This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Liberty hails decision that prior independent authorisation is needed for people’s communications data
The security and intelligence services must acquire “prior independent authorisation” to obtain people’s communications data from telecom providers, a civil rights campaign group has said, after it won a high court challenge.
Liberty hailed a “landmark victory” and said two judges ruled it was unlawful for MI5, MI6 and GCHQ to obtain individuals’ communications data from telecom providers without having prior independent authorisation during criminal investigations.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
The burden of proof has been reversed.No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In this way, government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.
Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. With the increase in precrime programs, threat assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance programs such as SpotShotter, which attempt to calculate where illegal activity might occur by triangulating sounds and images, the burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers.
Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT team raids are what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us. Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid. No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry. This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme. As libertarian Harry Browne observed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that’s been taken.”
Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether. The message: we cannot be trusted to obey the law or navigate the world on our end.
Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
Limitations on our right to move about freely. We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements. For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
The war on cash and the introduction of digital currency. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue. A cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).
The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. What this has amounted to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
In effect, you will disappear.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.
The post Everybody’s Guilty first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Letter from 150 organisations adds to MPs’ concern about the bill of rights bypassing pre-legislative process
Dominic Raab is facing demands today from 150 organisations to allow detailed parliamentary scrutiny of legislation that is expected to replace the Human Rights Act.
The justice secretary has been sent a letter coordinated by the campaign group Liberty calling for the bill of rights to be subjected to “robust consideration” amid fears that it will put the government beyond the reach of the law.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Facebook is collecting ultra-sensitive personal data about abortion seekers and enabling anti-abortion organizations to use that data as a tool to target and influence people online, in violation of its own policies and promises.
In the wake of a leaked Supreme Court opinion signaling the likely end of nationwide abortion protections, privacy experts are sounding alarms about all the ways people’s data trails could be used against them if some states criminalize abortion.
A joint investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Markup found that the world’s largest social media platform is already collecting data about people who visit the websites of hundreds of crisis pregnancy centers, which are quasi-health clinics, mostly run by religiously aligned organizations whose mission is to persuade people to choose an option other than abortion.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, prohibits websites and apps that use Facebook’s advertising technology from sending Facebook “sexual and reproductive health” data. After investigations by The Wall Street Journal in 2019 and New York state regulators in 2021, the social media giant created a machine-learning system to help detect sensitive health data and blocked data that contained any of 70,000 health-related terms.
But Reveal and The Markup have found Facebook’s code on the websites of hundreds of anti-abortion clinics. Using Blacklight, a Markup tool that detects cookies, keyloggers and other types of user-tracking technology on websites, Reveal analyzed the sites of nearly 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers – with data provided by the University of Georgia – and found that at least 294 shared visitor information with Facebook. In many cases, the information was extremely sensitive – for example, whether a person was considering abortion or looking to get a pregnancy test or emergency contraceptives.
In a statement to Reveal and The Markup, Facebook spokesperson Dale Hogan said: “It is against our policies for websites and apps to send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools,” which includes its advertising technology. “Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it detects, and we work to educate advertisers on how to properly set up our Business Tools.” Facebook declined to answer detailed questions about its filtering systems and policies on data from crisis pregnancy centers. It’s unknown whether the filters caught any of the data, but our investigation showed a significant amount made its way to Facebook.
Using Meta’s Privacy Center, we found that Facebook captured Reveal reporter Grace Oldham requesting an appointment at the Pregnancy Resource Center of Owasso in Oklahoma. More than a third of the websites sent data to Facebook when someone made an appointment for an “abortion consultation” or “pre-termination screening.” And at least 39 sites sent Facebook details such as the person’s name, email address or phone number.
Facebook takes in data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool called the Meta Pixel that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account. The Pixel is largely an advertising tool that allows businesses to do things like buy Facebook ads targeted to people who have visited their website or to people who share similar interests or demographics with their site’s other visitors. This is a mostly automated process in which the business does not have access to information about the specific users being targeted. It’s not clear how this data is later used.
Crisis pregnancy centers and other businesses can choose whether to install Pixel on their websites, though many website builders and third-party services automatically embed trackers. In 2020, The Markup found that 30% of the 80,000 most popular sites use the ad tracker, and Facebook has said millions of Pixels are on websites across the internet. Facebook says Pixel data can be stored for years.
That personal data can be used in a number of ways. The centers can deliver targeted advertising, on Facebook or elsewhere, aimed at deterring an individual from getting an abortion. It can be used to build anti-abortion ad campaigns – and spread misinformation about reproductive health – targeted at people with similar demographics and interests. And, in the worst-case scenario now contemplated by privacy experts, that digital trail might even be used as evidence against abortion seekers in states where the procedure is outlawed.
“I think this is going to be a wake-up call for millions of Americans about how much danger this tracking puts them in when laws change and people can weaponize these systems in ways that once seemed impossible,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the New York-based Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Facebook and crisis pregnancy centers “are operating with virtually no rules,” he said.
Facebook has policies and filters that are supposed to block sensitive personal data. But the platform’s filters have often proven to be porous against the vast amount of information they take in every day. Essentially, that means the company is putting the onus on its advertising clients to monitor themselves.
And Facebook does not have an incentive to crack down on violations of its advertising policies, said Serge Egelman, research director of the Usable Security & Privacy Group at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. “That costs them money to do. As long as they’re not legally obligated to do so, why would they expend any resources to fix this?”
Using Data to Make Abortion “Unthinkable”
Crisis pregnancy centers market themselves as being in the “pregnancy resource” business, offering a range of free or low-cost services from pregnancy tests to baby clothing and “options consultations.” But their mission, articulated by Heartbeat International, the largest crisis pregnancy center network in the world, is far more sweeping: “to make abortion unwanted today and unthinkable for future generations.”
Although many centers resemble medical clinics, the majority are not licensed medical facilities. Thus, most are not required to follow most privacy protections against the sharing of personal health information, including the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA.
In recent years, crisis pregnancy centers have become increasingly savvy about targeting people using sophisticated digital tools and infrastructure. Heartbeat International, for example, has developed suites of products to help individual centers improve their online presence, digital advertising and data management. These online tools enable the centers to amass highly personal information, including medical histories, details about prior pregnancies and even ultrasound photos, and store and share that information with networks of anti-abortion partners.
As Heartbeat International says on its webpage marketing its data management system: “Big data is revolutionizing all sorts of industries. Why shouldn’t it do the same for a critical ministry like ours?”
When asked about Heartbeat International’s data-sharing practices, spokesperson Andrea Trudden said, “Heartbeat International encourages all pregnancy help organizations to utilize a variety of marketing to reach those seeking pregnancy help.” But, she said, “we do not require affiliates to provide such details to us.”
Crisis pregnancy centers also have been documented as spreading false or misleading information about abortion, contraceptives and other reproductive health topics, including on Facebook. In 2021, the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that Facebook showed ads promoting an unproven medical procedure known as abortion pill reversal as many as 18.4 million times. Many of those advertisements were linked to Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Rescue Network project, which did not respond to a request for comment.
How We Tracked the Data
To test how Facebook and crisis pregnancy centers have been using the data the Pixel collects, Reveal reporter Grace Oldham created a new Facebook profile in late April solely for this investigation. Then, while logged in to Facebook, she visited the 294 crisis pregnancy center websites that Blacklight found to have a Pixel, clicking through each website and, when available, filling out appointment request forms. Oldham conducted the research in a clean browser with a cleared cache.
In early May, she and Reveal data reporter Dhruv Mehrotra used Meta’s Privacy Center to download and review the data of the clean Facebook account. They found that Facebook retained data about Oldham’s interactions with 88% of those crisis pregnancy center websites, linking her behavior to her Facebook profile. For instance, Facebook knew Oldham had scheduled an appointment with the Pregnancy Resource Center of Owasso, Oklahoma. That state’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, signed a law in late May that bans virtually all abortions from the point of fertilization and took effect immediately. The Owasso center did not respond to a request for comment, but after we reached out, Facebook’s tracking Pixel was removed from every page on the center’s website.
