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Category: Surveillance

  • The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

    When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

    ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

    Pay no heed to the circus politics coming out of Washington DC. It’s just more of the same grandstanding by tone-deaf politicians oblivious to the plight of the citizenry.

    Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted by the competing news headlines cataloging the antics of the ruling classes. While they are full of sound and fury, they are utterly lacking in substance.

    Tune out the blaring noise of meaningless babble. It is intended to drown out the very real menace of a government which is consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population.

    Focus instead on the steady march of the police state at both the national, state and local levels, and the essential freedoms that are being trampled underfoot in its single-minded pursuit of power.

    While the overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us—warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling—you rarely hear anything about them from the politicians, the corporations or the news media.

    So what’s behind the blackout of real news?

    Surely, if properly disclosed and consistently reported on, the sheer volume of the government’s activities, which undermine the Constitution and dance close to the edge of outright illegality, would give rise to a sea change in how business is conducted in our seats of power.

    Yet when we’re being bombarded with wall-to-wall news coverage and news cycles that change every few days, it’s difficult to stay focused on one thing—namely, holding the government accountable to abiding by the rule of law—and the powers-that-be understand this.

    As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

    When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

    These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

    Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

    Not only are Americans forced to spend more on taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, education and clothing combined, but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

    Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

    On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and speeding and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

    In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has one of the largest prison populations in the world.

    In the schools: The public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

    In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $93 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053. Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

    In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

    In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police have actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

    By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

    By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

    This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

    This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

    Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

    Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

    With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

    All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

    It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is not freedom, America.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chicago Nixed Its Racist Database of Gangs. Other Cities Should Follow.

    The Erase the Database Coalition has worked tirelessly for six years to end unjust surveillance and criminalization of Chicago’s most marginalized communities. On September 7, the Chicago Community Commission on Public Safety and Accountability asserted its oversight ability to vote unanimously to end the city’s gang database and start taking steps to live up to the idea of being a true sanctuary…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • BBC investigation finds body-worn cameras are ‘protecting the police’ rather than improving trust and transparency

    A BBC News investigation revealed that police officers are “widely” misusing body-worn cameras. In some cases, police turned the cameras off during uses of force, and in others officers shared footage from the cameras via WhatsApp. This led to suggestions that the cameras are undermining, rather than building, trust in the police.

    Selective use of body-worn cameras

    On 28 September, BBC News published a two-year investigation into the use of body-worn cameras by police across England and Wales. It found more than 150 reports of officers misusing the devices. They included:

    • Officers failing to switch on their cameras, or actively switching them off, when using force against people.
    • Forces deleting or failing to store crucial footage from body-worn cameras.
    • Individual officers sharing footage from their cameras in person, via social media, or on messaging apps.

    BBC News highlighted the case of Louisa and Yufial, who were prosecuted after allegedly abusing and attacking officers at a Black Lives Matter rally in London in May 2020. The siblings fought a two-year legal battle to obtain footage from the body-worn cameras of the officers in question.

    The footage revealed that an officer had struck Yufial, while another pushed Louisa. Police hadn’t initially disclosed this footage to the pair. At the appeal hearing, BBC News reported that the judge said:

    it seemed the prosecution had deliberately failed to disclose relevant information.

    Litany of misuse

    Noel Titheradge, who led the BBC‘s investigation, shared further examples of body-worn camera misuse on Twitter:

    The BBC investigation corroborated Louisa and Yufial’s experience of obstructions to obtaining footage from body-worn cameras. It reported one case in which two officers turned off their cameras whilst a man was punched five times.

    The force subsequently refused to provide the footage up to the point the cameras were switched off. It claimed that the recordings provided no “tangible benefit to the public”. The Information Commissioner, which is the ultimate arbiter of decisions on freedom of information requests, agreed with this statement.

    Disproportionate impact on Black and Asian people

    Action for Race Equality (ARE) responded to the investigation. The NGO said that the results would erode the public’s faith in policing even further:

    The news that footage is being grossly misused is deeply concerning. Public access to police body worn footage is already incredibly restricted, and officers having the ability to delete, edit, and misuse this footage will only further deplete the public’s trust and confidence in policing.

    This is particularly significant because policing organisations pushed the use of body-worn cameras in part as a means of building trust in policing. The Police Federation, for example, said a camera “increases transparency” and makes “officers more accountable”. A 2022 document from the National Police Chiefs’ Council echoed this. It said that the devices should “promote integrity and confidence in policing”.

    ARE went on to highlight how police misuse of body-worn cameras disproportionately affects Black and Asian people. With officers in England and Wales being five times more likely to use force against Black people, any discretionary decision by officers is statistically more likely to impact incidents involving the Black community.

    Helping the police ‘cover their backs’

    Back in 2016, Canary writer Emily Apple highlighted the problems of body-worn cameras. At a time when police forces were rapidly rolling the devices out to their officers, Apple said:

    police can also pick and choose when they turn their cameras on, so it will still not necessarily mean that the many incidences of police brutality will be recorded.

    This reflected wider anxieties about body cameras as a tool of state surveillance versus their utility in holding officers to account. Then, in 2020, a leaked Met Police memo said the cameras had recorded numerous instances of:

    poor communication, a lack of patience, [and] a lack of de-escalation before use of force is introduced.

    Officers’ discretion over using their body-worn cameras is therefore a mechanism for controlling public image. This is exacerbated by institutional support for the police’s position. Baroness Louise Casey, who led the Casey Review into behaviour and standards at the Metropolitan Police, was reported by BBC News as claiming that:

    many senior police officers believe body-worn video exists almost to cover their backs

    Yufiel agreed. He told the BBC that a body-worn camera is “labelled as protection for the public, but ultimately it protects the police”. Likewise, the Runnymede Trust, a racial equality think tank, described the BBC‘s findings as a:

    consistent pattern of police defending their own, covering up wrongdoing and active harm.

    Police apologists have claimed the BBC‘s investigation only uncovered a relatively few cases of body-worn camera misuse. Yet history has repeatedly belied the claim that there are just ‘few bad apples’ in policing – and it’s members of the public, not the police, who will suffer as a result.

