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Mass Surveillance

Snowden’s Advice To Trump On Surveillance

March 19, 2017 Alex Emmons, www.theintercept.com , , ,
By Alex Emmons for The Intercept. Snowden explained that the NSA’s surveillance dragnet currently allows any analyst with an appropriate clearance to search a massive database of communications for phones or IP addresses related to anyone, including the president. He was describing the Upstream program conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in which the NSA collects a vast number of American communications from internet cables entering and exiting the United States, ostensibly only “targeting” foreigners. “If Donald Trump wants to take this seriously, he needs to fix the problem that everyone in America’s communications are being collected right now, without a warrant, and they’re going into the bucket, and they’re protected by very lax internal policy regulations, and this simply is not enough,” said Snowden.

European Court Of Justice Rules Against Mass Surveillance

December 23, 2016 Staff, www.dw.com , ,
By Staff of DW - The ECJ has ruled that governments cannot force telecom firms to keep all customer data. The ruling, which says the laws violate basic privacy rights, comes as governments call for greater powers for spy agencies. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruled on Wednesday that laws allowing for the blanket collection and retention of location and traffic data are in breach of EU law. In their decision, the justices wrote that storing such data, which includes text message senders and recipients and call histories, allows for "very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained."

Snowden: ‘Journalists Are A Threatened Class’ In Era Of Mass Surveillance

October 28, 2016 Nika Knight, www.commondreams.org , ,
By Nika Knight for Common Dreams - "Journalists are increasingly a threatened class when we think about the right to privacy," Snowden said. "Yes, I can give you tips on how to protect your communications, but you are going to be engaging in an arms race that you simply cannot win. You must fight this on the front pages and you must win, if you want to be able to report in the same way that you've been able to do in the previous centuries."

Private Eyes: Little-Known Company Enabling Worldwide Mass Surveillance

October 26, 2016 Ryan Gallagher and Nicky Hager, www.theintercept.com ,
By Ryan Gallagher and Nicky Hager for The Intercept - IT WAS A POWERFUL piece of technology created for an important customer. The Medusa system, named after the mythical Greek monster with snakes instead of hair, had one main purpose: to vacuum up vast quantities of internet data at an astonishing speed. The technology was designed by Endace, a little-known New Zealand company. And the important customer was the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

CIA ‘Siren Servers’ Can Predict Social Uprisings 3-5 Days In Advance

October 10, 2016 Tim Hinchliffe, www.sociable.co , ,
By Tim Hinchliffe for The Sociable - The CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days before it happens thanks to powerful super computers dubbed Siren Servers by the father of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier. CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its “anticipatory intelligence” through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data.

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.
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