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Category: privacy

  • Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted under the Government’s New Precrime Program

    There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.

    ― James Bamford

    It never fails.

    Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.

    In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

    Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

    Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

    This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

    The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.

    Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.

    This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.

    In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

    Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.

    In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.

    It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.

    Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It works the same in any regime.

    As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”

    Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

    Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media.

    Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—working closely with corporations—who can listen in on your phone calls, read your text messages and emails, and track your movements based on the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone. Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure.

    Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that can monitor your speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and even your seatbelt use. Once you add satellites, GPS devices, license plate readers, and real-time traffic cameras to the mix, there’s nowhere you can go on our nation’s highways and byways that you can’t be followed. By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped with computers that know where you want to go before you do, privacy and autonomy will be little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror.

    Attend a political rally: Enacted in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

    Express yourself on social media: The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on 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. A decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.

    Serve in the military: Operation Vigilant Eagle, the brainchild of the Dept. of Homeland Security, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Police agencies are also using Beware, an “early warning” computer system that tips them off to a potential suspect’s inclination to be a troublemaker and assigns individuals a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—based on a variety of factors including one’s criminal records, military background, medical history and social media surveillance.

    Disagree with a law enforcement official: A growing number of government programs are aimed at identifying, monitoring and locking up anyone considered potentially “dangerous” or mentally ill (according to government standards, of course). For instance, a homeless man in New York City who reportedly had a history of violence but no signs of mental illness was forcibly detained in a psych ward for a week after arguing with shelter police. Despite the fact that doctors cited no medical reason to commit him, the man was locked up in accordance with a $22 million program that monitors mentally ill people considered “potentially” violent. According to the Associated Press, “A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man’s commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.”

    Call in sick to work: In Virginia, a so-called police “welfare check” instigated by a 58-year-old man’s employer after he called in sick resulted in a two-hour, SWAT team-style raid on the man’s truck and a 72-hour mental health hold. During the standoff, a heavily armed police tactical team confronted Benjamin Burruss as he was leaving an area motel, surrounded his truck, deployed a “stinger” device behind the rear tires, launched a flash grenade, smashed the side window in order to drag him from the truck, handcuffed and searched him, and transported him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and mental health hold. All of this was done despite the fact that police acknowledged they had no legal basis nor probable cause for detaining Burruss, given that he had not threatened to harm anyone and was not mentally ill.

    Limp or stutter: As a result of a nationwide push to certify a broad spectrum of government officials in mental health first-aid training (a 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities), more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported for having mental health issues by non-medical personnel. Mind you, once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, or a dissident watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there. For instance, one 37-year-old disabled man was arrested, diagnosed by police and an unlicensed mental health screener as having “mental health issues,” apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait, and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends. A subsequent hearing found that Gordon Goines, who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, has no mental illness and should not have been confined.

    Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad: According to the Transportation Security Administration’s 92-point secret behavior watch list for spotting terrorists, these are among some of the telling signs of suspicious behavior: fidgeting, whistling, bad body odor, yawning, clearing your throat, having a pale face from recently shaving your beard, covering your mouth with your hand when speaking and blinking your eyes fast. You can also be pulled aside for interrogation if you “have ‘unusual items,’ like almanacs and ‘numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones.’” One critic of the program accurately referred to the program as a “license to harass.”

    Allow yourself to 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, for instance: No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the Wii remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest. Another police officer repeatedly shot 70-year-old Bobby Canipe during a traffic stop. The cop saw the man reaching for his cane and, believing the cane to be a rifle, opened fire.

    Stare at a police officer: Miami-Dade police slammed the 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable.

    Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government: You might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you: express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers); exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership); read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books; show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies); fear an economic collapse; buy gold and barter items; subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation; voice fears about Big Brother or big government; expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties; or believe in a New World Order conspiracy. This is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced or declared unfit for society.

    Attend a public school: Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.” From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement. Additionally, as part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the FBI—the nation’s de facto secret police force—has been recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist” as part of its “Don’t Be a Puppet” campaign.

    Speak truth to power: Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

    Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

    All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

    The post Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted under the Government’s New Precrime Program first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NSW to introduce data breach notification scheme

    NSW is set to become the first Australian state or territory to introduce a mandatory data breach notification scheme, following a serious cyber incident last year.

    NSW public sector entities would be required to report data breaches to the Privacy Commissioner and affected individuals when a data breach involving personal or health information is “likely to result in serious harm”, under the proposed laws.

    The scheme would also require NSW government agencies to satisfy more data management requirements, including maintaining an internal data breach incident register, and have a publicly accessible data breach policy.

    The state’s Privacy Commissioner would be granted additional regulatory powers, including the power of entry to monitor compliance.

    People
    New laws would mean NSW public sector agencies will be required to notify individuals whose data has been breached.

    The mandatory reporting would fill some of the gaps in the Commonwealth’s Notifiable Data Breach Scheme, which already makes similar requirements for Australian Government agencies, businesses and not-for profit organisations that have an annual turnover of more than $3 million.

    The NSW government consulted on a breach reporting scheme in 2019, and received overwhelming support for a mandatory scheme.

    Introduction of a mandatory reporting scheme was also an “urgent” recommendation from a scathing review of the state government’s cybersecurity, prompted by a massive data breach at Service NSW last year.

    On Friday, NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman announced a consultation for the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Amendment Bill 2021, which would create the NSW Mandatory Notification of Data Breach Scheme.

    “If passed, this Bill will introduce a scheme that will ensure greater openness and accountability in relation to the handling of personal information held by NSW public sector agencies,” Mr Speakman said.

    The proposed legislation would require agencies that suspected a data breach had occurred to immediately attempt to contain the breach and assess whether it met the “serious harm” threshold. If so, the agency would need to immediately notify the NSW Privacy Commissioner with as many details as possible and provide subsequent updates as required.

    However, agencies would only be required to notify individuals affected by the breach “as soon as practicable” and would have three options on how to do so.

    Agencies must either notify all individuals to whom the information relates or notify only those individuals at risk of serious harm if it is “reasonably practicable” to identify them, according to the legislation.

    If the agency unable to reasonably identify affected individuals it must publish a notification on the agency’s website and take “reasonable steps” to publicise it.

    The new laws would also permit agencies to share citizens’ personal information with each other for the purpose of notification.

    The notifications should include a description of the breach, how the agency is responding, recommendations to minimise the impact of the breach, and the agency contact details. Agencies will need to provide more detailed information to the Privacy Commissioner.

    There are exceptions on law enforcement and health grounds, and for agencies that remedied the harm of the breach before it impacted individuals.

    The NSW Privacy Commissioner would receive new powers under the scheme, including the ability to enter agencies’ premises and inspect anything that relates to compliance with the scheme, including physical spaces, processes and systems.

    The watchdog would also be able to conduct audits in relation to the scheme and supply reports to agency heads and the responsible Minister.

    The government said it intends to introduce the legislation this year and the scheme would commence 12 months from the Bill passing.

    The proposed changes would also apply NSW privacy laws to all state-owned corporations that are not regulated by the Commonwealth Privacy Act.

    NSW Minister for Customer Service Victor Dominello said the government is committed to digital innovation but it must not come at the expense of privacy, trust and security.

    “The Information and Privacy Commission NSW and agencies such as Cyber Security NSW support the introduction of mandatory reporting to clarify agency obligations and give the NSW public greater certainty about how data breaches involving personal information will be handled,” Mr Dominello said.

    The legislation was developed by the Department of Communities and Justice and the Department of Customer Service, in consultation with the state’s privacy watchdog and the Ministry of Health.

