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Mass Surveillance

Walking Tour Of New York’s Massive Surveillance Network

October 2, 2016 Cora Currier, www.theintercept.com , , ,
By Cora Currier for The Intercept. New York City - Earlier this month, on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the lower tip of Manhattan was thronged with soldiers in uniform, firefighters marching with photos of lost friends pinned to their backpacks, and tourists bumbling around the new mall at the World Trade Center. Firetrucks and police cars ringed Zuccotti Park and white ribbons adorned the iron fence around the churchyard on Broadway. Trash cans were closed up, with signs announcing “temporary security lockdown.” So it felt a bit risky to be climbing up a street pole on Wall Street to closely inspect a microwave radar sensor, or to be lingering under a police camera, pointing and gesturing at the wires and antenna connected to it. Yet it was also entirely appropriate to be doing just that...

Walking Tour Of New York’s Massive Surveillance Network

September 27, 2016 Cora Currier, www.theintercept.com ,
By Cora Currier for The Intercept - EARLIER THIS MONTH, on the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the lower tip of Manhattan was thronged with soldiers in uniform, firefighters marching with photos of lost friends pinned to their backpacks, and tourists bumbling around the new mall at the World Trade Center. Firetrucks and police cars ringed Zuccotti Park and white ribbons adorned the iron fence around the churchyard on Broadway. Trash cans were closed up, with signs announcing “temporary security lockdown.”

The United States Of Innocence

September 11, 2016 Philip Weiss, www.mondoweiss.net , , ,
By Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss. Last week I published a lengthy interview with Guantanamo defense lawyer Major Todd Pierce (Retired), titled “Everything that we have done since 9/11 is wrong.” It told his story, from his childhood on a Minnesota farm to military service as a reservist in the Gulf War and the Iraq War. What follows is part 2, in which Pierce, who enters the New School this fall, relates his beliefs about American society today: that our wars in the Middle East have been fostered by propaganda and falsehood, including claims about radical Islam, and that the elites have fallen in line in a way that they did not do during Vietnam, and these developments threaten our democracy. We talked in Roseville, Minnesota, at the end of July.

Documents Reveal FBI Monitored Holocaust Survivor Hedy Epstein’s Activism

August 4, 2016 Sarah Lazare, www.alternet.org , ,
By Sarah Lazare for AlterNet - The FBI just released its files on the Holocaust survivor and intrepid human rights activist Hedy Epstein, revealing that the agency was monitoring her activism to support the human rights of Palestinians. The files on Epstein, who died in May at the age of 91, were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the writer and researcher Waqas Mirza. One heavily-redacted document, dated January 15, 2006, reveals that Epstein fell under surveillance due to her participation in a "delegation from St. Louis" that "traveled to Israel with [the International Solidarity movement] in the winter of 2003.”

Big Brother Is Listening As Well As Watching

July 14, 2016 Taylor Armerding, www.csoonline.com ,
By Taylor Armerding for CSO - In a world of ubiquitous security cameras, most people know by now that some form of Big Brother – government or private – is watching them. But they are less likely to know that in some areas, he is also listening. While it is not yet widespread, audio surveillance is increasingly being used on parts of urban mass transit systems. That is the bad news, in the view of privacy advocates. But the good news is that public awareness can, at least in some cases, curtail it.

NSA And CIA Double Warrantless Searches On Americans In Two Years

May 6, 2016 Jenna McLaughlin, www.theintercept.com , ,
By Jenna McLaughlin for The Intercept - FROM 2013 TO 2015, the NSA and CIA doubled the number of warrantless searches they conducted for Americans’ data in a massive NSA database ostensibly collected for foreign intelligence purposes, according to a new intelligence community transparency report. The estimated number of search terms “concerning a known U.S. person” to get contents of communications within what is known as the 702 database was 4,672 — more than double the 2013 figure.

White House Executive Order On Privacy Falls Short

February 21, 2016 Shahid Buttar, www.eff.org , , ,
By Shahid Buttar for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. February 9, 2016 - This morning, the White House announced an Executive Order establishing a federal interagency privacy council composed of senior privacy officials from two dozen federal agencies. While seeming to offer some promise, however, the council has a limited mandate, and ultimately represents an overdue nod to privacy principles the administration has repeatedly abused in practice. If the Obama administration wants to support privacy, it can start by finally offering straight answers to Congress on surveillance and intelligence practices that offend privacy. Instead, Congress has legislated surveillance policy in the dark while enduring a long series of executive misrepresentations.

How Many In US Swept Up In NSA’s Foreign Intel Surveillance?