Our analysis found that in states that will ban most or all abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned, at least 120 crisis pregnancy centers sent data to Facebook about their website visitors. In Tennessee, for example, where the Human Life Protection Act is poised to outlaw abortion statewide, Facebook retained data from Oldham’s interactions with 11 centers. Next Steps Resources in Dunlap sent data to Facebook about every single page Oldham visited on its site. Facebook stored that data and knew that Oldham had submitted an appointment request with the center. Next Steps’ executive director, Debbie Chandler, told Reveal and The Markup that the people she hired to manage her website and marketing disagreed that “any private information was being sent to Facebook.”
An appointment request form on the website of Next Steps Resources, a crisis pregnancy center in Dunlap, Tennessee. Screenshot via Nextstepinfo.org We also found that anti-abortion marketing companies gained access to some of Oldham’s Pixel data, even though she never interacted with their websites. These included Choose Life Marketing, whose website claims to help crisis pregnancy centers develop digital strategies to “reach more abortion-minded women,” and Stories Marketing, a social media marketing company for “pregnancy centers and life-affirming organizations.” Those organizations also added Oldham’s Facebook profile to custom audience groups capable of targeting her and people like her with ads for their services, as well as anti-abortion messaging. Choose Life Marketing and Stories Marketing did not respond to requests for comment.
In their online materials, the marketing companies explain why Facebook plays such an important role in their digital strategies. “Facebook ads have the highest return on investment (ROI) of any type of online marketing – even twice the ROI of Google Ads,” Stories Marketing says, adding: “Facebook ads can also be placed on Instagram and other apps for free, extending your reach at no extra cost.” According to Choose Life: “Retargeting is an effective method of keeping your center at the forefront of their minds. … This digital marketing method can also help build credibility and trust as women go through the decision-making process because your center’s name becomes familiar to them.”
We first ran our analysis in February and repeated it using the same methodology in early May. The results of both analyses were similar. As of Tuesday, Facebook still had data about Oldham’s interactions on crisis pregnancy center websites.
Abortion Data Collection “Ripe for Abuse”
Cahn, of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed concerns about how law enforcement agencies could use Facebook data to find people seeking abortions should the procedure become illegal in some states. “It’s ripe for abuse,” he said of Facebook’s data collection. “It seems indefensible to me that we are allowing companies to have so much power to expose our most intimate moments to these platforms and have them use it against us.”
In recent years, law enforcement agencies have barraged tech companies like Google and Uber with demands for user data. Often, these legal requests don’t target individual suspects but instead compel the company to divulge data about people in a particular place or searches using specific keywords. According to the most recent data available from Facebook’s Transparency Center, the company received nearly 60,000 government requests for data from July to December 2021 and complied 88% of the time.
Although crisis pregnancy centers could provide law enforcement with data about anyone who had voluntarily provided personal information, they probably don’t have the technology to disclose specific information about individuals who had merely visited their websites. But Facebook is different. Because the social media company can link activity on a crisis pregnancy center site to an individual’s profile, Facebook is in a much better position to divulge granular data about the center’s website visitors than the center itself.
Data from search engine histories played a key role in a 2018 criminal case, in which a Mississippi woman was indicted for second-degree murder after suffering a pregnancy loss at home. The evidence included internet searches the woman had allegedly conducted for how to “buy Misoprostol abortion pill online.” The charges eventually were dropped.
“There’s nothing to stop police from using Facebook ad-targeting data the same way they’ve been using Google’s data, as a mass digital dragnet,” Cahn said.
Laura Lazaro Cabrera, a legal officer at London-based Privacy International, said that even metadata, like the titles of webpages or URLs, can be revealing. “Think about what you can learn from a URL that says something about scheduling an abortion,” she said. “Facebook is in the business of developing algorithms. They know what sorts of information can act as a proxy for personal data.”
Getting Facebook to Fix the Problem
Privacy experts have been warning for years that Facebook’s laissez-faire attitude toward how clients use its advertising technology is vulnerable to exploitation. After The Wall Street Journal and New York state regulators exposed how the social media behemoth collected sensitive user data from popular health apps that chart everything from heart rates to menstrual cycles, Facebook claimed to have implemented sophisticated filtering mechanisms to detect and prevent it from taking in sensitive health data. According to the Journal, the filters were supposed to block “70,000 terms related to topics such as sexual health and medical conditions.”
But our investigation found that Facebook has continued to ingest data from webpages with obvious sexual health information – including ones with URLs that include phrases such as “post-abortion,” “i-think-im-pregnant” and “abortion-pill.”
Despite Facebook’s official policy prohibiting websites from sending it sensitive health information, it’s unclear what, if anything, the platform does to educate its advertising clients about the policy and proactively enforce it.
One way for Facebook to prevent anti-abortion organizations from misusing its ad technology would be to strengthen the filters it already has in place or to discontinue the Pixel tool entirely. But the reality, said Egelman of UC Berkeley, is that the company’s $115 billion a year in advertising revenue creates a huge financial disincentive to block user information.
“This is their business. The more data they get, the more targeted advertising they can do, and that’s the gravy train for them: targeted ads,” he said. “If they’re proactive about cutting off sites like that, it impacts their revenue in multiple ways.”
In the absence of Facebook action, Egelman says he thinks that the best fix is public pressure and tough legislation. That’s what happened last year, when critical backlash prompted Meta-owned Instagram to shelve its plans for a kids’ version of its social media software.
While no comprehensive federal data privacy legislation currently exists in the United States, a draft of a bill called the American Data Privacy and Protection Act was released in early June that, if passed, could increase the Federal Trade Commission’s power to regulate and enforce how companies can use sensitive health data. Until then, however, it remains up to state legislatures to enact consumer privacy protections.
Brandie Nonnecke, founding director of the CITRIS Policy Lab at UC Berkeley, said the European Union is creating stronger protections that would apply through the Digital Services Act. The new guidelines, which are awaiting formal approval by the European Parliament and EU Council, will require large online platforms, like Facebook, and search engines to proactively identify ways their systems could be abused and create strategies to prevent that misuse.
“We’re not in a place where there is robust enough transparency and accountability on these data ecosystems and how they’re being used,” she said, “and especially the vulnerabilities to individuals.”
Byard Duncan and Surya Mattu contributed to this story. It was edited by Nina Martin, Soo Oh, Rina Palta and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to their weekly newsletter at revealnews.org/newsletter.
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Australia’s privacy watchdog will likely investigate Bunnings, Kmart and The Good Guys after a consumer group uncovered the retailers’ use of facial recognition technology on customers. It comes after years of delay to Australian privacy law reform, sparking calls for more urgency and a dedicated facial recognition law. But the retail giants’ argument for using…
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The Coalition is uncommitted to privacy reform and Labor remains silent despite broad support from independents and minor parties, according to the Australian Privacy Foundation. Updated on Thursday, the Australian Privacy Foundation’s (APF) election scorecard indicated support for its recommended privacy priorities. The group invited 100 political parties and independent candidates to express whether they…
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Internal market commissioner raised concerns that hate speech will increase on the platform
The EU has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must “comply with our rules” or face sanctions that range from fines to a total ban, as concerns were raised that hate speech will increase on the platform under his ownership.
The world’s richest man has agreed a $44bn (£34bn) deal to buy the social media network, which will hand control of a platform with 217 million users to a self-confessed “free speech absolutist”.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Laws introducing increased penalties for data breaches announced in response to the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal will not be passed before the election despite being announced by the federal government more than three years ago. In March 2019 then-Attorney-General Christian Porter unveiled plans to significantly increase the penalty for breaches of privacy by social media…
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Former Minister of Trade and Industry Monica Mæland visiting Myanmar in 2014. Photo: Trond Viken, Ministry of Trade and Industry On 25 March, Telenor announced that the telecom giant had transferred the operational activities of Telenor Myanmar to M1 Group. [see: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2021/10/26/norways-telenor-in-myanmar-should-do-more-than-pull-out-it-should-not-hand-sensitive-data-to-the-regime/] In a release following the announcement, the Norwegian Forum for Development and Environment (ForUM) condemns the sale, and Kathrine Sund-Henriksen, ForUM’s general manager calls it a dark day for Telenor and for Norway as a human rights nation.
ForUM is a network of 50 Norwegian organizations within the development, environment, peace, and human rights with a vision of a democratic and peaceful world based on fair distribution, solidarity, human rights, and sustainability. ForUM writes that together with transferring the operational activities of Telenor Myanmar to M1 Group, Telenor also sells sensitive personal data of 18 million former Telenor customers, and there is an imminent danger that this information will soon be in the hands of the country’s brutal military dictatorship. ForUM is furious at the news that the sale has been completed.
