Orwellian

Mass State Surveillance Not About Privacy

"The way we’re encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be." Continue reading →

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Restore The Fourth: Group Organizes Nationwide Anti-NSA Spying Protests On July 4

"Restore the Fourth is a grassroots, non-partisan, non-violent movement that seeks to organize and assemble nationwide protests on July 4th, 2013. Protesters in over 100 cities across America will gather to demand that the government of the United States of America adhere to its constitutionally dictated limits and respect the Fourth Amendment. http://www.RestoretheFourth.net provides a detailed list of protest locations. Restore the Fourth maintains that justification of the Fourth Amendment beyond the original text need not be given; the legitimacy of which is self-evident." Continue reading →

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Where Immigration Policy Intersects with Government Surveillance

"The drones are already there, though they aren’t continuously in the air; some are Predator B and Guardian drones — unarmed versions of the fighter jet-shaped aircraft commonly used in the Middle East. Also in the sky are large blimps loaded with high-tech cameras, on loan from the Justice Department — like the one I saw resting here outside of Valentine, Texas, roughly 20 miles from the border. Called 'the floating eye,' these building-sized balloons were formerly used to spot insurgents in Afghanistan. Now, they have become so common in the area that one was included in an artist’s rendering of a soon-to-be-built drive-in movie theater in Marfa, Texas." Continue reading →

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Gulf Arab youth get around segregation with smartphone flirting

"In the United Arab Emirates and all across the conservative Gulf countries, dating is unacceptable among nationals while arranged marriages are the norm. By switching on WhosHere, a smartphone application which is popular in the kingdom, a young man sitting at the men’s section of the cafeteria could contact girls sitting in the families’ section. Before such applications, men would throw at the girls pieces of paper with their telephone numbers scribbled on them. But the Saudi telecom authority warned in March that it would ban applications like Skype and WhatsApp if providers failed to allow authorities access to censor content, according to an industry source." Continue reading →

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Senator: Contractor that vetted Snowden is under investigation

"A company that conducted a 2011 background investigation into Edward Snowden, the source of recent leaks about U.S. secret surveillance programs, is itself under investigation, Senator Claire McCaskill said on Thursday. In her opening statement before a Senate homeland security subcommittee hearing, McCaskill said USIS is currently under investigation by the Office of Personnel Management’s Inspector General based on allegations is systemically failed to adequately conduct investigations under its contract. 'It is a reminder that background investigations can have real consequences for our national security,' McCaskill said." Continue reading →

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Fact checking NSA’s 9/11 claim: U.S. already knew identity of Saudi hijacker

"Those making the argument have ignored a key aspect of historical record. U.S. intelligence agencies knew the identity of the hijacker in question, Saudi national Khalid al Mihdhar, long before 9/11 and had the ability find him, but they failed to do so. Mihdhar is at the center of the well-known story of the failure of information sharing between the CIA and FBI and other agencies. Indeed, the Obama administration’s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program." Continue reading →

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Bush-Era NSA Whistleblower Makes Most Explosive Allegations Yet About Extent of Gov’t Surveillance

"Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst and Bush-era NSA whistleblower, claimed Wednesday that the intelligence community has ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats. He also made another stunning allegation. He says the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama back in 2004. FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds and Tice agreed that such wide-ranging surveillance of officials could provide the intelligence agencies with unthinkable power to blackmail their opponents." Continue reading →

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Spyware claims emerge in spat over Chinese dissident at NYU

"When Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng arrived in the United States in May last year he was given a fellowship at New York University, use of a Greenwich Village apartment, and a pile of gifts from supporters, including smartphones and an iPad. But at least two of the gadgets presented to Chen as gifts may not have been quite what they seemed: They included software intended to spy on the blind dissident, according to Jerome Cohen, an NYU professor who has been Chen’s mentor, and another source familiar with the episode." Continue reading →

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What the NSA Revelations Tell Us about America’s Police State

"Ongoing revelations by The Guardian and The Washington Post of massive, illegal secret state surveillance of the American people along with advanced plans for waging offensive cyberwarfare on a global scale, including inside the US, underscores what Antifascist Calling has reported throughout the five years of our existence: that democracy and democratic institutions in the United States are dead letters. If what the Bush and now, Obama regimes are doing is not Orwellian blanket surveillance of the American people, then words fail." Continue reading →

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Excerpt from Michael Hastings’ “The Operators” Re: Death Threats

"I was standing outside the circle. Dave came up to me. 'You’re not going to fuck us, are you?' I answered what I always answer: 'I’m going to write a story; some of the stuff you’ll like, some of the stuff you probably won’t like.' Jake came up to me. 'We’ll hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write,' he said. 'C. will hunt you down and kill you.' I looked at Jake. He had what I’d heard people in the military call retired colonel syndrome. A certain inferiority complex and bitterness about not rising to the rank of general. 'Well, I get death threats like that about once a year, so no worries.'" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingExcerpt from Michael Hastings’ “The Operators” Re: Death Threats