    The post NSW to introduce data breach notification scheme appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms

    Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    The post Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Surveillance, Policing, and Algorithms

    A Cursory Examination of Modern-Day Policing and the Consequences it Poses for the Marginalized

    Since the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis Police at the onset of last summer, there has been a resurgence of political energy amongst the American population centered on significantly reforming policing in the United States. Ranging from demilitarization to defunding, there has been no shortage of policy proposals issued by an endless assortment of governmental bodies, academic institutions, think tanks, non-profits, etc., as a means to promote greater accountability amongst a public institution that has fully exerted its monopoly on violence upon the American people. A critical area of policing that is in desperate need of stringent regulation is the seemingly unfettered use of surveillance tools. Specifically, surveillance tools that are embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Some of these tools include but are not limited to: predictive policing software, facial recognition, automated license plate readers (ALPRs), and risk assessment scoring.

    The utility of these kinds of surveillance technologies is seen in a few ways. First, it allows for a mass extraction of data points from various sources. Second, it allows for automated processes of analyses such as pattern recognition and data point linkage and connection. Third, based on the machine-learning of patterns and connections, it allows for predictive analysis and the alerting and signaling to end users (police) of the technology of potential risks or threats. These tools have be used to inform law enforcement which people and places to monitor. Moreover, they have assisted law enforcement in determining which people are potential threats to public safety and order. Consequently, people will have interactions with police, will be arrested, will be charged, and will be imprisoned based on the application of these surveillance technologies.

    To this point it may be unclear as to what the problem is in regard to these police using these surveillance technologies. Surely, law enforcement is in need of some tools in order to root out and investigate crime. But before we fully address the problem with these tools we need further background regarding the functionality and utility of policing. To start, it must be acknowledged that the presence of an elite grouping of people, or a ruling class, who hold a disproportionate amount of political and socioeconomic power relative to the rest of the population has been a constant theme since the inception of the nation. Institutions and structures (of the government and economy) that form the backbone of the American state have been historically designed by and for the exclusive benefit of certain individuals: namely white, land-owning, generally wealthy males.

    One of the most prominent of these institutions is law and the criminal justice system, in relating these institutions to that of the powerful, sociologist Richard Quinney argues in his book The Social Reality of Crime that, “Although law is supposed to protect all [residents], it starts as a tool of the dominant class and ends by maintaining the dominance of that class. Law serves the powerful over the weak…Yet we are all bound by that law, and we are indoctrinated with the myth that it is our law.” Consequently, there is a robust history of non-privileged classes and groups in American society challenging this unequal distribution of power through various resistance methods. Examples of these challenges include, but are not limited to: the abolitionist movement, organized labor movements, women’s rights movement, civil rights movements, anti-war movements, and most recently the resurgence of criminal justice reform and anti-police brutality movements. Unsurprisingly, all of these challenges have been met with immense pushback from the ruling class, expressed through government, i.e. the police, due to the significant threat they impose on their source of power. Sociologist Alex Vitale, thoroughly documents these episodes throughout his book The End of Policing and perhaps one the best takeaway points from this work is this: “The myth of policing in a liberal democracy is that the police exist to prevent political activity that crosses the line into criminal activity, such as property destruction and violence. But they have always focused on detecting and disrupting movements that threaten the economic and political status quo, regardless of the presence of criminality.”

    The authority of the government is vested into the police to enforce the law, which itself is typically crafted to meet the interest of the ruling class. Thus the police serve as an extension, or more fittingly, a weapon and a shield of this power dynamic. Each iteration of the police has been imbued with the authority to use force as both a weapon of repression and as a shield to protect power and privilege from challenges and threats. As a result certain techniques and tools are used by the police to counter and neutralize these threats. One such tool is surveillance technology.

    Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that captures the essence of this idea comes from a report entitled “Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles,” authored by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition wherein they state, “Communities of color, immigrants and the economically marginalized are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance… It is yet another tool, another practice built upon the long lineage including slave patrols, lantern laws, Jim Crow, Red Squads, war on drugs, war on crime, war on gangs, war on terror, Operation Hammer, SWAT, aerial patrols, Weed and Seed, stop and frisk, gang injunctions, broken windows, and Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).”

    Finally, in contemporary society it is not a secret (especially since the Snowden revelations) that surveillance is ubiquitous in the US. It is ostensibly utilized for the promotion of national security and public safety and there is a truth to this claim. Yet, in a society that remains highly unequal with the existence of an incredibly privileged ruling class it remains relevant to point out, as privacy scholar Jeffrey Vagle argues in his article “Surveillance is still about power”, “…surveillance is, at its core, about the establishment, use, and maintenance of power…even the most common surveillance practices have a power dynamic that too often shifts from generally beneficial to abusive.” In sum, surveillance is an expression of power. It is also a tool wielded by the institution of law enforcement, itself an arm of the ruling class. Surveillance mechanisms are designed and have been utilized to preempt organized dissent from the status quo: which is the highly unequal distribution of political and socioeconomic power.

    With this political and historical context in mind, we can now return to the issue at hand: police use of surveillance technologies embedded with artificial intelligence and machine-learning, algorithmic functioning. Rather than outlining each of the surveillance technologies listed in the introduction in regard to their various features and components, I will summarize some of the major concerns that have been put forward in the literature surrounding this topic. Sociologist Sarah Brayne has shown in her work, most notably her article entitled “Big Data Surveillance: The Case for Policing” that there are noteworthy implications for the reproduction of inequality through the utilization of these technologies. For example, historical crime data serves as one of the primary components of information that is fed into these surveillance tools.

    This is significant because historical crime data is embedded with bias and discrimination which leads to the reinforcement and reproduction of criminal justice and legal biases but on a much wider scale given this expansive and proliferating surveillance architecture. As one report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation finds “Police are already policing minority neighborhoods and arresting people for things that may have gone unnoticed or unreported in less heavily patrolled neighborhoods. When this already skewed data is entered into a predictive algorithm, it will deploy more officers to the communities that are already overpoliced.” Another related issue that would feed into this reproduction of inequality is the unequal distribution and deployment of the physical surveillance technology. They will proliferate in areas already subject to higher police activity (areas that include residents primarily of color and low-income). Allowing for an even wider dragnet over a historically targeted population.

    One example of this is the tool ShotSpotter, which is a sensor for gunshots that sends immediate alerts to nearby police units, and its proliferation in certain Chicago neighborhoods. As discussed in this article from The Intercept documenting ShotSpotter’s use in what led up to the recent death of 13 year old Adam Toledo, the author states that “ShotSpotter is operative only in low-income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and is coupled with software, also sold by ShotSpotter, that guides deployment decisions. The inevitable rejoinder will be: That’s where the crime is. Here, we encounter the circular logic of predictive policing by which supposedly scientific methods yield racist results, as overpolicing of communities of color drives an “evidence-based” dynamic that produces more overpolicing and attendant harms.”

    Lastly, these surveillance technologies present a daunting future for civil liberties and rights such as right to privacy, speech, due process, etc. In regard to privacy, given a near total absence of guidelines and regulation, essentially all types of digital data, no matter how identifiable or private, is fair game to be collected, aggregated, and analyzed for any sort of prosecution, raising critical questions about what privacy is protected. The British media scholar John Fiske in the article entitled “Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism” asserts that surveillance and its affront on privacy is a crucial component of the larger power struggle between the rulers and the ruled in which, “Privacy maintains the area where the less powerful can exert control over the immediate conditions of their lives and bodies, reducing it decreases the localizing power of the weak and increases the imperializing power of the strong, [the ruling class, the state, the totalitarian].” In regard to speech, there are also negative implications for the ability to peacefully dissent against the rule of power structures if there is a wide-scale surveillance architecture monitoring these challenges. This is especially relevant for historically oppressed and marginalized groups who as mentioned already, have been systematically targeted and repressed by law enforcement when attempting to challenge power and attain greater rights.

