we end up looking pretty silly. Surprise!
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Flickr / Swerz
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Google is back in the privacy hot seat, as Britain’s privacy commission says it will once again investigate the kind and amount of personal information that the Internet search giant gathered from private Wi-Fi networks as its Google Street View cars patrolled.
Posted on Oct 24, 2010
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Flickr / Lars Willem Veldkampf
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The immigration debate in France just got a bit hairier. After the government publicly rounded up and expelled more than 10,000 Roma in this year alone, French authorities have announced they will begin to use a biometric fingerprinting system to discourage those who were expelled from coming back.
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Flickr / ONE/MILLION
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Never mind Joe Arpaio’s amazingly xenophobic and illegal policing practices concerning immigrants: An internal memo in the Maricopa County’s sheriff’s office is alleging that “America’s Toughest Sheriff” helped conduct politically motivated investigations and surveilled Arpaio’s own campaign rivals.
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AP / David Maung
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Who would have thought the comprehensive immigration reform promised by President Obama would include a whopping $600 million for increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border for surveillance technologies and 1,000 more Border Patrol agents?
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Flickr / courtesy anarchosyn.
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By G.W. Schulz, CIR —
At midnight on July 15, Arizona’s Department of Public Safety pulled the plug on dozens of speed cameras that criss-crossed state highways, part of a widely loathed program to catch traffic violators and control erratic driving. This at a time when every other government agency around the nation is steadily adopting as many enhanced security technologies as possible.
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Collage based on photo by Flickr user bgilliard (CC-BY-SA)
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Citing the specter of terrorism, an appeals court overturned a decision that would have forced New York City to turn over documents detailing the surveillance of demonstrators, street performers and other ne’er-do-wells who may have threatened the 2004 Republican convention ... and our national security, of course.
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Fake news by Andy Borowitz —
According to the head of the domestic spying operation, China decided to scrap its elaborate array of spy satellites, eavesdropping devices and closed-circuit surveillance cameras after recognizing that Facebook put them all to shame.
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U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement
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A recently implemented immigration program in Oakland subjects anyone booked at local jails to a fingerprint check to determine if they are in the country illegally. The deportation scheme is part of a $1.4 billion federal program that is supposed to be running in every jail in the country within a few years.
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U.S. Department of Homeland Security
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Igniting criticism by privacy advocates around the world, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is in the process of installing 450 full-body X-ray scanning machines in the country’s airports. The machines show images of hidden objects, as well as passengers’ bodies through their clothes.
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Flickr / The White House
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The president has signed a one-year extension of several provisions in the Patriot Act that would have expired Sunday, renewing the government’s authority to spy on phones and seize records and property of citizens.
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flickr / deneyterrio
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Facebook has come under fire more than once for its execs’ creative interpretations of the term privacy, and now the megasite’s fresh-faced CEO Mark Zuckerberg has drummed up a very interesting line of argument to justify his stance on the issue. What you might see as violations of personal privacy, Zuckerberg and his team view as “reflect[ing] the current social norms.” Oh.
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flickr.com / andersdenkend
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With 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain and not enough people to observe them all, a company called Internet Eyes has come up with a solution: reward volunteer “spies” with cash prizes to watch streaming camera footage and blow the whistle on evildoers.
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Original: crd! CC-BY-SA
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Most mobile phones have tiny GPS chips that do things like give directions or route your call to the right city when you dial 911. It turns out that law enforcement can ask phone companies for GPS info that reveals exactly where a phone owner is, and, according to a disturbing piece of audio making the rounds, the cops asked Sprint-Nextell for the locations of customers 8 million times in one year. (continued and video)
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infowars.net
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A judge has rejected a challenge to FISA brought by activists abroad who fear that their communications may be tapped by the U.S. government. The judge said fear is not enough to warrant a change in the law, and that challenges need to make explicit claims of unlawful surveillance. The question remains: How does one know he is being surveilled?
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Original: Flickr / kiwanja
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It turns out George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretap program wasn’t just illegal, it was pretty useless. A new report by the inspectors general of the agencies charged with catching the evildoers determined that many agents were flummoxed by the vague information coming out of the overly secretive program, and those who weren’t couldn’t demonstrate how it was helpful.
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Wikimedia Commons/YooTube
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Former President Bush’s infamous warrant-free domestic surveillance plan, instituted after 9/11 to monitor potentially suspicious communication between parties within and outside of the U.S., has deservedly gotten a bad rap—and it’s about to get worse, thanks to a congressionally mandated report released Friday.
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By Amy Goodman — Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
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Flickr/mikecolvin82
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This week in surveillance: The New York Times revealed that the NSA has been spying on the e-mails of millions of Americans, including ex-President Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, China has backed down from installing mandatory security software, while Iran tries to clamp down on communications, and Britain plans to track every phone call, e-mail and text message in Britain. Yikes!
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eyeborg.com
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A Canadian filmmaker is combining his love of science fiction with his alarm over the ramped-up surveillance in his native Toronto by putting a specially fitted Web cam into his prosthetic eye—he lost his own in a childhood accident—and filming everything he sees.
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By William Pfaff — Justice Department documents that demonstrate the Bush administration’s view of the president’s constitutional power in a “state of war” tell us things we suspected but didn’t want to know.
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aclu.org
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The Justice Department has released nine secret memos and opinions written by the Office of Legal Counsel that authorized some of the Bush administration’s unlawful national security policies.
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By Eugene Robinson — In his eyes, there’s “no such thing as short-term history.” It’s true that some presidencies look different after a few decades. But it’s also true that presidential acts can have immediate consequences—and Bush’s eight years are seen as a nadir that will take years to recover from.