    Featured image via Reveal Body Worn Camera Solutions/YouTube

    By Glen Black

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • CPJ joins statement urging EU states to reject mass surveillance proposal

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined more than 80 other digital and human rights groups in a joint statement on Wednesday, September 13, 2023, urging European Union countries to reject the bloc’s draft Child Sexual Abuse Regulation as it could violate hundreds of millions of people’s privacy rights.

    The proposal could force companies to scan everyone’s private digital communications, on behalf of governments, all the time. Tech companies would be able to break end-to-end encryption, jeopardizing journalists’ ability to protect their sources and violating the right to confidential communications.

    Read the full statement to the EU‘s 27 member states below.

    Read more about press freedom in the European Union in CPJ’s special report “Fragile Progress.”

    Statement-to-EU-countries-Do-not-agree-to-mass-surveillance-proposal-warn-NGOsDownload

    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

  • The Next Crisis Is Anyone’s Guess, But the Government Is Ready to Lockdown the Nation

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    — H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women, 1918

    First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

    Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

    In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

    It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

    Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

    Cue the Emergency State.

    Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

    As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times:

    Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

    Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.

    This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.

    The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.”

    Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.

    Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

    Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

    Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.

    Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.

    That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.

    This hysteria, which culminated in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where hundreds of Americans were called before Congress to testify about their so-called Communist affiliations and intimidated into making false confessions, also paved the way for the rise of an all-knowing, all-seeing governmental surveillance state.

    By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.

    By way of the National Defense Authorization Act, Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.

    Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.

    Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.

    That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.

    Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers, and allowing the FBI to operate as standing army.

    What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.

    So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?

    You should expect more of the same, only worse.

    More compliance, less resistance.

    More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.

    Most of all, you should expect more tyranny and less freedom.

    Given the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems in response to a future crisis, there’s every reason to worry about what comes next.

    Mark my words: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if and when another crisis arises—if and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public— then we will truly understand the extent to which the powers-that-be have fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.

    In the meantime, if all we do to reclaim our freedoms and regain control over our runaway government is vote for yet another puppet of the Deep State, by the time the next crisis arises, it may well be too late.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

    Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.

    The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.

    Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.

    This last point is particularly disturbing.

    Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.

    In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.

    Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.

    What this adds up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

    Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”

    Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every dollar we spend, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly 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.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars.

    Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.

    Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.

    Don’t believe it.

    The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

    Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.

    Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Amnesty International calls out the ‘chilling effect’ of AI facial recognition surveillance on Palestinians

    Amnesty International secretary general Agnes Callamard has called out the “chilling effect” of Israel’s use of facial recognition surveillance on Palestinians.

    Speaking to Middle East Eye, Callamard pointed out the human rights violations inherent in Israel’s discriminatory use of this technology. Her interview follows a detailed report on the issue which Amnesty published in May.

    Automated Apartheid

    In May, Amnesty published an 81-page report titled Automated Apartheid. It documented how the “previously-unreported” Red Wolf facial recognition system formed:

    part of an ever-growing surveillance network which is entrenching the Israeli government’s control over Palestinians.

    Callamard told Middle East Eye that the Red Wolf system used by Israeli authorities at military checkpoints in Occupied Palestinian Territories:

    has major problematic dimensions. The first one is that it is discriminatory, [it] targets Palestinians only. The second is that it has a chilling effect on freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, possibly, by implication, freedom of speech. It has allowed the Israeli authorities to maintain an enormous database of personal data, all of that in the name of… national security.

    Callamard also emphasised that:

    Crucially, crucially, that form of surveillance, automated surveillance as we call it, is part and parcel of the way Israeli authorities are maintaining and imposing a system of apartheid. It is part and parcel of the system of control and oppression and discrimination against one racial group, Palestinians, by the Israeli authorities. That is why… we have said this amounts to automated apartheid.

    Blue Wolf, Red Wolf

    Amnesty’s Automated Apartheid report also noted the ‘gamification’ of surveillance against Palestinians through another system called ‘Blue Wolf’. Operated via a phone app, Blue Wolf incentivised Israeli soldiers to constantly surveil Palestinians.

    The Red Wolf system, meanwhile, is being deployed at checkpoints to severely restrict the movement of Palestinians. In June, Amnesty met with the EU Commission in Brussels to discuss Israel’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to surveil Palestinians. Speaking to Al Jazeera at the time, Amnesty’s Matt Mahmoudi said:

    What’s particularly chilling about the way that it’s deployed in the context of the [Occupied Palestinian Territories] is the ways in which it is governing movement, so literally stifling individuals from being able to access basic rights and services… it’s very clear that Palestinians now have to contend with the additional calculus of fear involved in just engaging in everyday activities… We have accounts and testimonies of Palestinian families… noting how in Hebron the incursion of facial recognition technologies is effectively destroying any form of social life.

    Facial recognition: ‘a new layer of control’

    Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group, collaborated with Amnesty on the report published in May. Former Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldier Ori Givati from Breaking the Silence told Al Jazeera in June:

    When we started hearing about the use of these systems, we are hearing about basically a new layer of control… so, if until now, we have been controlling them only in the physical space… we added another layer which is controlling Palestinians’ digital space… So Palestinian today in the occupied territories is not only feeling like his home might be invaded any moment but also that his most private… information is being controlled by the military

    In other words, the use of pervasive electronic surveillance and facial recognition has entrenched even deeper Israel’s military occupation of Palestinians. It has further restricted the freedoms of Palestinians and added yet another level of fear and intrusion as they just try to go about their daily lives.

    The discriminatory and disproportionate application of these systems against Palestinians leaves little doubt that what they achieve is not security, as Israel claims. It is, by definition, apartheid.

    Featured image via YouTube/ Middle East Eye

    By Afroze Fatima Zaidi

  • Putin and Xi are the Laurel and Hardy of statesmen – but it’s no laughing matter | Simon Tisdall

    China’s paramount leader, like his Russian counterpart, is making a fine mess of his country’s economy and world standing

    It must be tough, being a dictator, when your diktats are ignored, thwarted and scorned. Vladimir Putin is a sad case in point. He ordered the glorious reintegration of Ukraine into his imaginary Russian empire. What he got was an existential crisis that he couldn’t control.

    China’s president, Xi Jinping, is another paramount leader with dictatorship issues. Xi presumes to exercise supreme control, channelling Mao Zedong like a card-carrying Communist party Zeus – yet repeatedly messes up. Xi’s signature tune could be the chorus to Moby’s Extreme Ways: “Then it fell apart … Like it always does.”

