GLENN GREENWALD - August 9th, 2010

It is unsurprising that the 9/11 attack fostered a massive expansion of America’s already sprawling Surveillance State. But what is surprising, or at least far less understandable, is that this growth shows no signs of abating even as we approach almost a full decade of emotional and temporal distance from that event. The spate of knee-jerk legislative expansions in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 trauma — the USA-PATRIOT Act — has actually been exceeded by the expansions of the last several years — first secretly and lawlessly by the Bush administration, and then legislatively and out in the open once Democrats took over control of the Congress in 2006. Simply put, there is no surveillance power too intrusive or unaccountable for our political class provided the word “terrorism” is invoked to “justify” those powers.

The More-Surveillance-Is-Always-Better Mindset

Illustrating this More-Surveillance-is-Always-Better mindset is what happened after The New York Times revealed in December, 2005 that the Bush administration had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without the warrants required by law and without any external oversight at all. Despite the fact that the 30-year-old FISA law made every such act of warrantless eavesdropping a felony, “punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both,” and despite the fact that all three federal judges who ruled on the program’s legality concluded that it was illegal, there was no accountability of any kind. The opposite is true: the telecom corporations which enabled and participated in this lawbreaking were immunized by a 2008 law supported by Barack Obama and enacted by the Democratic Congress. And that same Congress twice legalized the bulk of the warrantless eavesdropping powers which The New York Times had exposed: first with the 2007 Protect America Act, and then with the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which, for good measure, even added new warrantless surveillance authorities.

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Neil Kramer - June 08, 2010

Since the end of World War II, the United Kingdom has steadily and perceptibly regressed into a psychotic quagmire of officialdom. This has been implemented according to an explicit strategy to remove the personal privacy, self empowerment and spiritual alignment from the people of Britain. The current subjects of the German Dynastic elites known as The House Of Saxe-Coburg And Gotha (renamed The Windsors in 1917 for public relations reasons), are seeing a rapid regression to the in-your-face serfdom that was previously believed to have been consigned to the dark days of the 17th century. Or so it would seem.

Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian fantasy film ‘Brazil’ satirized the debilitating apparatus of bureaucracy and how it completely dehumanizes the free thinking individual whilst being firmly supported by a zombified populous who absorb and repeat its disempowering memes without question. If you’re not familiar with Britain’s particularly exasperating brand of totalitarianism, watch Brazil (The Directors Cut) for a crash course in pen-pushing authoritarian squalor. The film vividly illustrates Gilliam’s own frustrations on a personal creative level (regarding the increasingly corporatized movie industry), whilst succeeding in portraying the cold-blooded machinations of an oppressive regime that has finally thrown off the tiresome camouflage of democracy.

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Antifascist - Mar 14, 2010

A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the “barbarians at the gates,” that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of “democracy on the march,” “hope” and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.

Putting it another way, as the late, great Situationist malcontent, Guy Debord did decades ago in his relentless call for revolt, The Society of the Spectacle:

“The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’ With ever-increasing concreteness the spectacle recreates its own presuppositions.”

And when those “presuppositions” reproduce ever-more wretched clichés promulgated by true believers or rank opportunists, take your pick, market “democracy,” the “freedom to choose” (the length of one’s chains), or even quaint notions of national “sovereignty” (a sure fire way to get, and keep, the masses at each others’ throats!) we’re left with a fraud, a gigantic swindle, a “postmodern” refinement of tried and true methods that would do Orwell proud!

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Liz Hull - 12th February 2010

It has been nicknamed the flying saucepan and looks an unlikely weapon in the war against crime.

But yesterday it emerged that a suspected car thief had become the first person to be arrested in Britain thanks to the help of this miniature remote-controlled helicopter.

The Air Robot or drone was deployed by Merseyside police after officers lost the alleged offender who had escaped on foot in thick fog.

Using the device’s on-board camera and thermal-imaging technology, the operator was able to pick up the suspect through his body heat and direct foot patrols to his location.
It led officers to a 16-year-old youth, who was hiding in bushes alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal, in Litherland, Merseyside.

The drone, which measures 3ft between the tips of its four carbon fibre rotor blades, uses unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology originally designed for military reconnaissance.

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Christopher Soghoian - Dec. 1, 2009

Executive Summary

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

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When George Orwell wrote 1984, he probably never imagined that society would actually become that oppressive. Yet in some nations of the world it has. In fact, in nations such as the U.K., “Big Brother” controls have now been implemented that are so bizarre that Orwell could not have possibly envisioned them during the time in which he lived. The truth is that the U.K. has become a society run by elitist control freaks. The most intimate and personal details of the lives of millions of people in the U.K. are tightly monitored and controlled by a ruthless technocracy that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago. The following are 20 signs that the U.K. has now become the most oppressive Big Brother society on earth…..

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Research into techniques of facial biometrics, carried out by scientists at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), has come up with a system that is able to recognize the facial “DNA” of every individual by determining his/her most noteworthy facial traits, with a of 95% rate of precision.

