It's Funny Cuz It's Sad...

 

'I Want Them To Be Worried We’re Watching... To Never Know When We’re Overhead.'

Thursday, February 6, 2014 by Common Dreams

Law enforcement push 'persistent surveillance' monitoring systems

- Jon Queally, staff writer 

 

 

(Promotional image: Persistent Surveillance Systems)“I want them to be worried that we’re watching.
I want them to be worried that they never know when we’re overhead.”

'I Want Them To Be Worried We’re Watching... 

To Never Know When We’re Overhead.'
That's what Police Chief Richard Biehl of Dayton, Ohio told the Washington Post while referring to the people of his city as he supported new aerial surveillance technology that would allow his officers to "track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time."

Focused on the work of Persistent Surveillance Systems—a Dayton-based company that is already providing aerial surveillance for large events, like political rallies and sporting events—the Post's reporting reveals that even as "Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed."

For its part, Persistent Surveillance bills itself as a "full-service, wide area surveillance provider" that sells its capabilities to law enforcement agencies, border patrol, and others private firms. According to the company's website, their signature "Hawkeye II" surveillance system "is similar to a live version of Google-Earth—only with a TiVo-like capability" and provides:

Wide-Area Surveillance Sensors and Services that enable continuous, second-by-second video monitoring of a city-sized area. Because of the very high-resolution nature of PSS's sensors (up to 200 megapixels), vehicle and pedestrian activity can be tracked over a 16 square-mile area. If an event-of-interest happens within this area (a murder, for example), users can rewind the event to identify the perpetrator's place-of-origin, meeting locations, accomplices, driving routes, and final destination.

 

 (Click for larger image. Source: WaPo) 

According to the Post:

Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician.

Predictably, those in favor of the hovering surveillance technology, like Police Chief Biehl and the company's president Ryan McNutt, say the whole purpose of the 'unblinking eye-in-the-sky' is to solve crimes or prevent them from happening. And as McNutt explained, he envisions his companies technology not just attached to small planes, as they are now, but to ones with longer and wider ranges as well. He also thinks fixed surveillance units could "protect" large areas, boasting to the Post that "a single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument [...] could deter crime all around the [Natioanal] Mall."

But privacy advocates contend this is just another creepy development in the evolution of the 'Big Brother' society that George Orwell warned about and the National Security Agency has helped turn into a global enterprise.

“There are an infinite number of surveillance technologies that would help solve crimes . . . but there are reasons that we don’t do those things, or shouldn’t be doing those things,” said Joel Pruce, a University of Dayton postdoctoral fellow in human rights who opposed the use of the surveillance aircraft in Ohio supported by Biehl.

And Jay Stanley, a privacy expert with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Post:  

“If you turn your country into a totalitarian surveillance state, there’s always some wrongdoing you can prevent. The balance struck in our Constitution tilts toward liberty, and I think we should keep that value.”

A Eulogy for the Fourth Amendment

Even the Obama's Fans Aren't Pretending that was a Good Speech
by DAVID SWANSON


President Barack Obama gave a eulogy for the Fourth Amendment on Friday, and not even his fans are proclaiming victory. In this moment when Obama is actually doing one thing I agree with (talking to Iran), more and more people seem to be slowly, agonizingly slowly, finally, finally, finally, recognizing what a complete huckster he is when it comes to pretty speeches about his crimes.

Obama’s speech and new “policy directive” eliminate the Fourth Amendment. Massive bulk collection of everybody’s data will continue unconstitutionally, but Obama has expressed a certain vague desire to end it, sort of, except for the parts that are needed, but not to do so right away. The comparisons to the closure of the Guantanamo death camp began instantly.

Far from halting or apologizing for the abuses of the NSA, Obama defends them as necessitated by the danger of a new 911. While drones over Yemen and troops in Afghanistan and “special” forces in three-quarters of the world are widely understood to endanger us, and while alternatives that upheld the rule of law and made us safer would not require secrecy or human rights violations, Obama wants to continue the counterproductive and immoral militarism while holding off all blowback through the omniscience of Big Brother.

However, Obama’s own panel and every other panel that has looked into it found zero evidence that the new abusive NSA programs have prevented any violent attacks. And it is well-documented that (even given the disastrous policies that produced 911) the attacks of that day could have been stopped at the last minute by sharing existing data or responding to urgent memos to the president with any sort of serious effort.

Obama has not proposed to end abuses. He’s proposed to appoint two new bureaucrats plus John Podesta. Out of this speech we get reviews of policies, a commitment to tell the Director of National Intelligence to read court rulings that impact the crimes and abuses he’s engaged in, and a promise that the “Intelligence Community” will inspect itself. (Congress, the courts, and the people don’t come up in this list of reforms.) Usually this sort of imperial-presidential fluff wins praise from Obama’s followers. This time, I’m not hearing it.

True, after EFF created a great pre-speech scorecard, when Obama scored a big fat zero, EFF said it was encouraged that he might score a point some day. But they didn’t sound impassioned about their encoragement.

Obama’s promises not to abuse unchecked secret powers (and implied promise that none of his successors or subordinates will abuse them either) is not credible, or acceptable, while it just might be impeachable. We’re talking here about the same government that listens in on soldiers’ phone sex, Congress members’ daily lives, and everything it can get its hands on related to the actual, rather than rhetorical, promotion of liberty, justice, or peace. A report today quotes various members of the government with security clearance who want to murder Edward Snowden. We’re supposed to just trust them with the right to or persons, houses, papers, and effects without probably cause or warrant? Are we also to trust the corporations they ask to do their dirty work, should the theoretical future reform of this outrage involve paying corporations to own our info?

Obama claims the “debate” — in which no debate opponent was given a minute at the microphone — is valuable. But the whistleblowers who create such debates “endanger” us, Obama says. This he claims without evidence.
If the debate was so useful, why not give the man who made you hold it with yourself his passport back?

Obama began Friday’s speech with a Sarah Palinesque bit of Paul Revere history. Revere is now an honorary NSA spy. In reality, the British would have hit Revere with a hellfire missile if Obama had been their king. It all depends on which side of a war you imagine someone to be on, and on whether you imagine war itself is an acceptable form of human behavior at this late date. Without the endless war on the world, the need for secrecy would go away, and with it the powers that secrecy bestows, and with them the arrogant speeches by rulers who clearly hold us all in contempt.

Resisters of royalty came up with a cure back in Paul Revere’s day. They called it impeachment. Of course it would be highly inappropriate to use. It might get in the way of the Fight for Freedom.

‘U.S. Government Uses Terrorism As It’s Excuse To Do Almost EVERYTHING’ says Glenn Greenwald

And he's totally correct, and it spans the two dominant parties controlling the country via their corporate ownership.