    Continue reading…

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

  • Out of the shadows: why making NZ’s security threat assessment public is timely

    ANALYSIS: By Alexander Gillespie, University of Waikato

    The release of the threat assessment by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) this week is the final piece in a defence and security puzzle that marks a genuine shift towards more open and public discussion of these crucial policy areas.

    Together with July’s strategic foreign policy assessment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the national security strategy released last week, it rounds out the picture of New Zealand’s place in a fast-evolving geopolitical landscape.

    From increased strategic competition between countries, to declining social trust within them, as well as rapid technological change, the overall message is clear: business as usual is no longer an option.

    By releasing the strategy documents in this way, the government and its various agencies clearly hope to win public consent and support — ultimately, the greatest asset any country possesses to defend itself.

    Low threat of violent extremism
    If there is good news in the SIS assessment, it is that the threat of violent extremism is still considered “low”. That means no change since the threat level was reassessed last year, with a terror attack considered “possible” rather than “probable”.

    It is a welcome development since the threat level was lifted to “high” in the
    immediate aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack in 2019.

    This was lowered to “medium” about a month later — where it sat in September 2021, when another extremist attacked people with a knife in an Auckland mall, seriously
    wounding five.

    The threat level stayed there during the escalating social tension resulting from the government’s covid response. This saw New Zealand’s first conviction for sabotage and increasing threats to politicians, with the SIS and police intervening in at least one case to mitigate the risk.

    After protesters were cleared from the grounds of Parliament in early 2022, it was
    still feared an act of extremism by a small minority was likely.

    These risks now seem to be receding. And while the threat assessment notes that the online world can provide havens for extremism, the vast majority of those expressing vitriolic rhetoric are deemed unlikely to carry through with violence in the real world.

    Changing patterns of extremism
    Assessments like this are not a crystal ball; threats can emerge quickly and be near-invisible before they do. But right now, at least publicly, the SIS is not aware of any specific or credible attack planning.

    New Zealand's Security Threat Environment 2023 report
    New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment 2023 report. Image: APR screenshot

    Many extremists still fit well-defined categories. There are the politically motivated, potentially violent, anti-authority conspiracy theorists, of which there is a “small number”.

    And there are those motivated by identity (with white supremacist extremism the dominant strand) or faith (such as support for Islamic State, a decreasing and “very small number”).

    However, the SIS describes a noticeable increase in individuals who don’t fit within those traditional boundaries, but who hold mixed, unstable or unclear ideologies they may tailor to fit some other violent or extremist impulse.

    Espionage and cyber-security risks

    There also seems to be a revival of the espionage and spying cultures last seen during the Cold War. There is already the first military case of espionage before the courts, and the SIS is aware of individuals on the margins of government being cultivated and offered financial and other incentives to provide sensitive information.

    The SIS says espionage operations by foreign intelligence agencies against New Zealand, both at home and abroad, are persistent, opportunistic and increasingly wide ranging.

    While the government remains the main target, corporations, research institutions and state contractors are now all potential sources of sensitive information. Because non-governmental agencies are often not prepared for such threats, they pose a significant security risk.

    Cybersecurity remains a particular concern, although the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) recorded 350 incidents in 2021-22, which was a decline from 404 incidents recorded in the previous 12-month period.

    On the other hand, a growing proportion of cyber incidents affecting major New Zealand institutions can be linked to state-sponsored actors. Of the 350 reported major incidents, 118 were connected to foreign states (34 percent of the total, up from 28 percent the previous year).

    Russia, Iran and China
    Although the SIS recorded that only a “small number” of foreign states engaged in deceptive, corruptive or coercive attempts to exert political or social influence, the potential for harm is “significant”.

    Some of the most insidious examples concern harassment of ethnic communities within New Zealand who speak out against the actions of a foreign government.

    The SIS identifies Russia, Iran and China as the three offenders. Iran was recorded as reporting on Iranian communities and dissident groups in New Zealand. In addition, the assessment says:

    Most notable is the continued targeting of New Zealand’s diverse ethnic Chinese communities. We see these activities carried out by groups and individuals linked to the intelligence arm of the People’s Republic of China.

    Overall, the threat assessment makes for welcome – if at times unsettling – reading. Having such conversations in the open, rather than in whispers behind closed doors, demystifies aspects of national security.

    Most importantly, it gives greater credibility to those state agencies that must increase their transparency in order to build public trust and support for their unique roles within a working democracy.The Conversation

    Dr Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

  • Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition

          CounterSpin230811.mp3

     

    NYT: Eight Months Pregnant and Arrested After False Facial Recognition Match (with photo of Porcha Woodruff)

    New York Times (8/6/23)

    This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

    Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state.  We hear that conversation this week.

    Transcript:  ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

          CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3

     

    Newsweek: President Joe Biden's plan to cancel $39bn in student loans for hundreds of thousands of Americans

    Newsweek (8/7/23)

    Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

    Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

          CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

    The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.

  • Community Organizer Spied on by FBI and Colorado Springs Police Speaks Out

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department and local officers for illegally spying on local activist Jacqueline “Jax” Armendariz Unzueta and the Chinook Center, a community organizing hub in Colorado Springs. “This was one of the worst moments of my life,” says Unzueta, who describes the investigation by law enforcement as “incredibly…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Home Office secretly backs facial recognition technology to curb shoplifting

    Covert government strategy to install electronic surveillance in shops raises issues around bias and data, and contrasts sharply with the EU ban to keep AI out of public spaces

    Home Office officials have drawn up secret plans to lobby the independent privacy regulator in an attempt to push the rollout of controversial facial recognition technology into high street shops and supermarkets, internal government minutes seen by the Observer reveal.

    The covert strategy was agreed during a closed-door meeting on 8 March between policing minister Chris Philp, senior Home Office officials and the private firm Facewatch, whose facial recognition cameras have provoked fierce opposition after being installed in shops.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Whether You Live in a Small Town or a Big City, the Government Is Still Out to Get You

    There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

    This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

    The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

    Yet the song gets it wrong.

    You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

    Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

    It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

    Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

    That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

    Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

    While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

    Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

    For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

    We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

    We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

    We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

    And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

    By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

    This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

    The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

    Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

    So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Being Awake

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tracking

    “Your Smartphone Is Worse Than a Spy in Your Pocket: Edward Snowden“

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Targeted for Tyranny: We’re All Suspects Under the Government’s Pre-crime Program

    We’re all being targeted now.

