December 2012
10 posts
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Government seeks to shut down NSA wiretapping... →
Warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency began as a Bush-era program in October 2001; in 2008, the government essentially allowed the practice in the FISA Amendments Act. The same year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed lawsuits challenging the surveillance.
At a hearing today in San Francisco federal court, the debate over whether NSA can continue its practices heated...
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5 Unbelievably Creepy Surveillance Tactics →
Since the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties depends on high levels of public apathy, some of the most dangerous privacy breaches take place incrementally and under the radar; if it invites comparisons to Blade Runneror Orwell, then someone in the PR department didn’t do their job. Meanwhile, some of the biggest threats to privacy, like insecure online data or iPhone GPS tracking,...
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Exposing the US military's 'diabolical' drug... →
It’s a mad scientist narrative that seems perfect for a Kubrick film or Jacob’s Laddersequel, though Ketchum’s experiments had very real consequences, leaving some soldiers with lasting psychological conditions. Now, a group of former subjects has filed a class action suit against the federal government, describing its experiments as “diabolical.” The 81-year-old...
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California law enforcement moves to buy drones →
Since Congress passed legislation in February ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track the approval of unmanned aerial vehicles—more colloquially known as drones—for use by law enforcement agencies, police and sheriff departments across the country have been scrambling to purchase the smaller, unarmed cousins of the Predator and Reaper drones which carry out daily sorties...
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Police Have the Scary Capability to Track Wherever... →
The NYPD is but one of a growing number of local and state police agencies throughout the country engaged in the non-stop tracking of car license plates. Most troubling, the data captured through license plate reader (LPR) and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) programs are being integrated with other personal data to provide the security state with ever more detailed profiles of...
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No warrant, no problem: How the government can... →
The US government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your e-mails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena. Usually you won’t even be notified. The Senate last...
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The Police State and Your Texts: Police Groups Vie... →
thepoliticalfreakshow:
As Congress mulls changes to an outdated law intended to protect electronic privacy, a group of law enforcement officers is lobbying for a provision that would erode privacy by requiring that text messages be saved and stored for at least two years. According to CNET, police and prosecutors’ groups say they have increasingly come to rely on text messages as evidence in...
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NSA Whistleblower: Everyone in US under digital... →
RT talks to William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades. Virtual privacy in US, Petraeus affair and whistleblowers’ odds in fight against the authorities are among key topics of this exclusive interview.
November 2012
4 posts
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Sexual privacy under threat in a surveillance... →
Because of the Patriot Act, any of us, if we annoy or threaten powerful interests, can have our e-mails read without our knowledge. Any of us can be subject to a search that could lead from one e-mail correspondent to another until the National Security Agency or the FBI, which have both confirmed that they have invested heavily in domestic surveillance of social networks, find something...
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Senator Pushes Bill Allowing Warrantless Reading... →
Talk about a bait and switch. CNET is reporting that Senator Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.), who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has revised legislation he proposed previously that originally claimed to protect e-mail privacy of American citizens. That proposal has been rewritten, and now allows for law enforcement officials to read your e-mails without a warrant.
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Judge to Police: Feel Free to Invade Citizens'... →
In a closely watched case, the federal judge ruled that the Constitutional rights of two defendants — Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana of Green Bay, WI — were not violated when federal agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) invaded their private property without warrant to plant wireless surveillance cameras. The judge also ruled that the collected evidence...
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October 2012
8 posts
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TV Makes Americans Passive and Accepting of... →
Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi claim that TV addiction is “no mere metaphor” but is, at least psychologically, similar to drug addiction. Utilizing their Experience Sampling Method (in which participants carried a beeper and were signaled six to eight times a day at random to report their activity), Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found that almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported...
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Man Faces up to 15 Years in Prison for Facebook... →
Marine Also Imprisoned Without Trial The case echoes the story of U.S. Marine Brandon Raub. After honorably serving his country on tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Raub, 26, had grown disillusioned with the U.S. federal government, and like Mr. Michael took to posting vague, frustrated, incendiary commentaries to Facebook. Those posts led to local authorities and federal agents in...
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SCOTUS's Warrantless Wiretapping Punt is a Win for... →
Both Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney support throwing out due process (warrants) in cases where national security is viewed to be at risk — a policy first put in place by Republican President George W. Bush (with bipartisan support from America’s two ruling parties) in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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NDAA: The Biggest Election Issue No One's Talking... →
You don’t have to live alone in the woods, reading issues of Guns and Ammo and co-writing your manifesto with beard lice, to be terrified about the state of basic freedoms in America today. Given the counterterrorism provisions in the fairly recent National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), we currently live in a country where the government can pick up American citizens and...