“Ever since the sale was announced last summer, we have worked to prevent it because there is a big risk that the military junta will have access to sensitive personal information and use it to persecute, torture, and kill regime critics. Incredibly, Telenor is going through with a sale that has been criticized by human rights experts, civil society, Myanmar’s government in exile, and even their own employees in the country,” says Kathrine Sund-Henriksen.
Telenor has admitted that since October last year they have known that the junta uses the M1 Group as an intermediary and that the data will soon end up in the hands of Shwe Byain Phy Group, a local conglomerate with close ties to the junta. Kathrine Sund-Henriksen believes it is only a matter of time before the sale has tragic consequences for human rights activists in the country.
“When metadata is transferred, the junta will be able to know who a user has called, how long the call has lasted, and where the call was made. All of this can be used to expose activist groups operating in secret for the junta. According to the UN, the junta has killed more than 1,600 people and more than 12,000 have been arrested since last year’s coup. Those numbers will continue to increase, and Telenor has given the junta all the information they need to expose human rights defenders,” Kathrine Sund-Henriksen says.
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
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The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we’re part of the medium. The scary thing is, we’ll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us.”
— Director Steven Spielberg, Minority ReportWe have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move.
Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.”
Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report which was released 20 years ago—we are now trapped into a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2022.
Seemingly taking its cue from science fiction, technology has moved so fast in the short time since Minority Report premiered in 2002 that what once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.
Both worlds—our present-day reality and Spielberg’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America.
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. And bodily privacy and integrity has been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from an oblivious American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television and internet zombies, but we have been warned about such an ominous future in novels and movies for years.
The following 15 films may be the best representation of what we now face as a society.
Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, this film depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned, and firemen ironically are called on to burn contraband books—451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question his book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now pre-censors speech. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
The plot of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated ship is orchestrated by a computer system—known as HAL 9000—which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point in human evolution, technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous and human beings will become mere appendages of technology. In fact, at present, we are seeing this development with massive databases generated and controlled by the government that are administered by such secretive agencies as the National Security Agency and sweep all websites and other information devices collecting information on average citizens. We are being watched from cradle to grave.Planet of the Apes (1968). Based on Pierre Boulle’s novel, astronauts crash on a planet where apes are the masters and humans are treated as brutes and slaves. While fleeing from gorillas on horseback, astronaut Taylor is shot in the throat, captured and housed in a cage. From there, Taylor begins a journey wherein the truth revealed is that the planet was once controlled by technologically advanced humans who destroyed civilization. Taylor’s trek to the ominous Forbidden Zone reveals the startling fact that he was on planet earth all along. Descending into a fit of rage at what he sees in the final scene, Taylor screams: “We finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you.” The lesson is obvious, but will we listen? The script, although rewritten, was initially drafted by Rod Serling and retains Serling’s Twilight Zone-ish ending.
THX 1138 (1970). George Lucas’ directorial debut, this is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with “pain prods”—electro-shock batons. Sound like tasers?
A Clockwork Orange (1971). Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that cracks down on its citizens sporadically. Alex is a violent punk who finds himself in the grinding, crushing wheels of injustice. This film may accurately portray the future of western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force.
Soylent Green (1973). Set in a futuristic overpopulated New York City, the people depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit. Sound familiar?
Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade “replicants” (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is now dominated by mega-corporations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). Based upon a Philip K. Dick novel, this exquisite Ridley Scott film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell’s dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse, and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state. The government controls the masses by controlling their thoughts, altering history and changing the meaning of words. Winston Smith is a doubter who turns to self-expression through his diary and then begins questioning the ways and methods of Big Brother before being re-educated in a most brutal fashion.
Brazil (1985). Sharing a similar vision of the near future as 1984 and Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, this is arguably director Terry Gilliam’s best work, one replete with a merging of the fantastic and stark reality. Here, a mother-dominated, hapless clerk takes refuge in flights of fantasy to escape the ordinary drabness of life. Caught within the chaotic tentacles of a police state, the longing for more innocent, free times lies behind the vicious surface of this film.
They Live (1988). John Carpenter’s bizarre sci-fi social satire action film assumes the future has already arrived. John Nada is a homeless person who stumbles across a resistance movement and finds a pair of sunglasses that enables him to see the real world around him. What he discovers is a world controlled by ominous beings who bombard the citizens with subliminal messages such as “obey” and “conform.” Carpenter manages to make an effective political point about the underclass—that is, everyone except those in power. The point: we, the prisoners of our devices, are too busy sucking up the entertainment trivia beamed into our brains and attacking each other up to start an effective resistance movement.
The Matrix (1999). The story centers on a computer programmer Thomas A. Anderson, secretly a hacker known by the alias “Neo,” who begins a relentless quest to learn the meaning of “The Matrix”—cryptic references that appear on his computer. Neo’s search leads him to Morpheus who reveals the truth that the present reality is not what it seems and that Anderson is actually living in the future—2199. Humanity is at war against technology which has taken the form of intelligent beings, and Neo is actually living in The Matrix, an illusionary world that appears to be set in the present in order to keep the humans docile and under control. Neo soon joins Morpheus and his cohorts in a rebellion against the machines that use SWAT team tactics to keep things under control.
Minority Report (2002). Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick and directed by Steven Spielberg, the film offers a special effect-laden, techno-vision of a futuristic world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful. And if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will bring you under control. The setting is 2054 where PreCrime, a specialized police unit, apprehends criminals before they can commit the crime. Captain Anderton is the chief of the Washington, DC, PreCrime force which uses future visions generated by “pre-cogs” (mutated humans with precognitive abilities) to stop murders. Soon Anderton becomes the focus of an investigation when the precogs predict he will commit a murder. But the system can be manipulated. This film raises the issue of the danger of technology operating autonomously—which will happen eventually if it has not already occurred. To a hammer, all the world looks like a nail. In the same way, to a police state computer, we all look like suspects. In fact, before long, we all may be mere extensions or appendages of the police state—all suspects in a world commandeered by machines.
V for Vendetta (2006). This film depicts a society ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. A vigilante named V dons a mask and leads a rebellion against the state. The subtext here is that authoritarian regimes through repression create their own enemies—that is, terrorists—forcing government agents and terrorists into a recurring cycle of violence. And who is caught in the middle? The citizens, of course. This film has a cult following among various underground political groups such as Anonymous, whose members wear the same Guy Fawkes mask as that worn by V.Children of Men (2006). This film portrays a futuristic world without hope since humankind has lost its ability to procreate. Civilization has descended into chaos and is held together by a military state and a government that attempts to keep its totalitarian stronghold on the population. Most governments have collapsed, leaving Great Britain as one of the few remaining intact societies. As a result, millions of refugees seek asylum only to be rounded up and detained by the police. Suicide is a viable option as a suicide kit called Quietus is promoted on billboards and on television and newspapers. But hope for a new day comes when a woman becomes inexplicably pregnant.
Land of the Blind (2006). In this dark political satire, tyrannical rulers are overthrown by new leaders who prove to be just as evil as their predecessors. Maximilian II is a demented fascist ruler of a troubled land named Everycountry who has two main interests: tormenting his underlings and running his country’s movie industry. Citizens who are perceived as questioning the state are sent to “re-education camps” where the state’s concept of reality is drummed into their heads. Joe, a prison guard, is emotionally moved by the prisoner and renowned author Thorne and eventually joins a coup to remove the sadistic Maximilian, replacing him with Thorne. But soon Joe finds himself the target of the new government.
All of these films—and the writers who inspired them—understood what many Americans, caught up in their partisan, flag-waving, zombified states, are still struggling to come to terms with: that there is no such thing as a government organized for the good of the people. Even the best intentions among those in government inevitably give way to the desire to maintain power and control at all costs.
Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, even the sleepwalking masses (who remain convinced that all of the bad things happening in the police state—the police shootings, the police beatings, the raids, the roadside strip searches—are happening to other people) will have to wake up.
Sooner or later, the things happening to other people will start happening to us.
When that painful reality sinks in, it will hit with the force of a SWAT team crashing through your door, a taser being aimed at your stomach, and a gun pointed at your head. And there will be no channel to change, no reality to alter, and no manufactured farce to hide behind.