    The increasing reliance on AI-generated algorithms to replace human-led oversight of potentially life-altering events and interactions with police spells grave dangers for society’s most vulnerable as has been documented above. The complete degradation of our most basic democratic ideals and values and the erosion of government transparency and accountability are plausible consequences with the widespread adoption of these kinds of surveillance technologies. Ultimately, this technology is nothing more than a tool. Tools are imbued with the intention of those who create and wield them. They can be designed and/or used for ostensibly beneficial purposes, conversely they can be used for malevolent purposes as well. This is why it is then critical to understand the political and historical context in which the tools are birthed into existence. Given the extensive and current sordid utilization of surveillance tools by its wielder, the police, as a means to oppress and control masses of people, we should analyze every subsequent tool designed for our ‘security’ and ‘safety’ with scrutiny and a critical eye.

    Over the past year there has been a heightened level of scrutiny and due criticism, resulting in numerous victories in regard to regulating this police surveillance. Various local and municipal governments around the US have banned predictive policing and facial recognition technologies after experiencing strong pushback from well-organized community coalitions. But this is only a start and we must continue to resist the implementation of this algorithmic oppression in its shaping of group behavior towards dehumanized obedience and conformity. We have to seize upon this energy to stay mobilized, organized, and to articulate our demands for more and more police reform. There is an urgent need to address the worst police abuses and it is incumbent upon all of us to stand in solidarity with those who experience the brunt of this abuse.

    Levi Gonzalez is a researcher of various topics and issues regarding politics and history including: criminal justice, American foreign policy, surveillance, and public policy. He recently received a Master’s degree in Public Policy, with an emphasis on poverty and inequality, from the University of California, Riverside. Levi is a fierce opponent of systemic oppression, state sanctioned violence, imperialism, and exploitation. Learning from those who embrace the challenge of confronting their oppressor serves as a source of inspiration. Read other articles by Levi.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2021 at 7:23pm and is filed under Artificial Intelligence (AI), Police, Privacy, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents

    Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.

    —Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson, New York Times

    Databit by databit, we are building our own electronic concentration camps.

    With every new smart piece of smart technology we acquire, every new app we download, every new photo or post we share online, we are making it that much easier for the government and its corporate partners to identify, track and eventually round us up.

    Saint or sinner, it doesn’t matter because we’re all being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

    This is what it means to live in a suspect society.

    The government’s efforts to round up those who took part in the Capitol riots shows exactly how vulnerable we all are to the menace of a surveillance state that aspires to a God-like awareness of our lives.

    Relying on selfies, social media posts, location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing, government agents are compiling a massive data trove on anyone and everyone who may have been anywhere in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

    The amount of digital information is staggering: 15,000 hours of surveillance and body-worn camera footage; 1,600 electronic devices; 270,000 digital media tips; at least 140,000 photos and videos; and about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones.

    And that’s just what we know.

    More than 300 individuals from 40 states have already been charged and another 280 arrested in connection with the events of January 6. As many as 500 others are still being hunted by government agents.

    Also included in this data roundup are individuals who may have had nothing to do with the riots but whose cell phone location data identified them as being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Forget about being innocent until proven guilty.

    In a suspect society such as ours, the burden of proof has been flipped: now, you start off guilty and have to prove your innocence.

    For instance, you didn’t even have to be involved in the Capitol riots to qualify for a visit from the FBI: investigators have reportedly been tracking—and questioning—anyone whose cell phones connected to wi-fi or pinged cell phone towers near the Capitol. One man, who had gone out for a walk with his daughters only to end up stranded near the Capitol crowds, actually had FBI agents show up at his door days later. Using Google Maps, agents were able to pinpoint exactly where they were standing and for how long.

    All of the many creepy, calculating, invasive investigative and surveillance tools the government has acquired over the years are on full display right now in the FBI’s ongoing efforts to bring the rioters to “justice.”

    FBI agents are matching photos with drivers’ license pictures; tracking movements by way of license plate toll readers; and zooming in on physical identifying marks such as moles, scars and tattoos, as well as brands, logos and symbols on clothing and backpacks. They’re poring over hours of security and body camera footage; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts.

    It’s not just the FBI on the hunt, however.

    They’ve enlisted the help of volunteer posses of private citizens, such as Deep State Dogs, to collaborate on the grunt work. As Dinah Voyles Pulver reports, once Deep State Dogs locates a person and confirms their identity, they put a package together with the person’s name, address, phone number and several images and send it to the FBI.

    According to USA Today, the FBI is relying on the American public and volunteer cybersleuths to help bolster its cases.

    This takes See Something, Say Something snitching programs to a whole new level.

    The lesson to be learned: Big Brother, Big Sister and all of their friends are watching you.

    They see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.

    Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.

    Simply liking or sharing this article on Facebook, retweeting it on Twitter, or merely reading it or any other articles related to government wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties might be enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of activities and, therefore, puts you in the crosshairs of a government investigation as a potential troublemaker a.k.a. domestic extremist.

    Chances are, as the Washington Post reports, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.

    In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.

    The government has the know-how.

    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.

    Of course, the government has been hard at work for years acquiring these totalitarian powers.

    Long before the January 6 riots, the FBI was busily amassing the surveillance tools necessary to monitor social media posts, track and identify individuals using cell phone signals and facial recognition technology, and round up “suspects” who may be of interest to the government for one reason or another.

    As The Intercept reported, 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.

    All it needs is the data, which more than 90% of young adults and 65% of American adults are happy to provide.

    When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.

    As for the Fourth Amendment and its prohibitions on warrantless searches and invasions of privacy without probable cause, those safeguards have been rendered all but useless by legislative end-runs, judicial justifications, and corporate collusions.

    We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers.

    Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior.

    This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, social media posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

    For example, police have been using Stingray devices mounted on their cruisers to intercept cell phone calls and text messages without court-issued search warrants. Doppler radar devices, which can detect human breathing and movement within a home, are already being employed by the police to deliver arrest warrants.

    License plate readers, yet another law enforcement spying device made possible through funding by the Department of Homeland Security, can record up to 1800 license plates per minute. Moreover, these surveillance cameras can also photograph those inside a moving car. Reports indicate that the Drug Enforcement Administration has been using the cameras in conjunction with facial recognition software to build a “vehicle surveillance database” of the nation’s cars, drivers and passengers.

    Sidewalk and “public space” cameras, sold to gullible communities as a sure-fire means of fighting crime, is yet another DHS program that is blanketing small and large towns alike with government-funded and monitored surveillance cameras. It’s all part of a public-private partnership that gives government officials access to all manner of surveillance cameras, on sidewalks, on buildings, on buses, even those installed on private property.

    Couple these surveillance cameras with facial recognition and behavior-sensing technology and you have the makings of “pre-crime” cameras, which scan your mannerisms, compare you to pre-set parameters for “normal” behavior, and alert the police if you trigger any computerized alarms as being “suspicious.”

    State and federal law enforcement agencies are pushing to expand their biometric and DNA databases by requiring that anyone accused of a misdemeanor have their DNA collected and catalogued. However, technology is already available that allows the government to collect biometrics such as fingerprints from a distance, without a person’s cooperation or knowledge. One system can actually scan and identify a fingerprint from nearly 20 feet away.

    Developers are hard at work on a radar gun that can actually show if you or someone in your car is texting. Another technology being developed, dubbed a “textalyzer” device, would allow police to determine whether someone was driving while distracted. Refusing to submit one’s phone to testing could result in a suspended or revoked driver’s license.

    It’s a sure bet that anything the government welcomes (and funds) too enthusiastically is bound to be a Trojan horse full of nasty, invasive surprises.

    Case in point: police body cameras. Hailed as the easy fix solution to police abuses, these body cameras—made possible by funding from the Department of Justice—turn police officers into roving surveillance cameras. Of course, if you try to request access to that footage, you’ll find yourself being led a merry and costly chase through miles of red tape, bureaucratic footmen and unhelpful courts.

