Monthly Archives: September 2013

When the State Floods the Zone, Reform Is Dead

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“Do you think it would be a cause for concern that the State employed an army of “private” Americans to be its spies in businesses of every kind, perhaps including the business where you work? Would it bother you that the State has deputized tens of thousands of otherwise ‘ordinary’ Americans to be murderers when martial law is declared — murderers who are given an advance blank check for their killings?  But you don’t need to imagine any of this. All of this is true, and this program came into existence in 1996. The program is called InfraGard, and I wrote it about more than five years ago. As of February 2012, InfraGard had more than 45,000 members; roughly 7,000 new members join each year.”

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2013/09/when-state-floods-zone-reform-is-dead.html

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The Government Is Spying On Us Through Our Computers, Phones, Cars…

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“Private contractors can also view all of your data … and the government isn’t keeping track of which contractors see your data and which don’t. And top NSA and FBI experts say that the government can retroactively search all of the collected information on someone since 9/11 if they suspect someone of wrongdoing … or want to frame him.  The American government is in fact collecting and storing virtually every phone call, purchases, email, text message, internet searches, social media communications, health information, employment history, travel and student records, and virtually all other information of every American.”

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/the-government-is-spying-on-us-through-our-computers-phones-cars-buses-streetlights-at-airports-and-on-the-street-via-mobile-scanners-and-drones-through-our-smart-meters-and-in-many-other-ways.html

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N.S.A. Gathers Data on Social Connections of U.S. Citizens

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“Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.  The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

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“For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs. Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

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Destroying the Right to Be Left Alone

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“What makes high-tech surveillance so pernicious is its silent, magical quality. Historically, when government agents invaded people’s privacy they had to resort to the blunt instruments of force and violence, either torturing the body in the belief it could unlock the mind’s secrets or kicking down doors to rifle through a target’s personal effects and communications. The revolution in communications technology has made such intrusions look increasingly sloppy and obsolete. Why break a skull or kick down a door when you can read someone’s search terms or web-surfing history?”

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175750/tomgram:_calabrese_and_harwood,_privacy_down_the_drain

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Dallas Now Has Its Very Own Bulletproof, “Mine-Protected” Military SUV

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“Now that the war in Iraq is officially over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Defense found itself facing a conundrum. It had just spent billions of dollars buying heavily armored personnel carriers designed to stand up to insurgent attacks only to find that it had run out of wars to use them in.  The initial plan was to shove the vehicles, called MRAPS (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) into a warehouse and let them collect dust. That changed when someone decided that, having served so admirably overseas, it would be only just to bring the MRAPs stateside and deploy them in the domestic war on crime.”

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/09/dallas_county_now_has_its_very.php?page=all

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NSA surveillance goes beyond Orwell’s imagination: Guardian editor

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“The potential of the surveillance state goes way beyond anything in George Orwell‘s 1984, Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian‘s editor-in-chief, told an audience in New York on Monday.  Speaking in the wake of revelations about the extent of the NSA’s surveillance operations, Rusbridger said: “Orwell could never have imagined anything as complete as this, this concept of scooping up everything all the time. ‘This is something potentially astonishing about how life could be lived and the limitations on human freedom,’ he said.  Rusbridger said the NSA stories were ‘clearly’ not a story about totalitarianism, but that an infrastructure had been created that could be dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/23/orwell-nsa-surveillance-alan-rusbridger

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Can Our Total Surveillance State Avoid Becoming A Full-Blown Police State?

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“The fundamental issue involved amidst the ongoing cascade of revelations about NSA wrongdoing is this: what must be done to roll back the Executive Branch’s creation of a surveillance state, which is just one more major economic crisis or 9/11—as even centrists like Bob Woodward and Tom Friedman warn—from becoming a police-state. Most of the focus until now has been on trying to absorb the dimensions of the surveillance state we have suddenly learned we are living in since June 6. But it is now time to focus on the actions needed to end its assaults on democracy. This is not a simple question, either politically or technically.”

http://www.alternet.org/activism/we-live-under-total-surveillance-state-america-can-we-prevent-it-evolving-full-blown-police?paging=off

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It Won’t Stay in Vegas: The Metro PD’s Homeland Security Theater

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“Las Vegas, like every other city, does face a lethal threat from people who consider themselves emancipated from the law and entitled to kill without accountability. Like the Sovereigns, those people speak in a specialized language that supposedly legitimizes their lawlessness, and that makes no obvious sense to rational people who don’t belong to their clique. The Las Vegas branch of this domestic terrorist movement maintains a fraudulent ‘court’ where criminal actions, up to and including murder, are ratified. However, the crimes committed by that state-sanctioned terrorist syndicate are neither hypothetical, nor uncommon.”

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2013/09/it-wont-stay-in-vegas-metro-pds.html

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Life Takes Visa—Except If You Want to Buy Pot

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“Because of regulations that bar banks from doing business with drug traffickers, many financial institutions refuse to open accounts for dispensaries or give them small-business loans. The same goes for major credit-card companies like Visa and MasterCard. Merchant service providers—the middlemen between retailers and credit-card companies who process customers’ payments—are also reluctant to run afoul of the federal government, so most won’t accept payments from dispensaries. These restrictions force dispensaries to operate as cash-only businesses. Without a bank account, dispensary owners can’t deposit their money in a secure place or write checks to their landlords.”

http://prospect.org/article/life-takes-visa%E2%80%94except-if-you-want-buy-pot

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