Drug Agents Have an NSA-Style Spying Problem

Thursday, September 5, 2013 by ACLU Blog
by Ezekial Edwards

Over the last few months, we've been bombarded with revelation after revelation about the NSA's unprecedented spying on Americans. But, according to The New York Times, the NSA's untethered snooping is eclipsed by the agents fighting in a war that began long before 9/11: the costly and failed War on Drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration's secret Hemisphere Project, news of which broke this week, allows drug law enforcement agencies broad access to billions of AT&T phone records going back a quarter century—to 1987. As The New York Times explained, "the scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.'s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act."

Our government's mass telephonic data-mining has sparked immense and deserved outrage. But to those who have been targeted by the War on Drugs for the last several decades, the Hemisphere Project is only one in a long line of privacy-invading tactics employed by the U.S. government. Many other intrusions – such as the thousands of unconstitutional stops-and-frisks of people of color in cities across the country, the countless doors kicked in by police in search of drugs, the seizure and forfeiture of property of people never convicted of a crime – are representative of the kinds of common corporal intrusions that have been endured by many Americans, disproportionately of color, long before many post 9/11-era invasions of privacy became commonplace for all Americans.

Further, since 9/11, there has been an increasingly entrenched relationship between overreaching national security programs and domestic drug law enforcement policies. Each has fed on the other: the long-running drug war provided useful surveillance blueprints for the massive domestic spying programs that have sprouted up since 9/11. At the same time, domestic drug law enforcement agencies have seized upon the dismantling of basic constitutional protections over the past decade – in the name of national security – and pointed the resulting weapons toward America's own citizens.

It should not surprise us then that the Hemisphere Project is only the latest disclosure of mission creep.

We found out last month that the DEA secretly uses NSA surveillance data against Americans as part of its drug investigations – and then conceals its reliance on this foreign intelligence information. This practice jeopardizes the right to a fair trial for anyone facing criminal prosecution based on evidence derived from that surveillance data.

Or consider "sneak and peek" warrants, in which law enforcement enters a home or office when no one is present and conducts a search of the premises, without giving notice to the occupant beforehand. Provisions allowing for these warrants were included in the Patriot Act after government officials said they are necessary to fight terrorism, but 76% of "sneak and peeks" were used in drug investigations in 2010. (And that is no anomaly: from 2006-2009, 1,618 sneak and peek warrants were used in drug cases, 22 in fraud cases, and 15 in terrorism investigations). Further, the use of GPS tracking devices, aerial surveillance, and the militarization of police – often justified by national security needs – are instead often coopted as highly destructive components of our domestic drug war.

In keeping with the clandestine nature of our government's various spying programs, the DEA had delineated a series of steps to "keep the program under the radar" by instructing "all requestors … to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document" and "‘walling off' the information the government obtains from Hemisphere." This is all in the name of enforcing drug prohibition, a 40-year failure that has cost billions, led to the unnecessary incarceration of millions of Americans, and failed to make a significant dent in the use, availability, or potency of drugs.

Why has the DEA kept this surreptitious surveillance program in the shadows? Because, as with so many of government surveillance programs, Hemisphere raises serious constitutional questions. There is a strong argument that it is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment for the government to outsource the automatic collection and storage of millions of Americans' phone records without any individualized suspicion and without court approval or oversight—simply so that law enforcement agencies have easy and immediate access in the future. Like the N.S.A.'s mass call-tracking program, such extensive and unlimited data gathering, particularly reaching back decades, allows the government to construct incredibly detailed and invasive pictures of our past and present lives.

Simply put, under the tired guise of protecting Americans from drugs, the U.S. government has secretly targeted and invaded the life and privacy of millions of its own citizens. The U.S. should be ending the War on Drugs, not expanding it by secretly outsourcing widespread surveillance.

US Requested Tens of Thousands of Facebook Users' Data in Just 6 Months

Tuesday, August 27, 2013 by Common Dreams
Report welcome, but "governments don't necessarily need intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to get our data."
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

The U.S. requested data on between 20,000 and 21,000 Facebook users during the first six months of 2013, the social networking site announced on Tuesday.

"Whereas transparency reports detail lawful access requests, we are living in a world where governments exploit over-permissive, vague and outdated laws with impunity."

Facebook revealed the number of requests as part of its first-ever Global Government Requests Report.

While over 70 countries made user requests during the six-month period, the vast majority were from the U.S.. India came in second, requesting data on 4,144 users, and the U.K. came in third, requesting data on 2,337 users.

"Unlike other countries, which had an exact figure, the US data was given as a range due to it being forbidden for companies to disclose how many requests they have had," BBC News reported.

Facebook stated, "We continue to push the United States government to allow more transparency regarding these requests, including specific numbers and types of national security-related requests. We will publish updated information for the United States as soon as we obtain legal authorization to do so."

Though the "vast majority of these requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings," the report includes "both criminal and national security requests," Facebook noted.

Writing on Facebook's new transparency information, TechCrunch reported Tuesday:

The “Five Eyes” group of nations that share signal intelligence (United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) had at least 100 requests in the first six months of the year. New Zealand and Canada included. That matters. It indicates that countries participating in mass surveillance do so in every way possible. I think that the number of requests helps us understand the zeal of these nations to look into private activity.

UK-based surveillance watchdog Privacy International welcomed Facebook's transparency report, but said that greater legal protections must in place given the "terrifying reality—that governments don't necessarily need intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to get our data." They said in a statement:

we are left with a disturbingly hollow feeling regarding Facebook's gesture, and it has little to do with Facebook itself. Since documents leaked by Edward Snowden have been published and analysed, the veil has been lifted on what information governments actually collect about us. [...]

Whereas transparency reports detail lawful access requests, we are living in a world where governments exploit over-permissive, vague and outdated laws with impunity. What is needed is a new strong legal framework that all governments must abide by. Until then companies like Facebook are left with the burden of having to determine what information may be 'lawfully' demanded by each country, and deciding what they can or cannot release. This is too much to ask of these companies, and too great a trust to be placed in them.

The NSA: ‘The Abyss From Which There Is No Return’

August 19, 2013 By John W. Whitehead

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”—Senator Frank Church (1975)

We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.

Indeed, as I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government’s Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA’s vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and a depository for every imaginable kind of information—whether innocent or not, private or public—including communications, transactions and the like. In fact, anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for “innocent” reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.

If this is the new “normal” in the United States, it is not friendly to freedom. Frankly, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed. These are no longer experiments on our freedoms. These are acts of aggression.

Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the National Security Agency in the 1970s, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

Unfortunately, we have long since crossed over into that abyss, first under George W. Bush, who, among other things, authorized the NSA to listen in on the domestic phone calls of American citizens in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and now under President Obama, whose administration has done more to undermine the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of privacy and bodily integrity than any prior administration. Incredibly, many of those who were the most vocal in criticizing Bush for attempting to sidestep the Constitution have gone curiously silent in the face of Obama’s repeated violations.

Whether he intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape. Yet none of this could have been possible without the NSA, which is able to operate outside the constitutional system of checks and balances because Congress has never passed a law defining its responsibilities and obligations.