    The “internet of things” refers to the growing number of “smart” appliances and electronic devices now connected to the internet and capable of interacting with each other and being controlled remotely. These range from thermostats and coffee makers to cars and TVs. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such easy control and access. That price amounts to relinquishing ultimate control of and access to your home to the government and its corporate partners. For example, while Samsung’s Smart TVs are capable of “listening” to what you say, thereby allowing users to control the TV using voice commands, it also records everything you say and relays it to a third party, e.g., the government.

    Then again, the government doesn’t really need to spy on you using your smart TV when the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cellphone and record your conversations. The FBI can also do the same thing to laptop computers without the owner knowing any better.

    Drones, which are taking to the skies en masse, are the converging point for all of the weapons and technology already available to law enforcement agencies. In fact, drones can listen in on your phone calls, see through the walls of your home, scan your biometrics, photograph you and track your movements, and even corral you with sophisticated weaponry.

    All of these technologies add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence, especially not when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home.

    These digital trails are everywhere.

    As investigative journalists Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson explain, “This data—collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem … provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.”

    In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted.

    As Warzel and Thompson warn:

    “To think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence… This collection will only grow more sophisticated… It gets easier by the day… it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.”

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.

    There is no gray area any longer.

  • Image credit: K-Plex
    • The post Digital Trails: How the FBI Is Identifying, Tracking and Rounding Up Dissidents first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charities warn over ‘frightening’ plan to put plainclothes police in nightclubs

    Scheme distracts from rightful criticisms of police response to Clapham vigil, campaigners say

    Plans to protect women by putting plainclothes police officers in nightclubs are bizarre, frightening and “spectacularly missing the point”, campaigners and charities have said.

    The plans were outlined by the government as part of the steps it was taking to improve security and protect women from predatory offenders. Called Project Vigilant, the programme can involve officers attending areas around clubs and bars in plainclothes, along with increased police patrols as people leave at closing time.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth


    On Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol Hill “insurrection”, the Parler social media app was the number #1 most downloaded app in the Apple App Store. On “January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been ‘dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.’” By Jan. 11, Apple, Google, and Amazon had successfully colluded to destroy the capacity of one of the most popular apps on the web to operate.

    It was a blatant violation of antitrust laws during a period in which Big Tech has been repeatedly investigated and accused of similar infractions. In October 2020 top Democratic congressional lawmakers reported that “… Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google engage in a range of anti-competitive behavior, and antitrust laws need an overhaul to allow for more competition in the US internet economy.” The report recommended new legislation that could lead to the breakup of tech giants such as Facebook and Google.

    Yet the overnight shutdown of Parler was accompanied by deafening cheers from the media and politicians across the country. While the elimination of a rising competitor no doubt played a significant role in the takedown, ensuring coordinated messaging across the major social media platforms was likely the deciding factor in Parler’s demise. The same journalists and politicians applauded the heroic tech titans just as loudly when Twitter suppressed evidence of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings three weeks before the election and when Trump was permanently banned from Facebook.

    Parler’s targeted takedown by a conspiracy of tech giants signaled a new phase in the war for strategic reality control. The narrative managers find it quite inconvenient that the pandemic propaganda campaign has not gone completely according to plan. Resistance to the mainstream covid story has turned out to be more widespread than expected. There was a whiff of desperation about this open crushing of a rival platform.

    Parler’s real offense was to offer a media delivery system designed to foster free speech. Their service was a reaction against the rapidly multiplying and often inscrutable rules about what speech is allowed and what forbidden on the major platforms. Unlike Facebook and Google, Parler’s users choose what they want to see and are allowed to express their beliefs without the risk of being booted off the service for inadequate doublethink.

    Parler was not shut down because it allowed violent postings. Calls for violence were far more prevalent on Facebook and Twitter during the Capital Hill “coup attempt.” Its real crime was to provide a platform where users could express ideas that undercut the dominant narrative without fear of censorship. Its brutal shutdown sent a stark warning to potential competitors who might be similarly tempted to open their platforms to free speech.

    Domestic Netwar

    Since the beginning of the 2020 U.S. election cycle, the tech giants have unleashed multiple large-scale crackdowns on the content that challenges elite narratives. To understand the scale of the current censorship drive, consider a few of the major actions by Facebook and Twitter:

    • (10/14/2020) The New York Post, which has the 4th largest distribution rank of all newspapers in the U.S., published an article about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, claiming that he traded on his father’s position to obtain a seat worth $50,000 a month on the Board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Two hours after the story broke, Facebook announced that it was “’… reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform’: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article.” This was done before the article had been fact-checked. Shortly after this, Twitter banned “… entirely all users’ ability to share the Post article — not just on their public timeline but even using the platform’s private Direct Messaging feature.” Twitter users who tried to link to the New York Post article received an error message explaining that such linking was disabled due to the potentially harmful nature of the content. Shortly after, Twitter prevented the New York Post from posting any content, though later it was allowed to resume posting. It was a blatant act of censorship designed to influence the election.
    • (1/7/2021) Facebook bans the sitting President of the United States from further Facebook posting due to events that, according to Mark Zuckerberg, “… clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.” Note that Zuckerberg directly accuses Trump of planning to impede his lawfully elected successor from assuming power with minimal evidence.
    • (1/8/2021) Twitter permanently removes Trump’s account, “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account … we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Once again, a social media giant accuses the President of inciting violence on the basis of weak evidence.
    • (1/19/2021) Facebook announced that “As of January 12, 2021, we have identified over 890 militarized social movements to date and in total, removed about 3,400 Pages, 19,500 groups, 120 events, 25,300 Facebook profiles and 7500 Instagram accounts. We’ve also removed about 3,300 Pages, 10,500 groups, 510 events, 18,300 Facebook profiles and 27,300 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against QAnon.”
    • (2/8/2021) Facebook reported that, “Today … we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
      • COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
      • Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
      • It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
      • Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism”

    In each case, the de facto union formed between media outlets and the tech giants initiated a massive censorship campaign without provoking the journalistic outrage that would have erupted a few years ago. Open censorship is now not only accepted by mainstream media but celebrated in the post-pandemic world as a much needed “weaponization of truth.”

    Accompanying this unprecedented wave of repression is a new subgenre of journalism which Glenn Greenwald describes as “… an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power.” These journalists rationalize their sanitized tyranny as “working in the disinformation space” where their job is to identify offensive memes and shame those responsible for them.

    One reason the tech giants have recently abandoned their earlier restraint in eliminating dissident perspectives is that they are now being ridiculed by the world’s most influential media organizations whenever they fail to suppress so-called “fake news” with sufficient zeal. But the more significant reason is that mainstream media outlets are an organic extension of the intelligence apparatus that helped build Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants. These companies supply the tools to detect, demote, and remove content when it threatens their control over internet information.

    The attitude of many mainstream journalists is encapsulated in the recent recommendation by a New York Times reporter who called on the Biden administration to, “… put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’” This cross-agency task force leader “… would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws … it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.” This task force would coordinate the forces required for strikes against those found guilty of offering alternative accounts to officially defined reality.

    A Wilderness of Mirrors

    “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” – Unknown.

    According to his press, Tristan Harris is the trusted voice of the technological conscience. He co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) to drive a shift toward technology that operationalizes our informational well-being. The top priority in the site’s “Ledger of Harms” is social media users’ rampant addiction to disinformation.

    The CHT cites a finding from a recent scientific study that false news “… spreads six times faster than true news. According to researchers, this is because … fake news items usually have a higher emotional content and contain unexpected information which inevitably means that they will be shared and reposted more often.” This finding was based on the work of six fact-checking organizations.

    Unfortunately for Tristan, there is a fundamental deception lurking behind the “fake news” meme. Whenever we hear the term it evokes a conditioned reflex that tends to short-circuit any reflection on its actual meaning. “Fake news” is intended to signify falsehoods that qualified information professionals are able to refute based on careful research. This is the rarely questioned myth behind “fact-checking.” However, it is more accurately understood as an ideological trap intended to inculcate a reductive concept of truth that can be easily manipulated to advance elite agendas.

