Archive for the ‘Surveillance State’ Category
Civil Liberties, RIP
The Tea Partiers’ problem is that their protests come far too late – because the legal and political precedents targeting dissident groups were established long ago, with the full complicity and even enthusiastic support of most of those who call themselves “conservatives” these days. The “Patriot” Act – passed with conservative support – gives the government the “right” to not only spy on such groups, it also gives them the means to spy on anyone, for any reason, as well as the prosecutorial “tools” to put them away forever. Law enforcement agencies have set up “fusion centers” in order to collect information on American citizens who might be considered a “threat.” A recent report on “right-wing extremism” issued by the Department of Homeland Security” listed groups local law enforcement should keep tabs on, including members of the Libertarian and Constitution parties, as well as Ron Paul supporters. Efforts by the FBI and local police to infiltrate and set up members of the “Occupy” movement have been widespread. http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/05/16/our-civil-liberties-rip/
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Boston Becomes Toxic
The fallout from Boston has been more of the same lashing out that we saw post 9/11. People like Ron Paul who decry the breakdown in the constitution and rule of law are lambasted for being out of touch and “going too far” while the “liberal” Obama Administration prepares to give the FBI sweeping new powers. Unfortunately power is a zero sum game. If you take away rights and liberties they are not safe somewhere waiting to be restored, they are gone forever and have been transferred to someone else. If we establish the principle that any criminal act inflicting multiple casualties can be defined as terrorism and be treated by the imposition of martial law we will quickly lose constitutionally guaranteed access to some aspects of civilian rule of law. If we decide that no conversation or message, even if it originates in one’s home, is truly private then we will have lost a large measure of our personal liberty. And it can even get worse. There is speculation that the Obama Administration will use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as a model for another secret federal court that can decide on the use of drones to assassinate American citizens. As FISC rules 100% in favor of the government, we can only expect rubberstamp kill lists as part of our future. http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2013/05/15/boston-becomes-toxic/#.UZTnpKJXYh0.email
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Storm Clouds Gathering
This past week, we learned that the IRS has targeted for additional scrutiny the tax exemption applications of groups with whose messages it disagrees. We also learned that the Department of Justice obtained the personal telephone records of hundreds of reporters and editors employed by the Associated Press without a search warrant issued by a judge. And during this past week we learned that the White House, the Department of State and the CIA all engaged in a conspiracy of disinformation so that the official version of events of what caused the murders of four Americans at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, would not impair Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The common threads in all of this government secrecy and lying are a general rejection of government’s moral obligation to tell the truth, a disturbing yet brazen willingness to evade and avoid the restrictions the Constitution has deliberately built around government, and a glib admission that the government can do as it pleases so long as it can politically get away with it. http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2013/05/15/storm-clouds-gathering/#.UZTqBGuG6k4.email
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The Surveillance State: Is This the Price of Living in a ‘Free, Safe’ Society?
Even with our freedoms in shambles, our country in debt, our so-called “justice” system weighted in favor of corporations and the police state, our government officials dancing to the tune of corporate oligarchs, and a growing intolerance on the part of the government for anyone who challenges the status quo, Americans have yet to say “enough is enough.” http://original.antiwar.com/jwhitehead/2013/05/15/the-surveillance-state-is-this-the-price-of-living-in-a-free-safe-society/#.UZTqexI85sY.email
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Round the Clock Surveillance: Is This the Price of Living in a ‘Free, Safe’ Society?
The reality is this: we no longer live in a free society. Having traded our freedoms for a phantom promise of security, we now find ourselves imprisoned in a virtual cage of cameras, wiretaps and watchful government eyes. All the while, the world around us is no safer than when we started on this journey more than a decade ago. Indeed, it well may be that we are living in a far more dangerous world, not so much because the terrorist threat is any greater but because the government itself has become the greater threat to our freedoms. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead82.1.html
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Land of the Free Watch: CNN Calls for Real-Time Police State Surveillance
The establishment media is calling for the implementation of Big Brother technology following the Boston bombing last month. In order to prevent terrorist attacks, CNN argues, there must be real-time surveillance cameras planted everywhere. Panopticon technology is required if we are to expect government to protect us from terrorists and other miscreants, the corporate media network says. http://www.infowars.com/cnn-calls-for-real-time-police-state-surveillance/
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Homeland Security Funded Exercise Portrayed Homeschoolers as Terrorists
Taken on its own, the KOMO 4 News report below out of Seattle paints a stark and frightening picture of police battling “angry parents” in a simulated shooting at a school. The practice of police training to take on everything from homeschoolers to patriots and constitutionalists – “rightwing extremists” in government parlance – is anything but a rarity. Such exercises are now a prominent feature of the expanding police state. http://www.infowars.com/homeland-security-funded-exercise-portrayed-homeschoolers-as-terrorists/
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Dictatorship Watch: America’s Roads Have Been Turned Into a Revenue Generating Surveillance Grid
Back in the old days, the highways of America were great examples to the rest of the world of the tremendous liberties and freedoms that we enjoyed. Americans loved to hop into their vehicles and take a drive. But now government is sucking all of the fun out of driving. The control freak bureaucrats that dominate our political system have figured out that giant piles of money can be raised by turning our roads into revenue raising tools. At this point things have gotten so bad that even some police officers are admitting what is going on. http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/americas-roads-have-been-turned-into-a-revenue-generating-surveillance-grid
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Top Secret
Even those few crackpots and malcontents who might want to strike a blow against the US lack the organization, training, tanks, missiles, computers, artillery, ships, guns, trucks… and all the other paraphernalia that might make even a tiny dent in the imperial armor. So the “war” must remain a secret. It takes place in the shadows… a kind of imaginary battle… in which thousands of make-believe soldiers pretend to protect Western civilization from millions of fantastic foreign fiends. http://lewrockwell.com/bonner/bonner598.html
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Boston’s Top Cop Warns Against ‘Police State’
Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis warned against creating a “police state” in the aftermath of the marathon bombings during testimony in front of a congressional hearing today. Despite Davis’ call for the public’s privacy to be protected, he did call for more surveillance cameras as well as more undercover officers to increase security around big events. In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, numerous political figures and talking heads seized upon the attacks to call for big brother measures. Both Republican Congressman Peter King and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg cited the attack to justify increased surveillance. “So, I do think we need more cameras. We have to stay ahead of the terrorists and I do know in New York, the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, which is based on cameras, the outstanding work that results from that,” said King. “So yes, I do favor more cameras. They’re a great law enforcement method and device. And again, it keeps us ahead of the terrorists, who are constantly trying to kill us.” In reality, as Bruce Schneier has documented, the chance of an American being killed in a terrorist attack is virtually zero when compared to the most likely causes of death. http://www.infowars.com/bostons-top-cop-warns-against-police-state/
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Land of the Free Watch: Are All Telephone Calls Recorded and Accessible to the U.S. Government?