The constitutional accountability clause found in Article 1, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution demands that government agencies function within the bounds of the Constitution. It does so by empowering the people’s representatives in Congress to know what governmental agencies are actually doing by way of an accounting of their spending and also requiring full disclosure of their activities. However, because agencies such as the NSA operate with “black ops” (or secret) budgets, they are not accountable to Congress.

In his book Body of Secrets, the second installment of the most extensively researched inquiry into the NSA, author James Bamford describes the NSA as “a strange and invisible city unlike any on earth” that lies beyond a specially constructed and perpetually guarded exit ramp off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. “It contains what is probably the largest body of secrets ever created.”

Bamford’s use of the word “probably” is significant since the size of the NSA’s staff, budget and buildings is kept secret from the public. Intelligence experts estimate that the agency employs around 38,000 people, with a starting salary of $50,000 for its entry-level mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers. Its role in the intelligence enterprise and its massive budget dwarf those of its better-known counterpart, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The NSA’s website provides its own benchmarks:

Neither the number of employees nor the size of the Agency’s budget can be publicly disclosed. However, if the NSA/CSS were considered a corporation in terms of dollars spent, floor space occupied, and personnel employed, it would rank in the top 10 percent of the Fortune 500 companies.

If the NSA’s size seems daunting, its scope is disconcerting, especially as it pertains to surveillance activities domestically. The first inkling of this came in December 2005 when the New York Times reported that President Bush had secretly authorized the NSA to monitor international phone calls and email messages initiated by individuals (including American citizens) in the United States. Bush signed the executive order in 2002, under the pretext of needing to act quickly and secretly to detect communication among terrorists and their contacts and to quell future attacks in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

The New York Times story forced President Bush to admit that he had secretly instructed the NSA to wiretap Americans’ domestic communications with international parties without seeking a FISA warrant or congressional approval. The New York Times had already sat on its story for a full year due to White House pressure not to publish its findings. It would be another six months before USA Today delivered the second and most significant piece of the puzzle, namely that the NSA had been secretly collecting the phone records of tens of millions of Americans who used the national “private” networks AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

It would be another seven years before Americans were given undeniable proof—thanks to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—that the NSA had not only broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times every year but was actively working to flout attempts at oversight and accountability, aided and abetted in this subterfuge by the Obama administration.

Then again, all Snowden really did was confirm what we already suspected was happening. We already knew the NSA was technologically capable of spying on us. We also knew that the agency had, since the 1960s, routinely spied on various political groups and dissidents.

So if we already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?

The big deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution.

As for those who are not worried about the government filming you when you drive, listening to your phone calls, using satellites to track your movements and drones to further spy on you, you’d better start worrying. At a time when the average American breaks at least three laws a day without knowing it thanks to the glut of laws being added to the books every year, there’s a pretty good chance that if the government chose to target you for breaking the law, they’d be able to come up with something without much effort.

Then again, for those who insist they’re not doing anything wrong, per se, perhaps they should be. Because if you’re not doing anything wrong, it just might mean that you’re not doing anything at all, which is how we got into this mess in the first place.

Threat Assessment

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case
by Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013


The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:


Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.

Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

Google Report Shows 'Disturbing Growth in Government Surveillance'

Wednesday, January 23, 2013 by Common Dreams
Most recent Transparency Report from web giant reveals 136% increase in user data requests from US since 2009
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Google has released its newest semiannual Transparency Report on Wednesday, which shows a "steady increase in government requests" for user data and marks a "disturbing growth in government surveillance online."

The US made 8,438 user data requests during the second half of 2012, a nearly 136% percent increase since 2009. The report from the web giant, which discloses the number of requests it receives from governments and courts worldwide, shows that user data requests are up 70 percent since 2009, with a total of over 21,000 user data requests from over 33,000 users or accounts in the second half of 2012.

The U.S. made the biggest number of requests by far—8,438 during this period, which marks a nearly 136 percent increase since 2009.

Of those U.S. requests, 68% were from subpoenas, as Richard Salgado writes on Google's blog on the report, and "are requests for user-identifying information, issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and are the easiest to get because they typically don’t involve judges."

The Guardian's Dominic Rushe points out how the use of EPCA to get user data is dangerous:

The ECPA has been widely criticised by privacy advocates, and was passed in 1986, long before electronic communication became so common. Under the act, email stored on a third party's server for more than 180 days is considered abandoned. To access that information, officials need only a written statement certifying that the information is relevant to an investigation.

But Holmes Wilson, co-founder of online advocacy group Fight For the Future, said the Justice Department had argued that emails are "abandoned" once they are opened. "Ironically, the emails that now have the most protection are the spam that you never open," he said. "ECPA is under dire need of reform. Right now the government can access almost anything that you have online without a warrant and at anytime. Electronic communication should be afforded the same protection as your physical mail or files stores in a cabinet," he said.

Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, says the report "reveals a disturbing growth in government surveillance online," and adds:

On its own, the growth in number of requests for private information like emails should be alarming, especially after the Petreus case. Even more disturbing is that most requests have not been reviewed by a court to ensure that law enforcement has established probable cause to believe a crime has actually been committed, as the Fourth Amendment generally requires.

Today's report doesn't really tell us the full extent of unconstitutional privacy invasions. Law enforcement officials rightly note that they need subpoena access to subscriber information as the 'building blocks' for establishing probable case. They also insist they're already getting warrants for content information, even when ECPA doesn't require that. But we still don't have hard data on either claim. Worse, while large companies like Google may rightly refuse to turn over user data without a warrant, smaller companies without legal staffs may feel compelled to turn over private data with only a subpoena, or perhaps even without one at all.

America's Police State on Steroids At the Conventions--When Did Dissent Become a Crime?

Protests in Tampa and Charlotte have been swarmed by police and enveloped in surveillance.
September 6, 2012  |  

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- 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.

I was at the alternative journalist flophouse in Charlotte on Sept. 4, the first day of the Democratic National Convention, when I received word of kettled protesters a few blocks away. I had just met FireDogLake reporter Kevin Gosztola, and after forming a mutual admiration society, we raced outside.

We hoofed past siren-flashing police cars blocking side streets, hiking alongside an empty roadway. Walls of blue loomed ahead. Our hands went to our sides and drew cameras. As we neared a broad intersection, protesters appeared behind a double line of police using bicycles as barricades. The entire intersection was encircled by hundreds of ground troops, motorcycle cops, commanders, surveillance units and vehicles. Media flitted along the perimeter and uncertainty coursed through observers. Why had hundreds of police barricaded the protesters, were they going to sweep them up, would violence break out?

In turned out the protesters were conducting an impromptu street blockade, preventing delegate buses from proceeding on their appointed route. The police moved to funnel the protesters into an isolated grass field lined with metal fencing, the “free-speech prison.” It was devoid of life, save for CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin on a loudspeaker demanding: “Free Bradley Manning,” and “We don’t want a war with Iran.” A dozen anarchists approached the cage and broke into the “Hokey Pokey,” sticking their left arms in and singing, “You do the hokey-pokey and kiss your rights goodbye, that’s what it’s all about.”

