Given how similar they sound and how easy it is to imagine one leading to the other, confusing omniscience (having total knowledge) with omnipotence (having total power) is easy enough. But at the moment, Washington seems to be operating in a world in which the more you know about the secret lives of others, the less powerful you turn out to be.
Read more...Google sure looks like it wants to profile you psychologically.
Read more...Yves here. The last two Snowden revelations have kicked up the public and even official unhappiness over pervasive NSA spying a notch further. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the NSA and hear all the consternation.
Read more...Yves here. Even though the NSA is now attempting to say that Google and Yahoo were told to comply with the latest data-hoovering exercise exposed by Edward Snowden, Google angrily claims otherwise.
Read more...Obama started looking more stressed than usual around the time of the Snowden revelations. This Real News Network interview with political scientist Tom Ferguson helps explain why. The surveillance industry, broadly defined, gave proportionately much more to Obama than other industries in the 2012 election.
Read more...By Thomas Ferguson, professor of political science at University of Massachusetts, Boston, Paul Jorgensen, assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, Pan American, and Jie Chen, university statistician at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Long before President Obama kicked off his 2008 campaign, many Americans took it for granted that George W. Bush’s vast, sprawling national security apparatus needed to be reined in. But that’s not how this movie turned out, and it’s obvious why once you look at the 2012 election money trail.
Read more...Yves here. When Edward Snowden began revealing the true scope of the surveillance state and the degree to which major American tech and communications companies were partners, Ed Harrison almost immediately recognized how damaging the news was to the cloud computing model. Yours truly, among others, wondered how quickly some countries would try to regain control of their Internet architecture, at least to keep the NSA from snooping on strictly domestic communications. That trend would also favor non-US service and equipment providers. For instance, a book I’m reading now, Spies for Hire by Tim Shorrock, mentions in passing that the NSA wanted to restrict US companies developing stronger forms of encryption because if they got too good, the NSA would not be able to crack it either. The Americans were very unhappy, and argued that that restriction would enable Europeans and the Japanese to take the lead in that field. The solution? The NSA let our domestic players go ahead as long as they got secret decryption keys. Mind you, this tidbit was public knowledge before the Snowden exposes, but remember also that aside from websites that needed encryption to allow for Internet commerce, most people didn’t give encryption a passing thought. These sort of security/privacy issues have gone mainstream, to the detriment of some US players.
Read more...Yves here. The public is still digesting the implications of the Snowden surveillance state disclosures. Quite a few press reports have mentioned the degree to which the NSA uses contractors, usually to shake fingers at “how could they not expect businesses to cut corners and hire a guy like Snowden?” But there’s been less discussion of how these contractors fit into the surveillance ecosystem. This piece by Prajat Chatterjee helps fill that gap.
Read more...Yves here. This BBC NewsInsight interview is a remarkable little piece. Greenwald confronts a clearly hostile set of questions from the BBC interviewer. He is not amused and comes pretty close to giving her a dressing down. Go Glenn!
Read more...By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Cross posted from Testosterone Pit.
IBM announced today that it would throw another billion at Linux, the open-source operating system, to run its Power System servers. The big reason? To capitalize on customers’ mistaken perception that Linux is safe from NSA snooping.
Read more...Yves here. At first I thought I’d relegate this Real News Network piece to Links, but on further reflection, I decided it was too important for that. The segment recaps the main findings of a new book, Enemies Within, about a heretofore secret operation in the NYPD. This might appear to be a local story, but think twice.
Read more...The Obama Administration is presenting the upcoming Congressional votes on its blank check Authorization to Use Military Force in Syria as justified, irrelevant (since Kerry has asserted that the Administration doesn’t need Congress’ approval can attack even in the face of a no vote), but a done deal nevertheless. None of those claims stand up to scrutiny.
Gaius focuses on the question of the degree to which the military-surveillance complex is already calling the shots in the US. While he uses the current sanitized formulation, “deep state,” I wish he and others in the opposition would use a more accurate, if perhaps less tidy, turn of phrase, like “slow motion military coup.”
Read more...By Patrick Durusau. Cross posted from Another Word for It
Just in case you missed it, Groklaw has gone dark.
In Forced Exposure, Pamela Jones outlines why Groklaw cannot continue when all email is subject to constant monitoring by the government.
Read more...Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
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