As George Orwell warned, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.”
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Secret, blanket policy to take mobiles and extract data from them judged unlawful on several fronts
The Home Office operated an unlawful, secret, blanket policy to seize almost 2,000 mobile phones from asylum seekers arriving in the UK on small boats and then downloaded data from these phones, the high court has ruled.
The court found that the policy was unlawful on multiple fronts and breached the asylum seekers’ human rights. The judges ruled that there was no parliamentary authority for seizures and data extractions and that the legal power that Home Office officials thought they could use was the wrong one.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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There is no way to opt-out of data sharing when using ABC platforms the broadcaster has conceded, after experts publicly demonstrated user information being sent to third-party companies this week. But the ABC has pushed back on the latest controversy around users’ viewing habits being shared with data companies, insisting it is only for analytics…
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Privacy and security experts have called on the ABC to halt its switch to mandatory user accounts at the eleventh hour, warning that the public broadcaster has failed to justify the increased risks of tracking users and sharing data with US tech giants. Letters to ABC management from the Australian Privacy Foundation and a former…
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The CIA recently declassified parts of a letter written by two U.S. senators that revealed the existence of a previously unknown bulk spying program that collects and stores Americans’ data. The letter, written by Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, calls for the CIA to reveal the details of the program. It was sent to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in April 2021. Much of the letter remains classified, and neither the senators nor the CIA have provided any specifics about what the underlying spying program entails.
“Among the many details the public deserves to know are the nature of the CIA’s relationship with its sources and the legal framework for the collection; the kinds of records collected [redacted] the amount of Americans’ records maintained; and the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination, and queries (including US person queries) of the records,” the senators wrote. The mention of the CIA’s “relationship with its sources” is likely a reference to the telecommunication companies providing the data, a reminder of the symbiotic roles private companies play in national security surveillance.
The existence of the CIA’s program was first disclosed to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2021, according to Wyden and Heinrich. They became aware of the bulk collection from a report issued by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency whose members have access to classified information. That review, known as “Deep Dive II,” remains classified, but the CIA partially declassified a set of recommendations issued by the board. That document revealed that when CIA analysts enter a search term, or query, into the program, a “pop-up box will appear to remind the analysts” that they need to provide a foreign intelligence justification for the search. Analysts are not required to document that justification; the oversight board recommended requiring it.
Although Wyden and Heinrich, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said they were only informed about the bulk spying program in March 2021, a CIA official told The New York Times that Congress had already been told about the data collection. That official suggested that the new information in Deep Dive II had to do with the “repository and analysis tools for storing and querying that data after its collection.”
If the CIA is lying to Congress, or misleading members through wordplay and hiding behind technicalities, it would not be the first time in recent memory an intelligence official had done so. In 2013, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Senator Wyden in an open hearing about bulk surveillance of U.S. persons. Wyden asked if the National Security Agency (NSA) collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper responded “no,” later adding “not wittingly.”
Clapper’s obfuscation was a key motivation for Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, to leak documents to journalists exposing multiple mass surveillance programs. Following the Snowden disclosures, Clapper referred to his own earlier testimony as “clearly erroneous.”
There have been other episodes of tension, in some cases outright hostility, between intelligence agencies and their congressional watchdogs. At the end of Obama’s second term in office, the Senate Intelligence Committee assembled the most exhaustive accounting to date of the CIA’s role in the post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation program. Commonly referred to as “The Torture Report,” the document was designed to expose the CIA’s lies about the efficacy and necessity of torture. In the days immediately before the report was to be released, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose office was the primary author of the report, revealed that the CIA had spied on her staff. Then-CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the allegations, but later admitted the CIA had inappropriately surveilled Senate staffers while they were using a CIA network to conduct their research. The report remains classified, other than an executive summary that was released to the public with heavy redactions.
Although little is known about the newly disclosed CIA bulk spying program, Wyden and Heinrich wrote in their letter that its legal foundation is Executive Order (EO) 12333. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, serves as the authority that governs most covert foreign intelligence activities carried out by the U.S. government. It purportedly bans the assassinations and covert action “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media,” but the order gives wide latitude for overseas physical and electronic surveillance. Executive orders are issued by presidents, and by definition have not been passed by Congress. Although the intelligence committees in both chambers are supposed to have broad oversight over the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community, programs and activities governed by EO 12333 generally have more autonomy than those controlled by statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bulk spying may have something to do with collecting “financial data” as it relates to ISIS, as suggested by a different, partially declassified PCLOB report. If it does, it would suggest a familiar pattern in the “war on terror,” namely, intelligence agencies claiming that countering the threat of terrorism requires mass surveillance with no congressional or judicial oversight.
Elizabeth Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, reacted to the newly disclosed surveillance program by summarizing the distinctions between the two types of legal authorities. “You might be asking, didn’t Congress end bulk collection? The short answer is no,” she tweeted. “In 2015, Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting bulk collection when the government is acting under [FISA], but FISA only applies to certain types of surveillance that target U.S. persons or happen inside the United States. When the collection happens overseas or falls into one of FISA’s statutory gaps, it takes place under Executive Order (EO) 12333.”
Goitein added that “most foreign intelligence surveillance actually takes place under EO 12333, not FISA. That means it is subject to no statutory constraints whatsoever, and there is no judicial review or oversight.” When it comes to what prevents the CIA from using this bulk surveillance repository to search for U.S. persons’ data, Goitein writes, “Let’s be honest: nothing.”
The Snowden disclosures partially reveal the nearly limitless authority that intelligence agencies have claimed under EO 12333. The NSA program MYSTIC, revealed based on Snowden’s leaked documents, was “capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place,” The Washington Post reported in 2014. The Intercept reported two months later that a MYSTIC sub-program called SOMALGET had targeted the Bahamas, without the country’s government’s knowledge or approval. Both MYSTIC and SOMALGET operated under EO 12333.
Despite the well-documented abuses the CIA carried out under the auspices of the war on terror, and during the Cold War before that, there is very little political will at the moment to abolish the agency. However, the idea has been broached over the decades. In a 1974 speech, then-Senate candidate Bernie Sanders called the CIA “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” In 1991 and 1995, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced legislation to abolish the CIA and move some of its authorities to the State Department. Presidents Truman and Kennedy each expressed their reservations about the CIA’s authority, as did Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
The recent disclosures from Senators Wyden and Heinrich are a reminder that the CIA sees itself as an institution beyond the reach and control of Congress, and U.S. and international law. The agency can’t be trusted, and has repeatedly shown that it can’t be reformed. It may be well past time to resume questioning whether it should exist at all.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Rules making it harder for media to name those under criminal investigation could change when Human Rights Act replaced
Privacy laws that make it harder for the media to name individuals under criminal investigation could be rolled back as part of ministers’ plans to replace the Human Rights Act, government sources have suggested.
The claim follows concerns raised by media outlets over this week’s landmark Bloomberg v ZXC supreme court ruling. Judges concluded that Bloomberg News was wrong to name a businessman facing a criminal investigation relating to his work activities because he had a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
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Republican lawmakers in a handful of conservative states have stumbled on a roadblock to what they thought would be a clear path to setting new restrictions on abortion if the Supreme Court upends the landmark Roe v. Wade decision: right-to-privacy protections enshrined in their own state constitutions.
In states where courts have ruled that their constitutions’ explicit privacy rights extend to the right of a woman to have an abortion, the procedure would continue to be legal even if the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling is overturned, legal scholars and abortion-rights advocates said.
In Montana, the issue is playing out in the courts, where a state judge temporarily blocked three new anti-abortion laws. The state’s Republican attorney general appealed to the state Supreme Court, asking the justices to overturn a 23-year-old ruling that extended the state’s constitutional right to privacy to the right to have an abortion.
If that effort fails and if Roe v. Wade is overturned, conservative Montana could find itself a sanctuary for women seeking abortions from neighboring Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota, and South Dakota, states where access is more tenuous, said an analyst for a research organization that supports abortion rights.
“If half the states ban abortion, you are talking about people, if they can, traveling vast distances to get that right to care,” said Elizabeth Nash, a policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute. “And if access remains protected in Montana, then Montana will be a place where people seek that care.”
In the coming months, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule in a case challenging a Mississippi law that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The court recently let stand a Texas law that bans most abortions after six weeks and turns enforcement over to citizens who can file lawsuits against people who aid in the abortion.