It was a replay of the final night in Tampa, Fla., at the Republican National Convention. There, perhaps 150 protesters also blocked an intersection, delaying delegates exiting the convention after Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. Nearly 400 police penned in the protest, and at every intersection visible, up to two blocks away, squads of police waited in reserve. A crew of seven Guardian Angels had deputized themselves as back-ups in case the police were overwhelmed, their tee shirts and bodies having seen better days.

Police-to-Protester Radio Incalculably Wide

Protests in Tampa and Charlotte have been surrounded by media, swarmed by police and enveloped in surveillance. Perhaps because of the military-like mobilization, arrests have been rare and police in both cities have not prevented unpermitted marches, though they have been tightly managed. There were only two reported arrests [3] in Tampa, and activists who dropped banners and locked down at a coal-fired power plant were not arrested.

On Tuesday, Sept. 4, ten undocumented immigrants were hauled off after staging a nonviolent civil disobedience action. Police also nabbed three protesters, including one for wearing a mask and another for allegedly crossing a police line [4] – something I did multiple times without incident. Of course, I was wearing a suit, and the protesters were a bit scruffier, lending weight to activists’ contention that police single them out based on their appearance.

I moved on to a Planned Parenthood rally taking place nearby. I talked my way through the first layer of Secret Service despite lacking credentials. The crowd was a pink haze of tee shirts bearing the slogan, “2012 Yes We Plan,” with the zero replaced by a circular package of birth-control pills. With the branded tees, pink signs declaring “Women are watching and we’re voting Obama,” and canned speeches for Obama, it had all the spontaneity of a corporate rock concert, as soothing to the Democratic Party machine as a river of pink Pepto-Bismol. Unlike the feral anarchists outside, the pro-choice troops inside the Democratic fold were free of a suffocating police presence.

Drones, “less-lethal” weapons and anti-dissent laws

The feds gave $50 million each to Tampa and Charlotte for security for the conventions, and it showed in the police mobilization and shiny new equipment ranging from bicycles and “less lethal weapons” to communications gear and medieval-style armor for cops and horses. Given the fact that protesters amounted only to a few hundred, it’s suspicious that thousands of police needed to be deployed -- more than were in evidence for massive protests in Washington, D.C. against the Iraq War a decade ago.

The biggest impact of militarized policing is not at the conventions themselves, but in the long term. The two political conventions coincide with the Summer Olympics. The international games proved to be a handy way to push out the poor from city centers by constructing stadiums and Olympic villages that are repurposed for tourism, consumption and high-end housing. Similarly, conventions and summits like NATO, G8, the RNC and DNC are part of the trend of intensifying the policing of poor and dissidents.

In some cases the convention policing leads to a more aggressive posture. In Denver, which hosted the 2008 DNC, 200 police in riot gear [5] used their toys on Occupy Denver last October, attacking [6] them with rubber pellets, mace, batons and pepper spray. In Chicago [7], new laws passed to stifle dissent at NATO protests there in May were made permanent, as were laws passed in Charlotte [8] for the DNC. (The Tampa laws had a sunset clause.)

The covert side of policing summits and conventions is more disturbing. Tactics like infiltration, spying and provocateurs sometimes come to light when raids of activist spaces, pre-emptive arrests and contrived terrorist plots are sprung and the victims snared. Other elements remain covert.

Speculation was rife if drones would be employed during the RNC. A Tampa police spokeswoman denied [9] that any of the “60 local, state or federal agencies involved in the security operation of the Republican National Convention will utilize air or ground drones.” But a private company, United Drones, was adamant that it would be flying drones for an unnamed private party during the convention. The morning after the RNC ended, as I drove into Tampa across the Howard Frankland Bridge with a legal observer, we spotted a low-flying aircraft. It looked like a large model aircraft with no obvious cockpit to hold a pilot, but was moving much faster than highway traffic.

Militarized and pre-emptive policing

Alex S. Vitale, associate professor in sociology at Brooklyn College and author of City of Disorder [10] and numerous reports on protest policing [7], told AlterNet that he pinpoints the “intense changes” in policing to the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle that was disrupted by nonviolent protests. (The much-reported window-breaking by self-described anarchists took place after and away from the much larger nonviolent actions.) But there is no across-the-board standard, he cautions. “Policing is more militarized or pre-emptive in depending on the department,” he says.

“[P]olicing in the U.S. is very decentralized,” Vitale explains, and “the handling of protests is left to the local police.” At the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia, says Vitale, there was a “heavy police response, pre-emptive arrests, mass arrests, holding people on exorbitant bail.”

In New York at the 2004 RNC, the police response was “pre-emptive,” as Vitale describes it, complete with “mass arrests, infiltration and surveillance.” In 2000 at the DNC in Los Angeles, the ACLU lambasted the LAPD for creating “an orchestrated police riot [11]” after shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd at a rally for which organizers held a permit. Vitale says there was a “more militarized response” at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul.

Thus, the decision to give protests some breathing room in Tampa and Charlotte is notable because of past convention experiences, as well as the police attacks on Occupy camps in the last year. That may explain the absence of outright police aggression. Given the highly scripted nature of the conventions, 16,000 journalists looking for a story, and the prominence of Occupy Wall Street, chaos on the streets could have bumped the canned convention speeches from the top headline.

Vitale says: “Local officials want to minimize the level of dissent because to them, it’s all a very high-risk endeavor. They don’t want to get caught with the protests interrupting the events in any way.”

The danger of speaking out: 'Jesus, it's a war zone.'

I mention to Vitale that the Occupy Movement succeeded in part because it was theater: People acted out a new society in public. The flip side was the theater of the police response -- from the military-style assault on Occupy Oakland to the stormtrooper gear of Portland’s police to the cinematic staging of thousands of New York police sealing the financial district the night of May Day.

Vitale agrees there is an element of spectacle. He says the militarization of policing “communicates a symbolic message to participants and public that speaking out is dangerous and must be treated as a violent threat. The use of body armor and vehicles is almost never warranted. It communicates a message of fear and violence.”

That spectacle was on full display in Tampa and Charlotte. The day after Hurricane Isaac swiped Tampa, I wandered through the security zone, perhaps a quarter mile around the convention’s outer security perimeter. Stopping at a Salvation Army truck for some cold water, the only other civilian was a sun-crisped local. Appearing dazed, he gestured to the empty streets, speaking to no one in particular, “It’s a military zone. Jesus. It’s a war zone.”

Squads of camouflage-clad cops marched by; pelotons of bicycle police cruised streets; posses of horse-mounted police stood at the ready; heavy-duty golf carts crammed with law-enforcement personnel zipped by; platoons of riot police shadowed protesters; two-man teams on overpasses scanned areas below with binoculars, Secret Service in bulletproof vests secured checkpoints; assault boats plied the water; choppers circled above.