    We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.

    And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.

    Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.

    Nationwide, there are upwards of 123 real-time crime centers (a.k.a. fusion centers), which allow local police agencies to upload and share massive amounts of surveillance data and intelligence with state and federal agencies culled from surveillance cameras, facial recognition technology, gunshot sensors, social media monitoring, drones and body cameras, and artificial intelligence-driven predictive policing algorithms.

    These data fusion centers, which effectively create an electronic prison—a digital police state—from which there is no escape, are being built in partnership with big tech companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which helped to fuel the rise of police militarization and domestic surveillance.

    While these latest expansions of the surveillance state are part of the Biden Administration’s efforts to combat domestic extremism through the creation of a “pre-crime” crime prevention agency, they have long been a pivotal part of the government’s plans for total control and dominion.

    Yet this crime prevention campaign is not so much about making America safer as it is about ensuring that the government has the wherewithal to muzzle anti-government discontent, penalize anyone expressing anti-government sentiments, and preemptively nip in the bud any attempts by the populace to challenge the government’s authority or question its propaganda.

    As J.D. Tuccille writes for Reason, “[A]t a time when government officials rage against ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ that is often just disagreement with whatever opinions are currently popular among the political class, fusion centers frequently scrutinize peaceful dissenting speech.”

    Indeed, while the Biden Administration was recently dealt a legal blow over its attempts to urge social media companies to do more to combat so-called dis- and mis-information, these fusion centers are the unacknowledged powerhouses behind the government’s campaign to censor and retaliate against those who vocalize their disagreement and discontent with government policies.

    Already, the powers-that-be are mobilizing to ensure that fusion centers have the ability to monitor and lock down sectors of a community at a moment’s notice.

    For instance, a 42,000-square-foot behemoth of a fusion center in downtown Washington is reportedly designed to “better prepare law enforcement for the next public health emergency or Jan. 6-style attack.” According to an agency spokeswoman, “Screens covering the walls of the new facility will show surveillance cameras around the city as well as social media accounts that may be monitored for threatening speech.”

    It’s like a scene straight out of Steven Spielberg’s dystopian film Minority Report.

    Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.

    What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.

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

    In this way, the novel 1984 has become an operation manual for an omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state in which ordinary Americans find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s pre-crime sensors.

    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’s also a setup ripe for abuse.

    For instance, an investigative report by the Brennan Center found that “Over the last two decades, leaked materials have shown fusion centers tracking protestors and casting peaceful activities as potential threats. Their targets have included racial justice and environmental advocates, right-wing activists, and third-party political candidates.”

    One fusion center in Maine was found to have been “illegally collecting and sharing information about Maine residents who weren’t suspected of criminal activity. They included gun purchasers, people protesting the construction of a new power transmission line, the employees of a peace-building summer camp for teenagers, and even people who travelled to New York City frequently.”

    This is how the government is turning a nation of citizens into suspects and would-be criminals.

    This transformation is being driven by the Department of Homeland Security, the massive, costly, power-hungry bureaucracy working hard to ensure that the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful.

    Yet here’s the thing: you don’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 need to do is live in the United States.

    It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

    Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score.

    Without having ever knowingly committed a crime or been convicted of one, you and your fellow citizens have likely been assessed for behaviors the government might consider devious, dangerous or concerning; assigned a threat score based on your associations, activities and viewpoints; and catalogued in a government database according to how you should be approached by police and other government agencies based on your particular threat level.

    Combine predictive policing with surveillance, over-criminalization and pre-crime programs, then add in militarized police trained to shoot first and ask questions later, and as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, you’ll be lucky to escape with your life.

    If you’re not scared yet, you should be.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine a testing ground for Israeli ‘occupation war tech’, says author

    Antony Loewenstein
    Investigative journalist Antony Loewenstein . . . author of The Palestine Laboratory. Image: AL website

    Asia Pacific Report:
    Locations
    Monday, July 17: Christchurch
    Public meeting, 7pm
    Knox Centre, Cnr Bealey Avenue & Victoria street, Christchurch (books available)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/813719740268177/

    Tuesday, July 18: Wellington
    7pm
    St Andrews on the Terrace, 30 The Terrace (Unity Books will have a rep there)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/644521054258279/

    Wednesday, July 19: Hawkes Bay
    8pm
    Greenmeadows Community Hall, 83 Tait Drive, Napier
    https://www.facebook.com/events/6474977775923813/

    Thursday, July 20: Auckland
    Public Meeting, 7pm
    The Fickling Centre, 546 Mt Albert Road (The Women’s Bookshop will be at the meeting to sell books)
    https://www.facebook.com/events/285795137317711/


    TRT World News interviews Antony Loewenstein on this week’s Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp.

  • Israel Is Already Weaponizing AI — But Not in the Ways It Claims to Be

    Do scholars and activists who support Palestinian rights sometimes unintentionally promote the Israeli arms industry? The Israeli military hype machine famously uses the occupation as a “laboratory” or as a “showcase” for its newly developed weapons, but this creates a dilemma for activists who oppose Israeli arms exports. Scholars and activists are morally obligated to highlight the crimes…

    Source

  • German climate activists describe police wiretapping their communications as ‘absurd’

    Prosecutors in Germany confirmed a press report that police investigators listened in on phone calls of climate activists from Letzte Generation (“Last Generation”). The exposé sparked public outrage and rebuke from the activists.

    Climate surveillance

    Letzte Generation is known for members gluing themselves to roads to draw attention to the climate crisis. Police across Germany raided members of the group in May as part of an investigation into whether the protest group was raising funds to commit ‘criminal acts’. Police in the capital state of Bradenburg carried out similar raids in December 2022.

    A spokesperson for the Munich public prosecutor’s office said police are investigating whether Letzte Generation is “forming or supporting a criminal organisation”. Meanwhile, the group branded the police’s actions as “absurd”.

    The Sueddeutsche newspaper first revealed the wiretapping on 24 June. It said police surveillance had begun in October 2022. It included monitoring emails and voicemail accounts, and logging the GPS data of mobile phones.