Recognition techniques based on facial features, known as facial biometrics, is usually based on the search for those traits which make one face different from another. The research carried out by this team, in contrast, approaches the issue from a slightly different point of view. “The difference between our work and the majority of the others that are found in this field is the idea of individualized models.”, explains one of the study’s authors, mathematician David Delgado Gomez from the UC3M Statistics Department. “Our objective”, he continued, “is to create a model for each person which highlights the most distinguishing features of each face, as a sort of facial “DNI”.

The researchers had this idea when they were imagining the situation of a crowded room where someone comes in asking for one of them. “Our way to describe a person is through some traits that the others don’t have, such as the tall woman with blue eyes, or the bald guy with a beard. We try to apply this idea to our algorithm.”, remarked Professor Delgado, who has been carrying out this research with Federico Sukno, Kaushik Pavani and Alejandro Frangi from the CISTIB Group of Universidad Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, and Bjarne Ersboll and Jens Fagertun from the mathematical modelling group of Technical University of Denmark, which has recently published an article entitled “Similarity-based Fisherfaces”, with some of their research results appearing in the scientific journal Pattern Recognition Letters.

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James Slack - 28th October 2009

A Big Brother landmark has been passed with ten per cent of the population now stored on the Government’s DNA database.

In total, there are now an astonishing 5,532,847 individual profiles logged on the giant computer system - out of a population of 54million in England and Wales.

Around one million of those included on the system have never been convicted of any crime.

It will fuel the public backlash against the march towards a surveillance state, with polling released today showing eight out of ten voters are now fed-up with the increased use of surveillance powers.

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Noah Shachtman - October 19, 2009

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

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Mark Lerner - 25 September 2009

The Big Question - should government control the people or should the people control government?

Orwell’s prediction of a future big brother government came true. Whether acknowledged or not, Americans now live in a surveillance society.

Most of that American public falls into one of the categories the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) calls “potential threats;” environmentalists, animal lovers, anti-war protestors, pro-lifers, evangelical Christians, observant Jews, Constitutionalists, returning veterans, and third party candidate supporters are all “potential domestic terrorists.”

Just how far is the American public willing to let the government go in order to assure public safety? Do the people want the police on every block, all emails read by the government, phone calls overheard, or every financial transaction monitored? Do the people want sensors placed in cities that detect how much an individual perspires, in order to assess and monitor supposed guilt?

How about computer software programs that decide whether or not the way people walk or dress presents a threat to the government? In Britain citizens are captured on surveillance cameras an average of 300 times a day; does the American public want to be subjected to this level of scrutiny?

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The European Union is spending millions of pounds developing “Orwellian” technologies designed to scour the internet and CCTV images for “abnormal behaviour”.

Ian Johnston - 19 Sep 2009

A five-year research programme, called Project Indect, aims to develop computer programmes which act as “agents” to monitor and process information from web sites, discussion forums, file servers, peer-to-peer networks and even individual computers.

Its main objectives include the “automatic detection of threats and abnormal behaviour or violence”.

Project Indect, which received nearly £10 million in funding from the European Union, involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and computer scientists at York University, in addition to colleagues in nine other European countries.

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of human rights group Liberty, described the introduction of such mass surveillance techniques as a “sinister step” for any country, adding that it was “positively chilling” on a European scale.

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Surveillance is a gradual and incessant creep, the House of Lords warns. Unchecked, we march towards a mark where every detail about an individual is recorded and pored over by both the state and private sectors.

By then, though, it will be no use asking who is watching us – because everyone will be.

The Age | Aug 30, 2009

THE all-seeing eye was once seen as a divine force, surrounded by dazzling rays of light from on high. Its eyelid heavy but gaze unwavering, the eye was the protective stare of a supreme being watching over us from above.

Now, though, it simply watches, often from the shadows. Peering down from security cameras as we walk the city streets, buy bread at the corner store, fill the car with petrol, or catch a taxi or tram. Tracking us through our mobile phone or when driving through a tollway to Melbourne Airport, which last year trialled “virtual strip search” security scanners. Someone’s watching while we’re surfing online, sending an email, or updating our Facebook profile to paranoid. Melbourne once held pretensions of being the city that never sleeps. Now, at least, it is the city that never shuts its eyes.

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William N. Grigg - July 27, 2009

Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, as part of its continuing campaign against rationality, recently published a house editorial condemning civilian ownership of firearms.

Bobbing in the puddle of pathos created by the editorial staff’s lachrymosity can be found this lump of congealed hypocrisy: “[T]ough guys don’t pack firearms. Fearful guys do — people who see everyone around them as a threat and think the worst of faces they don’t recognize. Guns don’t showcase strength, they showcase weakness.”

There is the beginning of an important point here, but it’s one the people responsible for that editorial, in their ideologically induced foolishness, are too thick to recognize: If they are serious in their assessment that carrying firearms (particularly handguns) is symptomatic of socially dangerous insecurity on the part of those who carry them, then disarmament should begin with those most frequently found in public possession of those weapons — that is, the police.

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Cryptogon - June 22nd, 2009

What has happened is that bloggers have blown the support columns out from underneath traditional media and the people who run the show don’t like that.

The fact that some of us are able to survive by maintaining blogs must have come as an incredible shock to fat bastards in boardrooms across the land. That we are not “regulated” is unthinkable in the Soviet hive mind that governs the political economy of the United States.

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