Bruce Schneier - May 21, 2013

The Internet has turned into a massive surveillance tool. We’re constantly monitored on the Internet by hundreds of companies — both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything we do there is recorded, collected, and collated — sometimes by corporations wanting to sell us stuff and sometimes by governments wanting to keep an eye on us.

Ephemeral conversation is over. Wholesale surveillance is the norm. Maintaining privacy from these powerful entities is basically impossible, and any illusion of privacy we maintain is based either on ignorance or on our unwillingness to accept what’s really going on.

It’s about to get worse, though. Companies such as Google may know more about your personal interests than your spouse, but so far it’s been limited by the fact that these companies only see computer data. And even though your computer habits are increasingly being linked to your offline behavior, it’s still only behavior that involves computers.

The Internet of Things refers to a world where much more than our computers and cell phones is Internet-enabled. Soon there will be Internet-connected modules on our cars and home appliances. Internet-enabled medical devices will collect real-time health data about us. There’ll be Internet-connected tags on our clothing. In its extreme, everything can be connected to the Internet. It’s really just a matter of time, as these self-powered wireless-enabled computers become smaller and cheaper.

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Mar 05 2013 - Paul Slomp

I nearly fell off my chair while reading an article in the Guardian Weekly headlined “Canada’s spy chiefs target anti-frackers,” by Stephen Leahy. Apparently “monitoring of environmental activists in Canada by police and security agencies has become the “new normal” . . . (and that protests) and opposition to Canada’s resource-based economy, especially oil and gas production, are now viewed as threats to national security.” The article further notes that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) admit “the vast majority of spying is done within Canada” under the guise of “domestic terrorism.”

Farmers and ranchers are the people most affected by oil and gas activity on their farms. Their land rights are being trampled on — appropriated through provincial and federal legislation. And now they are being monitored by the RCMP and CSIS, suspected of terrorism because they are resisting oil and gas development on their land and in their communities?

Can this be? Has Canada become a “petro-state”?

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Ryan Gallagher - Feb. 4, 2013

Meet the groundbreaking new encryption app set to revolutionize privacy and freak out the feds.

For the past few months, some of the world’s leading cryptographers have been keeping a closely guarded secret about a pioneering new invention. Today, they’ve decided it’s time to tell all.

Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.

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sosadmin’s blog - 08/23/2012

We don’t know much about what the NSA is doing. What we do know – and what we suspect -  is featured in today’s New York Times. 

Shane Harris, author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, reports that the legacy of John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program “operates with little accountability or restraint” at the NSA, while filmmaker Laura Poitras invites William Binney, a 32-year NSA-veteran-turned-whistleblower, to talk about what that means for all of us. 

Binney contends that the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering has been “turned inward on this country” and that the NSA has the capacity to monitor what everyone is doing and show the “entire life” of an individual over time. 

Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician in Germany who gave a TED talk on telecom surveillance was able to map his own life using six months’ worth of data that telecoms had gathered on him. Just imagine what kind of dossier he could have put together on himself if he had access to the range of personal data and computer power possessed by the NSA.

As Shane Harris writes, the NSA’s “global surveillance system continues to grow. It now collects so much digital detritus – e-mails, calls, text messages, cellphone location data and a catalog of computer viruses – that the NSA is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it. What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom.”

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CNET has learned that the FBI has formed a Domestic Communications Assistance Center, which is tasked with developing new electronic surveillance technologies, including intercepting Internet, wireless, and VoIP communications.

Declan McCullagh - May 22, 2012

The FBI has recently formed a secretive surveillance unit with an ambitious goal: to invent technology that will let police more readily eavesdrop on Internet and wireless communications.

The establishment of the Quantico, Va.-based unit, which is also staffed by agents from the U.S. Marshals Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency, is a response to technological developments that FBI officials believe outpace law enforcement’s ability to listen in on private communications.

While the FBI has been tight-lipped about the creation of its Domestic Communications Assistance Center, or DCAC — it declined to respond to requests made two days ago about who’s running it, for instance — CNET has pieced together information about its operations through interviews and a review of internal government documents.

