Technocracy

Homeland Security’s Multibillion-Dollar Comedy Show

"What does the United States have to show for tens of billions of dollars of Homeland Security antiterrorism spending by local and state governments? Michael Sheehan, former New York City deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, observed, 'I firmly believe that those huge budget increases have not significantly contributed to our post–9/11 security.' But the war on terrorism has been an unmitigated victory for Leviathan and politicians at every level of government."

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LAPD takes another step toward deploying drones domestically

"Advocates say camera-mounted drones could help protect officers and others by collecting crucial information during high-risk situations or searches without jeopardizing their safety. For many privacy advocates and police critics, however, the drones stir Orwellian visions of unwarranted surveillance or fears of militarized, weapon-toting devices patrolling the skies. LAPD brass, along with police commissioners, tried to ease those concerns last fall by promising careful restrictions on when the drones would be used, and strong oversight of the pilot program."

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USAF General: Nobody’s Ready for the Killer Robot

"If you go back to Aquinas and to St. Augustine, they talk about things like 'right intention.' Does the person who is doing the killing have right intention? Is he even authorized to do it? Are we doing things to protect the innocent? Are we doing things to prevent unnecessary suffering? And with autonomy and artificial intelligence, I don't believe there's anybody even in the business who can actually demonstrate that we can trust that those systems are doing what they should be doing."

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A War On Opioids Is A War On Suffering People

"Appointing an Opioid Czar and strictly restricting access to said drugs is not the way to stop the 'opioid epidemic,' if I may use the term. People, good people, people with families and jobs and homes, people who just want to be able to do something that approximates functioning, are having serious issues getting medicine that they need. Because they’re having trouble getting medicine their doctor deemed they needed, more and more are finding themselves in pain crises and heading to their local emergency rooms for relief, clogging up an already-congested system and causing delays in care for people who are dealing with other critical emergencies."

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Arizona Citizens Tracked In REAL ID Facial Recognition Database

"But the use of the system to prevent identity theft isn’t what people are worried about; the problem is the lack of oversight in government programs that allows anyone with access to look into the database. As such, state-run facial recognition databases are dangerous and can lead down a slippery slope to allow other operations the technology wasn’t intended for."

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Disturbing Trend of Police Wanting Drones for Routine Infractions

"After lulling the public into believing that using drones in the U.S. would be confined to border patrol or for counter-terrorism in the event of an imminent threat, we are beginning to see police calling for far wider implementation of drone surveillance. I’d like to remind readers that up until 2010 it was a conspiracy theory to suggest that drones would be used in the U.S. at all. Until, of course, it came out that there had been a domestic drone program in the works for years. Subsequently, it became understood that the 'border' actually extends 100 miles inland through an area that the ACLU dubbed the 'Constitution-free Zone.'"

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With Gun and Medical Marijuana Registries, Hawaii Starts Disarming Patients

"Hawaii is one of 29 states that allow medical use of marijuana, but it is the only state that requires registration of all firearms. If you are familiar with the criteria that bar people from owning guns under federal law, you can probably surmise what the conjunction of these two facts means for patients who use cannabis as a medicine, which Hawaii allows them to do only if they register with the state. Some of them recently received a letter from Honolulu Police Chief Susan Ballard, instructing them to turn in their guns."

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Is Silicon Valley Building the Infrastructure for a Police State?

"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?"

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Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition To Identify Travelers

"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."

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