CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT OF 'FEAR OF ASSOCIATION' IS WHAT NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS INTEND TO USE TO CONTROL AMERICANS BEING BROUGHT FROM FIRST WORLD TO THIRD WORLD STATUS.
Remember, we can turn all of this surveillance onto corporations and banks known from actually committing massive crimes of fraud and corruption. Bernie Sanders may be the only one in the Presidential elections in 2016 that would walk the talk on this!
Last time I spoke of the costs to taxpayers of allowing this technology build-up continue at break-neck speed knowing there are too many obstacles to these systems operating in a way that protects the public and allows commerce to flow freely. The reason they are continuing with this build-up no matter the complications is the goal....it is a totalitarian capture of the American people. One cannot in good faith not see where this is going.
Right now all cell phones, computers, and even cars have built in GPS that we cannot disable. Sure, it allows them to track bad guys but the capacity for public harm is enormous. If you are like me I cannot even delete from my phone log an old phone number----and Facebook is known not to allow for complete removal of posts.
We know from the Boston bombing that NSA and Homeland Security are using these logs to not only follow us but people we have talked to. Guilt by association took the people contacted years before into the investigations. Not coincidentally, that is what autocratic dictators do and use it often on political activists and on citizens simply to install fear and suspicion.
As the article below states, these kinds of surveillance structures have already been used against ordinary US citizens and there is every reason to believe that the kinds of personal violations US citizens feel will become more and more a threat to freedom. IT IS AN OBVIOUS PATH. The author below is holding his elected official accountable. Maryland is ground zero for these surveillance, spying, meta-data analysis R and D and Johns Hopkins leads in pushing these kinds of civil rights/liberty policies along.
DEMOCRATS DO NOT DO THIS FOLKS----NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS DO!
U.S. domestic surveillance dangers are not theoretical
August 6, 2013 | Filed under: Columnists,News | Posted by: Bryan Clark
The ongoing revelations of the National Security Agency’s large set of domestic surveillance programs – including the collection of telephone metadata, internet traffic, search requests, email, satellite communications, and domestic mail tracking – now present us with a defining issue. The outcome of the struggle over this issue will be defining for the course of the nation, and the rights of its citizens.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation has suffered a slow but relentless expansion of domestic surveillance activities that appears now to have well surpassed the far-reaching, illegal domestic surveillance programs undertaken by the FBI under the decades-long leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.
We would do well to keep in mind that the dangers posed by domestic surveillance are not imaginary. As I have noted previously, there is a well-documented history of utilizing information collected during illegal domestic surveillance operations to blackmail, discredit or otherwise silence political dissidents.
As an ACLU report notes, between 1960 and 1974, the FBI maintained files on some 1 million American citizens, investigated a half million individuals it considered “subversives,” and regularly used tactics like illegal break-ins – referred to as “black bag jobs” – and warrantless wiretapping to collect information used for a variety of what the report calls “unsavory and viscous tactics.”
Citing reports produced by the Church Committee, a Senate investigation into domestic surveillance, the ACLU report notes that the FBI deployed tactics such as “anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupting meetings, ostracizing people from their professions and provoking target groups into rivalries that could have caused deaths.”
The most often noted incident was the effort to blackmail Martin Luther King as he broadened his activism from opposition to Jim Crow into opposition to the war in Vietnam and the notion of forming a “poor people’s movement.”
The report notes that there have been countless similar instances, including efforts to keep one-time University of California president Clark Kerr from finding employment, spying on School of the America’s Watch (an organization that works to close a training facility at Fort Benning, Ga. which has provided counterinsurgency training to the leaders of countless South and Central American death squads), and infiltrating the civil rights, environmental and women’s movements.
The report notes that many abuses from the ‘60s and ‘70s are only now coming to light as FBI files are declassified, though it also notes several similar instances from the last decade.
We should bear in mind that many of these abuses occurred at a time when surveillance was money and manpower intensive, technically difficult and time-consuming. That is no longer the case.
And there are serious allegations that abuses similar to those carried out by the FBI are now being carried out by the NSA.
NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, who was fired from the agency in 2005 after calling for better whistleblower protections, alleges that he personally saw surveillance files on business and industrial leaders, politicians, judges, anti-war groups and environmentalists. Nothing he has said is verifiable as of yet.
NSA whistleblower William Benny, a mathematician who worked for the agency until 2001, told the News Hour last week that he believes the government is collecting not only metadata but the content of telephone calls.
“I think, semantically, they’re trying to say that their definition of collection is having, literally, a physical analyst look or listen,” Benny said, noting that, by his estimation, a new data storage facility set to come on line next month in Utah could hold “roughly 100 years of the world’s communications.”