The real capabilities and behavior of the U.S. surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the U.S. government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
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Dictatorship Watch: Sheriff Bradshaw and the Palm Beach County Psihuska
“What does it hurt,” asked Sheriff Ric Bradshaw of Florida’s Palm Beach County, “to have somebody knock on the door and ask, ‘Hey, is everything OK?’” The answer to that question obviously depends on the identity of the “Somebody” who is making that inquiry. What Sheriff Bradshaw had in mind was a strike force composed of deputies, social workers, and “mental health” professionals from a “Behavioral Sciences Unit” (BSU) who would be on-call twenty-four hours a day, ready to be deployed to visit the homes of what the Soviets used to call “socially dangerous people.” In the Soviet Union, such people would often be involuntarily committed to a psihuska, or psychiatric prison. http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w323.html
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USSA Watch: Spy Court Approved All U.S. Wiretap Requests It Received in 2012
A special court established to review government requests for warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of suspected foreign spies received close to 1,900 warrant requests last year — all of which it approved. A report released earlier this week by the U.S. Department of Justice to the Senate shows the government in 2012 made 1,856 requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for authority to conduct electronic and physical surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. Of those, 1,789 were explicitly for electronic surveillance of suspects. The rest were for either physical surveillance alone or a combination of both. The government later withdrew one of its warrant requests and the FISC modified 40 of the proposed orders. But in the end, the court did not reject a single surveillance request from the government either wholly or in part, in 2012. http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9238882/Spy_court_OK_d_all_U.S._wiretap_requests_it_received_in_2012?source=CTWNLE_nlt_pm_2013-05-03
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Land of the Free Watch: Citizen Arrested at Suspicionless Checkpoint for Not Obeying Petty Commands
In Georgia, a citizen was arrested last month at an unconstitutional checkpoint for refusing to obey cops demanding he fully roll down his car window. The man was arrested for “obstructing justice,” in other words for not completely submitting to domination and submission procedures the state now requires as it wantonly violates the Fourth Amendment. http://www.infowars.com/citizen-arrested-at-suspicionless-checkpoint-for-not-obeying-petty-commands/
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Extremist Government Watch: Americans Fear Washington More Than Terror Attacks
According to a pair of recent polls, for the first time since the 9/11 terrorist hijackings, Americans are more fearful their government will abuse constitutional liberties than fail to keep its citizens safe. Even in the wake of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing – in which a pair of Islamic radicals are accused of planting explosives that took the lives of 3 and wounded over 280 – the polls suggest Americans are hesitant to give up any further freedoms in exchange for increased “security.” http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/americans-fear-government-more-than-terror/
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Americans Made a Pact With the Devil After 9/11/01
The pact with the devil occurred in the fall of 2001, when then President George W. Bush and Congress decided that they would use the machinery of the federal government to secure safety, rather than liberty. So, the Bush-inspired Patriot Act permits federal agents to write their own search warrants, and the Bush-inspired new FISA statutes permit search warrants of some Americans’ phone calls without a showing of probable cause as the Constitution requires, and the Bush-era intimidation of telephone service providers permitted our overseas spies to snoop on our domestic phone calls. None of this has enhanced safety, and all of it has diminished liberty. In the Obama administration, the devil has demanded more. In the past five years, we have seen federal spies capturing the keystrokes on our computers, local police using federal dollars to install cameras and microphones on nearly every street corner, and, the latest lamentable phenomenon, the use of false emergencies to undermine freedom. http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano97.1.html
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Police State Measures at Kentucky Derby
In response to the Boston bombings, Churchill Downs management has announced new restrictions to be imposed on attendees at the Kentucky Derby next month. Backpacks, duffel bags, large purses, coolers, camcorders, tripods, cameras with detachable lenses and numerous other items will be now be prohibited at the annual event which seats 50,000 people. In addition, fans will be subjected to an electronic wand search, according to the Associated Press. Attendees may also have their cell phones, tablets and other electronic devices searched. “These are not wholesale changes, but these would not have happened without the events that happened” at the Boston Marathon, Churchill Downs spokesman John Asher said last week. Asher cited the Department of Homeland Security’s slogan, “If You See Something, Say Something.” The DHS has “partnered” with transportation systems, universities, states, cities, sports leagues and local law enforcement to push the mantra. http://www.infowars.com/police-state-measures-at-kentucky-derby/
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Laboratory for a Fortressed World
Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-’90s, when Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution–the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners. Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the “flat world” to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom–a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world. http://www.thenation.com/article/laboratory-fortressed-world#
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Is One Human Life Worth More Than Another?
What really bothers me is the egocentric self importance this country, its media, and its politicians place upon a tragedy that occurs in one of our cities versus tragedies of equal or greater scale that are occuring every day due to our foreign interventionism. Last night, my local news spent 20 minutes of the 30 minute broadcast on the Boston bombings. They played the same footage over and over again. The talking heads from the MSM just blather on with theories and suppositions based upon nothing. Their biases regarding gun owners, foreigners, Tea Partiers, and political beliefs immediately show through. Whatever particular agenda they favor is used to flavor their “impartial” reporting. The country is now in a tizzy. The government is coming to the rescue. There will be calls for more security and safety measures. Obama will use this incident to push his gun control agenda, even though a gun wasn’t used. The death of an 8 year old will be the rallying cry for the statists to take more of your liberties and freedoms away. The politicians will use this incident to spend more of your money on police, cameras, DHS armored vehicles, SWAT teams, listening surveillance, and predator drones. How many billions have we spent since 9/11 on these agencies? http://www.theburningplatform.com/
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Roaches, Mosquitoes, and Birds: The Coming Micro-Drone Revolution
America will never be a “no drone zone.” That must be acknowledged from the outset. There is too much money to be made on drones, for one, and too many special interest groups – from the defense sector to law enforcement to the so-called “research” groups that are in it for purely “academic” reasons – who have a vested interest in ensuring that drones are here to stay. At one time, there was a small glimmer of hope that these aerial threats to privacy would not come home to roost, but that all ended when Barack Obama took office and made drones the cornerstone of his war efforts. By the time President Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act into law in 2012, there was no turning back. The FAA opened the door for drones, once confined to the battlefields over Iraq and Afghanistan, to be used domestically for a wide range of functions, both public and private, governmental and corporate. Those looking to the skies in search of Predator drones will be in for a surprise, however, because when the drones finally descend en masse on America, they will not be the massive aerial assault vehicles favored by the Obama administration in their overseas war efforts. Rather, the drones coming to a neighborhood near you will be small, some nano in size, capable of flying through city streets and buildings almost undetected, while hovering over cityscapes and public events for long periods of time, providing a means of 24/7 surveillance. These micro-drones will be the face of surveillance and crowd control in the coming drone age. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead78.1.html
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Mission Accomplished, Obama: Americans Now Willing to Submit to Cavity Searches
