Category Archives: Surveillance state

“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.

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“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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Will Snowden Revelations About Spying on Foreign Governments Undermine the European and Pacific Trade Talks?

Despite all the consternation in the US about Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent and intensity of snooping in the United States, it isn’t clear that the surveillance industry is even breaking a sweat. But the government and public uproar in Europe about US snooping on its supposed allies may change that pronto.

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Hong Kong to US on #Snowden: A4 Paper, Please. And Do Remember to Spellcheck!

By MsExpat, a journalist and essayist who lives in New York and Hong Kong, and Fellow of The Mighty Corrente Building. Originally published at Corrente.

Anyone who has ever had any dealings with Hong Kong’s scrupulous bureaucracy can’t help but chuckle at today’s South China Morning Post article detailing the problems that Hong Kong’s government had with the United States’ request to detain Edward Snowden. Since the SCMP is behind a paywall here are the juicy parts:

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Techies’ Efforts to Own #Snowden/NSA Surveillance Narrative = #Fail

Some Silicon Valley figures, along with some Democratic party-aligned media outlets, have tried assailing Glenn Greenwald, and indirectly, Edward Snowden, by trying to discredit certain aspects of the Guardian account of NSA surveillance in the US. But the tech pedants’ efforts to take down Greenwald and Snowden aren’t simply petty and disingenuous, they are ultimately destructive of the interests of American technology companies and American security.

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