Whether the NSA is actually recording and storing phone calls is mostly irrelevant because the fact that they can collect all telephone metadata at all means that they have tapped into all telephone communications. The metadata is not sent separately. If the NSA is not recording phone calls, it is only because they are choosing not to. And they could change their minds.
Whether such abuses using NSA-collected data are occurring at present is not the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that the intelligence community has vast standing surveillance infrastructure, powerful storage and data mining technology, a near-total lack of oversight and a culture of secrecy. It doubtless has information on Americans opposed to its interests, and therefore has incentive to use that information to harm them.
The unique danger of the NSA’S surveillance programs is that they render domestic surveillance so incredibly easy. The potential for current and future abuse is essentially limitless.
The citizens of West Virginia can do something about this. Sen. Jay Rockefeller currently sits on, and formerly chaired, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His constituents can and should pressure him to support a Church Committee-style investigation into the post-9/11 growth of the surveillance state.
_________________________________
Their is no accident that the news a person or group is under surveillance and the ability of that person or group to reach out to the public is directly related. If you make people afraid to be linked with political groups they do not reach out to investigate what these groups are about. That is how autocratic societies stop all methods of organizing and education.....making people afraid to be found associating with someone else.
Baltimore City police photograph and file people coming to demonstrations and they do not care who knows. It cuts down on the number of people coming out they say.
IF PEOPLE HAVE COMMITTED NO CRIME THEY CANNOT BE SURVEILLED.
NYPD surveillance of political activism questioned
By TOM HAYS | Associated Press – Wed, May 28, 2014 4:28 AM PHT NEW YORK (AP) — Political activists asked a new inspector general for the New York Police Department on Tuesday to force police officials to fully disclose details about how undercover officers sought to secretly infiltrate and monitor liberal activist groups.
Representatives of the groups hand-delivered a written complaint, which also called on the NYPD to account for "public moneys spent on these useless operations," to the lower Manhattan office of Philip Eure. It was the former federal prosecutor's first day on the job following his appointment earlier this year by the city Department of Investigation as the city's first-ever inspector general overseeing the NYPD.
"We're cautiously hopeful that the inspector general will pursue his mandate in favor of civil liberties," said Robert Jereski, a coordinator of a group called Friends of Brad Will.
In a statement, the Department of Investigation confirmed the paperwork was received. It said Eure will review it and "determine appropriate investigative action once the office is staffed."
NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said the police department would cooperate with any inquiry.
The independent watchdog post was created last year by the City Council in response to rising concerns over the NYPD's widespread tactic of street stops — known as "stop and frisk" — and its extensive surveillance of Muslims, as disclosed in stories by The Associated Press. Eure's first chore in the coming weeks is to assemble a staff of about 50 investigators, lawyers and analysts.
The complaint was filed by a coalition that includes environmental, human rights, housing rights and animal rights activists. It accuses NYPD of targeting "First Amendment protected activities like political advocacy" that provide "vital nourishment to our democratic system of government and prevents its corruption and atrophy."
It adds: "There is no place for police surveillance of political activity let alone police operations to subvert it in New York City's thriving democracy."
Over the years, the NYPD's Intelligence Division has sought to gather inside information about plans for political protests, claiming it was needed to take measures to keep the gatherings from turning violent.
In 2012, the AP disclosed documents detailing how an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans in 2008 to attend the People's Summit, a gathering of liberal groups. The officer reported overhearing participants discuss how the Friends of Brad Will was planning demonstrations in Mexico and across the United States to demand the removal of the governor of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Friends of Brad Will — formed after the murder of Will in 2006 while he was working as a journalist in Mexico — has a stated mission of increasing "public awareness about the human rights abuses linked to the 'war on drugs.'" Since the disclosure about the NYPD's surveillance, it and other groups have seen a decline in donations and participation, Jereski said.
"It's chilled the landscape to have the lawless behavior of the NYPD held over us," he said.
_______________________________________
The use of this technology to fight crime supposedly pre-emps civil rights and liberties. We all know these meta-data analyses are not being done only on suspected criminals. It is used for industrial spying, spying on political groups, and people like myself-----writing in ways that hold power accountable. Think of how people will be made afraid to associate or open up to people they do not know.....how people will use this to find advantage for personal gain.
IT WILL EXPLODE AS RULE OF LAW CONTINUES TO BE DISMANTLED AND PEOPLE FEEL THEY ARE FREE TO DO ANYTHING THEY WANT.
Johns Hopkins just used Federal money from Obama and sought by Cardin and Mikulski to build one of these meta-data centers on the Hopkins' campus and we already know it is being used to collect and sell data as well as for Homeland Security. These are not benevolent people who are doing this folks!