    How reliable is the “fact-checking”, the mechanism used by the major platforms to find and remove false news? A few months ago, OffGuardian published an article titled “WHO (Accidentally) Confirms Covid is No More Dangerous Than Flu.” According to a follow-up article, “… the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed ‘about 10%’ of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.” 0.14% is 24 times lower than WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% which was used to justify the lockdowns that devastated the world economy. That would put the IFR rate for covid right in line with the seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.

    However, the fact-checking organization known as Health Feedback claimed the following statement to be false, “The coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.” Health Feedback is a member of the WHO-led project Vaccine Safety Net (VSN) which claims that each reviewer “… contributing to our analyses holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals.” Their parent organization Science Feedback works with Facebook as part of its fact-checking program.

    Close analysis of the article indicates that the fact-checkers lied about Dr. Ryan’s actual claims. The lie was this: “Ryan said that, according to the WHO’s best estimates, the virus that causes COVID-19 could have infected up to 10% of the global population.” In fact, Ryan stated that “about 10%” was infected, not “up to 10%.” By reducing the size of the infected population, the IFR rate for covid can be bloated to the pandemic proportions needed to drive the elite agenda. To camouflage their mendacity, the fact-checker found a way to avoid directly quoting Dr. Ryan’s actual words by linking to Zero Hedge’s reblog of the article which provides a summary of his statements without quoting them directly.

    This egregious example is only one of many that demonstrate how fact-checkers squeeze the facts into the straitjacket of official truth. Since fact-checking is the central pillar of disinformation detection, its failure to stand up to analysis means that the entire superstructure behind the disinformation purge falls apart. As one fact-checking critic put it, “… this is what is known as a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ – a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.” Propaganda can be much amplified by technology, but it is the believability of its stories that drives the strategic reality operation. Its goal is to bury the text of truth under a scaffolding of interpretive lies.

    A Bodyguard of Lies

    “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” – Winston Churchill

    In the eyes of the elite, it is not the COVID-19 disease that is the existential threat to humanity, but alternative viewpoints about it. The “Doomsday Clock” released by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Jan. 27, 2021 highlighted three existential threats to humanity “… a resurgent nuclear arms race, climate change, and online misinformation about the Covid-19 epidemic.” The key question is whose existence is being threatened by covid misinformation – the planetary population or the great resetters who unleashed it? This could be a sign that the covid propaganda campaign has not lived up to elite expectations.

    It’s clear that in the last several months the elite have felt compelled to pursue a much more aggressive disinformation campaign. Facebook recently decided to prohibit all COVID-19 or vaccine-related posts that contain erroneous claims as defined in the “COVID-19 and Vaccine Policy Updates & Protections” posting. The new rule is that any claim that calls into question information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) or other reliable health sources will be removed.

    While Mark Zuckerberg constantly invokes AI as the ultimate solution to fake news, research shows that it can support, but not solve the problem of finding and suppressing news stories that undermine dominant narratives. Evaluating the threat, a story might pose depends on awareness of its social and political context. Yet even the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are currently incapable of identifying such contexts. Therefore AI-based content analysis does not yet provide reliable methods for the initial identification of misinformation except in straightforward scenarios such as detecting duplicates of previously debunked stories. Automation can speed up the work of professional fact-checkers, but at this time it can’t replace them.

    However, some advanced AI-based approaches have shown promise in the initial detection of dangerous postings. One method is to use AI to detect a story’s pattern of propagation. Since, according to the scientific study by the CHT previously cited, “fake news spreads six times faster than true news”, by scanning for stories with rapid spread patterns, researchers believe that AI might automatically detect information that could endanger official narratives. Using this method, fact-checkers can rapidly sift through a much greater volume of material to uncover offensive memes. The tech giants never seem to consider the possibility that the rapid spread pattern might in some cases be driven by a massive unsatisfied hunger for truth.

    Once a story has been tagged as disinformation, both defensive and offensive options need to be evaluated. If it is posted on a controlled social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, the platform can reduce its distribution, label it, or directly remove it. If it is on a platform that permits free speech such as Parler, the platform itself can be targeted by removing its hosting service in the way Amazon did in the wake of the “violent insurrection” on Capitol Hill.

    In the case of websites not hosted on an elite-controlled platform, these can be deplatformed by removing its domain name from the centralized DNS (Domain Name System) that controls access to web sites through its registered name. Since DNS is a centralised system, legal pressure from law enforcement agencies can force the domain name to be deleted so that the website becomes inaccessible. From 2018 to 2019, several police agencies seized 30,500 domain names in 20 different countries.

    Further steps may be needed in some cases. In November 2020, “… the national-security states of the U.S. and UK have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to COVID-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.” Journalists who raise unwelcome concerns about covid vaccines can be de-platformed and where feasible, their stories algorithmically erased from the internet.

    The UK signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been assigned the task of targeting websites that raise concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine. GHCQ’s cyberwar will not only take down anti-vaccine propaganda but will also seek to “… disrupt the operations of the cyber-actors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’” These targeted strikes against information terrorists will be coordinated through the “Five Eyes” alliance of intelligence agencies (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada).

    Resisting the Reality Engineers

    An alliance of intelligence agencies, fact-checkers, and think tanks have decided that the world population must be electronically immunized against information which undermines approved biosecurity narratives. Their tactical strikes against “disinformation” cloaks an attack on our capacity for independent thought. The algorithms used by the social media giants to generate obsessive user engagement transform us into easily manipulated slaves of semiconscious emotional stimuli. They are not protecting us from “fake news”, but from our own collective powers of discernment.

    Yet the current hysteria about “disinformation” is also a tacit admission that mainstream media has lost so much credibility that it has to resort to increasingly harsh censorship to force their former audience to listen to them. An effective resistance strategy must include developing the tools of critical thinking such as the ability to detect logical fallacies. Only by keeping our powers of discernment switched on at all times can we retain both our freedom of thought and the sane vision of the world that it empowers.

    Despite the social unrest that false news stories could and did cause, the founding fathers of the United States thought, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that those “… who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties … They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth …”1 In their minds, part of being an adult was the often-difficult art of distinguishing true from false information. The founders believed that truth is only accessible to free minds and that any attempt to curtail freedom weakens our access to truth.

  • Image credit: MSNBC
    1. Wu, Tim. 2016. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Kindle Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 49.
    The post Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • DWP uses excessive surveillance on suspected fraudsters, report finds

    Claimants are tailed, identified on CCTV and their social media monitored, Privacy International finds

    Suspected benefit fraudsters in the UK are being subjected to excessive surveillance techniques such as being tailed by government officers or identified in CCTV footage, according to a report.

    It also found that companies from bingo clubs to the BBC, estate agents and the NHS can be asked to provide information on people who may be under investigation.

    Related: One in three councils using algorithms to make welfare decisions

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Border Agents Can Search Phones Freely Under New Circuit Court Ruling

    A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.

    Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone.

    The post Border Agents Can Search Phones Freely Under New Circuit Court Ruling appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Don’t Impeach Trump: Impeach the Deep State for Its Conspiracy to Kill the Constitution

    All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

    — George Orwell, 1984

    Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.

    Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today.

    While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

    Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

    These are dangerous times.

    These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.

    No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

    The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

    This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

    This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

    This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

    This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.

    Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What remains all-too-usual, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

    Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

    Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

    Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home.

    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. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

    Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. It’s no longer unusual to hear accounts of men and women being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. What remains to be seen is how the emerging hypervigilance over COVID-19 vaccines will impact that right to bodily integrity.

    Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., little to nothing has been done to counteract these abuses. Instead, we are daily being accustomed to life in this electronic concentration camp.

    Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.

    Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

    It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.

    In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

    Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

    Sound familiar?

    Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.

    History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

    Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

    From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.

    Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

    The post Don’t Impeach Trump: Impeach the Deep State for Its Conspiracy to Kill the Constitution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Don’t Impeach Trump: Impeach the Deep State for Its Conspiracy to Kill the Constitution

    by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / February 9th, 2021

    All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

    — George Orwell, 1984

    Let’s be clear about one thing: the impeachment of Donald Trump is a waste of time and money.

    Impeaching Trump will accomplish very little, and it will not in any way improve the plight of the average American. It will only reinforce the spectacle and farce that have come to be synonymous with politics today.

    While the nation allows itself to be distracted by yet more bread-and-circus politics, the American kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians and corporate thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of the people) continues to suck the American people into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry are powerless to defend themselves against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

    So here’s what I propose: let’s impeach the Deep State and its cabal of government operatives from every point along the political spectrum (right, left and center) for conspiring to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward trajectory now, and things are moving fast.

    Even now, we are being pushed and prodded towards a civil war, not because the American people are so divided but because that’s how corrupt governments control a populace (i.e., divide and conquer).

    These are dangerous times.

    These are indeed dangerous times but not because of violent crime, which remains at an all-time low, or because of terrorism, which is statistically rare, or because the borders are being invaded by foreign armies, which data reports from the Department of Homeland Security refute, or because a pandemic is spreading like a contagion, or even because raging mobs of so-called domestic terrorists are trying to overthrow elections.

    No, the real danger that we face comes from none other than the U.S. government and the powers it has granted to its standing armies to rob, steal, cheat, harass, detain, brutalize, terrorize, torture and kill American citizens with immunity.

    The danger “we the people” face comes from masked invaders on the government payroll who crash through our doors in the dark of night, shoot our dogs, and terrorize our families.

    This danger comes from militarized henchmen on the government payroll who demand absolute obedience, instill abject fear, and shoot first and ask questions later.

    This danger comes from greedy, power-hungry bureaucrats on the government payroll who have little to no understanding of their constitutional limits.

    This danger comes from greedy politicians and corporations for whom profit trumps principle.

    This danger comes from a surveillance state that grows more and more ominous.

    Consider, if you will, all of the dastardly, devious, diabolical, dangerous, debilitating, deceitful, dehumanizing, demonic, depraved, dishonorable, disillusioning, discriminatory, dictatorial schemes inflicted on “we the people” by a bureaucratic, totalitarian regime that has long since ceased to be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

    Americans have no protection against police abuse. It is no longer unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. What remains all-too-usual, however, is the news that the officers involved in these incidents get off with little more than a slap on the hands.

    Americans are little more than pocketbooks to fund the police state. If there is any absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off. This is true, whether you’re talking about taxpayers being forced to fund high-priced weaponry that will be used against us, endless wars that do little for our safety or our freedoms, bloated government agencies such as the National Security Agency with its secret budgets, covert agendas and clandestine activities.

    Americans are no longer innocent until proven guilty. We once operated under the assumption that you were innocent until proven guilty. Due in large part to rapid advances in technology and a heightened surveillance culture, the burden of proof has been shifted so that the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty has been usurped by a new norm in which all citizens are suspects. This is exemplified by police practices of stopping and frisking people who are merely walking down the street and where there is no evidence of wrongdoing. Likewise, by subjecting Americans to full-body scans and license-plate readers without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the scans for later use, the government—in cahoots with the corporate state—has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an environment, we are all potentially guilty of some wrongdoing or other.

    Americans no longer have a right to self-defense. In the wake of various shootings in recent years, “gun control” has become a resounding theme. Those advocating gun reform see the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms as applying only to government officials. As a result, even Americans who legally own firearms are being treated with suspicion and, in some cases, undue violence. In one case, a Texas man had his home subjected to a no-knock raid and was shot in his bed after police, attempting to deliver a routine search warrant, learned that he was in legal possession of a firearm. In another incident, a Florida man who was licensed to carry a concealed firearm found himself detained for two hours during a routine traffic stop in Maryland while the arresting officer searched his vehicle in vain for the man’s gun, which he had left at home.

    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. Likewise, if government officials can fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof, and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of your property.

    Americans are powerless in the face of militarized police. In early America, citizens were considered equals with law enforcement officials. Authorities were rarely permitted to enter one’s home without permission or in a deceitful manner. And it was not uncommon for police officers to be held personally liable for trespass when they wrongfully invaded a citizen’s home. Unlike today, early Americans could resist arrest when a police officer tried to restrain them without proper justification or a warrant—which the police had to allow citizens to read before arresting them. (Daring to dispute a warrant with a police official today who is armed with high-tech military weapons and tasers would be nothing short of suicidal.) As police forces across the country continue to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies acquiring military-grade hardware in droves, Americans are finding their once-peaceful communities transformed into military outposts, complete with tanks, weaponry, and other equipment designed for the battlefield.

    Americans no longer have a right to bodily integrity. Court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and probe us intimately. It’s no longer unusual to hear accounts of men and women being subjected to what is essentially government-sanctioned rape by police in the course of “routine” traffic stops. What remains to be seen is how the emerging hypervigilance over COVID-19 vaccines will impact that right to bodily integrity.

    Americans no longer have a right to the expectation of privacy. Despite the staggering number of revelations about government spying on Americans’ phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc., little to nothing has been done to counteract these abuses. Instead, we are daily being accustomed to life in this electronic concentration camp.

    Americans can no longer rely on the courts to mete out justice. The U.S. Supreme Court was intended to be an institution established to intervene and protect the people against the government and its agents when they overstep their bounds. Yet through their deference to police power, preference for security over freedom, and evisceration of our most basic rights for the sake of order and expediency, the justices of the Supreme Court have become the architects of the American police state in which we now live, while the lower courts have appointed themselves courts of order, concerned primarily with advancing the government’s agenda, no matter how unjust or illegal.

    Americans no longer have a representative government. We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age, let’s call it the age of authoritarianism. In fact, a study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups.

    It is not overstating matters to say that Congress, which has done its best to keep their unhappy constituents at a distance, may well be the most self-serving, semi-corrupt institution in America.

    In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism: a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere subjects to be controlled.

    Rest assured that when and if fascism finally takes hold in America, the basic forms of government will remain: Fascism will appear to be friendly. The legislators will be in session. There will be elections, and the news media will continue to cover the entertainment and political trivia. Consent of the governed, however, will no longer apply. Actual control will have finally passed to the oligarchic elite controlling the government behind the scenes.

    Sound familiar?

    Clearly, we are now ruled by an oligarchic elite of governmental and corporate interests. We have moved into “corporatism” (favored by Benito Mussolini), which is a halfway point on the road to full-blown fascism. Corporatism is where the few moneyed interests—not elected by the citizenry—rule over the many.

    History may show that from this point forward, we will have left behind any semblance of constitutional government and entered into a totalitarian state where all citizens are suspects and security trumps freedom.

    Even with its constantly shifting terrain, this topsy-turvy travesty of law and government has become America’s new normal.

    From Clinton to Bush, Obama to Trump, and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the powers-that-be want us to remain distracted, divided, alienated from each other based on our politics, our bank accounts, our religion, our race and our value systems.

    Yet as George Orwell observed, “The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

    This article was posted on Tuesday, February 9th, 2021 at 6:04pm and is filed under Democracy, Democrats, Donald Trump, Human Rights, Justice, Police, Politics, Privacy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • ‘Weak, dysfunctional’: Privacy office needs more money

    Australia’s privacy office is “weak” and “dysfunctional” and requires significant additional funding and resources to adequately carry out its important roles, according to submissions to the federal government’s Privacy Act review.

    Nearly all submissions to the inquiry, being conducted by the Attorney-General’s department, are in agreement that the Office of the Australia Information Commissioner (OAIC) is under-funded, under-resourced and ineffective in its current state due to these factors.