DCAC’s mandate is broad, covering everything from trying to intercept and decode Skype conversations to building custom wiretap hardware or analyzing the gigabytes of data that a wireless provider or social network might turn over in response to a court order. It’s also designed to serve as a kind of surveillance help desk for state, local, and other federal police.

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More background: Surveillance State democracy

Christopher Slobogin - Apr. 11, 2012

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) recently issued “Guidelines for Access, Retention, Use, and Dissemination by the National Counterterrorism Center and Agencies of Information in Datasets Containing Non-Terrorism Information” [PDF]. As this prolix title implies, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the key agency for organizing and analyzing national security intelligence, routinely acquires and accesses datasets about US citizens that contain personal details having nothing to do with terrorism. These datasets could contain information about credit card transactions, airline reservations, phone and ISP communications, bank, tax and social security records and perhaps even medical consultations. Nowhere do the guidelines mention these datasets by name, but previous intelligence practices make clear they are among the sources the NCTC wants to consult. While the government was probably collecting much of this information before the events of September 11, 2001, since that time it has clearly been aggressively engaged in doing so, through a series of programs known successively as Total Information Awareness, Terrorism Information Awareness, ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement) and, most recently, “fusion centers,” where information from various sources is “fused” together.

Before promulgation of the guidelines, the government could legally retain information that is not presently linked to national security concerns for no longer than six months. The guidelines extend that period to at least five years. The impetus for this change was undoubtedly the belief that effective counter-terrorism is possible only if intelligence agencies have access to every conceivably relevant piece of information, which is less likely to occur if datasets are frequently purged.

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Cannonfire - April 09, 2012

Since when has it become acceptable for television commercials to tell outright lies? I was under the impression that deceptive advertising was illegal.

You know about Progressive Insurance. That’s the company whose TV ads feature a lovely lady wearing a white uniform and blindingly red lipstick. The folks at Progressive are pushing a device called Snapshot which plugs into your car’s steering column and sends the company information about your driving habits. If you practice good habits, you get a substantial discount.

The question is: How much info are you sending to them? Are they tracking your location via GPS? Are they keeping track of how fast you go?

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Is Thomas Drake an enemy of the State?

Jane Mayer - May 23, 2011

On June 13th, a fifty-four-year-old former government employee named Thomas Drake is scheduled to appear in a courtroom in Baltimore, where he will face some of the gravest charges that can be brought against an American citizen. A former senior executive at the National Security Agency, the government’s electronic-espionage service, he is accused, in essence, of being an enemy of the state. According to a ten-count indictment delivered against him in April, 2010, Drake violated the Espionage Act—the 1917 statute that was used to convict Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who, in the eighties and nineties, sold U.S. intelligence to the K.G.B., enabling the Kremlin to assassinate informants. In 2007, the indictment says, Drake willfully retained top-secret defense documents that he had sworn an oath to protect, sneaking them out of the intelligence agency’s headquarters, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and taking them home, for the purpose of “unauthorized disclosure.” The aim of this scheme, the indictment says, was to leak government secrets to an unnamed newspaper reporter, who is identifiable as Siobhan Gorman, of the Baltimore Sun. Gorman wrote a prize-winning series of articles for the Sun about financial waste, bureaucratic dysfunction, and dubious legal practices in N.S.A. counterterrorism programs. Drake is also charged with obstructing justice and lying to federal law-enforcement agents. If he is convicted on all counts, he could receive a prison term of thirty-five years.

The government argues that Drake recklessly endangered the lives of American servicemen. “This is not an issue of benign documents,” William M. Welch II, the senior litigation counsel who is prosecuting the case, argued at a hearing in March, 2010. The N.S.A., he went on, collects “intelligence for the soldier in the field. So when individuals go out and they harm that ability, our intelligence goes dark and our soldier in the field gets harmed.”

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Antifascist Calling - April 24, 2011

As the United States morphs into a failed state, one unwilling and soon perhaps, unable, to provide for the common good even as it hands over trillions of dollars to a gang of financial brigands engorged like parasitic ticks on the wealth of others, keeping the lid on is more than just an imperial obsession: it’s big business.

Earlier this month, New Scientist reported that “a new way of working out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down your current location to within a few hundred metres.”