    Following the exposé, Munich’s public prosecutor described some of the calls monitored. They included conversations between members of the climate activist group and journalists making media enquiries. Police didn’t target journalists directly, the prosecutor said, but they “were affected by the measures due to calls made via the monitored telephone numbers”.

    Disproportionate policing

    Reacting to the news, Letzte Generation wrote on Twitter:

    We protest showing our names and faces, publish our plans, accept the legal consequences.

    Nevertheless, the Bavarian LKA (police) logged telephone calls, emails and movement profiles. Even our press phone was monitored. That is absurd!

    The climate activist group added that it is unsure whether police are still surveilling its communications.

    Politicians weighed in on the news, too. Dietmar Bartsch, parliamentary leader of the left-wing Linke opposition party, called the surveillance “completely inappropriate”. And Lars Castellucci, an MP from the ruling Social Democrats (SPD), said the wiretapping “raises questions about proportionality”.

    Letzte Generation activists have vowed to continue their protests.

    Featured image via Letzte Generation/YouTube

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Glen Black

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Our Ongoing March Into Dystopia And Oblivion

    Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

    ❖

    Lots of fun stuff in the news today.

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which oversees the spy agencies of the United States, has admitted in a report requested by Senator Ron Wyden that the US intelligence cartel has been circumventing constitutional regulations designed to protect US citizens from government surveillance by simply purchasing information collected by commercial data brokers.

    In an escalation in surveillance capitalism that should surprise no one but alarm everyone, US intelligence agencies have found that while the Fourth Amendment prohibits their directly wiretapping, hacking or bugging whomever they please without a warrant, there’s nothing stopping them from simply purchasing massive amounts of data harvested by Silicon Valley tech companies which can provide them with similar kinds of information. So that’s what they’ve been doing, because of course it is.

    But remember kids, it’s important for you to be very afraid of TikTok because TikTok might harvest your information and give it to an authoritarian surveillance state.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    CIA: Can I have your personal information?
    People: No way!
    Google: Can I have your personal information?
    People: Sure.
    Google: Here's that personal information you bought.
    CIA: Thanks!

    — Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) June 15, 2023

    A disturbing new Responsible Statecraft piece by Branko Marcetic notes that the civilian leadership roles in the US government which have historically been responsible for reining in the more dangerous impulses of the US war machine have actually been far more hawkish and aggressive on Ukraine than the Pentagon’s professional warmakers. According to a recent Washington Post report, inside the Biden administration “the Pentagon is considered more cautious than the White House or State Department about sending more sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine.”

    If only the war machine is responsible for placing checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine, that means there are no real checks on the nuclear brinkmanship of the war machine. If JFK had been more hawkish and aggressive than his own generals at the most perilous moments of the last cold war, it’s entirely likely that the world as we know it would not exist today. It is bone-chilling that we are relying on the better angels of the most murderous military on earth to see us through these increasingly close games of nuclear chicken.

    As Marcetic discussed in another article last year, the insanely hawkish rhetoric we are seeing from the western political/media class around the subject of nuclear brinkmanship is demonstrably far more oriented toward reckless confrontation than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The people whose job it is to encourage restraint in these situations — the press, the diplomats, and the elected officials — are instead doing the exact opposite.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    Insane and evil–the AEI dips a toe in the idea that the US should give Ukraine nukes:https://t.co/qiI7UyXchZ

    — Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) June 13, 2023

    And the discourse is only getting crazier. The neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute is now floating the idea of giving nukes to Ukraine, which is about as evil and demented a foreign policy position as anyone could possibly come up with.

    This as influential Russian foreign policy strategist Sergey Karaganov argues that Moscow has “set too high a threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and that “it is necessary to arouse the instinct of self-preservation that the West has lost” by “lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons” and “moving up the deterrence-escalation ladder.” Karaganov cites the fact that Belarus has begun receiving tactical nukes from Russia to show that Moscow is already moving in this direction.

    This looks all the more disquieting in light of Michael Tracey’s observations in a recent Newsweek article titled “The Government Keeps Lying to Us About Ukraine. Where Is the Outrage?” Tracey discusses the way fighters from Ukraine and from NATO member Poland have been ramping up attacks on Russian territory, while the US government and news media deceive the American public about the fact that this is happening and how dangerous it is.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    I wrote an item for Newsweek about how the US government is systematically deceiving the American people about the nature of US involvement in Ukraine — and the deception keeps getting more and more extreme https://t.co/zexOTPTCMy

    — Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 14, 2023

    On top of all this you’ve got the empire’s increasingly ridiculous spin about the Nord Stream pipeline bombings. The mass media are now saying that Ukrainian special operations forces perpetrated the attack, and that the CIA had advanced knowledge of their plans, but tried unsuccessfully to tell them not to go through with it.

    Which is a narrative that just so happens to fit perfectly into alignment with the information interests of the US empire. It contradicts reporting by Seymour Hersh that the US was directly involved in the attack, it pins culpability on a nation with whom the west highly sympathizes who can be framed as acting in their own defense against Russian invaders, and the US intelligence cartel gets to wash its hands of the whole ordeal by claiming it told the Ukrainians not to attack pipelines used by US ally Germany.

    It’s also a narrative that is completely nonsensical. Saying “America didn’t attack Nord Stream, Ukraine did!” is like saying “Will Smith didn’t slap Chris Rock, his hand did!” Ukraine is completely dependent on the will of the US government to continue this war; if the US government draws a hard line and tells them not to do something or risk losing support, it will necessarily have to obey. It’s been public knowledge for a year now that the CIA is intimately involved in activities on the ground in Ukraine, and the CIA has been actively training Ukrainian special operations forces since before this war even began.

    class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>

    It’s amazing how many revisions this “actually Ukraine did it” narrative has undergone ever since Hersh’s bombshell in February forced NATO spy agencies to plant a counter-narrative. It’s like watching a slow wiki page edit, revised & drip-dripped across major NATOland media. https://t.co/4lygcedysJ

    — Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) June 14, 2023

    So it’s a distinction without a difference to claim that Ukraine and not the US bombed Nord Stream — and that’s pretending for the sake of argument that we know the US wasn’t much more directly involved in the attack than it is admitting. There is currently no logical reason to assume that’s even the case, and there is never any valid reason to take the US intelligence cartel at its word about anything.

    We are marching toward dystopia and oblivion, and we are doing it in ways that have no historical precedent. We’re in completely uncharted waters, and things are only getting crazier and crazier.