Cities across the nation are beefing up security around government buildings, transit hubs, national landmarks and sporting events. We’ll see bomb-sniffing dogs and TSA agents everywhere we turn. And as a result of Obama’s intentional usage of the word “terrorism” Americans are now willing to do anything if it means they’ll be safe and protected in their own country. Check your Facebook wall or Twitter stream and you’ll see dozens of posts asking where was the security at the Boston Marathon. Why were people allowed in with backpacks? Why weren’t those backpacks inspected? Where were the bomb-sniffing dogs and TSA agents? People across America are now begging to be searched everywhere they go. http://www.infowars.com/mission-accomplished-obama-americans-now-willing-to-submit-to-cavity-searches/
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Idaho Bans Government Spy Drones
Idaho has become the second state in the US to ban warrantless spy drones being used by police or government, in an effort to protect privacy. Idaho Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter signed legislation into law Thursday that restricts the use of unmanned vehicles by public agencies, and mandates that warrants must be obtained in order to collect evidence using the technology. Legislation has been introduced by lawmakers in 36 other states to regulate domestic drone use, and bills are still actively being considered in 31 states. Recent reports have noted that the drone industry is engaged an all out PR offensive to convince Americans that the unmanned vehicles are more than just tools for spying and assassinations. http://www.infowars.com/idaho-bans-government-spy-drones/
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Resistance is Dangerous – But Submission is Often Fatal
Resisting arrest is not a crime. It is a common-law right, the exercise of which is treated as if it were a crime. The act of resistance was transmuted into a criminal offense chiefly through judicial activism, rather than legislation. Courts that seek to criminalize resistance have generally made the pragmatic argument that resistance is more dangerous than submission. We’ve long since reached the point where the reverse is often the case. http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w319.html
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New York’s Totalitarian Mayor: Military-Style Drones Will Patrol the City
Like it or not, the eye in the sky will soon be following your every move, according to Mayor Bloomberg. “You can’t keep the tides from coming in,” the mayor remarked when asked about drones on his weekly radio show. “We’re going to have more visibility and less privacy. I just don’t see how you could stop that.” The NYPD already has cameras mounted at strategic locations around the city and there’s no reason, by the mayor’s reckoning, that they have to attached to light poles. “It’s scary. What’s the difference if a drone is up in the air or on a building,” he said. The mayor put the timeframe for an all-seeing society at about five years, when he estimated “there’ll be cameras every place.” Using the same line of reasoning, Bloomberg urged Albany to approve speed cameras to catch motorists going too fast on city streets. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/military_style_drones_patrolling_t1RZyNvZ39uSvzv9Ful25H#.UU31YUEty0Q.email
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Judge Rules Secret FBI Letters Unconstitutional
They’re called national security letters and the FBI issues thousands of them a year to banks, phone companies and other businesses demanding customer information. They’re sent without judicial review and recipients are barred from disclosing them. On Friday, a federal judge in San Francisco declared the letters unconstitutional, saying the secretive demands for customer data violate the First Amendment. http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/259037/group/homepage/
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Extremism Watch: Obama’s Secrecy Fixation
Along with others, I’ve spent the last four years documenting the extreme, often unprecedented, commitment to secrecy that this president has exhibited, including his vindictive war on whistleblowers, his refusal to disclose even the legal principles underpinning his claimed war powers of assassination, and his unrelenting, Bush-copying invocation of secrecy privileges to prevent courts even from deciding the legality of his conduct. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/14/obama-transparency-podesta-sunshine-week
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A Rare Victory Over the Surveillance State — Court Curbs Laptop Searches at U.S. Border
A federal appeals court on Friday said Customs and Border Protection officers cannot confiscate or download every laptop or electronic device brought into the U.S., ruling that people have an expectation their data are private and that the government must have “reasonable suspicion” before it starts to do any intensive snooping. In a broad ruling, the court also said merely putting password protection on information is not enough to trigger the government’s “reasonable suspicion” to conduct a more intrusive search — but can be taken into account along with other factors. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/8/court-limits-feds-ability-search-laptops-border/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS
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The Shadowy Boondoggle That is ‘Homeland Security’
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which celebrates its 10th birthday this March, has grown into a miniature Pentagon. It’s supposed to be the actual “defense” department — since the Pentagon is essentially a Department of Offense — and it’s rife with all the same issues and defects that critics of the military-industrial complex have decried for decades. In other words, “homeland security” has become another obese boondoggle. But here’s the strange thing: unlike the Pentagon, this monstrosity draws no attention whatsoever — even though, by our calculations, this country has spent a jaw-dropping $791 billion on “homeland security” since 9/11. To give you a sense of just how big that is, Washington spent an inflation-adjusted $500 billion on the entire New Deal. Despite sucking up a sum of money that could have rebuilt crumbling infrastructure from coast to coast, this new agency and the very concept of “homeland security” have largely flown beneath the media radar — with disastrous results. http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2013/02/28/the-shadowy-boondoggle-that-is-homeland-security/
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Epic DHS Checkpoint Refusals
Checkpoints (some would say illegal checkpoints) have been popping up quite frequently in the new USSA. As you see in this video, you DO NOT have to comply with their question’s or demands. Don’t forget, (for now at least) you have rights. Notice that in each checkpoint refusal, refusing to relinquish your constitutional rights leaves the Federal agents perplexed, agitated, and powerless. http://www.silverdoctors.com/epic-dhs-checkpoint-refusals/
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Land of the Free Watch: Supreme Court Throws Out Challenge to Government Electronic Surveillance
The conversion of the United States into a type of “prison” with the inmates under the constant surveillance of the government “jailers” is progressing quickly; this time, with the help of the Supreme Court. By a 5-4 decision on Tuesday, the court rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of government wiretaps and monitoring of citizens’ e-mails, telephone calls, and electronic messages. Those targeted for the surveillance are not suspected of committing any crime, so searching their communications is a direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/14638-supreme-court-throws-out-challenge-to-government-electronic-surveillance
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The U.S. Supreme Court: Architects of the American Police State
These are the hallmarks of the emerging American police state, where police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens. Whether it’s police officers breaking through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or strip searching innocent motorists on the side of the road, in a police state such as ours, these instances of abuse are not condemned by the government. Rather, they are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution. The justices of the United States Supreme Court through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency have become the architects of the American police state. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead73.1.html
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Your Own Smart Phone, Turned Against You
As The Guardian reported just recently, the defense industry is already working with Raytheon to build its own application that would map our physical movements, as well as our activity on social networking sites, including Facebook, Google, Twitter and FourSquare, which taken together, can drill down on both the location and buying habits of millions of users a day. http://original.antiwar.com/vlahos/2013/02/18/your-own-smart-phone-turned-against-you/
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Dorner, Drones and the NDAA
Cops all around the country are chomping at the bit to use drones, as this interactive map shows. In addition to tracking down alleged cop killers, police want to use the technology for more mundane and practical purposes in service to the state – for instance, snooping on folks exercising the First Amendment. In January, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said he would be interested in using drones for monitoring crowds and large demonstrations, according to NBC in New York. But as former Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin notes, the introduction of drones – machines used to kill untried supposed terrorists (and their families and no small number of innocent bystanders) – in the United States means the government is ready to use military force against the American people.