While there is federal involvement in policing conventions says Vitale, “I’ve always resisted the notion that we can explain the intensification of policing as a result of federal intervention. The military, fed law enforcement and local law enforcement have all become less tolerant of dissent. They are all experimenting with new techniques and technologies to aggressively contain the dissent. They are all learning from each other.”

Keeping away all but militants and fanatics: "making money off orange jumpsuits"

In the security state, democracy has withered. In Tampa during the Republican National Convention, what was known as the “free speech zone” was a portable stage on a crumbling road slicing through barren brownfields. The Westboro Baptist Church [12] – the “God hates fags” gang that pickets the funerals of dead U.S. soldiers based on the logic that they were killed as divine retribution for believing “it’s OK to be gay” – entered the zone one afternoon. As a handful toted flamboyant posters of hate, more than 100 police took up position.

A minute after I chanced upon them, a hundred or so anarchists marched on the scene chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re anarchists, we’re going to fuck you up!” Dozens of reporters and cameraman stalked the edges like lions hunting antelopes. As the protesters encircled the Westboro crew, mixing insults with pleas for tolerance, 100 riot police pounded the street as they rounded the corner. More police poured in from every direction and a helicopter swooped in.

Despite the tension, no violence occurred. Vermin Supreme [13], the performance activist who sports an upside-down boot affixed to his head, gently dissuaded the police from breaking heads by pointing out over a bullhorn that there was no need for aggression against peaceful protests. The anarchists had made their point and went on their way. But the city of Tampa had also made its point. In the militarized convention space, the only groups exercising the right to dissent are left-wing militants and right-wing fanatics.

There is a strategy to this. Vitale says, “We are producing urban spaces in many cities that are hostile to dissent. The summits accentuate that by adding in a layer of barricades and intensive policing.” The purpose of the intensive policing, he argues, is to insulate the rich and powerful who attend the conventions “from the rabble.” He adds: “Dictators have been doing this sort of thing for generations.”

I asked Vitale if these conventions are pop-up police states. He countered, “I’ve been to police states, and you get shot if you demonstrate, not spend a night in jail.”

That’s true -- for most Americans. But at a rally against voter suppression in Tampa, Life Malcolm, a member of the Black People’s Advancement and Defense Organization, described his hometown.

“Tampa is a police state," Malcolm said. "Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week we are under constant surveillance. We see the police on every street corner, in their cars, on their bicycles, or on foot patrol in our communities. All night long their helicopters are whirling overhead when we are trying to read with our children, put them bed or be romantic with our mates. The police beat us up, scare us, lock us up, harass us. You can’t even walk down the street being black, drive down the street being black.”

As a consequence, said Malcolm, “In our neighborhoods nobody comes outside. Everybody is boarded up in the house because they are afraid to come outside the house and be caught by the police like some kind of animal. In the state of Florida, they used to make their money off oranges, now they make their money off people in orange jumpsuits.”

Long after the media and politicians are gone, dozens of local and state police agencies will be back at work, showered with new weapons, technology and laws to contain troublemakers and undesirables. No matter who wins in November, the march toward a police state will continue unabated.

The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology

Friday, August 17, 2012 by The Guardian/UK
If you think that 24/7 tracking of citizens by biometric recognition systems is paranoid fantasy, just read the industry newsletters

by Naomi Wolf

 

A software engineer in my Facebook community wrote recently about his outrage that when he visited Disneyland, and went on a ride, the theme park offered him the photo of himself and his girlfriend to buy – with his credit card information already linked to it. He noted that he had never entered his name or information into anything at the theme park, or indicated that he wanted a photo, or alerted the humans at the ride to who he and his girlfriend were – so, he said, based on his professional experience, the system had to be using facial recognition technology. He had never signed an agreement allowing them to do so, and he declared that this use was illegal. He also claimed that Disney had recently shared data from facial-recognition technology with the United States military.

Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.

Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd.

Fast forward: after the Occupy crackdowns, I noted that odd-looking CCTVs had started to appear, attached to lampposts, in public venues in Manhattan where the small but unbowed remnants of Occupy congregated: there was one in Union Square, right in front of their encampment. I reported here on my experience of witnessing a white van marked "Indiana Energy" that was lifting workers up to the lampposts all around Union Square, and installing a type of camera. When I asked the workers what was happening – and why an Indiana company was dealing with New York City civic infrastructure, which would certainly raise questions – I was told: "I'm a contractor. Talk to ConEd."

I then noticed, some months later, that these bizarre camera/lights had been installed not only all around Union Square but also around Washington Square Park. I posted a photo I took of them, and asked: "What is this?" Commentators who had lived in China said that they were the same camera/streetlight combinations that are mounted around public places in China. These are enabled for facial recognition technology, which allows police to watch video that is tagged to individuals, in real time. When too many people congregate, they can be dispersed and intimidated simply by the risk of being identified – before dissent can coalesce. (Another of my Facebook commentators said that such lamppost cameras had been installed in Michigan, and that they barked "Obey", at pedestrians. This, too, sounded highly implausible – until this week in Richmond, British Columbia, near the Vancouver airport, when I was startled as the lamppost in the intersection started talking to me – in this case, instructing me on how to cross (as though I were blind or partially sighted).

Finally, last week, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to unveil a major new police surveillance infrastructure, developed by Microsoft. The Domain Awareness System links existing police databases with live video feeds, including cameras using vehicle license plate recognition software. No mention was made of whether the system plans to use – or already uses – facial recognition software. But, at present, there is no law to prevent US government and law enforcement agencies from building facial recognition databases.

And we know from industry newsletters that the US military, law enforcement, and the department of homeland security are betting heavily on facial recognition technology. As PC World notes, Facebook itself is a market leader in the technology – but military and security agencies are close behind.

According to Homeland Security Newswire, billions of dollars are being invested in the development and manufacture of various biometric technologies capable of detecting and identifying anyone, anywhere in the world – via iris-scanning systems, already in use; foot-scanning technology (really); voice pattern ID software, and so on.

What is very obvious is that this technology will not be applied merely to people under arrest, or to people under surveillance in accordance with the fourth amendment (suspects in possible terrorist plots or other potential crimes, after law enforcement agents have already obtained a warrant from a magistrate). No, the "targets" here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of "national security", the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.

The revealing boosterism of a trade magazine like Homeland Security Newswire envisions endless profits for the surveillance industry, in a society where your TV is spying on you, a billboard you drive by recognizes you, Minority Report style, and the FBI knows where to find your tattoo – before you have committed any crime: "FBI on Track to Book Faces, Scars, Tattoos", it notes; "Billboards, TVs Detect your Faces; Advertisers Salivate", it gloats; "Biometric Companies See Government as the Driver of Future Market Growth", it announces. Indeed, the article admits without a blush that all the growth is expected to be in government consumption, with "no real expectation" of private-sector growth at all. So much for smaller government!

