Mass Surveillance

Biden’s Legacy: Enhancing The ‘State Secrets Privilege’ To Protect The National Security State

December 8, 2024 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! 9/11, Anti-Muslim, CIA, FBI, Guantanamo Bay, Joe Biden, Mass Surveillance

Abu Zubaydah, a high-profile detainee at Guantanamo Bay, was tortured by the CIA. He attempted to subpoena James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, both architects of the agency’s torture program who interrogated him at a black site in Poland. However, the CIA invoked the “state secrets privilege” to block Zubaydah from seeking testimony that could be used in a Polish criminal investigation. The case involving the state secrets privilege was eventually heard by the United States Supreme Court, and the court not only ruled in favor of the CIA but also expanded the privilege.

Predictive Policing And The Paris 2024 Olympic Games

July 26, 2024 Yegor Halva, Unicorn Riot. Educate! France, Mass Surveillance, Olympics, Police

As Paris prepares to host the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games from July 26 to August 11, 2024, the French government is implementing unprecedented surveillance measures to ensure safety. However, these measures have sparked fierce debate over the potential erosion of civil liberties, with opposition groups claiming that these systems automate social injustice. Sporting mega-events, including the Olympic Games, have long been testing grounds for new surveillance technologies. Their exceptional size and security demands constitute an emergency situation which is used as a pretext to justify the accelerated implementation of extraordinary regulations and policies that temporarily suspend law, along with the adoption of legislation that would be otherwise very hard to pass during “normal” periods.

Biden Terrifyingly Grows Ranks Of Government Spies

April 23, 2024 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! Government Spying, Joe Biden, Mass Surveillance, Patriot Act, Surveillance

On April 20, Edward Snowden declared, “America lost something important today, and hardly anyone heard. The headlines of state-aligned media screech and crow about the nefarious designs of your fellow citizens and the necessity of foreign wars without end, but find few words for a crime against the Constitution.” The NSA whistleblower was referring to the United States Senate reauthorizing and expanding surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Joe Biden circulated a memo that cast the Fourth Amendment right to privacy as a "threat to national security."

The White House Is Wrong: Section 702 Needs Drastic Change

April 9, 2024 Brendan Gilligan and Matthew Guariglia, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Educate! Congress, Mass Surveillance, NSA, Privacy, SAFE Act, White House

With Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act set to expire later this month, the White House recently released a memo objecting to the SAFE Act—legislation introduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Mike Lee that would reauthorize Section 702 with some reforms. The White House is wrong. SAFE is a bipartisan bill that may be our most realistic chance of reforming a dangerous NSA mass surveillance program that even the federal government’s privacy watchdog and the White House itself have acknowledged needs reform.

How San Diego Built A Surveillance Apparatus

October 11, 2023 Jesse Marx, In These Times. Resist! California, Mass Surveillance, Police, San Diego, Surveillance, Sustainability

San Diego. California - It sounded smart on paper. In 2016, the San Diego City Council created a new infrastructure project related to its environmental initiatives: Thousands of streetlights would be retrofitted with energy-efficient LEDs. Plus, remote-controlled sensors would produce publicly accessible data on weather, traffic and parking. Considering the energy savings, the $30 million partnership with General Electric would pay for itself. Win-win. But today, the project is an example of how not to create “smart” city utilities. Those sensors included integrated cameras, and no councilmember formally opposed the potential surveillance issues. Most San Diego residents only learned they were filmed indiscriminately thanks to media reports — in 2019.

The TSA Has Assaulted Us For 20 Years With Nothing To Show For It

November 12, 2022 Lee Camp, Mintpress News. Resistance Report Airports, FBI, Mass Surveillance, TSA

In the U.S. where we are fighting invasions of privacy and the destruction of our First Amendment rights in about 900 different ways every day, most of us have stopped talking about how insane and offensive airport security still is. To begin with, allow me to disabuse you of the notion that airport security stops terror attacks. As Darryl Campbell reports in The Verge, “the reality is that TSA has played next to no role in the biggest counterterrorism stories of the past two decades. According to the think tank RAND, intelligence and security services manage to foil nearly two-thirds of terrorist plots in the planning stages.” Of course, U.S. law enforcement also helps create almost all of the “terror attacks” they thwart.