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AP photo / Craig Ruttle
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By Chris Hedges — The free market and globalization, promised as the route to worldwide prosperity, have been exposed as a con game. We will either find our way out of this mess by embracing an uncompromising democratic socialism or we will continue to be fleeced and impoverished by our bankrupt elite.
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By Joe Conason — To understand the philosophy of government that Dick Cheney brought to Washington over the past seven years, it is most instructive to see “Frost/Nixon,” with Frank Langella’s remarkable reanimation of Tricky Dick for a generation that never knew him.
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White House / Eric Draper
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By Eugene Robinson — The history-be-my-judge interviews that President Bush and Vice President Cheney have been giving recently help me understand their choices—but also reinforce my confident belief, and my fervent hope, that history will throw the book at them.
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google.org/flutrends
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While worries over Google’s “big brother” surveillance practices still worry many, a softer, more health-conscious side of the search giant is partnering with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The tool, “Google Flu Trends,” uses the aggregate regional data obtained from flu-related searches to predict epidemics weeks before they can be diagnosed by traditional measures.
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AP photo / Carolyn Kaster
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By Elliot D. Cohen — Sen. John McCain’s ideological ties to the Bush-Cheney administration have mostly passed beneath the radar of the mainstream media, but if McCain loses the presidential race to Barack Obama, his neoconservative legacy could erupt into the open with a force that should not be underestimated.
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By Eugene Robinson — Can any Republican candidate claim with a straight face to represent the party of small government? For that matter, can any Republican candidate plausibly explain what the party is supposed to stand for these days?
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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By Bruce Fein — Would the Republican VP nominee vote for herself? During her debate with Joe Biden, Sarah Palin said “we have to fight for” and “protect” our freedom, but her party and the policies she seems to support have crippled American liberty.
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thirdphaze.com
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Just what kind of interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would allow U.S. National Security Agency linguists to eavesdrop on Americans’, er, pillow talk? That’s the charge being leveled by more than one such NSA interpreter who worked at an NSA listening station at Fort Gordon, Ga.
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A lobbying powerhouse with an emphatically pro-Republican political action committee is pounding Democratic Senate candidates for supporting legislation that would make it easier for workers to unionize. The ads portray Al Franken in Minnesota and Tom Allen of Maine as backing Big Brother-style surveillance of American workers.
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fbi.gov
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The Justice Department was dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on Friday on a new set of rules designed to help FBI agents zero in on potential national security threats within the U.S., allowing them to gather information in public places—and even conduct interviews—without identifying themselves.
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AP photo / Matt Rourke
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By Chris Hedges — St. Paul is a window into our future. It is a future where constitutional rights mean nothing and where lawful dissent is branded a form of terrorism.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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It’s reassuring to know that when Alberto Gonzales was our nation’s attorney general, he schlepped highly classified documents to his home in Virginia in an unlocked briefcase. Oops! Also, once he’d toted them home, Gonzales didn’t put them in a safe for extra protection because he “couldn’t remember the combination.” Fiddlesticks!
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By Marie Cocco — Steven Wax’s new book provides an insider’s view of some of the most hideous practices our country has allowed since the 9/11 attacks. And that’s without giving accounts of torture and abuse of detainees.
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Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges warns in an L.A. Times Op-Ed that “If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday—giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans—is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.”
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Executive Office of the President of the United States
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You know a legislative compromise is one-sided when the AP headline announcing its passage reads “Senate Bows to Bush.” Democratic advocates of the new FISA bill, passed by the Senate on Wednesday, are still trying to explain what they got in exchange for rolling back a few civil liberties and burying some of the president’s abuses. When they figure it out, someone, somewhere, will surely be listening.
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There’s a lot more to object to in the new FISA bill than just retroactive immunity for the telecoms. It seems that the regulation of surveillance is still hopelessly out of date. How is a court supposed to handle complex algorithms and countless terabytes of data? Truthdig contributor Elliot Cohen warns that the new law could conceivably allow the theft of the 2008 presidential election.
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Flickr / BohPhoto
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Barack Obama says he was erroneously “tagged as being on the left,” a reputation that served him well during the primaries. Now that he has the nomination secured, the candidate is trying to reinvent himself as a centrist. Take his endorsement Tuesday of one of George W. Bush’s signature policies, the “faith-based initiative.”
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Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights has the goods on the new FISA bill, which offers retroactive immunity to the telecoms and allows the government to spy on Americans without a warrant.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak, file
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By Chris Hedges — Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers.
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Democrats and Republicans cut a deal in Congress on Thursday to rewrite controversial surveillance legislation. It’s being billed as a compromise, but civil rights advocates are groaning over concessions including virtual immunity for telecommunications companies and the ability to spy on Americans without a warrant.
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time.com
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As if 100 years in Iraq wasn’t enough, a top adviser to John McCain claims that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee supports and believes lawful Bush’s infamous warrantless wiretapping program.
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theactorsgang.com
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By Kasia Anderson — It’s usually a reliable sign that a once-original idea has been utterly stripped of its impact by the time it becomes the premise for a reality television show. Not so for “Big Brother.” Several seasons of that particular televised train wreck have come and gone, and besides, Apple Computer also cashed in on the whole surveillance paranoia theme ages ago. Big Brother is watching. We get it.
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By Marie Cocco — Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.
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boston.com
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At the request of House Republicans, Congress on Thursday held a closed-door session to debate the FISA warrantless eavesdropping bill. The last time a closed-door session occurred was in 1983, when lawmakers convened in secret to discuss clandestine U.S. support of Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua.
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