October 30, 2015 Staff, www.brennancenter.org ,
By Staff of Brenna Center for Justice - Today the Brennan Center for Justice, joined by more than 30 other privacy and civil liberties organizations, urged Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper to determine and disclose how many Americans are swept up in NSA surveillance under a law that authorizes the agency to target foreigners overseas. Coming on the heels of the DNI’s release of a “Principles of Intelligence Transparency Implementation Plan” earlier this week, the letter challenges the Intelligence Community to put action behind its words. “Americans deserve to know the truth about so-called ‘foreign intelligence’ surveillance,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

Newsletter: Movements And Elections

May 31, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. Popular Resistance was created to help build a broad-based movement that is informed and acts strategically to challenge the status quo. There are so many crises today and we have been focused on trying to stop those crises from worsening (“stop the machine”) while using the fights and partial victories to build capacity for the movement. We have avoided putting emphasis on elections in part because it is important not to get caught up in the electoral cycle which has been nothing more than a periodic horse race between corporate candidates chosen through a rigged system. Instead, we hoped that more people would step out of the electoral cycle and take a longer-term view of the work that must be done to build a movement with real power.

Why NSA surveillance Is Worse Than You’ve Ever Imagined

May 16, 2015 James Bamford, www.blogs.reuters.com , , ,
Last summer, after months of encrypted emails, I spent three days in Moscow hanging out with Edward Snowden for a Wired cover story. Over pepperoni pizza, he told me that what finally drove him to leave his country and become a whistleblower was his conviction that the National Security Agency was conducting illegal surveillance on every American. Thursday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York agreed with him. In a long-awaited opinion, the three-judge panel ruled that the NSA program that secretly intercepts the telephone metadata of every American — who calls whom and when — was illegal.

Right-Left Unite Over Extension Of Patriot Act

May 10, 2015 Julian Hattem, www.thehill.com , , , ,
A coalition of advocacy groups from all sides of the political spectrum has joined forces to warn against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) plan to renew expiring portions of the Patriot Act without changes. Traditionally conservative organizations such as FreedomWorks and Gun Owners of America joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP and dozens of other groups to warn the Senate majority leader against his “clean” reauthorization of the national security law. “In the absence of meaningful reform, it is unacceptable to rubber stamp reauthorization of an authority that the government has used to spy on millions of innocent Americans,” the groups told McConnell and other leaders of Congress on Wednesday. “These bulk surveillance programs raise serious constitutional concerns, erode global confidence in the security of digital products, and are unnecessary for national security,” they added.

Industries Dedicated To Getting Your Privacy Back

April 26, 2015 Janet Burns, www.alternet.org ,
Low-tech protections against widespread surveillance have been gaining ground, too. Though initially designed as a tongue-in-cheek solution to prying eyes and cameras, Becky Stern’s Laptop Compubody Sock offers a portable, peek-free zone to laptop users, while the CHBL Jammer Coat and sold-out Phonekerchief use metal-infused fabrics to make personal gadgets unreachable, blocking texts, calls and radio waves. For people willing to sport a bit more hardware in the name of privacy, the Sentient City Survival Kit offers underwear that notifies wearers about real-life phishing and tracking attempts, and its LED umbrella lets users “flirt with object tracking algorithms used in advanced surveillance systems” and even “train these systems to recognize nonhuman shapes.”

Day Of Action Against C-51 Across Canada

March 15, 2015 The Canadian Press, www.macleans.ca , , ,
MONTREAL — Thousands of Canadians came together to loudly denounce the Conservative government’s proposed anti-terror legislation in rallies held across the country on Saturday. In a park in Montreal’s north end, a few dozen of the hundreds of demonstrators taped their mouths shut in protest of the bill, which opponents say would allow the government to stifle protest and dissent. As they marched toward the office of Liberal leader Justin Trudeau, many of the large contingent waved signs bearing messages such as “Stop Harper,” and “Activism is not a crime.” The Conservative government introduced the legislation, known as Bill C-51, in January. The wide-ranging bill would give police much broader powers and allow them to detain terror suspects and give new powers to Canada’s spy agency.

Newsletter: Redefining The 21st Century

March 14, 2015 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org , , , , , , ,
In his story about how he became aware, Marcus Godwyn writes, "I don’t know about you but when it comes to this 21st century, so far, I’m distinctly not a fan!" It is up to us to redefine what the 21st century ultimately means. To that end, here is what happened this week and what is coming up. The Internet in the 21st Century The new net neutrality rules were published this week and the good news from our friends at Free Press is that the Internet as a common carrier has been restored. Matt Wood says, “These rules are an all-too-rare example of Washington actually working for the people.” This only happened because people organized and mobilized to make it happen. The result was an unexpected one and would not have occurred without a people's intervention.

If Mass Surveillance Is A Permanent State — We Resist

March 9, 2015 Hendrik Alexandersson, www.hax.5july.org , , ,
From the Snowden files, people know for sure. There is mass surveillance. It is conducted on a global scale by various NSA schemes. In most countries there are national surveillance programmes. And in the EU, data retention means logging all our phone calls, text messages, e-mails, net connections and mobile positions. (This is done in most EU countries, despite the European Court of Justice having invalidated the EU data retention directive for breaching human rights.) Then we have the things we do not know. Obviously the Russians and the Chinese have their own global mass surveillance systems. And in the western world there are many surveillance programmes still unknown for the public. (Sometimes outsourced to private contractors.)
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