In America’s Drone Wars, Collateral Damage Comes Home
Why you should care about America’s drone wars: among other things, they radicalize populations against us and traumatize the operators.
Read more...Category Archives: Surveillance state
“This is Just Evil”: Massive Private License Plate Database Tracks Car Locations Over Years
Large-scale logging of time and location stamped license plate data, retained over years, means Big Brother knows where you have been.
Read more...Andrew Bacevich: Six National Security Questions Hillary, Donald, Ted, Marco, etc., Don’t Want to Answer and Won’t Even Be Asked
In the realm of national security, election 2016 promises to be not just a missed opportunity but a complete bust.
Read more...What’s Your Threat Score?
Pre-crime has arrived.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Google Sarcasm, or How I (and the Entire Industry) Make a Living
Richter describes what it’s like as a publisher to be subject to the vagaries of Google Adsense.
Read more...The Internet of Things – Supplied or Demanded?
An intriguing comparison of how the Internet of Things is being sold in the US and Japan.
Read more...Matthew Cunningham-Cook: How the TPP Will Create a Medical Privacy Hellscape
Yet another reason to oppose this truly awful, anti-people deal.
Read more...Tom Engelhardt: The Fog of Intelligence, or How to Be Eternally ‘Caught Off Guard’ in the Greater Middle East
An in-depth look at the US’s big-ticket intelligence apparatus that can’t shoot straight in the Middle East. A bug or a feature?
Read more...Dealing With Mass Killings in America: Funding Our Children, Not Our Wars
As mass killings become more common in the US, law enforcement agents fixate on and unduly publicize cases with jihadist links. As this post describes, that serves as an excuse for even more intensive surveillance.
Yet as Mark Ames described in one of the first works on these rampages, in his book “Going Postal,” there were no obvious similarities among the perps. They weren’t all, or even often, isolated losers. They did not typically come from broken homes. They were generally of above average intelligence. Aside from being disproportionately male, the other common thread was that they had been bullied.
If Ames’ observations still hold true, the lack of distinctive demographic or behavioral predictors of those who go on rampages means that heightened surveillance is at best another form of security theater, and at worst an excuse for Stasi-like dossier-gethering.
Read more...CIA Whistleblower Sentenced to 42 Months Based on Metadata
Yves here. I’m featuring this Real News Network report, which may seem to be harrow for our non-financial coverage, for two reasons. First, the interview is with Marcy Wheeler. I suspect many readers know and admire her work but have not seen her speak. Second, her talk flags a particularly disturbing element of the government’s successful case against CIA whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling, namely, that it was weak and depended almost entirely on circumstantial metadata evidence. That should give consumers pause about their casual attitude towards the government’s data hoovering: “Oh, there’s nothing they can see that is of interest.” As this story indicates, the officialdom was able to use inconclusive information as the basis of a narrative that worked in court.
Read more...New Example of the Pentagon, DEA and Private Companies Conspiring to Beat Encryption, Track Everything You Do
Why even the supposed gold standard of Internet security, encryption, may not protect you.
Read more...Angela Merkel’s NSA Nightmare Just Got A Lot Worse
Angela Merkel could be in serious trouble, after revelations that Germany’s national intelligence agency, the BND, has been spying on key European assets on behalf of US intelligence.
Read more...The “War on Cash” in 10 Spine-Chilling Quotes
The war on cash is escalating.
Read more...Big Data Is Watching You (at Work)
By Lambert Strether of Corrente. There’s been some admiring coverage in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere of UPS’s Orion system of algorithmic route selection (driver reactions), but not much discussion of how electronic monitoring structures the UPS driver’s entire working day (or what we “professional” types are wont to call our “workflow”). A recent […]
Read more...Comments on David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”
Neoliberalism and the question of the state.
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