Tomgram: Shamsi and Harwood, An Electronic Archipelago of Domestic Surveillance | TomDispatch.
Let me tell you my modest post-9/11 dream. One morning, I’ll wake up and see a newspaper article that begins something like this: “The FBI is attempting to persuade an obscure regulatory body in Washington to change its rules of engagement in order to curtail the agency’s significant powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers.” Now, wouldn’t that be amazing? Unfortunately, as you’ve undoubtedly already guessed, that day didn’t come last week. To create that sentence I had to fiddle with the odd word or two in the lead sentence of an article about the FBI’s attempt to gain “significant new powers to hack into and carry out surveillance of computers throughout the U.S. and around the world.”
When it comes to the expansion of our national security-cum-surveillance state, last week was just another humdrum seven days of news. There were revelations about the widespread monitoring of the snail mail of Americans. (“[T]he United States Postal Service reported that it approved nearly 50,000 requests last year from law enforcement agencies and its own internal inspection unit to secretly monitor the mail of Americans for use in criminal and national security investigations.”) There was the news that a “sneak and peek” provision in the Patriot Act that “allows investigators to conduct searches without informing the target of the search” was now being used remarkably regularly. Back in 2001, supporters of the Act had sworn that the provision would only be applied in rare cases involving terrorism. Last week we learned that it is being used thousands of times a year as a common law enforcement tool in drug cases. Oh, and on our list should go the FBI’s new push to get access to your encrypted iPhones!
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