http://www.infowars.com/dorner-drones-and-the-ndaa/
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Google Moves to Destroy Online Anonymity, Unintentionally Helping Authoritarian Governments
Do you have a right to anonymous political free speech? According to the Supreme Court, you do. According to the Department of Homeland Security, you don’t. They’ve hired General Dynamics to track U.S. citizens exercising this critical civil right. http://www.globalresearch.ca/google-moves-to-destroy-online-anonymity-unintentionally-helping-authoritarian-governments/5322542
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Drone Wrath for a Compliant Society
The military has transformed warfare into a deadly computer game with drone weapons. Media programs like Weaponology or Future Weapons on the Military Channel provide detailed examples of the lethalness of autonomous technology. The use of drones as the preferred method of carnage is well established. Seldom do moral questions come into the discussions of eliminating enemies of the state. The rules of engagement vested in international law and the Geneva Convention, either ignored or rewritten for high-tech 21st Century combat, becomes the foundational tactic to maintain the killing force of the grand empire. http://www.batr.org/totalitariancollectivism/021013.html
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The Relentless March of the U.S. Police State
Each day, the U.S. police state grows larger, more powerful, more pervasive, and more menacing. When will the majority awaken to the realization that this threat has nothing to do with party politics, that it makes no difference whether a Republican or a Democrat occupies the presidency while our freedoms are demolished? http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33842.htm
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Totalitarianism Watch: UK Government to Track All Internet Use
UK spy agencies want to install ‘black box’ surveillance devices across the country’s communications networks to monitor internet use, it emerged today. A report by an influential committee of MPs tells how spooks are keen to implement a nationwide surveillance regime aimed at logging nearly everything Britons do and say online. The spy network will rely on a technology known as Deep Packet Inspection to log data from communications ranging from online services like Facebook and Twitter, Skype calls with family members and visits to pornographic websites. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2274388/MI5-install-black-box-spy-devices-monitor-UK-internet-traffic.html#ixzz2K88UoGmU
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Pentagon’s New Massive Expansion of ‘Cyber-Security’ Unit is About Everything Except Defense
Cyber-threats are the new pretext to justify expansion of power and profit for the public-private National Security State. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/28/pentagon-cyber-security-expansion-stuxnet
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U.S. Government Claims – Just Like the Communists – that the Truth is Too Complicated and Dangerous to Disclose to the Public
Secretive, unaccountable agencies are making life and death decisions which effect our most basic rights. They provide “secret evidence” to courts which cannot be checked and often withhold any such “evidence” even from the judges. http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/01/u-s-government-claims-that-the-situation-is-so-complicated-and-dangerous-that-it-must-act-on-secret-information-just-like-the-nazis.html
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What the FBI Doesn’t Want You to Know About Its ‘Secret’ Surveillance Techniques
The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones, a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to Jones – and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS trackers – you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is “private and confidential.” http://lewrockwell.com/spl5/fbi-secret-surveillance-techniques.html
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Orwell’s Nightmare is Coming True
I’m an optimist on the future of technology. But the way a lot of it is going to be applied by people in government is a different question. The current developments are quite disturbing, especially the emerging capability of police to use cameras and computers to scan millions and millions of people and identify individuals in seconds. They say it’s to track sex offenders or catch terrorists, but what’s clearly at stake here is the universal monitoring of everyone all the time – just like in 1984. The bad news is that it’s here now, and spreading around the world. http://lewrockwell.com/casey/casey146.html
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Land of the Free Watch: Permanent Checkpoints
If the occasional random roadside stop n’ frisk is a good idea – and not a violation of anyone’s rights – why not make such gantlets ubiquitous – and permanent? That’s the nut of San Antonio Deputy Police Chief Anthony Trevino’s argument in favor of establishing permanent DWI checkpoints. He’d like them in the vicinity of what he calls “hot spots” – that is, establishments where alcohol is served, such as restaurants and bars. (See here for the news story.) But why not everywhere? After all, “drunk driving” is a possibility anywhere. If Trevino’s wish is granted, the price of going out to dinner will include not merely the possibility of having to submit to an unwarranted (and unwanted) interrogation and inspection by the likes of Trevino and his pals. It will be a certain thing. The new normal – part of the routine. Just like being forced to assume the I surrender pose at the airport, spread your legs and let a blue-shirted goon have his (or her) way with you as the price of getting on an airplane. It has already been established in law – sanctified by the black-clad priests of legalese – that it is not “unreasonable” (and so, not a violation of the Fourth Amendment) to stop vehicles at random – that is, without any specific probable cause – and require drivers to roll down their window, provide ID, answer questions and – at the arbitrary discretion of the costumed enforcer – remove themselves from their vehicle and submit to a sobriety test of one kind or another. To prove to his satisfaction, in other words, that you aren’t “drunk.” As opposed to the old-fashioned idea that it’s up to the law to prove you are. If all that is “reasonable” – and not a violation of the Fourth (and Fifth) Amendment – then surely what Trevino is proposing ought to pass muster, too. Which is why, in all likelihood, it will pass muster. http://ericpetersautos.com/2013/01/09/permanent-checkpoints/
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Totalitarianism Watch: Judge Approves Texas School District’s Student ID Tracking System
A student in a Texas public school district who called her student identification card the “Mark of the Beast” lost her federal court case Tuesday challenging her suspension for rejecting the radio-frequency identification chip implanted in the card she is forced to wear around her neck. http://thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/14157-judge-approves-texas-school-district%E2%80%99s-student-id-tracking-system
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TSA Denies Using Drone At Vikings-Packers Game
The TSA yesterday denied employing an unmanned surveillance drone at the December 30th Vikings-Packers game at the Metrodome in Minnesota, dismissing online photographs of the flying craft. As we reported earlier in the week, Attorney Nathan M. Hansen took photographs of the spy drone and posted them to his twitter feed following the game. The images revealed a small drone with four rotors hovering high above the crowds. http://www.infowars.com/tsa-denies-using-drone-at-vikings-packers-game/
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Mother, Should I Trust the Government?
When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace. Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony. It began with the immediate passage of the Orwellian Patriot Act one month after 9/11. Did the corporate media question how a 363 page all-encompassing expansion of police state power was written in a few weeks after 9/11 and passed by October 26? They did not. The bill was pre-written and ready for instant implementation when the time was right. The Orwellian version of America was launched. http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=45633
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The Coming Drone Attack on America
People often ask me, in terms of my argument about “ten steps” that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both U.S. military and by commercial interests, into U.S. airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year – it means that the police state is now officially here. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/coming-drone-attack-america
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Land of the Free Watch: Google Starts Watching What You Do Off the Internet Too
The most powerful company on the Internet just got a whole lot creepier: a new service from Google merges offline consumer info with online intelligence, allowing advertisers to target users based on what they do at the keyboard and at the mall. Without much fanfare, Google announced news this week of a new advertising project, Conversions API, that will let businesses build all-encompassing user profiles based off of not just what users search for on the Web, but what they purchase outside of the home. http://rt.com/usa/news/google-internet-online-offline-500/
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Land of the Free Watch: You May Be a Suspicious Hotel Guest
Do you routinely put the “do not disturb” sign on your hotel room door? If you do, you may fit the profile of a suspected terrorist, and the FBI and Homeland Security Administration want to know about it. The FBI and HSA have released a joint bulletin to hotels throughout the world alerting them to potentially suspicious activities by hotel guests representing “potential indicators of terrorist activity.” http://lewrockwell.com/nestmann/nestmann51.1.html
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Spy Agency Conducts Surveillance on All U.S. Citizens