U.S. News
Phones Leave a Telltale Trail
Remember, we can turn all of this surveillance onto corporations and banks known from actually committing massive crimes of fraud and corruption. Bernie Sanders may be the only one in the Presidential elections in 2016 that would walk the talk on this!
Last time I spoke of the costs to taxpayers of allowing this technology build-up continue at break-neck speed knowing there are too many obstacles to these systems operating in a way that protects the public and allows commerce to flow freely. The reason they are continuing with this build-up no matter the complications is the goal....it is a totalitarian capture of the American people. One cannot in good faith not see where this is going.
Right now all cell phones, computers, and even cars have built in GPS that we cannot disable. Sure, it allows them to track bad guys but the capacity for public harm is enormous. If you are like me I cannot even delete from my phone log an old phone number----and Facebook is known not to allow for complete removal of posts.
We know from the Boston bombing that NSA and Homeland Security are using these logs to not only follow us but people we have talked to. Guilt by association took the people contacted years before into the investigations. Not coincidentally, that is what autocratic dictators do and use it often on political activists and on citizens simply to install fear and suspicion.
As the article below states, these kinds of surveillance structures have already been used against ordinary US citizens and there is every reason to believe that the kinds of personal violations US citizens feel will become more and more a threat to freedom. IT IS AN OBVIOUS PATH. The author below is holding his elected official accountable. Maryland is ground zero for these surveillance, spying, meta-data analysis R and D and Johns Hopkins leads in pushing these kinds of civil rights/liberty policies along.
DEMOCRATS DO NOT DO THIS FOLKS----NEO-LIBERALS AND NEO-CONS DO!
U.S. domestic surveillance dangers are not theoretical
August 6, 2013 | Filed under: Columnists,News | Posted by: Bryan Clark
The ongoing revelations of the National Security Agency’s large set of domestic surveillance programs – including the collection of telephone metadata, internet traffic, search requests, email, satellite communications, and domestic mail tracking – now present us with a defining issue. The outcome of the struggle over this issue will be defining for the course of the nation, and the rights of its citizens.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the nation has suffered a slow but relentless expansion of domestic surveillance activities that appears now to have well surpassed the far-reaching, illegal domestic surveillance programs undertaken by the FBI under the decades-long leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.
We would do well to keep in mind that the dangers posed by domestic surveillance are not imaginary. As I have noted previously, there is a well-documented history of utilizing information collected during illegal domestic surveillance operations to blackmail, discredit or otherwise silence political dissidents.
As an ACLU report notes, between 1960 and 1974, the FBI maintained files on some 1 million American citizens, investigated a half million individuals it considered “subversives,” and regularly used tactics like illegal break-ins – referred to as “black bag jobs” – and warrantless wiretapping to collect information used for a variety of what the report calls “unsavory and viscous tactics.”
Citing reports produced by the Church Committee, a Senate investigation into domestic surveillance, the ACLU report notes that the FBI deployed tactics such as “anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupting meetings, ostracizing people from their professions and provoking target groups into rivalries that could have caused deaths.”
The most often noted incident was the effort to blackmail Martin Luther King as he broadened his activism from opposition to Jim Crow into opposition to the war in Vietnam and the notion of forming a “poor people’s movement.”
The report notes that there have been countless similar instances, including efforts to keep one-time University of California president Clark Kerr from finding employment, spying on School of the America’s Watch (an organization that works to close a training facility at Fort Benning, Ga. which has provided counterinsurgency training to the leaders of countless South and Central American death squads), and infiltrating the civil rights, environmental and women’s movements.
The report notes that many abuses from the ‘60s and ‘70s are only now coming to light as FBI files are declassified, though it also notes several similar instances from the last decade.
We should bear in mind that many of these abuses occurred at a time when surveillance was money and manpower intensive, technically difficult and time-consuming. That is no longer the case.
And there are serious allegations that abuses similar to those carried out by the FBI are now being carried out by the NSA.
NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, who was fired from the agency in 2005 after calling for better whistleblower protections, alleges that he personally saw surveillance files on business and industrial leaders, politicians, judges, anti-war groups and environmentalists. Nothing he has said is verifiable as of yet.
NSA whistleblower William Benny, a mathematician who worked for the agency until 2001, told the News Hour last week that he believes the government is collecting not only metadata but the content of telephone calls.
“I think, semantically, they’re trying to say that their definition of collection is having, literally, a physical analyst look or listen,” Benny said, noting that, by his estimation, a new data storage facility set to come on line next month in Utah could hold “roughly 100 years of the world’s communications.”