The ruling in the Mississippi case, legal experts speculate, could upend the Roe decision that guaranteed abortion rights around the country and allow individual states to set their own laws. In that scenario, the Guttmacher Institute predicts, abortion is certain or likely to be banned in 26 states.
Meanwhile, lawmakers and citizens in other states — including New Jersey, New York, and Colorado — are working to protect or expand abortion rights.
The original Roe v. Wade ruling was largely based on protecting the right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. But the words “right to privacy” aren’t actually written in the U.S. Constitution, a point frequently raised by abortion opponents.
Those words are, however, written into the constitutions of 11 states, adding an unexpected twist to sorting out a post-Roe legal landscape.
It’s not an issue for left-leaning states like California, which passed a 2002 law protecting abortion rights that cited its constitutional right to privacy for personal reproductive decisions. In that state, leaders are preparing for a potential rush of women from other states in search of medical care if the Supreme Court weakens or throws out its Roe decision.
But in conservative Alaska, abortion rights advocates say the constitutional right to privacy will protect a woman’s option there regardless of what the U.S. Supreme Court does. Voters will decide in November whether to call a constitutional convention, which abortion opponents see as an opportunity to amend the constitution to ban abortions.
In Florida, the state constitution says that “every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life.” In 1989, the Florida Supreme Court found that the provision protects the right to an abortion.
Louisiana’s state constitution protects its citizens against invasions of privacy, but voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2020, inserting that “nothing in this constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion.”
Right-to-privacy provisions are also found in the constitutions of Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Washington.
Montana’s constitution says, “The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society and shall not be infringed without the showing of a compelling state interest.”
In 1999, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that includes the right of citizens to make their own medical decisions. “We held that this right protected a woman’s right to procreative autonomy and her ability to seek and obtain a lawful medical procedure, which abortions were and are, free from interference from the government,” retired Montana Supreme Court Justice James Nelson, who wrote the court’s unanimous opinion, said in a recent interview.
Caitlin Borgmann, the executive director of the Montana ACLU, succinctly described the importance of the ruling. “It is essentially Montana’s Roe v. Wade,” she said.
The Republican-controlled Montana Legislature, buoyed by the state’s first Republican governor in 16 years, passed a slate of anti-abortion bills last year. They included a ban on most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, the requirement that providers give a woman the opportunity to view an ultrasound before an abortion, and constraints on the use of abortion pills, including that an authorized abortion provider first examine and then give the woman the drug in person, an added obstacle in a rural state like Montana.
Planned Parenthood of Montana filed a lawsuit that said those bills violate the state’s constitutional right to privacy, along with rights to equal protection, safety, health and happiness, individual dignity, free speech, and due process. Billings Judge Michael Moses in October granted a preliminary injunction to block the laws from taking effect.
That ruling prompted one Republican lawmaker, Rep. Derek Skees, to call for throwing out “Montana’s socialist rag of a constitution,” according to the Flathead Beacon. “There’s no basis in our constitution to use the right to privacy to murder a baby,” he told the newspaper.
Attorney General Austin Knudsen has asked the Montana Supreme Court to overturn Moses’ injunction and nullify the 1999 ruling that linked privacy rights to medical decisions. Knudsen said the court’s seven members have a chance to correct what he called “unrestrained judicial activism,” according to legal filings.
David Dewhirst, Montana’s solicitor general under Knudsen, called the 1999 decision “sloppy” and “a mess.”
“This is not some sort of political stunt,” Dewhirst said. “The case is wrongly decided.”
Martha Fuller, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Montana, said she believes Knudsen’s attempt to overturn the state court’s 1999 privacy ruling echoes the larger national debate over court precedents in abortion law. “The law is the law and not based on, ‘This judge said this, and this other judge said that,’” Fuller said. “That’s not where the integrity of our legal system comes from.”
If the state’s high court rules against Knudsen, abortion advocates anticipate that lawmakers will ask voters to alter the state’s constitution, either through an amendment or by initiating a constitutional convention, which would be Montana’s first in more than five decades.
Changing the state’s constitution, however, is purposefully difficult, said Anthony Johnstone, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Montana. Just to ask voters to consider an amendment or a convention requires 100 votes in the state’s 150-seat legislature.
“Montanans always have the last word in amending our constitution,” Johnstone said.
KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.
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During Donald Trump’s campaign for president, claims of Russian misinformation and disinformation were ubiquitous on cable news, Twitter and op-ed columns. Public discussion of misinformation has since skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, usually focusing on harmful anti-vaccination media coverage on, for example, Fox News and Joe Rogan’s popular podcast. There are, of course, no shortage of Fox News segments praising anti-vaxxers until they die, generally by hosts who themselves have gotten the vaccine. Rogan’s anti-science, I’m-just-asking-questions shtick is also a serious threat to public health.
Although these are real problems that require profound solutions, there’s an emergent category of would-be misinformation debunkers who should be treated with a great degree of skepticism — specifically, members and partners of the national security state.
There is a not-so-subtle push happening right now to increase the Department of Homeland Security’s role in “combating misinformation.” A recent post on the human rights-focused legal blog Just Security is a good example of this phenomenon. The two authors, a retired brigadier general and a former communications adviser at DHS, argue that misinformation should first and foremost be understood “as a growing threat to America’s security.” To respond to these threats, DHS should “adopt an integrated or ‘whole-of-department’ approach to countering MisDisMal [misinformation, disinformation and malinformation] in key areas under its purview, such as election security, cybersecurity, counterterrorism, disaster response, and public safety.”
The authors suggest a public facing anti-misinformation campaign could be modeled on the “If you see something, say something,” initiative, instituted after 9/11. It’s worth noting that even that seemingly benign poster campaign was more than it appeared, and was riddled with controversy. In 2015, the ACLU sued the government over the program, alleging that the reports generated by the program were discriminatory and resulted in unconstitutional surveillance and data collection. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within DHS created a website to partially address this concern during the 2020 election, called “Rumor Control.” That site addressed disinformation specific to the electoral process but seems to have done little to tamp down the increasing belief among Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen.
The “See Something, Say Something” campaign is a perfect illustration of the dangers to civil liberties posed by involving DHS more thoroughly in countering disinformation. On the surface, it sounds impossible to object to: Who would oppose alerting the authorities to a suspicious package? But the implementation of that program was incredibly and predictably discriminatory: Muslims, Arabs, and people perceived to be either of those identities were over-represented in the reports that were generated, according to an ACLU review.
Similarly, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was asked by reporters last month about the connection between misinformation and what DHS classifies as “domestic extremism.” Mayorkas said his agency was seeing “a greater connectivity between misinformation and false narratives propagated on social media and the threat landscape,” and that “false narratives about a stolen election have an impact on the threat landscape.”
For many liberals, Mayorkas’s comments are likely a welcome development after years of DHS and the FBI ignoring the threat posed by the far right. But just like “See Something” posters, there was a barely disguised push to expand the security state in Mayorkas’s remarks. “The use of encrypted channels of communication, it’s posed a challenge to law enforcement well before Jan. 6 2021,” he added. “That is, quite frankly, another element that makes up the threat landscape for us.”
Here again we see how a seemingly unobjectionable premise — Trump’s lies about the 2020 election are harmful — is transformed in the hands of the security state into a justification for increasing its surveillance capacity. Federal law enforcement has been waging a public relations fight against strong encryption, which protects digital communications from outside surveillance, for years. It’s to be expected that they would instrumentalize the very real threat of right-wing violence toward their own ends. A broad coalition of privacy advocates and organizers from the civil liberty champions the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the centrist Third Way have fought against attempts to weaken encryption, with varying degrees of success.
The Obama years provide an even better example of the dangers posed by using local and federal law enforcement to supposedly combat what are ultimately political issues. When Obama and his team came into office, they were determined to leave the rhetoric of the global “war on terror” behind. However, that doesn’t mean they left behind its substance or surveillance tactics. The new phrase of the hour was “countering violent extremism” (CVE), and government contractors shoehorned that phrase into many proposals, because that’s where the money was.
As a result, a cottage industry of CVE-providers sprang up, working in a public-private partnership with the FBI and DHS. On the surface, this approach was a break from the draconian surveillance of Muslim communities that was ubiquitous under George W. Bush. For many Muslims, however, there was far more continuity than disruption between the two approaches.