To acclimate their populations to this brave new world of invasive surveillance technologies, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and and his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, both recently introduced "snoop" bills. Meanwhile, in the US – "the land of the free" – the onward march of the surveillers continues apace, without check or consultation.

NSA Whistleblowers: NSA Spying on 'the Entire Country'

Wednesday, July 25, 2012 by Common Dreams

Former NSA employees Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe and William Binney warn of widespread gov't surveillance

The National Security Agency (NSA) has created a "pernicious, persistent and permanent" database since 9/11 and is spying on "the entire country" according to NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe and William Binney.

Drake, Wiebe and Binney made the comments speaking on Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer on Current TV on Monday.

Drake said the widespread domestic spying was due to a “key decision made shortly after 9/11 which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance,” putting touted efforts at national security above all else, including constitutional rights.

Referring to an NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah which will hold communications collected by the agency, Binney said, "That facility alone can probably hold somewhere close to a hundred years’ worth of the communications of the world.” Binney continues, “Once you accumulate that kind of data — they’re accumulating against everybody — [it's] resident in programs that can pull it together in timelines and things like that and let them see into your life.”

Binney said the NSA was developing automated algorithms that would allow the NSA to easily sort through everyone's data. "Everybody will be a part of this," he stated.

Asked by Spitzer if anyone at the NSA worried of 4th amendment implications and raised questions, Wiebe said, "No."

The three whistleblowers are providing evidence in a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against the NSA.

"For years, government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts. Neither the Constitution nor federal law allow the government to collect massive amounts of communications and data of innocent Americans and fish around in it in case it might find something interesting. This kind of power is too easily abused. We're extremely pleased that more whistleblowers have come forward to help end this massive spying program."

"The NSA warrantless surveillance programs have been the subject of widespread reporting and debate for more than six years now. They are just not a secret," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Yet the government keeps making the same 'state secrets' claims again and again. It's time for Americans to have their day in court and for a judge to rule on the legality of this massive surveillance."

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In April, William Binney gave his first television interview after resigning from the National Security Agency to Democracy Now!:

Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

Washington admits surveillance violated Fourth Amendment

 (just once, huh?--jef)

RT
Published: 22 July, 2012
 

The US government has admitted to violating the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures on at least one occasion during surveillance efforts.

In a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) confirmed a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court finding that “some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government were unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

The FISA Amendments Act, signed into law by former US President George W. Bush on July 10, 2008, provides an extension to the government’s use of wiretapping in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, allowing the government to collect any phone or e-mail communications made when at least one party is believed to be outside of the United States – without requiring a warrant.

Wyden is the most vocal Senator to question the extent of the government’s use of domestic communications surveillance, which includes wiretapping.

Without providing details about when and how the violation occurred, or the extent of the “unreasonable” surveillance, the DNI letter confirmed that FISA has “sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”

The FISA Court found that the government was using unreasonable minimization procedures – meaning it was overstepping the length of time it was legally permitted to retain its surveillance data.

The government says it has “remedied” the FISA Court’s concerns regarding the constitutional violation and will continue to lawfully collect e-mails and phone calls, but the letter’s indication of at least one “unreasonable” search remains a troubling fact to Americans concerned about their privacy.

While the DNI confirmed a fault, the director’s office claimed it was in the country’s best interest to publicize the issue, stating, "the public interest in disclosure outweighs the damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.”

The news of the constitutional violation comes as the Obama administration is pressuring Congress to reauthorize the 2008 statute, which would otherwise expire at the end of the year. (broken campaign promise--in fact, the opposite of what he campaigned for in the primaries, then reversed his stance right before the '08 election--jef).

DNI director James Clapper says reauthorization should be a top priority to prevent terrorist attacks against Americans (since 9-11, ALL of the terrorist plots that have been stopped were  also planned by the FBI as set-ups to entrap potential terrorists. No foreign terrorist plots have been stopped by Bush OR Obama.---jef)

The law “allows the Intelligence Community to collect vital information about international terrorists and other important targets overseas while providing robust protection for the civil liberties and privacy of Americans,” he wrote Congressional leaders.

But Wyden is threatening to block the government’s requested five-year extension of the statute unless lawmakers receive more information about the extent of the wiretapping. The Senator is concerned that communication between “law-abiding Americans” is being unlawfully intercepted.

Wyden says the government could develop a large collection of personal e-mails and phone call data, and sift through it to isolate conversations between individual Americans. He maintains that such “back door searches” must be avoided.

In June, the National Security Agency (NSA) refused to disclose how many Americans have been affected by government surveillance. Wyder responded by noting that the fact that the number is unknown hides the extent of the spying.

In response to the NSA’s secrecy, Wyden offered an amendment prohibiting warrantless searches of domestic communication, which was rejected.

“This law clearly has had a bigger privacy impact than most people realize,” Wyden said. “In particular, I believe that the ‘back door searches’ loophole needs to be closed.”

Life Under Constant Watch

The Surveillance State
by FIRMIN DeBRABANDER

The surveillance state expands. Since 9-11, our phones are subject to warrantless wiretaps. Our email and internet transactions leave a trail for some to follow. The police can access our GPS location data through our smart phones, also without a warrant. Retailers record our purchasing habits with painstaking detail. Apparently, Target studies those purchases to determine when customers are pregnant—in the second trimester no less—for specialized marketing purposes.

And now, there will be surveillance drones. Congress recently passed a bill that opens the gates to widespread use of surveillance drones on US soil. There has been relatively little coverage of this alarming development: drones, so far associated with our illegal war in Pakistan and Yemen, are soon to become a domestic mainstay. On our shores, they will be used for law enforcement and border protection, but also commercially, for real estate, entertainment and journalistic purposes, for example. One prominent drone showcased on the internet is a hummingbird drone. As the name suggests, it’s tiny, quick and highly mobile. A popular video shows the hummingbird drone entering a building and flying down a corridor, transmitting everything it sees. Imagine the possibilities.

What is the effect of all this lost privacy? How does it change our behavior? Because surely it does; we are apt to behave differently when we feel we are alone or watched. What will our personal lives be like as so much more of them is made public?

In his book Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that constant surveillance has a devastating effect. It’s a subtle form of oppression.

When we feel we are being watched, we are more self-conscious of our behavior, more likely to watch what we do and conform to what we think the surveyors want or expect. The hawks among us say this is a good thing: if you’re doing nothing wrong, what do you have to fear from a hummingbird drone? But it’s not as simple as that.

Constant surveillance, Foucault maintained, can be a kind of torture—a revelation implemented by 19th century prison architects. It’s also ideal for authoritarian government in that it’s a highly efficient form of power: authority doesn’t need to coerce individuals physically to behave a certain way; surveillance inserts authority’s eye inside the individual, and he monitors himself. Surveillance enables power to be anonymous, Foucault says, which is especially devastating. You don’t know exactly why you are being watched, or exactly what’s expected of you, and ultimately cultivates a kind of inbred paranoia where you are unsure and timid about everything you do.

