"Silicon Valley firms are building surveillance and profiling tools to help government agents make sense of the massive amount of information available on social media and in publicly accessible data sets. Are they using cutting-edge technologies to keep Americans safe, or laying the groundwork for a police state?"
"US Customs and Border Protection considers its jurisdiction to be anything within 100 miles of the border, so naturally one of the privacy questions for Americans is whether this tech would be deployed inside the United States. CBP did not respond to a request for comment on this story that was sent yesterday evening. We’ll update this post if we hear back."
"This breakdown—triggered by polarizing circus politics, media-fed mass hysteria, militarization and militainment (the selling of war and violence as entertainment), a sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of growing corruption, the government’s alienation from its populace, and an economy that has much of the population struggling to get by—is manifesting itself in madness, mayhem and an utter disregard for the very principles and liberties that have kept us out of the clutches of totalitarianism for so long."
"What if this bulk surveillance is about power and control and not about safety? What if the use of intelligence data for political purposes and not for safety is a profound danger to democracy? What if government can't keep us safe? What if we falsely think that it does keep us safe? What if that delusion makes us less safe? What if government's bulk acquisition of private data makes us less free? What if government works not for us but for itself? What do we do about it?"
"It’s important to keep in mind that all of this was kept secret from the American people from 1963 to the 1990s. Military personnel who participated in the autopsy were required by superior officers to sign written secrecy oaths, in which they promised never to reveal what they had seen during the autopsy. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, everything surrounding the autopsy would have remained secret, most likely forever."
"The records that the National Archives just released included a secret FBI analysis on civil-rights leader Martin Luther King. The thrust of the analysis is that King was a communist, and an immoral communist at that. Does the FBI analysis on King have any bearing on the Kennedy assassination? Actually, yes. That’s where critical thinking, circumstantial evidence, inferential thinking, and common sense come into play."
"Trump, consistent with his dictatorial tendencies, has effectively rewritten the law to suit himself and the CIA."
"These are all, by definition, conspiracy theories – but they are also all things done by the other. Conspiracies happen over there. They are done by the bad guys. We don’t do them. ….except of course, when we do."
"The evidence for a conspiracy organized at the deepest levels of the intelligence apparatus is overwhelming. James Douglass presents it in such depth and so logically that only one hardened to the truth would not be deeply moved and affected by his book."
"Post 9/11 authorization to use military force has been used to intervene in 19 countries. Congress ought to reclaim its authority to declare war, explains Col. Larry Wilkerson."