Under CVE, rather than fearing a new member of the mosque might be an informant, the local leaders themselves, including imams, teachers and counselors, were tasked with surveilling their communities and reporting so-called suspicious activity. “The result of generalized monitoring — whether conducted by the government or by community ‘partners’ — is a climate of fear and self-censorship, where people must watch what they say and with whom they speak, lest they be reported for engaging in lawful behavior vaguely defined as suspicious,” the ACLU wrote to Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, in 2014.
Although these CVE programs purported to be ideologically neutral, the overwhelming majority of their funding was directed toward spying on Muslim communities. The Brennan Center for Justice found that under Obama, “the federal government awarded 31 CVE grants totaling $10 million, with only one going to a group that even partially focused on far-right violence.”
These programs relied, either implicitly or explicitly, on bogus “radicalization” theories that purported to be able to identify the early signs of violent urges or so-called terrorist ideologies. What they actually did was criminalize protected speech and association rights, and treat reasonable political opinions, such as harsh criticism of U.S. imperial policy in the greater Middle East, as precursors to indiscriminate violence. These theories adopt a “conveyor belt” metaphor that sees a linear progression from radical political beliefs or increased religiosity to violence. This manufactured threat of imminent violence is then used to justify surveillance and targeting for investigation.
It’s understandable, if misguided, to believe that the powers the U.S. government has directed at Muslims and other oppressed and persecuted communities can now be redirected towards the threat posed by white supremacist groups. There are very real risks to U.S. democracy, limited and insufficient though it is, that fall under the umbrella of disinformation. Lack of public trust in government and media is a complicated phenomenon that needs to be seen in the context of neoliberal reforms from the 1970s onward that deliberately sought to destroy the idea of a public good, as well as elite-led catastrophes like the war in Iraq and the global recession in 2008. However, the way to combat misinformation and a lack of public trust is not by directing more surveillance and police toward the problem, it’s by building trust in public institutions by meeting people’s material needs.
The argument here is not that the state, per se, has no role in providing honest information to the public, batting down bad information and securing election infrastructure. All of those tasks are necessary, and only the federal government has sufficient resources to achieve those ends. The issue is which organs of the state claim these authorities, and toward what end. DHS, FBI, and the rest of federal law enforcement say they want to counter misinformation. The problem is that these agencies have a clear record of spreading misinformation themselves — and causing harm with every new campaign that purports to keep us safe.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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A group of civil society organisations and privacy campaigners have accused the government of using “scare tactics” to try to sway public opinion over the use of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps.
“Encryption is vital”
Writing an open letter to mark Safer Internet Day, the Open Rights Group and more than 40 other campaign groups criticised a recent Home Office advertising campaign which claimed that encryption puts children at risk from predators and can be used to hide online abuse.
The civil society groups said they are concerned that the government is seeking to influence public opinion prior to amending the draft Online Safety Bill so that tech firms would be forced to weaken or remove end-to-end encryption from their messaging systems, something the groups argue would in fact put more people at risk.
Jim Killock from the Open Rights Group said:
The way the Government has been using scare tactics damages trust with its citizens.
The Government exploiting emotive narratives for their campaign is manipulative and does not provide a balanced view. The truth is that encryption is vital for online safety.
The open letter has been signed by a number of experts as well as members of the Global Encryption Coalition including Index on Censorship, the Internet Society and human rights group Article 19. It said that damaging encryption would reduce privacy for the wider public, as well as vital protections for the most vulnerable.
The letter said:
Undermining encryption would make our private communications unsafe, allowing hostile strangers and governments to intercept conversations.
Undermining encryption would put at risk the safety of those who need it most.
Survivors of abuse or domestic violence, including children, need secure and confidential communications to speak to loved ones and access the information and support they need.
Tomorrow will be #SaferInternetDay!
Curious about who'll be celebrating #SID2022 with us on Tuesday, 8 February and how? 
Discover industry partners, institutions and other organisations committed to creating a better internet for everyone at https://t.co/1x2CynXKbL pic.twitter.com/wkZ5U6KpLI— Safer Internet Day (@safeinternetday) February 7, 2022
Privacy
Popular apps such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Signal use end-to-end encryption to offer secure, private messaging for users. Facebook has announced plans to introduce end-to-end encryption – so messages can only be accessed and read by the sender and recipient – across the rest of its app messaging platforms by 2023.
The tech giant has said it is taking the time until then to “get this right” and strike a balance between user privacy and keeping people safe online.
The Home Office and some law enforcement agencies have suggested that encryption can hamper efforts to stop criminals from organising and communicating. Home secretary Priti Patel has previously spoken out about her concerns around encryption, saying it could put progress in preventing child sexual abuse “at jeopardy”.
Last year, Metropolitan Police commissioner Cressida Dick called for greater international co-operation among law enforcement bodies and governments to engage tech companies on the issue. Dick has faced repeated allegations of corruption in her time at the Met.
In response to the open letter, security minister Damian Hinds said:
Privacy and children’s safety are not an either/or – we need both. End-to-end encryption can be an important and beneficial technology when used responsibly, and the Government supports this.
We believe it can be implemented in a way that is consistent with protecting children, and that’s what we want to see.
Hinds seems to be suggesting that encryption should have a ‘back door’ that allows those with access to view messages. As others have pointed out, this would make data vulnerable to malicious actors who seek to gain access to the back door. As Marc Laliberte wrote for Help Net Security in 2020:
There’s simply no such thing as a “good guys only” backdoor. Eventually, a cyber-criminal will get their hands on the “golden key” or exploit the intentional chink in the armor to break their way in. The NSA losing its stockpile of Windows zero-day vulnerabilities in 2016 should be clear proof that we shouldn’t be so quick to trust government agencies to act responsibly with security.
He added:
Even if most governments managed to pass anti-encryption laws, criminals would simply move to different apps instead of the ones that maintain compliance. Giving up the security and privacy of the masses is simply too big of a price to pay for something that is very unlikely prevent crime and incredibly likely to result in abuse.
By The Canary
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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Facebook has lost its Federal Court appeal against a ruling that it is breached privacy laws by tracking Australian users and failing to protect the data. The American tech giant had claimed its global structure meant it was not carrying out business in Australia or holding Australian’s personal information when it allegedly failed to protect…
The post Federal Court rules against Facebook on Cambridge Analytica appeal appeared first on InnovationAus.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.
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A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power.
— Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
If we haven’t learned by now, we should beware of anything the government insists is for our own good.
Take the Biden Administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.Given the deteriorating state of the nation’s infrastructure (aging highways and bridges, outdated railways and airports, etc.), which have been neglected for years in order to fund America’s endless wars abroad, it would seem like an obvious and long overdue fix.
Yet there’s a catch.
There’s always a catch.
Tucked into the whopping $1 trillion bipartisan spending bill is a provision requiring automakers to prescribe a “federal motor vehicle safety standard for advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology, and for other purposes.”
As Jason Torchinksky writes for Jalopnik:
It’s pretty clear that the goals of this section of the law are to reduce drunk driving fatalities and crashes via still-undetermined technological tools that somehow are able to “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired,” and/or “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle is equal to or greater than the blood alcohol concentration described in section 163(a) of title 23, United States Code,” and if either or both of these conditions are proven to be positive — if the car thinks you’re drunk, then it may “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation.”
As expected, the details are disconcertingly vague, which leaves the government with a wide berth to sow the seeds of mischief and mayhem. For instance, nowhere does the legislation indicate how such a so-called “kill switch” would work, what constitutes a driver who is “impaired,” and what “other purposes” might warrant the government using such a backdoor kill switch.
As former Rep. Bob Barr explains:
Everything about this mandatory measure should set off red flares. First, use of the word “passively” suggests the system will always be on and constantly monitoring the vehicle. Secondly, the system must connect to the vehicle’s operational controls, so as to disable the vehicle either before driving or during, when impairment is detected. Thirdly, it will be an “open” system, or at least one with a backdoor, meaning authorized (or unauthorized) third-parties can remotely access the system’s data at any time.
This is a privacy disaster in the making, and the fact that the provision made it through the Congress reveals — yet again — how little its members care about the privacy of their constituents… The lack of ultimate control over one’s vehicle presents numerous and extremely serious safety issues… If that is not reason enough for concern, there are serious legal issues with this mandate. Other vehicle-related enforcement methods used by the Nanny State, such as traffic cameras and license plate readers, have long presented constitutional problems; notably with the 5th Amendment’s right to not self-incriminate, and the 6th Amendment’s right to face one’s accuser.