Further, Foucault suggests, surveillance that is widely established in society softens the ground for overt political oppression, because it makes us less resistant to breaches of our rights.

This thought occurred to me following the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision to uphold the right of prison officials to strip-search anyone entering a prison facility, no matter how minor the offense. In the case in question, a man was strip-searched after being arrested for an unpaid fine; his arrest was mistaken—he had already paid the fine. The Supreme Court defended the right to strip-search him anyway. Clearly this would seem to undermine our cherished notion of presumed innocence, and it grievously offends our personal dignity. But such galling invasions of privacy, and disregard for personal dignity, become increasingly acceptable when we are already accustomed to them more broadly—all the time, in subtle ways.

The political problem with all this surveillance is obvious, if we’d care to admit it. The political authorities have so much more access to the details of our lives, and in the wrong hands, could do real harm. The only thing protecting us is the character of those in power who collect all this information—and swear they will do nothing objectionable with it. Regarding the new National Defense Authorization Act, which sanctions the president’s power to detain indefinitely or even assassinate US citizens suspected of involvement in terrorist organizations, Obama tried to allay fears by arguing that his administration will use discretion and judgment in exercising this power. What about subsequent administrations? Our founding fathers were highly concerned to design a government that was impervious to corruption by the character flaws of individual office holders. The War on Terror has steadily rendered us vulnerable to just that.

What is perhaps most remarkable in all this is how we are largely unperturbed by the growing surveillance state. Indeed, we jump headlong into these new technologies that allow us to be watched. The ACLU is like a voice in the wilderness screaming about civil rights threats, but we’re too busy shopping online, sharing intimate personal details on Facebook, Tweeting our most mundane revelations.

When I raise these concerns with my students, some consider them overly alarmist. Most are unfazed. I pressed them on this recently, and one student pointed out that they were 10 years old when the Patriot Act was implemented following the 9-11 attacks. They have also spent half their lives with the internet, email and smartphones, and so, have known nothing else. In short, surveillance is their norm.

And they have known only benevolent, or at least innocuous, surveillance to date. Does this mean they trust the powers that know so much about them, and could do so much with that knowledge? When I ask that question, the response is almost universally negative. They have very little confidence in the ruling parties—and that’s a view shared by populations across the spectrum. So what’s going on? Why are we giving so much information—and ultimately power—to authorities we have such little confidence in?

There are a variety of factors at work here. On one hand, you might say, we’re just lazy, or too enamored with new technologies, to worry about who is watching us and why. Alternately, as Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor has argued, we are a society increasingly suffering from ‘time poverty’: we work long hours, commute long distances, ferry our kids to and from countless activities, and in our frenzy, have come to rely on the multiple conveniences offered by the new technology that helps us get through our frantic schedules. In general, these new media are so fully integrated into our lives that we simply can’t imagine living without them. They have gotten us accustomed to levels of convenience such as we’ve never known before—a convenience directly proportionate to the amount personal information we surrender.

Underlying all of this, however, is something I have thought about for a while. As a society, we have lost sight of the significance of privacy, and that it is essential to freedom—and democracy. We willingly give up our privacy in the belief that our freedom remains untouched through it all. Indeed, in a War on Terror, forgoing our privacy seems like an easy sacrifice, especially when you get the wondrous conveniences of all the new media in return. But freedom without privacy, Foucault points out, is no freedom at all.

The more we are watched, he argues, we come to feel less free to be unique, quirky, sometimes eccentric individuals. Surveillance exerts a covert pressure. Under constant surveillance, we are more prone to conform, less liable to ask vexing social questions that might draw attention to ourselves and upset someone—who? We are less inclined to develop our own ideas and opinions, work them out in our thoughts and words, test them in public venues—and stick to them. We become more careful, less likely to take chances and engage in risky behavior. But democracy requires creative, independent, fearless individualism.

There is no halting the progress of technology, a progress that has become frighteningly quick in the digital age. However, this in itself is no excuse to accept a looming profusion of hummingbird drones on our streets and in our neighborhoods. The surveillance drones will come, to be sure, but we must watch them in turn—and the watchers. It starts when we recall that privacy is an essential good, an inalienable and non-negotiable right, as the authors of our Constitution—in an age very far removed from our technologies—once understood very well.

The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Robert David Steele Vivas | Reality Sandwich

The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds to pay for monitoring both the locations and the conversations of anyone they wish -- without a warrant --suggest that the government of the United States of America (USA)-from local to national-is no longer in friendly hands.

As a professional intelligence officer and a retired Marine Corps officer, I am deeply offended, personally threatened, and patriotically alarmed.  Evil has triumphed across the United States of America.  Every single institution -- from academies to civil society to commerce to the government and law enforcement at all levels, the media, the out of control military-industrial complex, and the bottom-feeding non-governmental and non-profit organizations that suck at the federal government tits gorged with printed money -- has failed to respect the Constitution.  There is neither intelligence nor integrity at the highest levels of all of our institutions.

2012 is a year of confrontation and convergence.  On the confrontation side, we have a federal government that dismisses the Constitution across all three branches -- a Court that believes corporations are citizens and strip-searches for parking tickets are "okay"; a Congress that abdicates its Article 1 responsibilities, instead serving as foot-soldiers to the corrupt two-party tyranny that excludes the majority from the ballot and the vote; and an Executive that borrows a trillion a year in our name, wastes two trillion a year, and has claimed the right to kill US citizens without due process, and to lie to the Courts when it deems it necessary for "national security."

There is nothing secure about the USA today, and the root of our insecurity is entirely of our own making.  The traitors among us -- the Wall Street banks and their front end, the Federal Reserve; the two political parties, best of the servant class; and a broad band of political appointee and uniformed flag officers (generals and admirals) as well as their civilian equivalent, the senior executive service, are all enmeshed in a grid of high crimes and misdemeanors that relegate the USA to being a Third World nation, crooked at the top, impoverished at the bottom.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the poster child for the growth of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State.  There are two major "costs" to the citizen of this pervasive national surveillance state.  First is the cost of creating it.  NSA and the Cyber-Command, led by the same politically-complacent individual, General Keith Alexander (the man responsible for ABLE DANGER not reporting its findings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in advance of 9/11), now costs the taxpayer over $25 billion dollars a year.  A drop in the bucket when compared to the trillion a year spent on the US military, or the trillion a year spent on earmarks, entitlements, and other forms of  Congressionally-mandated waste, but a useful example to discuss.  Second is the cost to society of a government focused on the wrong targets for the wrong reasons.  For one third of what we spend on the US militaryincluding the secret intelligence world, we could eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity from poverty to war to genocide to human trafficking.  For what we spend on NSA we could give every one of the five billion poor a free cell phone for life, backed up by call centers that educate them "one cell call at a time."

