Getting Out of Our Lanes: Understanding Discrimination in the Digital Economy
How digital surveillance reinforces socioeconomic hierarchies.
Read more...Category Archives: Surveillance state
Tom Engelhardt: More and War – The Tao of Washington
Yves here. This is a terrific piece on the thinking, such as it is, that has come to dominate the Beltway, and how these preoccupations keep the US lurching forward in a costly, destructive policy trajectory.
Read more...Don Quijones: How the Trade in Services Agreement Lets Big Brother Go Global
A new leak shows that the even-more-secret-than-the-TTP-and-TTIP Trade in Services Agreement is worse than you imagined.
Read more...The Police Union’s Irresponsible Reaction To Shooting Of Two NYPD Officers
Yves here. I left NYC the day that Ismaaiyl Brinsley killed two New York City policemen after shooting his former girlfriend in Baltimore. On the plane, three students (two in grad school, one in college) who didn’t previously know each other and were going home to Birmingham were discussing the event. All were concerned that this would put a chill on the protests against police brutality. And in case you wondered, yes, all were white.
The police are using this tragedy for selfish and anti-democratic ends. And what is troubling is that Mayor De Blasio hasn’t put them in their place. Corey Robin explains what that really signifies:
Read more...Parallel Sovereignty on Rose Street in Baltimore
The sort of people you want around if there’s ever a legitimacy crisis.
Read more...Deep State? Or Shallow Focus?
A maniacally close reading of “Glossary of Open Politics,” beginning with the entry for “deep state.”
Read more...Ferguson in Context on the Eve of the Grand Jury Decision
The “ground truth” of the protests, the forces arrayed against them, the grand jury, political economy in Ferguson, and Mike Brown’s father.
Read more...“ISPs Removing Their Customers’ E-mail Encryption”
Bob sent me a post from Slashdot which should serve as a wake-up call as to how difficult it is to protect yourself on the Internet if you are a mere mortal. They quote an Electronic Frontier Foundation report on how encryption is being subverted:
Read more...Tom Englehardt Interviews Laura Poitras on Snowden and the Total Information Capture Approach to Surveillance
Yves here. This interview with Laura Poitras is a reminder of how the world has, and more important, hasn’t changed since the explosive revelations made by Edward Snowden less than a year and a half ago. Even though his disclosures produced a great uproar, with demands in the US, UK, and Europe for explanations and […]
Read more...John Helmer: CIA Bumbling, Then and Now
Yves here. This post presents some of the CIA’s less-than-proud moments, curiously omitted in a recently-published history of the CIA’s meddling in the Middle East, juxtaposed with some of its more recent miscues.
Read more...Tom Engelhardt: How American Intelligence Works in the Twenty-First Century
The American intelligence services, despite their lavish funding, are not as smart as they’d have you believe. In fact, by many standards, they are colossal failures. Why is that?
Read more...Evil Feedly and Digg: “Social Logins” as Symptoms of Creeping Surveillance State
Your humble blogger is a beached whale as a result of the steady march of police state practices on the Internet. And to calibrate how heinous the underlying situation is, Lambert, who has 20 years of experience as a computer professional, calls my current mess the technology equivalent of being shoved into a minefield without any signs. And as you’ll see below, I’ve already stepped on one mine.
Read more...Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald, and New Zealand’s Intelligence Service, GCSB
Does New Zealand’s Intelligence Service spy indiscriminately on New Zealanders? High-profile, high-stakes claims and counterclaims, just ahead of the NZ elections.
Read more...Getting Sucked into ObamaCare is a Lot Like Being on Probation
Yves here. Lambert, in his relentless Obamacare skullduggery, has unearthed yet another ugly feature of this Rube Goldberg contraption for enriching health insurers: unprecedented levels of required reporting to the Federal government. Your humble blogger had already flagged one, that Obamacare is designed with the bizarre assumption that everyone in America has a steady paycheck. You are supposed to be able to estimate your income. How can people who are part-time workers, with employers who ratchet up and down how much time they need, supposed to comply? Or even worse, how about self-employed people, who have variable and unpredictable income and expenses, as well as the occasional collection issue.
But Obamacare policyholders are ALSO required to report on a raft of “lifestyle changes” including when you become pregnant (which means you also need to report if you have a change in that “status” via miscarriage or abortion), or a change in “household size”. One assumes that means “household” from an IRS standpoint, but could it mean from a Census perspective? Do renters have to report if they take on a roommate?
And even better, as Lambert discusses in detail, HHS also makes it hard to prove that you’ve made the required updates. Charming.
Read more...Militarized Policing: One Nation Under SWAT
Yves here. If we had a bona fide democracy left in America, as opposed to a simulacrum of one, the night-after-night spectacle of constabulary overkill in Ferguson would spark outrage and a concerted effort to restrict militarized policing, particularly against peaceful protestors. Officials knew precisely what was at stake when they kept journalists as far away as possible from the 17 city, coordinated paramilitary crackdown against Occupy Wall Street.
But now that many comparatively small cities have war toys like tanks in their possession, and are also hiring former soldiers, it appears that we’ve passed an event horizon. Unless some of these municipalities are prepared to get rid of this militarized policing gear (and not by giving it to another city, but by destroying it or letting it deteriorate into uselessness), it’s inconceivable that the police won’t continue to abuse their greatly expanded powers.
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