The Obama administration overruled recommendations from within the U..S Department of Homeland Security and implemented new guidelines earlier this year that allow the government to gather and analyze intelligence on every single U.S. citizen. Since the spring, a little-know intelligence agency outside of Washington, D.C. has been able to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the U.S Constitution and conduct dragnet surveillance of the entire country, combing massive datasets using advanced algorithms to search and seize personal info on anyone they wish, reports the Wall Street Journal this week. There’s no safeguard that says only Americans with criminal records are the ones included, and it’s not just suspected terrorists that are considered in the searches either. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) has been provided with entire government databases and given nearly endless access to intelligence on everyone in the country, regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything that would have made them a person of interest. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33310.htm
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Government Spying Out of Control
The president and the leadership of both political parties in both houses of Congress have abandoned their oaths to uphold the Constitution. They have claimed that foreigners and their American communicants are committed to destroying the country and only the invasion of everyone’s right to privacy will keep us safe. They are violating the privacy of us all to find the communications of a few. Who will keep us safe from them? Their behavior is committed to destroying the Constitution. http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano80.1.html
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The Corporatist Intelligence Agency
While the CIA is commonly understood to be an intelligence agency, we shouldn’t forget the important role it has played in carrying out clandestine operations that have benefited the financial elite. This accusation is substantiated by the CIA’s elitist origins, its well-documented connections to Wall Street, and its sordid history of carrying out assassinations, staging coups, and fomenting civil wars. The CIA and the financial elite have always had shared goals, interests, and backgrounds. Those in the upper echelons at Langley have often attended the same universities, belonged to the same fraternities, and attended the same clubs and parties as the Wall Street elite. http://www.infowars.com/the-corporatist-intelligence-agency/
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Drones in America? They Are Already Here
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is one of the most important organizations we have in America today. While most of the country lays fast asleep to the dangers of the encroaching surveillance state, the EFF is always vigilantly at work on the front lines. In their latest article, they show that military drones are already flying all over these United States and, using information received from a FOIA lawsuit they provide important details on what is flying and where. You may be shocked at some of their conclusions. http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2012/12/06/drones-in-america-they-are-already-here/
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‘Everyone in U.S. Under Virtual Surveillance’ — NSA Whistleblower
The FBI records the emails of nearly all US citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this information against anyone. Binney, one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in the history of the National Security Agency, resigned in 2001. He claimed he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the Constitution, such as how the FBI engages in widespread and pervasive surveillance through powerful devices called ‘Naris.’ This year, Binney received the Callaway award, an annual prize that recognizes those who champion constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives. http://rt.com/usa/news/surveillance-spying-e-mail-citizens-178/
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CIA-Sponsored Trolls Monitor Internet and Interact With Users to Discredit Factual Information
According to Lynnae Williams, former CIA clandestine service trainee and DIA analyst, the FBI and CIA use trolls to monitor social media and interact with users to discredit information disseminated on the web. Williams explains that the CIA provides training videos to new recruits on how to troll the internet. Once a target is locked-in, all open source information is obtained on the individual, and then any angle to discredit them in public forum is used on social media sites. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/12/01/cia-trolls-infect-the-net/
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Looking Beyond Election Day: The Issues That Threaten to Derail the Nation
While it may be months before the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy can be fully resolved, Americans cannot afford to lose sight of the very real and pressing issues that threaten to derail the nation. What follows is an overview of the major issues that both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, despite their respective billion dollar war chests, have failed to mention during their extensive campaign trail stumping and televised debates. These are issues that aren’t going away anytime soon. Indeed, unless we take a proactive approach to the problems that loom large before us, especially as they relate to America’s ongoing transformation into a police state, we may find that they are here to stay. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead62.1.html
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Video: Truck Driver Stands Up To Unconstitutional Checkpoint
A truck driver who passed through an unconstitutional checkpoint 30 miles from the Mexican border stood up for his 4th Amendment rights by refusing to answer questions in another example of how Americans are re-asserting their liberties. http://www.infowars.com/video-truck-driver-stands-up-to-unconstitutional-checkpoint/
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Intensified Warrantless Spying in America
Post-9/11, lawless spying became policy. In 2002, Bush authorized it by presidential order. Big Brother watches everyone it sets its sights on. So-called threats were invented to justify it. Today, it’s more intensive than ever. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2012/10/15/intensified-warrantless-spying-in-america/
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Land of the Free Watch: Sheriff Wants Drones to Peek Inside Buildings
Technology previously used to hunt insurgents in Afghanistan. http://www.infowars.com/sheriff-wants-drones-to-peek-inside-buildings/
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Land of the Free Watch: DHS to Start Testing Drones Over U.S. For ‘Public Safety’
Don’t be surprised if you catch a federal fleet of sneaky spy drones soaring over your head in the near future, but don’t be too terrified — it’s all in the name of public safety. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is asking the makers of small unmanned aerial vehicles to submit their crafts for consideration as the agency ramps up the construction of a full-fledged surveillance state across America. http://rt.com/usa/news/dhs-us-public-safety-019/
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Riots Over Rotten Apple Mania
Liberalism is a common mindset of Apple users. While this same bias exists with most left coast marketing programs of other tech companies, Apple is notable for their counterculture presentations. The irony of the 1984 Apple’s Macintosh Commercial, satirizes the totalitarian world view, while the 2012 Apple business prototype exemplifies the very essence of the surveillance society. Liberation of personal computing does not survive in a cloud. The foreign workers at Foxconn and other offshore facilities seek employment, even at the lowest of scales. However, much of the technology used in the design and integration of the roving observation device surpasses the internal security monitoring at any Chinese factory. So many Americans are enticed into voluntarily surrendering their privacy rights for the fleeting pleasure of being connected to the smart phone high tech matrix. Next on the horizon is the Apple TV. Sadly, the capacities of the intrusive home monitoring system will be one more step to the suicidal society of servitude and misery. http://www.batr.org/negotium/092612.html
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Smile, the Government is Watching: Next Generation Identification
“You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement was scrutinized.” – George Orwell, 1984. Brace yourselves for the next wave in the surveillance state’s steady incursions into our lives. It’s coming at us with a lethal one-two punch. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead56.1.html
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Trapwire, Wikileaks, and the NDAA
A good listen but contains lots of f-bombs. http://maxkeiser.com/2012/09/11/trapwire-wikileaks-ndaa/
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Think Privacy is Threatened Today — Just Wait Until Tomorrow
Only a century ago, most people were known only by name and occupation. Records of your great-grandparents’ existence were likely limited to birth records, baptismal records, death records, census records, the purchase of a home, and perhaps the payment of property tax. Even this information was generally filed and forgotten, because of the considerable expense involved in paying clerks to organize it. Your great-grandparents could purchase primitive telephones, automobiles, and electric appliances, if they could afford them. However, no systematic recordkeeping existed of the phone calls they made or where they drove in their vehicle. Of course, no cell phones existed, no Internet, and no biometric tools to identify anyone other than basic fingerprinting. Fast-forward from 1912 to 2012, and we enter a very different era. Here are a few examples from my files. http://lewrockwell.com/nestmann/nestmann44.1.html
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High-Tech Police State Hardware Rolled Out in Tampa For RNC
