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“Nothing To Hide,” A Poor Excuse To Justify Surveillance

“Nothing To Hide,” A Poor Excuse To Justify Surveillance

Many people claim they have nothing to hide and use that as the reason they don’t object to the expanding web of surveillance being weaved over them. These people ignore the fact we are surrendering our right to freedom when we as a society go down this path. The reality is that when someone knows all about you and your deepest thought they gain tremendous power over you. This is directly linked to the ability to control you.This weekend on a short trip I came across a couple of annoying examples of the government dirtying the waters and making our lives more difficult and less free. These include turning parts of the interstate system into a toll road then not taking cash as payment and so-called “photo enforcement” of traffic laws. While many states have gone to using cameras to some extent for enforcing traffic laws, the practice remains highly controversial. Whether it is incorporated in the notion of reducing labor, streamlining the system, or ending counterfeiting or money laundering, the above can complicate our life. Tech is not the gift of freedom many people think. It could be said we are being boxed in and many of our options are not being preserved. 

 

 

Some People Remain Optimistic

The picture to the right is one of many that appeared when searching for images showing people stand up and fighting. The idea of resisting new rules and mandates placed upon us conflicts with the idea we should all try to go along with what we are being told to do. Some people have even suggested and claimed those resisting the changes fostered upon us be labeled terrorists.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Government Surveillance: Those Signs Showing Your Speed May Be SPYING On You

Government Surveillance: Those Signs Showing Your Speed May Be SPYING On You

Those signs that show you how fast you are traveling may be a part of a United States government surveillance program. That sign might not only be there to remind you what the speed limit is but a part of a dystopian “Big Brother” spy network.

“There used to be an old police saying, ‘If you robbed a bank, please drive carefully,’” former NYPD Detective Sergeant and Bronx Cold Case Squad commander Joseph Giacalone told Quartz. Giacalone that if a getaway driver didn’t do anything to attract the attention of police and get pulled over, they usually had a half-decent chance of fleeing. “But that’s no longer in effect because you can drive slow, you can stop at every red light, but these license plate readers and surveillance cameras track your every movement.”

According to recently released US federal contracting data, the Drug Enforcement Administration will be expanding the footprint of its nationwide surveillance network with the purchase of “multiple” trailer-mounted speed displays “to be retrofitted as mobile LPR [License Plate Reader] platforms.” The DEA is buying them from RU2 Systems Inc., a private Mesa, Arizona company.  But that’s not all.  Two other related contracts have been found, as reported by Quartz.

The two contracts show that the DEA has hired a small machine shop in California, and another in Virginia, to conceal the readers within the signs. An RU2 representative said the company providing the LPR devices themselves is a Canadian firm called Genetec. The DEA’s most recent budget describes the program as “a federation of independent federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement license plate readers linked into a cooperative system, designed to enhance the ability of law enforcement agencies to interdict drug traffickers, money launderers or other criminal activities on high drug and money trafficking corridors and other public roadways throughout the U.S.” .

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11

How NSA Surveillance Was Birthed from the Drug War – The DEA Tracked Billions of Phone Calls Pre 9/11

The now-discontinued operation, carried out by the DEA’s intelligence arm, was the government’s first known effort to gather data on Americans in bulk, sweeping up records of telephone calls made by millions of U.S. citizens regardless of whether they were suspected of a crime. It was a model for the massive phone surveillance system the NSA launched to identify terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. That dragnet drew sharp criticism that the government had intruded too deeply into Americans’ privacy after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked it to the news media two years ago.

The similarities between the NSA program and the DEA operation established a decade earlier are striking – too much so to have been a coincidence, people familiar with the programs said. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker said, “It’s very hard to see (the DEA operation) as anything other than the precursor” to the NSA’s terrorist surveillance.

The extent of that surveillance alarmed privacy advocates, who questioned its legality. “This was aimed squarely at Americans,” said Mark Rumold, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That’s very significant from a constitutional perspective.”

Holder halted the data collection in September 2013 amid the fallout from Snowden’s revelations about other surveillance programs.

– From today’s USA Today article: U.S. Secretly Tracked Billions of Calls for Decades

 

The drug war is something that wouldn’t even exist in a rational, mature and intelligent civilization. Not only is it ineffective, invasive and brutish, but we now know that the almost religious zealousness with which it has been pursued by its proponents has led directly to the current unconstitutional surveillance state. If not for our acquiescence to the “war on drugs,” would the authoritarian statists amongst us have been able to usher in the even more dangerous but similarly endless “war on terror?” Personally, I doubt it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

John Oliver on Government Surveillance

John Oliver on Government Surveillance

Getting the News from Comedy Shows …

The self-censoring US mainstream media are usually not a very good source of impartial (read: non-government approved) information. We completely disagree with Noam Chomsky’s leftist political views, which in our opinion are astoundingly naïve for someone of his intellectual stature, but we do believe he has always made quite valid points about how “consent is manufactured” in the US (and elsewhere for that matter). Governments are lying routinely, and in theory, the press should challenge them on that. It just seems to happen only very rarely.

The hysterical pro-war propaganda disseminated in the mainstream media prior to the Iraq war will forever stand as one of the low points in this respect. Most of it was based on bald-faced lies, something that should have been glaringly obvious to anyone calling himself a journalist at the time. And yet, not one of the major mainstream media organizations even made an attempt to challenge the government’s lies and propaganda – instead they did everything to reinforce them. This was reportedly done to preserve “access” to all those named and unnamed government officials feeding the press with what can only very loosely be termed “information”. One wonders what such access is worth if all the audience ever gets out of it is the amplification of government propaganda.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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