Once again, the burden of proof is reversed, and “we the people” find ourselves no longer presumed innocent until proven guilty but suspects in a suspect society.
These “vehicle kill switches” may be sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they will quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Indeed, when you think about it, these vehicle kill switches are a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives.
For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.
Just think of all the ways in which the government has been empowered to dictate what we say, do and think; where we go; with whom we associate; how we raise our families; how we live our lives; what we consume; how we spend our money; how we protect ourselves and our loved ones; and to what extent our rights as individuals can be displaced for the sake of the so-called greater good.
In this way, we have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by such science fiction writers as George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
In keeping with Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report, which was released 20 years ago—we have been imprisoned in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
Minority Report is set in the year 2054, but it could just as well have taken place in 2022.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, Spielberg’s unnerving vision of the future is fast becoming our reality.
Both worlds—our present-day reality and Minority Report’s celluloid vision of the future—are characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. Political correctness—a philosophy that discourages diversity—has become a guiding principle of modern society.
The courts have shredded the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In fact, SWAT teams battering down doors without search warrants and FBI agents acting as a secret police that investigate dissenting citizens are common occurrences in contemporary America.
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. And bodily privacy and integrity has been utterly eviscerated by a prevailing view that Americans have no rights over what happens to their bodies during an encounter with government officials, who are allowed to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.
We’re on the losing end of a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now, our cars. As if the government wasn’t already able to track our movements on the nation’s highways and byways by way of satellites, GPS devices, and real-time traffic cameras, performance data recorders, black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications will monitor our vehicle’s speed, direction, location, gear selection, brake force, the number of miles traveled and seatbelts use, and transmit this data to other drivers, including the police.
In this Brave New World, there is no communication not spied upon, no movement untracked, no thought unheard. In other words, there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
Herded along by drones, smart phones, GPS devices, smart TVs, social media, smart meters, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, online banking, license plate readers and driverless cars, we are quickly approaching a point of singularity with the interconnected technological metaverse that is life in the American police state.
Every new piece of technologically-enabled gadget we acquire and technologically-boobytrapped legislation that Congress enacts pulls us that much deeper into the sticky snare.
These vehicle kill switches are yet another Trojan Horse: sold to us as safety measures for the sake of the greater good, all the while poised to wreak havoc on what little shreds of autonomy we have left.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re hurtling down a one-way road at mind-boggling speeds to a destination not of our choosing, the terrain is getting more treacherous by the minute, and we’ve passed all the exit ramps.
From this point forward, there is no turning back, and the signpost ahead reads “Danger.”
Time to buckle up your seatbelts, folks. We’re in for a bumpy ride.
The post The Government’s Kill Switch for Your Car, Your Freedoms, and Your Life first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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The trial of Swedish software developer and digital rights activist Ola Bini, began on January 19 in Ecuador, reports People’s Dispatch.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
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Tyranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.
— An academic study into pathocracy
Disgruntled mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A Constitution in tatters.Between the riots, lockdowns, political theater, and COVID-19 mandates, 2021 was one for the history books.
In our ongoing pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, here were some of the stumbling blocks that kept us fettered:
Riots, martial law, and the Deep State’s coup. A simmering pot of political tensions boiled over on January 6, 2021, when protesters stormed the Capitol because the jailer of their choice didn’t get chosen to knock heads for another four years. It took no time at all for the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned. The subsequent military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next was little more than martial law disguised as national security. The January 6 attempt to storm the Capitol by so-called insurrectionists created the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.
The imperial president. All of the imperial powers amassed by Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Joe Biden, the nation’s 46th president.
The Surveillance State. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. Consider that it took days, if not hours or minutes, for the FBI to begin the process of identifying, tracking and rounding up those suspected of being part of the Capitol riots. Imagine how quickly government agents could target and round up any segment of society they wanted to based on the digital trails and digital footprints we leave behind.
Digital tyranny. In response to the events of Jan. 6, the tech giants meted out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship. Suddenly, individuals, including those who had no ties to the Capitol riots, began to experience lock outs, suspensions and even deletions of their social media accounts. It signaled a turning point in the battle for control over digital speech, one that leaves “we the people” on the losing end of the bargain.
A new war on terror. “Domestic terrorism,” used interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist,” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous,” became the new poster child for expanding the government’s powers at the expense of civil liberties. As part of his inaugural address, President Biden pledged to wage war on so-called political extremism, ushering in what investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald described as “a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting ‘terrorism’ that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.
Government violence. The death penalty may have been abolished in Virginia in 2021, but government-sanctioned murder and mayhem continued unabated, with the U.S. government acting as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that had already been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Police particularly posed a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent.
Culture wars. Political correctness gave way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule which, coupled with government and corporate censors and a cancel culture determined not to offend “certain” viewpoints, was all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. Critical race theory also moved to the forefront of the culture wars.
Home invasions. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices. However, in a rare move, the Supreme Court put its foot down in two cases—Caniglia v. Strom and Lange v. California—to prevent police from carrying out warrantless home invasions in order to seize lawfully-owned guns under the pretext of their so-called “community caretaking” duties and from entering homes without warrants under the guise of being in “hot pursuit” of someone they suspect may have committed a crime.
Bodily integrity. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases: these were just a few ways in which Americans continued to be reminded that we have no control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
COVID-19. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) expanded their powers, abused their authority, and further oppressed their constituents. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., it remains to be seen how the rights of the individual will hold up in the face of long-term COVID-19 authoritarianism.
Financial tyranny. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) exceeded $29 trillion and is growing. That translates to almost $230,000 per taxpayer. The amount this country owes is now greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051. Meanwhile, the government continued to spend taxpayer money it didn’t have on programs it couldn’t afford; businesses shuttered for lack of customers, resources and employees; and consumers continued to encounter global supply chain shortages (and skyrocketing prices) on everything from computer chips and cars to construction materials.
Global Deep State. Owing in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations, it became increasingly obvious that we had entered into a new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations. We’ve been inching closer to this global world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. Fascism became a global menace.
20 years of crises. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn: The Great Depression. The World Wars. The 9/11 terror attacks. The COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the government’s (mis)management of various states of emergency in the past 20 years from 9/11 to COVID-19 has spawned a massive security-industrial complex the likes of which have never been seen before.
The state of our nation. There may have been a new guy in charge this year, but for the most part, nothing changed. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. Over the past year, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans found themselves repeatedly subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.
In other words, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
The post Madness, Mayhem, and Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Silicon Valley has become infamous for its role in the surveillance ecosystem, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bosses are increasingly using an array of tech industry tools to keep constant tabs on their employees working from home, despite statistics showing that those who work remotely are more productive than their counterparts toiling away in office buildings.
But one woman who worked for the tech industry’s biggest company is fighting back. Ashley Gjovik, a former Apple project manager who was fired in September after speaking out about workplace safety concerns, has asked labor regulators to rule that the company employs illegal surveillance tactics. In October, Gjovik filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Apple of a number of unfair labor practices, including keeping tabs on employees in a manner that prevents them from exercising their right to discuss working conditions.
Gjovik also alleged that the company violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by retaliating against her for voicing concerns about workplace safety stemming from the fact that Apple’s office building in Sunnyvale, California, is situated on top of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-designated Superfund site, an area contaminated by hazardous industrial waste that is supposed to have been cleaned up and contained if humans are in the vicinity. If Gjovik prevails, the NLRB could issue a ruling curtailing employers’ abilities to surveil workers and chill their speech.
Gjovik has filed numerous other complaints with several environmental and workplace safety regulators, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and has been meticulous in documenting her experience, as demonstrated by her personal website.
This week, the Department of Labor ruled that Gjovik’s complaints had merit, and that the agency’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would be investigating her whistleblower retaliation complaints. Whistleblowing law expert Stephen Kohn told the Financial Times that it was unusual for OSHA to investigate such allegations because companies often “silence and intimidate” employees and because those filing charges must establish that their case is likely to succeed.
“Most of us know that there’s some level of pollution in our day-to-day lives, but there’s still a lot of trust in the government and companies to do the right thing when it comes to poisoning people,” she told Truthout.
