Gaius Publius: IRS is Using NSA Data Too. Who in Town Isn’t?
Your Google-collected, Verizon-collected data seems to very broadly available. How broadly? Way more than you thought. Read on for the grizzly details.
Read more...Category Archives: Surveillance state
A Killer App for Google Glass?
Before readers start throwing brickbats at me, understand that I am no fan of the Google Glass project. But the killer app for Google Glass could be protecting citizens from authoritarian policing.
Read more...Wolf Richter: NSA Pricked The “Cloud” Bubble For US Tech Companies
Yves here. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch. As soon as Glenn Greenwald started to reveal the extent of NSA snooping, Ed Harrison remarked via e-mail that one of the casualties would be cloud-based computing models. Wolf Richter catalogues the damage so far. And who would trust any of the proprietors, given how obliging virtually all Silicon Valley players have been when it comes to indulging the pet needs of the surveillance state?
Read more...More American Stasi: US Drug Agency Fabricates Cover Stories for Data Collection, Including from “Intelligence Intercepts”
In a weird but more disturbing analogue to chain of title abuses, where banks would forge signatures and fabricate documents to remedy the failure to transfer assets properly to securitization trusts, Reuters reported today that the Drug Enforcement Agency would doctor up where it got evidence from so it could use it in court. Now why would the DEA bother to go to all that trouble? Chorus: Because if a decent defense lawyer found out where it came from, it would in most cases be inadmissible.
Read more...Peter Van Buren: Bradley Manning, Surveillance State Creep, and the Emergence of Post-Constitutional America
Yves here. Van Buren looks at how severely the Constitution has been eroded and catalogues elements of both monitoring and legal abuses that have not gotten the attention they warrant.
Read more...Obama Starting to Lose It Over Snowden
Thanks to Obama’s famed “no drama” coolness, it’s hard to detect when he’s breaking a sweat. But if you look at the substance of his actions, it’s clear the President is losing his famed poise, at least as far as Snowden and the surveillance state revelations are concerned.
Read more...Tom Engelhardt: Edward Snowden vs. Robert Seldon Lady Shows How Our One-Superpower World Works
Retired CIA agent Robert Seldon Lady, convicted in absentia in Italy for a rendition/kidnapping operation, is picked up in Panama on an Interpol warrant, hits the news for a day, and then is allowed to fly back to the U.S. where he disappears — and despite the Edward Snowden case, the Washington media doesn’t even blink.
Read more...Bill Black: Is it Legal Malpractice to Fail to Get Holder to Promise Not to Torture your Client?
One of the things I never expected to read was a promise by any United States official that a potential defendant in a criminal prosecution by our federal courts “will not be tortured.”
Read more...Close House Vote on Amash Amendment to Curb the NSA a Blow to the Security State
While I am sure readers will be disappointed that this proposal to curb the NSA was defeated (see background here), the margin of victory for the bad guys was so stunningly narrow that it shows how badly support for the NSA has fallen even among its normal allies.
Read more...I’m Three Hops from a Terrorist, and Therefore Probably in the NSA’s Dragnet. And You?
Last month, the Atlantic highlighted the fact that the NSA had ‘fessed up to the fact that its snooping operation was a lot more encompassing than it had previously admitted.
Read more...Chris Hedges: “America is a Tinderbox”
A Real News Network interview with Chris Hedges precipitated a lively, thoughtful discussion of the mess we are in as a civilization and whether we can pull ourselves out of what looks like a nosedive.
I thought readers might enjoy continuing the exchange, and the latest release in this Real News Network series should provide ample grist for debate.
Read more...An Open Letter to the Media – #Snowden and Latin America
Yves here. This letter from Chicago Public Media (hat tip martha r), signed by a number of prominent scholars and Latin American professionals, sets out to correct the record of the American media’s depiction of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela in their discussion of Edward Snowden’s situation. I hope our readers south of the border will be able to add to this discussion.
Read more...Has Snowden Just Misplayed His Cards?
It may seem a bit presumptuous to question how Edward Snowden has conducted his affairs so far. After all, he is still alive and not in the tender care of the so-called American justice system, despite having crossed the surveillance arm of the world’s only superpower and fomenting multiple diplomatic uproars. And the political part of Snowden’s project seems to be going as well as he could have hoped.
But it isn’t clear Snowden has been as adept in his personal affairs of late. His press conference in Russia may have made a tenuous situation worse.
Read more...“Immigration Reform” = “Surveillance Reform” as Military Tactics Move Inland From US Borders
Yves here. The latest post at TomDispatch, Creating a Military-Industrial-Immigration Complex, How to Turn the U.S.-Mexican Border into a War Zone by Todd Miller, describes how the US border with Mexico, which is being defined more and more generously, has become an R&D lab for US security operations, as well as a new profit opportunity for defense contractors, who are looking for ways to repurpose combat equipment for domestic use. To put none too fine a point on its, the police state will be perfected on illegal immigrants or in-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time Americans mainly of color, and then deployed on the rest of us. The 17 city paramilatary crackdown on Occupy was just the warm-up act.
Read more...“Les Français sont comme les chihuahuas” (#Snowden)
By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience
Although the incident occurred several days ago, the responses among French readers were so extraordinary that they merit further attention. For many, the incident represented an unmistakable turning point:
There is a certain concept of the world that is disappearing definitively.
And so I have selected a representative sample of these responses, both from Le Figaro (center right) and Le Monde (center left), and formed them into a conversation:
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