Whether the NSA is actually recording and storing phone calls is mostly irrelevant because the fact that they can collect all telephone metadata at all means that they have tapped into all telephone communications. The metadata is not sent separately. If the NSA is not recording phone calls, it is only because they are choosing not to. And they could change their minds.
Whether such abuses using NSA-collected data are occurring at present is not the crux of the issue. The crux of the issue is that the intelligence community has vast standing surveillance infrastructure, powerful storage and data mining technology, a near-total lack of oversight and a culture of secrecy. It doubtless has information on Americans opposed to its interests, and therefore has incentive to use that information to harm them.
The unique danger of the NSA’S surveillance programs is that they render domestic surveillance so incredibly easy. The potential for current and future abuse is essentially limitless.
The citizens of West Virginia can do something about this. Sen. Jay Rockefeller currently sits on, and formerly chaired, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. His constituents can and should pressure him to support a Church Committee-style investigation into the post-9/11 growth of the surveillance state.
_________________________________
Their is no accident that the news a person or group is under surveillance and the ability of that person or group to reach out to the public is directly related. If you make people afraid to be linked with political groups they do not reach out to investigate what these groups are about. That is how autocratic societies stop all methods of organizing and education.....making people afraid to be found associating with someone else.
Baltimore City police photograph and file people coming to demonstrations and they do not care who knows. It cuts down on the number of people coming out they say.
IF PEOPLE HAVE COMMITTED NO CRIME THEY CANNOT BE SURVEILLED.
NYPD surveillance of political activism questioned
By TOM HAYS | Associated Press – Wed, May 28, 2014 4:28 AM PHT NEW YORK (AP) — Political activists asked a new inspector general for the New York Police Department on Tuesday to force police officials to fully disclose details about how undercover officers sought to secretly infiltrate and monitor liberal activist groups.
Representatives of the groups hand-delivered a written complaint, which also called on the NYPD to account for "public moneys spent on these useless operations," to the lower Manhattan office of Philip Eure. It was the former federal prosecutor's first day on the job following his appointment earlier this year by the city Department of Investigation as the city's first-ever inspector general overseeing the NYPD.
"We're cautiously hopeful that the inspector general will pursue his mandate in favor of civil liberties," said Robert Jereski, a coordinator of a group called Friends of Brad Will.
In a statement, the Department of Investigation confirmed the paperwork was received. It said Eure will review it and "determine appropriate investigative action once the office is staffed."
NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said the police department would cooperate with any inquiry.
The independent watchdog post was created last year by the City Council in response to rising concerns over the NYPD's widespread tactic of street stops — known as "stop and frisk" — and its extensive surveillance of Muslims, as disclosed in stories by The Associated Press. Eure's first chore in the coming weeks is to assemble a staff of about 50 investigators, lawyers and analysts.
The complaint was filed by a coalition that includes environmental, human rights, housing rights and animal rights activists. It accuses NYPD of targeting "First Amendment protected activities like political advocacy" that provide "vital nourishment to our democratic system of government and prevents its corruption and atrophy."
It adds: "There is no place for police surveillance of political activity let alone police operations to subvert it in New York City's thriving democracy."
Over the years, the NYPD's Intelligence Division has sought to gather inside information about plans for political protests, claiming it was needed to take measures to keep the gatherings from turning violent.
In 2012, the AP disclosed documents detailing how an undercover NYPD officer traveled to New Orleans in 2008 to attend the People's Summit, a gathering of liberal groups. The officer reported overhearing participants discuss how the Friends of Brad Will was planning demonstrations in Mexico and across the United States to demand the removal of the governor of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Friends of Brad Will — formed after the murder of Will in 2006 while he was working as a journalist in Mexico — has a stated mission of increasing "public awareness about the human rights abuses linked to the 'war on drugs.'" Since the disclosure about the NYPD's surveillance, it and other groups have seen a decline in donations and participation, Jereski said.
"It's chilled the landscape to have the lawless behavior of the NYPD held over us," he said.
_______________________________________
The use of this technology to fight crime supposedly pre-emps civil rights and liberties. We all know these meta-data analyses are not being done only on suspected criminals. It is used for industrial spying, spying on political groups, and people like myself-----writing in ways that hold power accountable. Think of how people will be made afraid to associate or open up to people they do not know.....how people will use this to find advantage for personal gain.
IT WILL EXPLODE AS RULE OF LAW CONTINUES TO BE DISMANTLED AND PEOPLE FEEL THEY ARE FREE TO DO ANYTHING THEY WANT.
Johns Hopkins just used Federal money from Obama and sought by Cardin and Mikulski to build one of these meta-data centers on the Hopkins' campus and we already know it is being used to collect and sell data as well as for Homeland Security. These are not benevolent people who are doing this folks!
U.S. News
Phones Leave a Telltale Trail
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