In her NLRB complaint alleging illegal surveillance by Apple, Gjovik cited the company’s handbook, which reserves the right to search employees’ work equipment and their personal devices “to protect Apple confidential and sensitive information.” The company defines its proprietary information to include “compensation, training, recruiting, and other human resource information.”
Under federal labor law, all employees have the right to discuss their working conditions “for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” The NLRB has ruled that management cannot spy on employees exercising their rights.
The Apple handbook includes a footnote stating that the company is not attempting to restrict its employees’ “rights to speak freely about wages, hours, or working conditions as legally permitted.” But Apple policy also generally forbids employees from making any public disclosures without prior approval, including statements to the press, and it orders employees to refrain from discussing “compensation, training, recruiting, and other human resource information” after leaving the company, which it attempts to enforce through non-disclosure agreements. The handbook also bars employees from sharing information about their coworkers’ “compensation, health information, or performance and disciplinary matters” without any footnotes about “rights to speak freely about wages, hours, or working conditions,” according to Gjovik’s complaint.
Charges that Gjovik filed with the NLRB also cite a memo circulated by Apple CEO Tim Cook after details of a meeting featuring discussion of pay equity was leaked to the press. Cook responded to the disclosure by vowing “to identify those who leaked” and by saying “people who leak confidential information do not belong here,” contradicting any stated policy granting employees the right to discuss their working conditions.
Gjovik also told Truthout that when she informed someone on Apple’s employee resources team that she had the legal right to speak publicly about working conditions, he replied, “Most people don’t figure that out.”
In response to questions about Gjovik and Apple workplace activists, Apple has typically declined to make specific comments. For example, the company told Slate: “We are and have always been deeply committed to creating and maintaining a positive and inclusive workplace. We take all concerns seriously and we thoroughly investigate whenever a concern is raised and, out of respect for the privacy of any individuals involved, we do not discuss specific employee matters.”
Apple has not responded to Truthout’s request for comment on Gjovik’s claim that a member of its employee resources team told her that the majority of Apple employees aren’t aware of their rights in the workplace.
Gjovik’s conflict with Apple management started in March, when an administrative assistant emailed her team about the company’s Environmental Health and Safety division wanting to conduct a “vapor intrusion survey” in the Sunnyvale office. The phrase set off “alarm bells” for Gjovik, who had spent the last six months battling her apartment’s property managers after becoming ill and learning that the residence was built on top of another EPA Superfund site.
“My body was just going crazy. It was such a nightmare. I was buying books on terminal illness,” Gjovik said.
When she applied what she learned from her struggle at home, things started going south. Gjovik responded to the administrative assistant’s email by asking her management team if Apple had conducted comprehensive air quality tests, citing an Atlantic article from 2013 which documented how their Sunnyvale building was next to three separate triple fund sites. Apple started leasing the property in 2015, hadn’t conducted any tests since moving in, and did not inform employees of the hazardous waste underneath them, Gjovik alleged, noting that she herself discovered the lack of testing in public records after learning how to do research through her apartment ordeal. She said that management claimed that they didn’t have to inform employees of the situation because there was no evidence of air quality issues. Gjovik replied that they lacked the evidence because they didn’t perform proper tests.
Meanwhile, evidence of retaliation against Gjovik by management started to mount. HR opened a sexual harassment investigation into one of Gjovik’s superiors that she did not want initiated out of fear that hostility from above would worsen. She started getting bombarded with an unrealistic number of work assignments. One boss cited Gjovik’s “mental health issues” in urging her to drop her concerns about the Superfund site. Additionally, she says, superiors told her not to raise questions about workplace safety — always over the phone or in person. Gjovik attempted to document those statements by replying in emails with notes about the conversations, asking if she missed anything.
By the middle of summer, things began to escalate. On July 23, Gjovik made The New York Times quote of the day for questioning why Apple management wanted its employees to return to office work as the Delta variant of COVID-19 started to spread throughout the country. Around the same time, she took to the company’s messaging platform, Slack, to ask her coworkers if they have had negative experiences dealing with HR, receiving numerous responses in the affirmative. In early August, after informing employee resources, Gjovik asked colleagues working in the office to document cracks in the floor — a sign that vapor intrusion may be occurring. They took photographs and sent them to Gjovik, and she planned to go into the office the next day to gather evidence herself. On the day of her planned trip to the office, however, she was informed that she was being put on paid administrative leave. On September 9, after Gjovik received a request from Apple management to cooperate with an investigation about “a sensitive Intellectual Property matter,” she agreed to cooperate but never found out what it is they were trying to discover. Gjovik asked that the inquiry be conducted in writing over email. Subsequently, she was fired.
The night before Gjovik was fired, she received a direct message on Twitter from a random helpful follower urging her to take steps to protect her privacy, in a general warning that invoked his own experience with private sector surveillance. Hours later, she asked her Twitter followers if it would be “over-paranoid” to worry about the security of her messages on Apple’s iCloud. Soon after, she began taking her personal information off of servers controlled by Apple and, as she told the tech publication Protocol, Gjovik began to unplug smart devices in her home. She told Truthout that she has no proof of the company using non-public information against her, but noted that internet trolls defending Apple have used information that she has not shared about her health and compensation to insult her, calling the matter a “nightmare sandwich.” Gjovik has also documented how supervisors at Apple were warning her to be wary of private-sector surveillance when she told them how she was locking horns with her property management company.
Still, there is an end to the nightmare in sight and a silver lining. Gjovik is hoping that complaints she has filed with workplace regulators will prevent Apple and other massive companies from bullying and mistreating employees, especially workers who aren’t as well-compensated as she was. Already, it appears that the complaints she filed after being put on administrative leave have the potential to bear fruit. In addition to the Department of Labor advancing her case, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission told Gjovik in September that she has the right to sue Apple in state court for creating a hostile work environment. Experts familiar with the NLRA, including former NLRB officials, have said that Gjovik has a strong case against Apple — especially her complaint about CEO Cook threatening the employees who leaked details about the meeting concerning pay equity.
“What he’s saying here goes too far,” NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman told Bloomberg about the Cook memo. “It’s restrictive of people’s ability to talk about employment policies.” Mark Gaston Pearce, another former NLRB chair who, like Liebman, led the Board during the Obama administration, tweeted that Gjovik’s case could be “a vehicle” to reverse pro-management rulings by the Board under the Trump administration. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, who has the power to direct Board agents to advance cases that could set precedent, has asked regional offices to pursue cases designed to expand the definition of “concerted activity,” which was narrowed under Trump, including those involving handbook policies like the ones flagged by Gjovik. Abruzzo also noted on November 4 the Board has ruled that concerted activity includes “protesting unsafe working conditions and asserting statutory rights, like filing a claim with [OSHA].”
As far as her complaint to the SEC is concerned, Gjovik said she wants to stop the company from misrepresenting how it treats its employees. The complaint centers around a shareholder, Nia Impact Capital, who alleged that Apple is exposing itself to employment litigation risk by enforcing a culture of secrecy beyond that which is necessary to protect its trade secrets. The company responded by claiming that “Apple does not limit employees’ and contractors’ ability to speak freely about harassment, discrimination, and other unlawful acts in the workplace.” Gjovik’s SEC complaint alleges that these are “false & misleading statements of material importance” by Apple, citing an agency commissioner who warned in September 2020 against companies engaged in “woke-washing where companies attempt to portray themselves in a light they believe will be advantageous for them on issues like diversity.”
Not that any of this has brought Gjovik much pleasure. She told Gizmodo that working for Apple was a “dream” job, and although she held a high-pressure position, she was paid well and proud of her work. But since she was put in a situation where she feared for her health and safety, and got significant push back from the company for raising concerns about it, she wants to take the opportunity to stand up for herself and others.
“I was a very senior employee who gave them my blood, sweat and tears. If they’re doing it to me, what the fuck are they doing to retail?” she asked rhetorically. “I’m going to file as much shit as I can.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that in early August, Gjovik went into the Sunnyvale office herself to take photos of cracks in the floor.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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The Australian Federal Police breached privacy rules in its use of a controversial facial recognition tool by not properly assessing the risks of using the technology, the national privacy watchdog has found. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) released its determination on the AFP’s use of Clearview AI, finding that it failed to…
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