On Saturday, the Tampa Bay Times reported that federal officialdom would not unleash drones in the skies above the RNC to surveil citizens exercising the First Amendment. “The Secret Service is not aware of any drones being used for the security planning of the national special security event,” said George Ogilvie, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. Au contraire, reports the Daily Mail. The feds will deploy an array of high-tech surveillance devices during the event, including the sinister looking Wraith, an unmanned vehicle that can reach speeds of 65 miles per hour and carry two 12-gauge belt-fed shotguns that can fire 250 rounds per minute. http://www.infowars.com/high-tech-police-state-hardware-rolled-out-in-tampa-for-rnc/
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The Corporate Surveillance State: How the Thought Police Use Your Cell Phone to Track Your Every Move
Advanced technology now provides government agents and police officers with the ability to track our every move. The surveillance state is our new society. It is here, and it is spying on you, your family and your friends every day. Worse yet, those in control are using life’s little conveniences, namely cell phones, to do much of the spying. And worst of all, the corporations who produce these little conveniences are happy to hand your personal information over to the police so long as their profit margins increase. To put it simply, the corporate-surveillance state is in full effect, and there is nowhere to hide. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead52.1.html
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The Eye of Sauron
People speak of the onrush of the police state. I think that many do not understand how fast it comes, or how thorough it will be. The political framework falls rapidly into place. Few or no safeguards exist, and probably few are possible. A growing authoritarianism rapidly erodes what protections we had. The courts allow random searches of passengers of trains and subways without probable cause. Warrantless tapping of personal communications is rampant, or done with secret warrants from a secret federal judge. TSA has Viper squads that stop cars at random for searches. In many places it is against the law to video the police, who everywhere become more militarized and less accountable. For practical purposes, citizens have no recourse. http://www.fredoneverything.net/Saurons_Eye.shtml
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Land of the Free Watch: Stratfor E-Mails Reveal Secret, Widespread TrapWire Surveillance System
Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology — and have installed it across the U.S. under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous. Every few seconds, data picked up at surveillance points in major cities and landmarks across the United States are recorded digitally on the spot, then encrypted and instantaneously delivered to a fortified central database center at an undisclosed location to be aggregated with other intelligence. It’s part of a program called TrapWire and it’s the brainchild of the Abraxas, a Northern Virginia company staffed with elite from America’s intelligence community. The employee roster at Arbaxas reads like a who’s who of agents once with the Pentagon, CIA and other government entities according to their public LinkedIn profiles, and the corporation’s ties are assumed to go deeper than even documented. http://rt.com/usa/news/stratfor-trapwire-abraxas-wikileaks-313/
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Gazillions
Gazillions. That’s the number of times the federal government has spied on Americans since 9/11 through the use of drones, legal search warrants, illegal search warrants, federal agent-written search warrants and just plain government spying. This is according to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who, when he asked the government to tell him what it was doing to violate our privacy, was given a classified briefing. The senator – one of just a few in the U.S. Senate who believes that the Constitution means what it says – was required by federal law to agree not to reveal what spies and bureaucrats told him during the briefing. http://lewrockwell.com/napolitano/napolitano64.1.html
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Privacy as a Positive Good
We’ve all heard the insulting, tyrannical cliché: Why do you care, if you have nothing to hide? The comeback, if not that it would fall on deaf ears, should be this: Because I value myself. The real value of privacy is not because it allows us to hide things, it’s that privacy allows us to develop independently – according to our own natures. In other words, privacy is an essential tool for personal development. Privacy is a positive good, not merely a tool for hiding things. http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/rosenberg-p6.1.1.html
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Land of the Free Watch: Court Upholds Domestic Drone Use in Arrest of American Citizen
A North Dakota court has preliminarily upheld the first-ever use of an unmanned drone to assist in the arrest of an American citizen. A judge denied a request to dismiss charges Wednesday against Rodney Brossart, a man arrested last year after a 16-hour standoff with police at his Lakota, N.D., ranch. Brossart’s lawyer argued that law enforcement’s “warrantless use of [an] unmanned military-like surveillance aircraft” and “outrageous governmental conduct” warranted dismissal of the case. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/08/02/court-upholds-domestic-drone-use-in-arrest-of-american-citizen
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Land of the Free Watch: NYPD Launches New All-Seeing ‘Domestic Awareness System’
The NYPD is set to unleash an advanced “domestic awareness system” that combines the city-wide surveillance system with extensive databases to track the “terrorists.” http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com/2012/08/01/total-surveillance-nypd-launches-allseeing-domestic-awareness-system-157321/
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Thoughtcrime is Real in Totalitarian Britain
I am careful what I say on Twitter especially, and the internet in general. The sad reality is that the internet is not the place for expressing views that you do not want the wider public — including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — to know you hold. We already know that the National Security Agency will soon capture all communications — phone calls, search histories, web history, e-mails, passwords, etc — in their Utah data centre. In Britain, a dangerous precedent is being set. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-thoughtcrime-real
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DHS Prepares For Civil Unrest as Obama Poised to Destroy Second Amendment
Surveillance drones have a new mission. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) they will be used for “public safety.” Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the DHS, told a House Committee meeting on Homeland Security that the more than 30,000 drones that will be deployed into American skies are just arbitrarily watching out for U.S. citizens. http://www.infowars.com/dhs-prepares-for-civil-unrest-as-obama-poised-to-destroy-2nd-amendment/
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London 2012 Olympics: The Staging Ground for the Coming Police State?
It’s what the Romans used to refer to as “bread and circuses” – the idea that the key to controlling the masses is by satiating their carnal appetites and entertaining them with mindless distraction. Thus, while the world loses itself in the pomp and circumstance of a thoroughly British Olympics, complete with Sir Paul McCartney rocking the opening ceremony, celebrity sightings galore and a fair share of athletic feats and inspirational victories to keep us glued to our TV sets, a more sinister drama will be unfolding. Welcome to the 2012 Summer Olympics, the staging ground for the coming police state. Under cover of the glitz and glamour of these time-honored Games, a chilling military operation is underway, masterminded by a merger of the corporate, military and security industrial complexes and staffed by more than 40,000 civilian police, British military and security personnel, as well as FBI, CIA, and TSA agents, and private security contractors. Appropriately enough, this year’s Olympic mascot, Wenlock – a strange, futuristic blob with an all-seeing eye to “record everything” in the games – is being sold in Olympic stores dressed in a policeman’s uniform. http://lewrockwell.com/whitehead/whitehead50.1.html
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Four More Years of Warrantless Surveillance
What this means is that the NSA, like an enormous vacuum cleaner, is monitoring nearly all electronic and voice communications in real time and storing the information that is not used immediately. The volume collected cannot even be calculated. When Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked for the number of American citizens whose communications had been intercepted, the NSA replied that to release such information would be an invasion of privacy for the people who had been spied on and that such “an estimate was beyond [its] capacity.” http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2012/07/25/four-more-years-of-warrantless-surveillance/
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Your Security’s a Joke (and You’re the Butt of It)
The official figure for documents classified by the U.S. government last year is — hold your hats on this one — 92,064,862. And as WikiLeaks managed to release hundreds of thousands of them online a couple of years ago, that’s meant a bonanza of even more money for yet more rigorous protection. You have to feel at least some dollop of pity for protection bureaucrats like Fitzgerald. While back in 1995 the U.S. government classified a mere 5,685,462 documents — in those days, we were practically a secret-less nation — today, of those 92 million sequestered documents, 26,058,678 were given a “top secret” classification. There are today almost five times as many “top secret” documents as total classified documents back then. Here’s another kind of inflation (disguised as deflation): in 1996, the government declassified 196 million pages of documents. In 2011, that figure was 26.7 million. In other words, these days what becomes secret remains ever more inflatedly secret. That’s what qualifies as “transparency, participation, and collaboration” inside the Complex and in an administration that came into office proclaiming “sunshine” policies. (All of the above info thanks to another of those ISOO reports.) And keep in mind that the National Security Complex is proud of such figures! http://original.antiwar.com/engelhardt/2012/07/19/that-makes-no-sense/