    What a wild world. What a time to be alive.

    _______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    Featured image via Adobe Stock.

  • Judge refuses fresh evidence in Assange appeal, but there are at least two Get Out Of Jail cards

    On 8 June, high court judge Jonathan Swift announced that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s appeal against extradition to the US has failed. Swift’s rulings are here and here.

    The rulings came just days after it was revealed that new evidence had been withheld by police in Spain. That evidence appears to further demonstrate the political nature of the Assange prosecution.

    Meanwhile, Swift has given Assange’s lawyers until Tuesday 13 June to submit another appeal. However, he made it clear that any appeal should not include a submission of fresh evidence. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to explore this new evidence.

    The surveillance

    Spanish security firm UC Global conducted surveillance of Assange and his visitors inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London over several years:

    According to a former employee of the firm, “American friends” requested the surveillance. UC Global even arranged for the surveillance to be streamed to the US.

    Newly revealed evidence

    The new evidence was revealed during the ongoing investigation in a Madrid court of UC Global head David Morales. As a result, Assange accused Morales of violating his privacy. This fresh evidence consists of files marked on an external hard drive as “CIA,” “Embassy”, and “Videos”.

    WikiLeaks journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson published a screenshot of the files:

    The connection between Morales and US intelligence was first brought to the attention of the London court by Assange’s defence lawyer Gareth Peirce.

    How the new evidence was discovered

    Assange’s lawyers were active in exposing the missing UC Global surveillance files.

    Spanish news outlet El Pais explained:

    The discovery of these new clues about the CIA’s spying on the cyberactivist — who remains imprisoned in a London jail — is no accident. Assange’s lawyers found problems when downloading the records uploaded to the cloud.

    They managed to get Judge Santiago Pedraz — who is overseeing the case — to authorize a second copy of the material seized by the agents.

    Failure to disclose evidence

    Spanish police had failed to disclose the new evidence to the Madrid court. Its concealment is directly relevant to the Assange extradition proceedings.

    Regarding the non-disclosure of evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) clearly states:

    A failure by the prosecutor or the police to comply with their respective obligations… may result in a defence application to stay proceedings as an abuse of process, the exclusion of material evidence or a successful appeal.

    Two famous cases of non-disclosure in the UK resulted in the quashing of convictions and the accused set free.

    One saw the collapse of the Ratcliffe and Drax trials of environmental activists and their convictions quashed. Both trials showed the CPS withheld evidence that undercover officer Mark Kennedy was pivotal to the actions.

    In another case, four people known as the ‘Guildford Four’, accused of bombing a pub, had their convictions quashed too. That was after defence lawyers – including Peirce, who represents Assange – revealed that police had withheld evidence of their innocence.

    Surveillance breaches confidentiality

    CIA spy-craft could be regarded as par for the course.

    But that’s not necessarily true in this case. In September 2019 the Canary reported that the surveillance on the Ecuadorian Embassy involved monitoring of meetings between the Wikileaks founder and his lawyers. The lawyers included Melynda Taylor, Jennifer Robinson, and Baltasar Garzón.

    Indeed, the Madrid court was told that Morales:

    had received explicit requests for information, which stated on several occasions that these requests came from the US, in the form of a list of targets which were communicated via email, telephone and verbally. The security personnel deployed in the embassy were instructed to pay special attention to these targets. Among them, special attention had to be given to Mr. Assange’s lawyers.

    Thus the newly revealed evidence could throw more light on these breaches of client-lawyer confidentiality. Such breaches would normally see a case voided.

    It’s not over yet

    Given Swift’s rulings, any appeal submitted on Tuesday will likely be about points of law.

    However, as his wife Stella Assange pointed out, there’s a possibility that Swift’s rulings could be bypassed:

    Assange’s ‘get out of jail’ cards?

    There are at least two more Get Out Of Jail options available to Assange’s legal team. For example, an earlier appeal to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is yet to conclude. It’s possible the ECHR could issue an injunction to delay the extradition until it can examine the case further.

    Should that option fail, Assange lawyer Jennifer Robinson has argued for a political solution. One suggestion is that the US and Australia agree on a deal that takes into account the time served by Assange in Belmarsh prison.

    Matters may be coming to a head.

    Featured image via YouTube – Zabby

    By Tom Coburg

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • New Biography Details How MLK’s Criticism of Malcolm X Was Fabricated

    We speak in depth with journalist Jonathan Eig about his new book, King: A Life, the first major biography of the civil rights leader in more than 35 years, which draws on unredacted FBI files, as well as the files of the personal aide to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, to show how Johnson and others partnered in the FBI’s surveillance of King and efforts to destroy him, led by director J.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China

     

    AP: TikTok content creators file lawsuit against Montana over first-in-nation law banning app

    “Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” a lawsuit argues (AP, 5/18/23).

    There is an emerging consensus in US foreign policy circles that a US/China cold  war is either imminent or already underway (Foreign Policy, 12/29/22; New Yorker, 2/26/23; New York Times, 3/23/23; Fox News, 3/28/23; Reuters, 3/30/23). Domestically, the most recent and most intense iteration of this anti-China fervor is the move to ban the Chinese video app TikTok, which is both a sweeping assault on free speech movement and a dangerous sign that mere affiliation with China is grounds for vilification and loss of rights.

    Several TikTok content creators are suing to overturn “Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights,” on the grounds “that the state doesn’t have any authority over matters of national security” (AP, 5/18/23). TikTok followed up with a lawsuit of its own (New York Times, 5/22/23). The app is banned on government devices at the federal level and in some states (CBS, 3/1/23; AP, 3/1/23), but the Montana law is the first to bar its use outright.

    Momentum for a wider ban

    USA Today: Lawmakers announces bipartisan legislation that would ban TikTok in the US

    Rep. Mike Gallagher (R.-Wis.), a congressmember seeking to ban TikTok nationally, called the app “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans” (USA Today, 12/13/22).

    Republicans see this as momentum to push other state bans. Lawmakers of both major parties are pushing legislation that “would block all transactions from any social media company in or under the influence of a ‘country of concern,’ like China and Russia,” a move that would ban TikTok in the US (USA Today, 12/13/22). Such a sweeping ban is popular among voters, especially among Republicans (Pew, 3/31/23; Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23).