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Kids Tagged With RFID Chips? The Creepy New... →
Schools across the country are adopting a variety of different tools to monitor students both in school and outside school. Among these tools are RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags embedded in school ID cards, GPS tracking software in computers, and even CCTV video camera systems.
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How the Camera On Your Cellphone Can Be Captured... →
As Kade Ellis of Privacy SOS and the ACLU reported, a security expert says that everyone who was at Occupy Wall Street had their cell phone surveyed by the NYPD. “[T]he identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known...
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Senate Panel: Homeland Security Data Centers... →
The Senate concludes that when all the privileged details of the investigations were considered, there was no sign that the pricey data centers were successful at fighting any known terrorist plot. So what did the data centers accomplish? According to the panel the legacy is mostly negative. They claim the Fusion centers — whose objective is ostensibly to share national intelligence...
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Government Sprayed Radioactive Chemicals on Poor... →
In 1994, the government admitted that it had in fact used St. Louis as a testing ground during the Cold War because it was architecturally similar to Soviet cities, but it said that the material sprayed was zinc cadmium sulfide, a fine powder that is not thought to be dangerous to ones health. Between 1957 and 1958, the U.S. government sprayed much of the United States with this chemical...
September 2012
12 posts
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America Going Orwell at Mach Speed -- Authorities... →
The blurb for VoiceGrid ID has a particularly dystopic echo, offering a “voice data management solution with unlimited database size” in addition to system architecture that scale all the way up to “national system deployments.”
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4 Government and Private Entities Conspiring to... →
Americans’ personal privacy is being crushed by the rise of a four-headed corporate-state surveillance system. The four “heads” are: federal government agencies; state and local law enforcement entities; telecoms, web sites & Internet “apps” companies; and private data aggregators (sometimes referred to as commercial data warehouses).
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How the Post 9/11 Fever Led Our National Security... →
Our governmental officials now have extraordinary new freedoms to kidnap, torture, abuse, murder, surveil, and assassinate (including American citizens).
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FBI's $1B USD Facial Recognition Project Enjoys... →
… the FBI has also hinted that it might add photos of individuals under investigation, or individuals who appeared near high-profile persons of interest to the database. The latter prospect has privacy advocates most alarmed, as it could land you on “Big Brother’s database” without a single criminal act. In fact, the FBI appears to be doing exactly that already, as some...
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When Did Dissent Become a Crime? America's Police... →
In cities hosting large gatherings such as the national political conventions or international summits, we’ve come to expect a massive militarized police presence, even as the ranks of protesters thin. But what happens to all of the new high-tech cop toys and newly passed ordinances once conventioneers leave town? They stay.
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Undercover Agents at Occupy Austin Entrapped... →
Activists with Occupy Austin revealed Wednesday that an Austin Police Department detective’s entrapment led to the seven arrests on Dec. 12, 2011, during the Gulf Port Action in Houston, Texas. The seven protesters are facing up to two years in state prison, and one activist, Iraq war veteran Eric Marquez , has been in jail since December as a result of the charges.
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We Distract Ourselves With Petty Spectacles While... →
The giddy, money-drenched, choreographed carnival in Tampa and the one coming up in Charlotte divert us from the real world—the one steadily collapsing around us. The glitz and propaganda, the ridiculous obsessions imparted by our electronic hallucinations, and the spectacles that pass for political participation mask the deadly ecological assault by the corporate state. The worse it gets, the...
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Court ruling that NSA spying violated 4th... →
EFF sues US to uncover details of court decision on phone and e-mail spying.
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Serious Revolt Is the Only Option People Have Left →
The determining factor in global corporate production is now poverty. The poorer the worker and the poorer the nation, the greater the competitive advantage. With access to vast pools of desperate, impoverished workers eager for scraps, unions and working conditions no longer impede the quest for larger and larger profits. And when the corporations do not need these workers they are cast aside....
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How Your Movements Are Being Tracked, Probably... →
License plate readers are getting set up at a brisk pace across the country.
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Goodbye, Liberty! 10 Ways Americans Are No Longer... →
Our most fundamental rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are under assault. But the adversary is Big Wealth, not Big Government as conservatives like to claim.
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Big Brother on a budget: How Internet surveillance... →
Deep packet inspection, petabyte-scale analytics create a “CCTV for networks.”
August 2012
7 posts
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Your car, tracked: the rapid rise of license plate... →
Largely unregulated, cameras now collect millions of travel records every day.