    The OAIC is facing a “remarkable” drop in annual funding when the $25 million lifeline over three years provided in 2019 comes to an end.

    suburbs city
    Ordinary people: The privacy regulator is under-resourced an inquiry has been told

    The office was allocated $24 million in 2020-21 but will receive an average of about $13.3 million annually over the forward estimates.

    The OAIC is yet to receive a funding guarantee going forward, and its budget over the forward estimates will likely be determined as part of the review of the Privacy Act.

    The resourcing of the privacy office was a central theme among many of the submissions to the issues paper of the inquiry.

    The Australian Privacy Foundation said that the OAIC is a “weak regulator” compared to its global peers.

    “The OAIC needs to have adequate funding, strong powers, a regulatory culture similar to the ACCC and high compensation limits. The OAIC needs to be a strong regulator, and the review of the Privacy Act must be followed with adequate funding of the OAIC,” the Australian Privacy Foundation submission said.

    A privacy commission separate from the office’s information roles should also be established, the submission argued, while it is “ineffectual and arguably dysfunctional” due in part to its lack of funding and Australian courts not having many opportunities to interpret the Privacy Act.

    In a separate submission, Electronic Frontiers Australia said that the “greatest impediment” to the upholding of privacy rights for Australia is the “chronic underfunding” of the OAIC.

    The Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner (OVIC) also made the case for its federal counterpart to be provided significantly more funding to deal with its increasing workload.

    “Effective enforcement of the Privacy Act is impacted by the amount of resourcing provided to the OAIC to enable it to carry out its statutory functions. Consider OAIC’s and its predecessors’ expanding privacy responsibilities over the last four decades, as described in their annual reports. These reports show that the role of Australia’s federal privacy regulator has grown immensely over this time,” the OVIC submission said.

    “In 2019-20, the OAIC’s privacy functions including providing advice, conducting audits, managing a data breach notification scheme, exercising a wide range of regulatory powers, conducting court proceedings against Facebook, and handing 2,673 privacy complaints.

    “As well as regulating the public sector, it also has the larger task of regulating Australia’s private sector, and large global businesses that collect personal information in Australia,” OVIC said.

    “In light of its growing responsibilities, it is crucial that the OAIC is appropriately resourced to effectively carry out its regulatory functions, including its complaint handling and determination functions.”

    The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), whose digital platforms inquiry led the government to launch the Privacy Act inquiry, also said the OAIC’s funding should be central to this investigation.

    “It is important that the review consider whether the OAIC has the full suite of enforcement and investigative tools it needs and whether the OAIC is adequately staffed and resourced to take enforcement action,” the ACCC said in a submission.

    The OAIC itself has also told the government that it needs more funding and staff to “effectively deter inappropriate conduct and support privacy best practice”.

    “There is a need to take more substantive regulatory and enforcement action on the Commissioner’s own initiative in order to shift the behaviour of regulated entities across sectors, rectify, remedy and provide broader deterrence. This requires sufficient regulatory tools and powers, as well as resources,” Australian Information Commissioner Angelene Falk said in the submission.

    “The OAIC must be appropriately resourced to properly carry out its statutory functions and use the full suite of regulatory powers effectively, including enforcement through the courts, which can be costly and resource intensive.”

    The post ‘Weak, dysfunctional’: Privacy office needs more money appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • 2020: The Year the Tree of Liberty Was Torched

    by John W. Whitehead / December 31st, 2020

    The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.

    — John Lennon

    No doubt about it: 2020—a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom—was the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for freedom.

    Government corruption, tyranny, and abuse coupled with a Big Brother-knows-best mindset and the COVID-19 pandemic propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which nationwide lockdowns, egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians were accepted as the norm.

    Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades and in the past year, in particular.

    The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers that have been amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.

    Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces continued to be a menace to the citizenry and the rule of law. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies acquired even more weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. Police officers were also given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons and subject them to forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.

    The courts failed to uphold justice. With every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts more concerned with protecting government agents than upholding the rights of “we the people.” This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. A review of critical court rulings over the past two decades, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

    COVID-19 allowed the Emergency State to expand its powers. 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) could expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. While COVID-19 took a significant toll on the nation emotionally, physically, and economically, it also allowed the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, with talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, forced vaccinations, snitch tip lines and onerous lockdowns.

    The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans have become sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    America became a red flag nation. Red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws generally 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. 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, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States. Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

    The cost of policing the globe drove the nation deeper into debt. America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense. The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Yet America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world. This is how a military empire occupies the globe. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is falling apart.

    Free speech was dealt one knock-out punch after another. Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, shadow banning on the Internet, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good. On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow. The reasons for such censorship varied widely from political correctness, so-called safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of free speech.

    The Deep State took over. The American system of representative government has been overthrown by the Deep State—a.k.a. the police state a.k.a. the military/corporate industrial complex—a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad. The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished. In its place is a shadow government, a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House. Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. This shadow government, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

    The takeaway: Everything the founders of this country feared has come to dominate in modern America. “We the people” have been saddled with a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

    So how do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs, and then locked down and stripped of any semblance of personal freedom?

    No matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.

    For that matter, protests and populist movements also haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.

    So how do you not only push back against the government’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means?

    You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics.

    Take your cue from the Tenth Amendment and nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

    In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government.

    For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants.

    Nullification is one way of doing so.

    America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.

    Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.

    The power to change things for the better rests with us not the politicians.

    As long as we continue to allow callousness, cruelty, meanness, immorality, ignorance, hatred, intolerance, racism, militarism, materialism, meanness and injustice—magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality—to trump justice, fairness and equality, there can be no hope of prevailing against the police state.

    We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent and push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the police state is marching forward, more powerful than ever.

    If there is to be any hope for freedom in 2021, it rests with “we the people.”

    This article was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2020 at 7:40am and is filed under Corruption, COVID-19, Democracy, Espionage/”Intelligence”, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Opinion, Police, Politics, Privacy, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Data consent rules part of Privacy Act review

    There should be a significant overhaul of privacy laws to require the use of consent for data collection and move towards a privacy by default approach instead, the New York Times Company has urged in a rare submission to the Australian government.

    The New York Times, along with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and several other organisations, made a submission to the federal government’s review of the Privacy Act with a major focus on the need to reduce the prevalence of “bundled” consent forms for data collection currently employed by tech giants.

    The New York Times submission said that requiring consent should be “relied upon as rarely as possible” and should be reserved for high-risk data collection and use.

    “People have limited resources in time and energy to dedicate to understanding the specifics of a business’s data processing. These resources should be treated with respect and called upon sparingly,” the New York Times submission said.

    Data
    People power: The NYT and Privacy Office want consent changes

    Approaches such as those included in the Europe Union’s General Data Protection Rule shouldn’t be adopted in Australia as this “normalises consent as the first thing one does when visiting a site or app pays superficial lip service to transparency and agency while producing neither”, the submission said.

    “Our preference is instead to default to permissible data processing that matches pre-digital expectations of privacy as described above, and to require consent to anything beyond that to be slow, difficult, specific and temporary,” it said.

    “This set of permissible defaults, so long as it matches a reasonable digital mapping of user expectations, would effectively be pro-consumer – far more so than the status quo – while still enabling businesses to access enough data that they can reap the benefits specific to the digital era in terms of efficiencies and product development.”

    This was echoed by the OAIC in its own submission, with the office pointing to a general shift towards companies bundling all data collection policies and conditions into the one form, and the risks associated with this method.

    “APP 1 privacy policies and APP 5 notices were not intended to be consent mechanisms that amount to contractual terms and conditions for consumers,” the OAIC submission said. “There has, however, been a shift towards building privacy policies and notices into one document, sometimes called ‘terms and conditions’ and purporting to use them to seek ‘agreement’ to broad data handling practices.

    “This has likely been driven by global, USA-based corporations operating in Australia, which have imported and spread American norms where privacy is a matter of contractual negotiation.”