Although similar techniques are already in use, they are not very accurate in terms of closing the surveillance trap. “Every computer connected to the web has an internet protocol (IP) address, but there is no simple way to map this to a physical location,” reporter Jacob Aron informs us. “The current best system can be out by as much as 35 kilometres.”

However, Yong Wang, “a computer scientist at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have used businesses and universities as landmarks to achieve much higher accuracy.”

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A Hall of Shame of State Snooping, Prying, and Informing Aimed at Destroying the Fabric of Civil Society

Stephan Salisbury - October 3, 2010

The dried blood on the concrete floor is there for all to see, a stain forever marking the spot on a Memphis motel balcony where Martin Luther King, Jr. lay mortally wounded by a sniper’s bullet.

It is a stark and ghostly image speaking to the sharp pain of absence. King is gone. His aides are gone. Only the stain remains. What now?

That image is, of course, a photograph taken by Ernest C. Withers, Memphis born and bred, and known as the photographer of the civil rights movement. He was there at the Lorraine Motel, as he had been at so many other critical places, recording iconic images of those tumultuous years.

In addition to photographing moments large and small in the struggle for black civil rights in the South, Withers had another job. He was an informer for the FBI, passing along information on the doings of King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Ben Hooks, and other leaders of the movement. He reported on meetings he attended as a photographer, welcomed in by those he knew so intimately. He passed along photos of events and gatherings to his handler, Special Agent William H. Lawrence of the FBI’s Memphis office. He named names and sketched out plans.

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By Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press - 01/18/2010

Governments, regardless of their political structure or historical background, have always striven to not only control information, but also to gather it from the people by covert means. Often, this secretive observation of the citizenry escalates into a completely open and full-fledged surveillance state. The U.S. in particular stands on a precarious edge: the line between abhorring invasion of privacy, and embracing invasion of privacy as necessary for the “greater good.” Many people assume that such a mindset is forced on the masses by the elite, that strength of arms is somehow required to make them accept the conditions of a police state, but this is not always so. It is very difficult for governments, despite any technological developments or resources they may have, to enforce and maintain a fascistic political construct. In order to retain control, they must build a “Surveillance Culture;” a society in which the people watch each other, and where individuals censor themselves instead of being censored by the authorities. In the end, a police state cannot exist without the help of the people it means to dominate. By spying on each other, we destroy ourselves.

But how does a nation reach such a point in its collective psyche? How are we driven to passive enslavement? In this article we will examine the methods used by governments and aristocratic minorities to manipulate the majority towards self imprisonment, as well as examples of how this process is burgeoning in the U.S. at this very moment…

Communist China: The Future Of America?

Many of us conjure images of Hitler’s Germany and hordes of Nazi stormtroopers when considering the idea of a police state, and this extreme example often blinds us to the tyranny slowly building in our own country.

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• Obama staffer wants ‘cognitive infiltration’ of 9/11 conspiracy groups
• Sunstein’s Paper Provides More Evidence COLINTELPRO Still Operational
• Top Obama czar: Infiltrate all ‘conspiracy theorists’
• Conspiracy theories, online government spooks, and Cass Sunstein (Parts 1 and 2)
• Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Antifascist - January 7, 2009

An FBI provocateur and undercover informant, Brandon Michael Darby, unmasked himself December 30 in a bizarre letter to the Independent Media Center (IMC), an activist website and alternative news clearinghouse.

Darby’s admission came after government documents were provided to defense attorneys representing Bradley Crowder and David McKay. The activists were arrested in early September during the Republican National Convention and charged with one count of possession of firearms. They remain in jail awaiting trial.

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Parts I and II.

Chris Williams - 3rd December 2008

Italian president and media baron Silvio Berlusconi said today that he would use his country’s imminent presidency of the G8 group to push for an international agreement to “regulate the internet”.

Speaking to Italian postal workers, Reuters reports Berlusconi said: “The G8 has as its task the regulation of financial markets… I think the next G8 can bring to the table a proposal for a regulation of the internet.”

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Surprise, surprise. An identified member of the false-flag terroristic, crypto-Masonic, fascist Propaganda Due, actually has disdain for free speech! …Never saw that coming.