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Spying on Americans Through Cellphone Carriers
What most Americans are blissfully unaware of is the fact that they carry in their pockets what have been described as near-perfect spy devices: their cellphones. Earlier this week, The New York Times disclosed that “cellphone carriers reported that they responded to a startling 1.3 million demands for subscriber information last year from law enforcement agencies seeking text messages, caller locations and other information in the course of investigations.” The report by carriers, made in response to congressional inquiries “document an explosion in cellphone surveillance in the last five years, with the companies turning over records thousands of times a day in response to police emergencies, court orders, law enforcement subpoenas and other requests.” http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31899
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Getting Us Ready for World Government
A free internet has enabled millions to realize the truth about the Zionist occupational government (ZOG) – Zionist power in America and in governments of the world. It has also greatly helped enlarge our understanding of the historic role of Jewish supremacism in fomenting movements such as free masonry, communism, and hate crimes legislation, designed to hasten Jewish world dominion. In response, the government of Israel has enlisted tens of thousands of Jewish “cyber warriors” worldwide to help counter truth on thousands of blogs and websites. (Web server Go Daddy terminated Truthtellers.org last month because of such pressure.) The Jewish Anti-Defamation League continues to push for federal legislation, or a U.S. Department of Education decree, making it a “hate crime” against Jewish students to criticize Israel on university campuses. Last week the Jewish Telegraph Agency described criticism of Israel at US colleges as “overwhelming.” Israel is clearly unable to stem the tide, even in the “pro-Israel” U.S.A. Thus, we appear to still enjoy a free society with civil liberties and rights to freedom of speech. Yet, behind the scenes, a phalanx of technology is being created that could be used to ultimately quell and outlaw inconvenient truth. Such technology, combined with legal precedent and a society well trained to hate “discriminators” and “the intolerant,” could do what still looks impossible today: Make Brave New World a reality. http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/HowZOGWatchesYou.html
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U.S. Drone Manufacturers Contribute Millions to Congressional Campaigns
President Obama’s drone fever is contagious and is spreading worldwide, and the American industries that build the drones are slavering over the chance to supply the demand. Christopher Ames, the director of international strategy development for Pentagon contractor General Atomics Aeronautical, was almost gleeful in his statement to Reuters regarding the opening of a potentially lucrative overseas market for his company’s remote control killing machines. http://thenewamerican.com/usnews/foreign-policy/item/12078-us-drone-manufacturers-contribute-millions-to-congressional-campaigns
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Information Overload: Driving a Stake Through the National Security State
While the degree of surveillance of our activities here in Obama’s America may be much more far-reaching — thanks to today’s vastly more advanced computer technology — than under East Germany’s notorious Stasi (for Staatssicherheit), who reportedly had one in every three of that country’s citizens spying on the other two, the U.S. is nowhere near as repressive as any of those police states I’ve witnessed. We are not being hauled off to Guantanamo or Leavenworth simply because of what we say or write — at least not yet. But we can learn from those repressive states and from the resistance forces that have worked against them. http://www.nationofchange.org/information-overload-driving-stake-through-national-security-state-1342186946
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Totalitarianism Watch: New Homeland Security Laser Scanner Reads People at Molecular Level
The Department of Homeland Security will soon be using a laser at airports that can detect everything about you from over 160-feet away. http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/07/11/new-homeland-security-laser-scanner-reads-people-at-molecular-level/
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New NSA Spy Center: Total Invasion of Your Privacy
As Americans celebrated our “freedom and liberty” last week, few realized our government is now spending $2 billion on the largest spy center. It will require the electricity used by a city of 200,000 people. Its ostensible purpose is to know everything possible about America’s “cyber enemies.” It will also know everything about you. It will constantly sift through every phone call, email, text and twitter, building and storing an increasingly complex profile of every American who uses modern technology. It will be quite easy for government to see who welcomes the new world order, and who does not. http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/NSASpyCenter.html
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How America’s Surveillance State Breeds Conformity and Fear
The Surveillance State hovers over any attacks that meaningfully challenge state-appropriated power. It doesn’t just hover over it. It impedes it, it deters it and kills it. That’s its intent. It does that by design. And so, understanding what the Surveillance State, how it operates — most importantly, figuring out how to challenge it and undermine it, and subvert it — really is, I think, an absolute prerequisite to any sort of meaningful activism, to developing strategies and tactics for how to challenge state and corporate power. http://www.alternet.org/visions/156170
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Here Comes Skynet: Army Drones Almost Ready to Share Sky With Airlines
On July 5, the US Army announced it had completed a two-week demonstration of a new ground-based sensor system for its MQ-1C Gray Eagle unmanned aerial system (UAS) that will allow UAS operators to detect and avoid other aircraft. The Army is now ready to begin the certification process with the Federal Aviation Administration to allow the Grey Eagle—formerly known as the Warrior—to fly unfettered in domestic airspace. The Army expects to start flying the UASs in domestic airspace for training by March of 2014. http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2012/07/here-comes-skynet-army-drones-almost.html
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Three Former NSA Employees Expose ‘Mass Illegal Surveillance’ in Court
The National Security Agency (NSA), which has recently been protected from having to disclose their relationship with the search engine giant and data mining powerhouse Google, is back in court over the case Jewel v. NSA. The case, which was reinstated by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in late 2011, is challenging the NSA’s now well known massive warrantless surveillance program. This case is more important than ever with the NSA pouring a whopping $2 billion into a heavily fortified data center which will almost certainly be used to monitor the communications of Americans. http://theintelhub.com/2012/07/05/three-former-nsa-employees-expose-mass-illegal-surveillance-in-court/
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Look Up in the Sky and See a Drone
All Americans should be asking their elected officials about the limits of the use of drones — before it’s too late. One option is to eliminate federal grants that subsidize drones for police departments. Another is to mandate that police obtain a warrant in circumstances where drones can surveil a private residence or anywhere else citizens have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Militarization at home, as the Founding Fathers argued centuries ago, is inconsistent with the values of a free society. Since 9/11, some in Washington seem to have forgotten that a free society depends on a citizenry whose natural rights are protected by a limited and accountable government — not by a government that uses high-tech, stealth video cameras to constantly surveil the public wherever and whenever it wants. http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/sky-a-drone-article-1.1096621
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The Coup of 2012: Encroachment Upon Basic Freedoms, Militarized Police State in America
We claim and hope to be a society of laws, by the people, for all the people. But we are not. Never have been. Nonetheless, we are capable of evolving, of igniting a revolution of values in this country and becoming the land we all aspire to “with justice and freedom for all.” But in order to get there, we will have to overcome the coup of 2012. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31428
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Companies Most Compliant With Big Brother Include Verizon, AT&T, Apple, Microsoft, Foursquare
When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T and Facebook. But what happens when the government demands that these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? http://www.disinfo.com/2012/06/companies-most-compliant-with-big-brother-include-verizon-att-apple-microsoft-foursquare/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+disinfo%2FoMPh+%28Disinformation%29
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10 Signs That the Highways of America Are Being Transformed Into a High Tech Prison Grid
Once upon a time, the open highways of America were one of our greatest symbols of liberty and freedom. Anyone could hop in a car and set off for a new adventure at any time and even our music encouraged us to “get our kicks on route 66″. But today everything has changed. http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/highway-prison-grid.html
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Where Is the Outrage?