    The reason for the swift action is the app’s Chinese ownership. Rep. Darrell Issa (R.-Calif.) said, “Having TikTok on our phones is like having 80 million Chinese spy balloons flying over America” (Twitter, 2/28/23)—a reference to one of the most overblown news stories of 2023 (CounterPunch, 2/7/23; FAIR.org, 2/10/23). FBI Director Christopher Wray (CNBC, 11/15/22) told Congress of his “national security concerns” about TikTok, warning that

    the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users. Or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations…. Or to control software on millions of devices…to potentially technically compromise personal devices.

    The New York Times (3/17/23) reported that the

    Justice Department is investigating the surveillance of American citizens, including several journalists who cover the tech industry, by the Chinese company that owns TikTok.

    Social spying hypocrisy

    Al Jazeera: US says China can spy with TikTok. It spies on world with Google

    While US lawmakers railed against the possibility that TikTok might be used by China to spy on US users, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the “US government itself uses US tech companies that effectively control the global internet to spy on everyone else.”

    The funny thing here is that if the US government is worried about social media being used for surveillance, it should look inward. The Brennan Center (8/18/22), which is suing for Department of Homeland Security records on its use of social media surveillance tools, notes that “social media has become a significant source of information for US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” The civil liberties organization notes that “there are myriad examples of the FBI and DHS using social media to surveil people speaking out on issues from racial justice to the treatment of immigrants.”

    Even as Congress mulls a ban on TikTok, Al Jazeera (3/28/23) reported, the Biden administration is seeking “the renewal of powers that force firms like Google, Meta and Apple to facilitate untrammeled spying on non-US citizens located overseas.” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) gives Washington the power to snoop on the social media conversations of users both foreign and, through the use of so-called “backdoor searches,” domestic. While many governments spy, the Qatari news site pointed out, “Washington enjoys an advantage not shared by other countries: jurisdiction over the handful of companies that effectively run the modern internet.”

    “They’re making a big stink about TikTok and the Chinese collecting data when the US is collecting a great deal of data itself,” Seton Hall constitutional law expert Jonathan Hafetz told Al Jazeera. “It is a little bit ironic for the US to sort of trumpet citizens’ privacy concerns or worries about surveillance. It’s OK for them to collect the data, but they don’t want China to collect it.”

    Accordingly, the Biden administration is demanding the platform be sold to rid itself of Chinese ownership, insisting that failure to do so would result in a nationwide ban. The New York Times (3/15/23) said this stance “harks back to the position of former President Donald J. Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company.” In 2020, FAIR (8/5/20) raised the possibility that Trump would leverage anti-Chinese sentiment to go after the app, but now a Democratic administration could finish what Trump started.

    Don’t assume the president is bluffing, either; FAIR (7/1/21) reported that the Biden administration, citing “disinformation” as a reason, “shut down the websites of 33 foreign media outlets, including ones based in Iran, Bahrain, Yemen and Palestine,” a list that included Iranian state broadcaster Press TV.

    An orchestrated campaign

    WaPo: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok

    Facebook parent company Meta paid a GOP consulting firm to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat, especially as a foreign-owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post, 3/30/22).

    TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a for-profit tech company headquartered in Beijing and incorporated in the Cayman Islands. ByteDance disputes that it has the ability to track US citizens (CNBC, 10/21/22), and the Chinese government denies that it pressures companies to engage in espionage (New York Times, 3/24/23). But TikTok, like other for-profit social media platforms, routinely collects data on users to sell to advertisers (MarketWatch, 10/25/22; CBC, 3/1/23).

    Global Times (3/24/23), published by China’s Communist Party, declared that the “witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’s technological innovation is going downhill.” “The political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility,” the paper added.

    The party paper (3/1/23) acknowledged that TikTok still has a profit “gap with Google, Facebook, etc.,” but maintained that “its growth momentum is rapid,” and thus “directly threatens the advertising revenue of several major social networks in the US.” The paper said that “if the US does not go after TikTok and curb its growth in the relevant market, several leading US high-tech and networking companies” would feel a competitive sting.

    Chinese state and party media have hyperbolic tendencies, but this accusation of a financial motive for opposition to TikTok isn’t far-fetched. In fact, the Washington Post (3/30/22) reported that

    Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

    The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor.

    Such a move might seem comically cynical, but it’s working. Corporate anti-competitive power has joined an alliance with Cold War fears about the Chinese to influence US policy, to the extent that the government is contemplating censoring media now available to 80 million Americans. (By comparison, CNN.com reportedly has 129 million unique monthly visitors in the US, the New York Times brand has 99 million and FoxNews.com has 76 million.)

    Unprecedented silencing

    Pew: More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend on other social media sites

    A growing share of TikTok users are regularly getting news from the site (Pew, 10/21/22)—”in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.”

    A media silencing of that magnitude seems unprecedented; the Biden administration’s seizure of Middle Eastern media websites is troubling, but Press TV isn’t as central to US life as TikTok is. “In just two years, the share of US adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has roughly tripled, from 3% in 2020 to 10% in 2022,” Pew Research (10/21/22) reported, which stands “in contrast with many other social media sites, where news consumption has either declined or stayed about the same in recent years.” TikTok has announced plans to share its ad revenue with its content creators (Variety, 5/4/22), and the platform played a role in the rebounding of US post-pandemic tourism markets (Wall Street Journal, 5/8/23).

    TikTok has argued that bans would hurt the US economy (Axios, 3/21/23), although the nation’s top lawmakers are unmoved by this (Newsweek, 3/14/23).

    The urge to cleanse the media landscape of anything related to China has been roiling at a smaller scale for some time. Rep. Brian Mast (R.-Fla.) wants to ban Chinese government and Communist Party officials from US social platforms (Mast press release, 3/22/23; Fox News, 6/14/22) because, as he said in a press statement, “Chinese officials lie through our social media.” Singling out the sinister duplicity of Chinese officials overlooks the reality that mendacity among politicians is a universal cross-cultural phenomenon.

    The Trump administration required “five Chinese state-run media organizations to register their personnel and property with the US government, granting them a designation akin to diplomatic entities,” affecting “Xinhua News Agency; China Global Television Network, previously known as CCTV; China Radio International; the parent company of China Daily newspaper; and the parent company of the People’s Daily newspaper” (Politico, 2/18/20).