NSA is an example of a closed system, a secret system, a system without accountability, a system that processes less than 7% of what it collects on "important" targets such as China, and less than 1% of all that it collects.  It is, in other words, a pathologically ineffective organization, not just a pathologically intrusive organization.

Bearing in mind that NSA has cost the taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars -- over a trillion dollars over its history and in today's inflated (devalued) dollars; it is quite salutary to recognize that still today NSA has not been able to build the ultimate computer.  In the words of James Bamford, the foremost author of books about NSA, as he described the ultimate computer in his last sentence of the book BODY OF SECRETS: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency:

Eventually NSA may secretly achieve the ultimate in quickness, compatibility, and efficiency -- a computer with petaflop and higher speeds shrunk into a container about a liter in size, and powered by only about ten watts of power: the human brain.

"Top Secret America" is an Administrative Law state, an inverted democracy, a totalitarian attempt to micro-manage everything from agriculture to water (the latter now under military control according to the latest national security decision memorandum).  The reason Congress strives to micro-manage is clear: this is how they extort money, using micro-management to frame earmarks and exemptions.  The Congress refuses to acknowledge the ten high-level threats to humanity while making the first threat -- poverty -- much worse within the USA. We now spend more on food stamps [Obama dollars] than we do on education.  In brief, our government is ignorant, unethical, and ineffective.  It is also pathologically out of control and acting against the public interest across the board.  

The corruption of the US Government is comprehensive -- the Cabinet departments strive to protect budget share for the recipients of taxpayer revenue and borrowed funds, instead of actually striving to address the public interest.  From agriculture, where 47% of the food is lost from mega-farm to processing to supermarket to home to trash; to energy where 50% of the generated energy is lost in the very inefficient downstream process; to health, where 50% of every federal dollar spent on health is documented waste; to the military, where the model for embedded fraud, waste, and abuse originated, We the People are no longer represented, nor served with integrity, by our so-called national government.

The time has come for the United STATES of America to dissolve the federation and eliminate the Congress, the Executive, and the Supreme Court.  I recommend that Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, and Washington threaten to secede from the Union immediately, demanding a new Constitutional Convention as a condition for returning to a reconstituted Second American Republic.  The rest of the STATES should be nullifying every federal regulation and expelling federal employees and especially federal military contingents, from their territory.  We need to rebuild the USA from the bottom-up, at Human Scale, with integral resilience, which is to say, true deep independence from any external authority.

There is a better way, the Open Source Everything (OSE) way.  For some time now the model created by Richard Stallman and other pioneers of Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) has been migrating to other areas.  Open Government, Open Society, and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) are three such areas.  Below is a figure from the forthcoming book (to be released 5 June 2012, now available for pre-order at all major online stores), THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust.

The OSE way is the way of Panarchy -- of harnessing and empowering every human brain, of enabling all humans to connect to all information openly, transparently, making truth the primary input and trust the primary output.

The OSE way breaks the back of the closed Industrial Era tendency to "manufacture evil" as Lionel Tiger put it.  Commoditizing humans and locking up knowledge is the worst possible strategy for resilience in a complex delicate environment of "Peak Everything."  In the face to total corruption and total lack of responsibility at the federal level -- a corruption inherent in the two-party tyranny that promises no public gain irrespective of which of the two theatrical puppets might "win" the 2012 election already plagued by vote manipulation across the primaries -- we who wish to survive and prosper have no alternative but to reject the federal, secret, closed, corrupt system now in place as well as its illegitimate off-spring at the state and local levels.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust is the culmination of my life's work as a former spy and former Marine Corps officer.  It is my ninth book, the first written for the general public and the first to be available in all bookstores.  It is also the first that is not also free online, a concession necessary to achieve the broadest possible sales to support North Atlantic Books / Evolver Editions.  They have priced the book honorably, and it can be bought right now on Amazon for under $10.

We are in an era where the government is lying to the public about everything.  The unemployment rate is actually 22.4% (and it is closer to 40% for the 18-24 and 55-65 year-old demographics).  Jobs are not being created, they are being lost.  Virtually everything that each Cabinet department claims in support of their respective budgets is a lie.  The Department of Defense (DoD) of which NSA is a major part, is especially corrupt and ineffective.  The infantry -- the most honorable and decent part of defense, comprises 4% of the total force, takes 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% -- ONE PERCENT -- of the total defense budget.  It is my judgment that at least 50% of the other 99% is fraud, waste, or abuse.  The service chiefs have been dishonorable, rejecting intelligence (decision-support on policy, acquisition, and operations) and forsaking integrity.  I am ashamed of what passes for "leadership" these days and agree with Lee Iacocca -- there are no leaders in Washington, only craven over-promoted clerks striving to please their banking and corporate masters against the day they can "retire" after a career in betrayal of the public trust, and roll over into an even more lucrative second career as a "beltway bandit."

I have led the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement these past 20 years, and while 90 governments have created OSINT units, the US Government has refused to modernize its intelligence fiefdoms, and continues to provide no more than 4% -- according to General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret) -- of what any major official needs, and nothing for everyone else.  I have addressed this in my CounterPunch article, "Intelligence for the President-AND Everyone Else."

Today I am seeking one government or one great international university that is interested in creating an Open Source Agency (OSA) such as a handful of us finally got on to pages 23 and 423 of the 9/11 Commission Report, but under diplomatic auspices rather than spy auspices.  In the USA, Hillary Rodham Clinton has no legacy of note -- this could be her legacy.  Otherwise, I offer this to Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, or Venezuela -- together with the new financial system that is emerging in rejection of the vast corruption attendant to the US dollar.  The OSA, integrating a World Brain, a Global Game, and a Multinational Decision Support Centre (MDSC), could create a prosperous world at peace.

The rest of the world is now routing around the US Government because its corruption and its pathological disconnect from both ethics and reality.  The USG is now correctly seen as a fatal cancer for global to local governance, something Latin Americans realized long ago, as so ably described in Open Veins of Latin America.  Hybrid governance is the new way of the world.  This means that the eight communities of information: the academy, civil society including labor unions and religions, commerce, government at all levels, law enforcement, media including bloggers, military, and non-governmental/non-profit organizations -- must all learn to achieve consensus on the basis of shared information and a shared process of sense-making.

True cost economics and a strategic analytic model that integrates the ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies from Agriculture to Water, must be the heart of this new global to local panarchic system of self-governance.  The first major government or the first major university to create a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance could become the de facto leader of the 21st Century, gaining enormous legitimacy and with legitimacy, global reach and effectiveness, from transparent truthful shared information.  As long as they root everything in ethics, and understand Will and Ariel Durant's point in Lessons of History that the only lasting revolution is in the mind of man, I have no doubt that our future will be bright.  There are not enough guns to keep us all down; the five billion poor and their brains are the one unlimited resources we have; from transparency, truth, from truth, trust, from trust, a prosperous world at peace.  St.

Robert David Steele Vivas