For the past few weeks, I have been writing in this column about the government’s use of drones and challenging their constitutionality on Fox News Channel where I work. I once asked on air what Thomas Jefferson would have done if — had drones existed at the time — King George III had sent drones to peer inside the bedroom windows of Monticello. I suspect that Jefferson and his household would have trained their muskets on the drones and taken them down. I offer this historical anachronism as a hypothetical only, not as one who is urging the use of violence against the government. Nevertheless, what Jeffersonians are among us today? http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2012/06/06/where-is-the-outrage/
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30,000 Secret Surveillance Orders Demanded Annually to Spy on Americans
It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the US Congress authorized the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, but the incredibly outdated legislation is still used each and every day to let federal agents find out personal and private information by combing through emails, texts and any other form of online correspondence. Kade Crockford is a privacy rights coordinator with the American Civil Liberties Union and is fighting to make sure that ECPA is laid to rest. http://rt.com/usa/news/ecpa-crockford-surveillance-government-104/
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Police State USA: The Paranoid Style of American Governance
U.S. legislation exhibiting undue suspiciousness toward allegedly strange “others” suggests how the paranoid style has thoroughly imbued American governance, particularly over the past 10 years. An especially strong onset of symptoms is evidenced in the blizzard of new laws, programs, and executive orders dating from September 11, 2001. Indeed, the U.S. government’s dramatic increase in suspicion and contempt toward others over the last decade, combined with its accelerated violent and criminal aggression toward innocents at home and abroad, indicates a potential onset of what might even be deemed paranoid schizophrenia. With the development of such a condition the subject as a whole suffers from acute delusions of persecution and is tormented by illusory forces that it perceives as seeking to inflict harm on it. This advanced stage of illness may have been triggered by the violent terrorist attack of September 11, 2001; one that the subject immediately blamed on a set of previous associates, Osama bin Laden and his mercenary group known as Al Qaeda. Despite the government’s continued insistence that bin Laden and Al Qaeda are the culprits, exhaustive expert forensic and scientific investigations have been unable to confirm their involvement in the crime. Nevertheless, the subject uses the unresolved incident as the primary rationale for its accelerated paranoia. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=31220
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Land of the Free Watch: EPA Using Drones to Spy on Cattle Ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa
Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson. http://www.infowars.com/epa-using-drones-to-spy-on-cattle-ranchers-in-nebraska-and-iowa/
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Land of the Free Watch: Virginia Governor Says Drones Are ‘Great’ for America
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell epitomizes the current crop of American politicians that know nothing about the Constitution and the proper role of government as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson and the founders. http://www.infowars.com/virginia-gov-warrantless-drones-great-for-america/
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Hundreds of Words To Avoid Using Online If You Don’t Want the Government Spying on You (and They Include ‘Pork’, ‘Cloud’ and ‘Mexico’)
The Department of Homeland Security has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S. The intriguing the list includes obvious choices such as ‘attack’, ‘Al Qaeda’, ‘terrorism’ and ‘dirty bomb’ alongside dozens of seemingly innocent words like ‘pork’, ‘cloud’, ‘team’ and ‘Mexico’. Released under a freedom of information request, the information sheds new light on how government analysts are instructed to patrol the internet searching for domestic and external threats. http://lewrockwell.com/spl4/avoid-these-words-online.html
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Land of the Free Watch: FBI Secretly Creates Internet Police
The FBI was rather public with its recent demands for backdoor access to websites and Internet services across the board, but as the agency awaits those secret surveillance powers, they’re working on their own end to have those e-spy capabilities. Not much has been revealed about one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newest projects, the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, and the FBI will probably try to keep it that way. Despite attempting to keep the DCAC largely under wraps, an investigation spearheaded by CNET’s Declan McCullagh is quickly collecting details about the agency’s latest endeavor. Governmental agencies have been searching seemingly without end for ways to pry into the personal communications of computer users in America. Congressional approval and cooperation from Internet companies could be an eternity away, of course, but the FBI might be able to bypass that entirely by taking the matter into their own hands. At the Quantico, Virginia headquarters of the DCAC, federal workers are believed to be already hard at work on projects that will put FBI spies into the Internet, snooping on unsuspecting American’s Skype calls, instant messages and everything else carried out with a mouse and keyboard. http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/fbi-internet-police.html
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Warrantless Spying Fight
The only positive aspect of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 was that Congress imposed a four-year sunset provision on the new warrantless eavesdropping powers it authorized. That sunset provision is set to expire and — surprise, surprise — the Obama administration, just like it did for the Patriot Act, is demanding its full-scale renewal without a single change or reform. http://www.salon.com/2012/05/24/warrantless_spying_fight/singleton/
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The Police State is Here
The federal government now boasts 16 national intelligence agencies, spending an estimated $100 billion per year and employing an army of staffers and contractors who routinely (and illegally) spy domestically. Investigative journalist James Bamford recently wrote in Wired magazine that the National Security Agency is putting finishing touches on a massive data storage center in Utah as part of its “Stellar Wind” program, a massive surveillance and data-mining operation that involves collecting, storing, and examining billions of domestic phone calls and email messages. This project is a culmination of a decade-long effort by the nation’s spy agencies to create a panoptic society, in which the entire population is brought under round-the-clock government surveillance. This is no longer the stuff of dystopian futuristic novels and is now a grim reality, largely because of the stupendous increases in computing power and storage capacity achieved in recent years. “Total information awareness” is now feasible thanks to the geniuses in Silicon Valley — and it is now considered permissible by the psychopaths and control freaks running the national-security state. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31396.htm
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Judge Napolitano: First Patriot to Shoot Down a Government Spy Drone Will Be a Hero
Judge Andrew Napolitano has warned Congress not to act “like potted plants” regarding the increased use of unmanned surveillance drones without warrants over US skies by military, government, and law enforcement agencies. http://www.infowars.com/judge-napolitano-first-patriot-to-shoot-down-a-government-spy-drone-will-be-a-hero/
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The Surveillance State: Knowing Every Bit About You
No one ever accused Jeremy Bentham of thinking small. The early 18th-century British philosopher, social reformer, and co-founder of the celebrated philosophical school of Utilitarianism, Bentham was known for his unconventional ideas. Like many self-styled progressive thinkers of his age, Bentham expended a considerable amount of energy dreaming up new ways to use the power of the state to protect private citizens from their own alleged follies. The concept of the Panopticon was probably Bentham’s best-known brainchild. An extravagant idea for its time, it has proven an enduring metaphor in our time and – far more importantly – prefigured our modern obsession with high-tech surveillance. Derived from Greek roots that mean “all-seeing,” Bentham’s Panopticon was a building designed to house many people in close quarters whose rooms were so configured that a central authority, using a system of tubes and mirrors, could keep every inmate under constant surveillance. The Panopticon concept could be applied to prisons, factories, or any place where large numbers of people would live or work in close quarters. “Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens [burdens] lightened – economy seated, as it were, upon a rock – the Gordian knot of the poor-law not cut, but untied – all by a simple idea in architecture,” Bentham enthused, proclaiming that his Panopticon represented “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” The energetic Bentham tried to persuade the British government to let him design a Panopticon prison, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Although he managed to persuade Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger of the Panopticon’s potential, Pitt’s successor shut down the project. But Bentham’s premise – of a system of comprehensive state surveillance to guarantee a pliant and docile citizenry – is still with us, magnified by the potency of 21st-century technology and zealously promoted the world over, but especially in Western nations, like Great Britain and the United States, that once viewed such state activities as abhorrent and dangerous to liberty. A decade after the defining crisis of our era, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the United States of America is on the verge of becoming a Panopticon society, with powers of state surveillance far beyond the most fevered imaginings of Bentham and fellow pre-modern utopians. http://lewrockwell.com/spl4/the-surveillance-state.html
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