    In an effort to paint the Democratic Socialists of America-backed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) as some sort of shadowy foreign agent, Fox News (2/2/23) ran the headline, “AOC, Other Politicians Paid Thousands in Campaign Cash to Chinese Foreign Agent.” But buried in the clunky language of the news story is the fact Ocasio-Cortez and other politicians, including at least one Republican, simply ran campaign ads in Chinese-language newspapers owned by Sing Tao, a Hong Kong-based newspaper company. Candidates routinely buy ads in ethnic media to reach voters, but Fox offered this innocuous campaign act as evidence of Chinese treachery within our borders.

    Fear of an Asian menace

    Guardian: DeSantis signs bills banning Chinese citizens from buying land in Florida

    Gov. Ron DeSantis presents Florida’s discrimination against Chinese nationals as a move to counter “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” (Guardian, 5/9/23).

    It’s worth remembering that fear of an Asian menace in the United States led to the nation’s first major immigration restrictions (CNN, 5/6/23) and mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans during World War II (NPR, 1/29/23; FAIR.org, 2/16/23). It continues to lead to racist murder (CNN, 6/23/22) and other anti-Asian crimes (Guardian, 7/21/22).

    “Inflammatory rhetoric about China can exacerbate the sense that Asian Americans are ‘racialized outsiders,’” Asian-American advocates said during the Covid pandemic (Axios, 3/23/21). Florida’s recent ban on property ownership by Chinese nationals (Guardian, 5/9/23) shows that the impulse to scapegoat is alive and well.

    If official fears about TikTok collection of user data—which is central to the business model of all major US social media companies—can override First Amendment guarantees and deprive Americans of a major communication platform, then one has to ask what more the states and the federal government that are already frothing with anti-China hysteria are willing to do next.

    In this sense, the people suing to keep TikTok available in Montana aren’t simply fighting for their access to a content platform, but are repelling a political impulse that in the past has led us to blacklists and McCarthyism. Let’s hope these video makers are victorious.

    Research assistance: Lara-Nour Walton

    The post Montana TikTok Ban a Sign of Intensified Cold War With China appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Ultra Violence

    Rachel Maddow’s podcast tells the story of American Nazis in the 1940s. But the era’s real and lasting authoritarian danger came from the spectacular growth of a national security state.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • French court’s approval of Olympics AI surveillance plan fuels privacy concerns

    Rights groups including Amnesty and Human Rights Watch call proposals ‘a dangerous precedent’ in open letter

    France’s top constitutional court has sanctioned the controversial use of surveillance powered by artificial intelligence at next year’s Olympics in a blow to privacy campaigners.

    The French court’s decision came two months after the national assembly approved laws allowing for the experimental use of hi-tech surveillance in an attempt to head off any trouble at the Games next summer, when 600,000 people are expected to attend.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Iranian police plan to use smart cameras to identify ‘violators of hijab law’

    Women who break Islamic dress code will be identified, warned on first instance and then taken to court

    Police in Iran plan to use smart technology in public places to identify and then penalise women who violate the country’s strict Islamic dress code, the force said on Saturday.

    A statement said police would “take action to identify norm-breaking people by using tools and smart cameras in public places and thoroughfares”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Policing Does Not Have Problems — It Is the Problem

    Watching the brutal beating of Tyre Nichols for me drove home a deeper understanding that policing as an institution can never be reformed, and that policing itself is structurally tied to inherent forms of repressive control, “legitimate” violence and surveillance. The activity of policing has embedded within it a normative construction of the social world that identifies what must be subdued.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  •  ICE Has Quietly Been Forcing Schools and Abortion Clinics to Share Private Data

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have requested information from news organizations, elementary schools and abortion clinics, according to documents received by Wired. The agency has also demanded data from major tech firms, money transfer services, telecommunications companies, and utility companies by issuing administrative subpoenas known as 1509 custom summonses.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Restrict Act Critics Call the Far-Reaching “TikTok Ban” Bill a “Patriot Act 2.0”

    First off, let’s be clear on one thing: The supposed “TikTok ban” bill — aka the bipartisan Restrict Act (S.686) — does not actually ban TikTok. The word “TikTok” does not appear once in the bill’s 55 pages. But critics of the Restrict Act on the left and right are now sounding the alarm in rare alignment — calling the measure a Patriot Act 2.0 which opens the door to unprecedented digital…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In First TikTok, AOC Says Solution Is Not Ban But Strong Privacy Laws



    Amid a national debate over whether Congress should ban TikTok, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday posted her first video on the social media platform to make the case for shifting the focus to broad privacy protections for Americans.

    The New York Democrat’s move follows TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee as well as rights content creators, privacy advocates, and other progressive lawmakers rallying against a company-specific ban on Capitol Hill earlier this week.

    Supporters of banning TikTok—which experts say would benefit its Big Tech competitors, Google, Meta, and Snap—claim to be concerned that ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform, could share data with the Chinese government.

    Meanwhile, digital rights advocates such as Fight for the Future director Evan Greer have argued that if really policymakers want to protect Americans from the surveillance capitalist business model also embraced by U.S. tech giants, “they should advocate for strong data privacy laws that prevent all companies (including TikTok!) from collecting so much sensitive data about us in the first place, rather than engaging in what amounts to xenophobic showboating that does exactly nothing to protect anyone.”

    Ocasio-Cortez embraced that argument, saying in her inaugural video: “Do I believe TikTok should be banned? No.”

    “I think it’s important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be,” Ocasio-Cortez says. “The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders, and this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it.”

    Advocates of banning TikTok “say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app,” she explains. “However, that doesn’t really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don’t know about without really any significant regulation whatsoever.”

    “In fact, the United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books,” the congresswoman stresses, pointing to the European Union’s legislation as an example. “So to me, the solution here is not to ban an individual company, but to actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no.”

    “Usually when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing,” she notes, adding that no such event has happened. “So why would we be proposing a ban regarding such a significant issue without being clued in on this at all? It just doesn’t feel right to me.”

    The “Squad” member further argues that “we are a government by the people and for the people—and if we want to make a decision as significant as banning TikTok,” any information that could justify such a policy “should be shared with the public.”

    “Our first priority,” Ocasio-Cortez concludes, “should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.