    The current approach of requiring consent for expected actions turns the process into a “tick-box exercise which will detract the value of consent in higher-risk situations where it will actually be valuable”, the OAIC said.

    The reforms of consent laws around data should focus on measures to address the limitations with this scheme, rather than expanding its use, the office said.

    “The overuse of these mechanisms will place an unrealistic burden of understanding the risks of complicated information handling practices on individuals. This will not address the privacy risks and harms facing individuals in the digital age,” the OAIC said.

    Consent was also a key topic in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) 18-month inquiry into digital platforms, which spurred the government’s review of the Privacy Act.

    The competition watchdog recommended that consent be required to be obtained whenever a user’s personal information is collected, used or disclosed by an entity subject to the Privacy Act, unless the personal information is necessary for the performance of a contract to which the consumer is a party, or if there is an overriding public interest reason.

    This should include a “clear affirmative act that is freely given, specific, unambiguous and informed”, and should not be bundled into the one option.

    “It may also be appropriate for the consent requirements to be implemented along with measures to minimise consent fatigue, such as not requiring consent when personal information is processed in accordance with a contract to which the consumer is a party, or using standardised icons or phrases to refer to certain categories of consents to facilitate consumers’ comprehension and decision-making,” the ACCC report said.

    In its submission, the New York Times said the reforms to the Privacy Act should be based on ensuring these laws match those applying to the physical world.

    “We suggest grounding expectations of privacy in what they would be outside of the digital realm as that makes it easy for individuals to reason about the usage that may be made of their data,” it said.

    “If visiting a site is akin to visiting a shop, then users can readily understand who may recognise them, what kind of information may be collected, with what retention period, to which third parties it may be shared, and so forth.”

    The post Data consent rules part of Privacy Act review appeared first on InnovationAus.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.

  • Human Rights in the Age of Covid: New Challenges, Old Solutions?

    By Maria O’Sullivan

    In 2020, human rights law is being tested to its limits. 

    As we are now all aware, in March 2020, the World Health Organization declared that an outbreak of the viral disease COVID-19 had reached the level of a global pandemic and called for governments to take urgent action to stop the spread of the virus.

    The role of law in this health emergency has been central. It has permeated all aspects of our lives. In Australia, executive directions have been issued which require the closing of non-essential businesses, placed limitations on public gatherings, and severely restricted the movement of individuals. These measures have serious implications for various human rights protections, including the right to liberty, freedom of association, freedom of movement and the right to privacy. 

    Normally, such restrictions would be unlawful. However, as I have noted elsewhere, a declaration of a state of emergency allows governments to enact restrictive measures in the interest of  protecting public health. For instance,  Victoria’s state of emergency declaration gives state authorities wide powers under its Public Health and Wellbeing Act 2008 to issue directions to restrict people’s movement and regulate public behaviour. This is important because officially declaring a state of emergency allows exceptional powers to be used in exceptional circumstances.

    Because this emergency is testing the limits of our human rights protections in Australia, it represents an opportunity to consider how our legal system functions when society is tested. And, in particular, what the operation of the Covid laws say about how human rights are protected in Australia. 

    In some ways, Covid presents new challenges which can be met by ‘old solutions’, that is, our existing principles and oversight mechanisms. Importantly, however, Covid also presents some new challenges which require human rights law in Australia to adopt new approaches and develop new solutions.

    Here, I wish to highlight one particular aspect of Covid which demonstrates that we require some rethinking about human rights protections in Australia: the recent debates about mobile phone tracing to assist in controlling the Covid outbreak.

    A New Challenge which requires a New Solution – Privacy and Surveillance

    As reported in the media in recent weeks, the Australian government is planning to launch an app which will automate coronavirus contact tracing. Although the exact specifications of the app are still unclear, it appears that it will trace every person who has been in contact with a mobile phone owner who has tested positive for coronavirus in the previous few weeks. It will do so using Bluetooth smart phone connections to record who has been near a person for 15 minutes or more (the period defined as a contact). 

    Obviously, this raises serious concerns for privacy. This is so even if installing the app is to be voluntary rather than mandatory.

    International human rights law is clear that state parties have an obligation to protect everyone against arbitrary or unlawful interference with their privacy, family, or correspondence (Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights).

    This is where the Covid emergency represents a new challenge which human rights law must meet. 

    Many would probably agree that certain fundamental limits should be put in place to regulate such a surveillance tool. First, any use of data should only be used only for the purpose of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and cease once the pandemic is over. In this regard, the tracing app raises the issue of “mission creep”: that the government will use it for COVID purposes, but continue to access the data once the pandemic is over. Second,  the data must be properly and safely stored. Here I note that there have been some concerns around how the Australian government is going to protect data privacy, particularly given that the contract for storing the app’s data is going to a US-based company (Amazon). Third, these technologies must address risks in relation to discrimination against racial minorities and marginalised populations.

    But on a more conceptual level, I would argue that we must rethink how privacy and technology interact. This is something which has been highlighted by the Covid emergency, but will remain a problem after that is resolved.

    There are two aspects of concern here which require new legal approaches. First, there is often a lack of transparency in how technology is implemented in Australia. This may be a problem which can be remedied by a public education campaign to ensure that those affected by technology have at least a rudimentary understanding of how data is used by authorities and an understanding of their rights.

    Second, given the nature of the information many people hold on their phones (photos, intimate messages etc) it could be argued that they are an extension of ourselves and are part of our private life, even perhaps part of our identity. This is because they reveal information that is reflective of our personal attributes. For instance, the types of dating apps on a person’s phone will reveal their sexual identity. Other information and apps may reveal  an individual’s political and religious beliefs. Mobile phones are therefore not simply ‘telecommunications devices’. This means that human rights law must reconceptualise the concept of privacy and a ‘private life’ to deal with this societal fact.

    In terms of specific changes to existing regimes, I would highlight that Australia does not have a statutory, legally-enforceable right to privacy. Therefore, as the Castan Centre recommended in a recent submission to the Human Rights Commission’s Inquiry on Human Rights and Technology, a tort for serious invasion for privacy should be adopted. This would allow for better protection against intrusion and misuse of private information and serve as an accountability mechanism for governmental actions in this area.

    Broader Reflections: Implications for human rights in Australia

    I have discussed above a specific example of an area in which Australia needs to reform its protection of human rights, specifically the right to privacy.

    However, I would argue as a more general proposition that Australia relies heavily for its human rights adherence on oversight and accountability mechanisms (such as parliamentary processes). Whilst some of those have continued to operate, it is becoming increasingly clear that we require greater entrenchment of our rights than our legal system currently provides.

    The Castan Centre has long advocated for a federal Human Rights Charter. When we have defeated Covid-19, I would argue that this should happen.

    I also wish to make some broader reflections about the implications for society of the current epidemic. Most people in Australia have never undergone such extensive personal restrictions on our freedoms as we are currently experiencing. It is my hope that this experience may lead  us to have some insight into the plight of others – to deepen our understanding of the human rights abuses that many marginalised and vulnerable people in Australia and elsewhere have faced and continue to face today. The government has said many times that we must come together as a nation. This is true. But we must also reflect on inequality and disadvantage in our society and come together as a nation to ensure our law protects us fairly and equally from those problems. 

    *I wish to acknowledge the excellent editorial assistance and suggestions provided to me by Castan Centre Project Officer, Andrea Olivares-Jones in the preparation of this article.

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    This post was originally published on Castan Centre for Human Rights Law.

  • Harpooned by Facebook

    As smart devices become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, we look at how Facebook and other companies gather information about their users and turn it into profits. 

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    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • NCAC Urges Swift Consideration of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Nominees

    The PCLOB has now lacked a quorum for over 19 months, hamstringing its ability to function.

    The post NCAC Urges Swift Consideration of Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board Nominees appeared first on National Coalition Against Censorship.

    This post was originally published on Blog – National Coalition Against Censorship.