The scanners can read 60 license plates per second, then match observed plates against a “hot list” of wanted vehicles, stolen cars, or criminal suspects. LPRs have increasingly become a mainstay of law enforcement nationwide; many agencies tout them as a highly effective “force multiplier”...
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How a drug mule named "Big Foot" helped create... →
Shoddy legal reasoning was used in a decision that bucks the Fourth Amendment.
In the summer of 2006, agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency used GPS tracking technology to locate drug courier Melvin Skinner’s prepaid phone, ultimately seizing more than 1,000 pounds of marijuana from Skinner’s mobile home. The judges on the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit then apparently smoked all of it...
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Army's all-seeing, super blimp makes debut flight →
The U.S. Army has launched the debut flight of its massive Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), a souped-up blimp designed to fly continuously for 21 days and provide full surveillance of an area.
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The NYPD’s Domain Awareness System Is Watching You... →
theamericanbear:
Life in the Panopticon:
The New York City Police Department and Microsoft have partnered up to bring the world a surveillance system straight out of a sci-fi novel. With a name both mundane and a little bit menacing, the Domain Awareness System allows the department to access around 3,000 CCTV cameras around the city and link the feeds with software to cross-check criminal and...
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They got drones? So do we →
Drones transformed the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. But their use has been extremely limited in U.S. skies. The Federal Aviation Administration essentially bans the commercial use of drones, and government use is still highly restricted.
But that’s changing.
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Congressman presses for limits on domestic drone... →
By the FAA’s estimation, there could be over 30,000 unmanned aircraft in use in the United States by 2020. But there have been significant concerns voiced over the safety of drones and the potential threat to privacy. A House Homeland Security subcommittee heard testimony late last month on the threat posed by drones to citizens’ civil rights, and how some drones currently deployed...
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July 2012
16 posts
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When It Comes to Cybersecurity, Scare Tactics... →
This week, comments from Democratic Senators, a panel of witnessses, and the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) called on the Senate to enact cybersecurity legislation. But a new poll shows that Americans don’t want to sacrifice civil liberties by allowing unfettered data exchanges between corporations and the government.
The Cybersecurity Act would also give companies the...
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Pentagon’s Mega Stun Gun Could Blast You... →
Imagine a stun gun that doesn’t just drop you to the floor, but renders you unconscious for several minutes. This tech is called a “nano-second electrical pulse,” and the Pentagon believes it could be used in a gun that would hit targets with high voltages of electricity for an amazingly short amount of time – we’re talking billionths of seconds here. That would make the enemy an easy capture....
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The Phony “War on Cops” and the Real War on Us →
Situations that cops thirty years ago would have defused with talk and reason are now resolved with “less lethal force” such as the use of tasers on agitated 80-year-old women whose homes were invaded at 3AM. Even talking to a confused or upset person apparently poses a monstrous threat to life and limb — or at least an unacceptable inconvenience for someone in a hurry to reach the donut shop...
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NSA whistleblower: They’re assembling information... →
“They’re pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country … and assembling that information,” Binney explained. “So government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it’s a very dangerous process.” He estimated that something like 1.6 billion logs have been processed since 2001.
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EEG helmet may be able to determine who you know →
Veritas Scientific CEO Eric Elbot told IEEE Spectrum that one of its earlier devices, called BrainTruth, had already seen military use to test individuals entering the US that were suspected of being foreign agents…
Elbot is confident in the device, stating that “The last realm of privacy is your mind… This will invade that.”
This needs to be acquired by activists...
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DEA installs license-plate recognition devices... →
Clusters of what at first appear to be surveillance cameras have begun turning up in recent months on the Southwest border, and while some of the machines are merely surveillance cameras, others are specialized recognition devices that automatically capture license-plate numbers and the geographic location of everyone who passes by, plus the date and time.
The DEA confirms that the devices have...
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A year after court order, TSA still fails to... →
“Require the Transportation Security Administration to Follow the Law” - Support this petition!
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ACLU releases Android app that secretly videos... →
The advent of Police Tape is designed to counter a practice an increasing number of civilians have encountered over the past few years: those who videotape or photograph police officers performing routine stops and other official acts are frequently arrested or disciplined. Evidently, many officers are all in favor of increased surveillance as long as it isn’t turned on them.
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American Spying on Citizens Hits Record High →
The information represents the first time data have been collected nationally on the frequency of cell surveillance by law enforcement. The volume of the requests reported by the carriers — which most likely involve several million subscribers — surprised even some officials who have closely followed the growth of cell surveillance.