Whistleblower Objects To Pentagon Purchases Of Browsing Data

September 25, 2022 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! Data, Mass Surveillance, NCIS, Pentagon

A United States military whistleblower filed a series of complaints alleging the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is engaged in the warrantless purchase and use of Americans’ internet browsing data, which it obtained from a broker. “According to the whistleblower, NCIS is purchasing access to data, which includes netflow records and some communications content from Team Cymru,” Senator Ron Wyden shared in a letter to the offices of the inspector general for the Pentagon, Justice Department, and Homeland Security Department. The warrantless purchase of Americans’ data is not limited to the NCIS. Wyden’s office examined public contracting records and found Team Cymru was awarded data brokering contracts with US Cyber Command, the US Army, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the US Secret Service.

After Years Of Tribal Resistance, DHS Finishes Its ‘Virtual Wall’

September 8, 2022 Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle. Educate! Border Wall, Indigenous Sovereignty, Mass Surveillance

When I come across surveillance towers in the borderlands, I first look to see if there are any communities, towns, or houses in its view. I did this on Monday, on the Tohono O’odham Nation in the southern Arizona borderlands, when I found an “integrated fixed tower,” built by the Israeli company Elbit Systems. It took me, two other journalists, and O’odham member Raymond Daukei all day to find it. I could see that homes in Topawa—a community of 380 people backed by the verdant western side of the muscular Baboquivari mountain range—were easily in range of the tower’s sophisticated camera system, which can see up to seven and a half miles.

New Records Detail DHS Purchase And Use Of Cell Phone Location Data

July 19, 2022 Shreya Tewari and Fikayo Walter-Johnson, American Civil Liberties Union. Educate! Cell Phones, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration, Mass Surveillance

Today, the ACLU published thousands of pages of previously unreleased records about how Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other parts of the Department of Homeland Security are sidestepping our Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable government searches and seizures by buying access to, and using, huge volumes of people’s cell phone location information quietly extracted from smartphone apps. The records, which the ACLU obtained over the course of the last year through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, shed new light on the government’s ability to obtain our most private information by simply opening the federal wallet. These documents are further proof that Congress needs to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, which would end law enforcement agencies’ practice of buying their way around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement.

Report: FBI Searched The Data Of Americans Millions Of Times In 2021

May 5, 2022 Kevin Reed, WSWS. Educate! FBI, Mass Surveillance, National Security

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) reported on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched through the electronic data of Americans 3.4 million times in 2021. The searches were revealed in the ODNI’s “Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities” for calendar year 2021. The data shows that there was nearly a tripling of these unconstitutional searches from 1.3 million in 2020. In typical fashion the ODNI report waives away this intensification of the surveillance state by claiming it was a technical matter related to vital national security matters, the details of which are never explained.

Police Will Pilot A Program To Live-Stream Amazon Ring Cameras

November 5, 2020 Matthew Guariglia, Electronic Frontier Foundation. Educate! Mass Surveillance, Mississippi, Police, Ring Cameras

This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of participating residents. Since Ring first made a splash in the private security camera market, we’ve been warning of its potential to undermine the civil liberties of its users and their communities. We’ve been especially concerned with Ring’s 1,000+ partnerships with local police departments, which facilitate bulk footage requests directly from users without oversight or having to acquire a warrant.

A “Persistent Eye In The Sky” May Be Coming To A City Near You

September 20, 2020 Medea Benjamin and Barry Summers, Information Clearinghouse. Educate! Drones, Mass Surveillance, US military, Weapons makers

“Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.” That same persistent eye in the sky may soon be deployed over U.S. cities. At the time he made that comment about surveillance drones over Afghanistan, Maj. General James Poss was the Air Force’s top intelligence officer. He was preparing to leave the Pentagon, and move over to the Federal Aviation Administration. His job was to begin executing the plan to allow those same surveillance drones to fly over American cities.

Mass Surveillance Program Revealed By Snowden Was Illegal

September 4, 2020 Raphael Satter, Reuters. Educate! Constitutional Rights, Edward Snowden, Legal System, Mass Surveillance

Seven years after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans’ telephone records, an appeals court has found the program was unlawful — and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth. In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the warrantless telephone dragnet that secretly collected millions of Americans’ telephone records violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may well have been unconstitutional.

How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

August 30, 2020 Cory Doctorow, One Zero. Strategize! Big Tech, Capitalism, Mass Surveillance, Monopoly

Figuring out what we want our tech to look like is crucial if we’re going to get out of this mess. Today, we’re at a crossroads where we’re trying to figure out if we want to fix the Big Tech companies that dominate our internet or if we want to fix the internet itself by unshackling it from Big Tech’s stranglehold. We can’t do both, so we have to choose. I want us to choose wisely. Taming Big Tech is integral to fixing the internet, and for that, we need digital rights activism.

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