Nestled near the headwaters of the Au Sable River in Northern Lower Michigan, in lands forcibly taken from the Odawa and Ojibwa, the Michigan Army National Guard (MIANG) currently operates the largest National Guard training site in the country, Camp Grayling. At 230 square miles, it could fit Detroit (139 sq. miles), Lansing (37 sq. miles), and Grand Rapids (45 sq. miles) safely within its…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Whether it’s scrolling on your smartphone, sharing content on social media, or using facial scanners at travel points, every digital interaction generates data. What many don’t realize is that data — which can include information about your location, relationships, and even physical features — is turned over to private companies and the government without their knowledge.
“Big Tech” can use this data to profit off our private information or make us vulnerable to manipulation, exploitation, or abuse. Citing these vulnerabilities, President Biden called for Congress to take action in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday.
“We’ve heard a lot of talk about creating committees. It’s time to walk the walk and get something done,” he wrote.
It’s true, the time for regulation to prevent exploitation by “Big Tech” is overdue — but it’s not just “Big Tech” in and of itself we should be concerned about, but also its applications. It’s crucial to consider how law enforcement and the government also can use our data without our consent in ways that can increase the risk of wrongful accusations, arrests, and convictions.
Big data technologies can create serious risk of wrongful conviction when applied as surveillance tools in criminal investigations. These technologies are often deployed before being fully tested and have already been proven to have disparate impacts on people of color. For example, the use of facial recognition technology has been increasing, despite being known to misidentify people of color at higher rates. Such technology has led to the wrongful arrests of at least four innocent Black people.
Surveillance technology that uses algorithmic tools may weaponize information about a person’s identity, behavior, and relationships against them — even when that information is inaccurate. Cristian Diaz Ortiz, an El Salvadorian teenager awaiting asylum, was arrested and slated for deportation after he was wrongly labeled a member of the international criminal gang MS-13 and included in a gang database. Law enforcement categorized him as a gang member based on algorithmic inferences because he had been “hanging out with friends around his neighborhood.”
Even if a surveillance technology is accurate, it can still increase the risk of wrongful arrest by distorting suspect development. By their nature, big data-driven tools cast a wide net and can generate a pool of potential suspects that includes innocent people.
In doing so, they can lead law enforcement to focus their investigations on innocent people. In 2018, Jorge Molina was arrested for a murder he did not commit after a new technology described as a “Google dragnet” found that Mr. Molina had been logged into his email on a device near the location of the murder. The device belonged to someone else and had been near the murder location, though Mr. Molina never was.
Once an innocent person is singled out and becomes a person of interest, tunnel vision can set in to the point where even powerful exculpatory evidence won’t shake an investigator’s belief in an innocent person’s guilt. The day after Mr. Molina’s arrest, a detective told the district attorney’s office that it was “highly unlikely” that he had committed the murder, yet Mr. Molina was not released for several more days.
This kind of investigatory tunnel vision has serious real world implications. For example, exoneration data shows that pre-trial exculpatory DNA results were explained away or dismissed in nearly 9% of the 325 DNA exonerations in the United States between 1989 and 2014.
Investigative technologies like these are still unregulated in the United States. Not only are there no requirements for how rigorously they must be tested before being deployed, there also are no rules ensuring full disclosure around them.
This means that people charged with a crime might not be told what technologies police used to identify them. And even if they do know which technologies were used, they may not have access to the information about how the tool works or what data was used in their case. Because so many of these technologies are proprietary, defendants are not allowed access to the source code and even basic information about the data usage and processing while mounting their legal defense.
We agree with President Biden that it’s time to set limits. And while the president emphasized the need for “clear limits on how companies can collect, use and share highly personal data — your internet history, your personal communications, your location, and your health, genetic and biometric data,” we believe Congress must go a step further.
Congress must make explicit in its anticipated bill that it will regulate how investigative tools are used in criminal investigations to protect people’s data and prevent wrongful convictions, including how data may or may not be collected, used, or stored in those investigations. Doing so would ensure the just application of algorithmic technologies far more efficiently than piecemeal regulation of individual technologies — especially given the constant proliferation of new tools.
Once a company or a government agency extracts data about your physical traits, location, or identity, that information is theirs forever and can be used by them in perpetuity. Without regulation, we can’t fully protect people — and in particular, vulnerable communities and historically criminalized communities — from data harms.
President Biden is right about this: We must take action to protect our data. And we look forward to working with Congress to advance equity in data privacy and protections in the criminal legal system to ensure their simultaneous contributions to public safety, strengthening communities, and the just and equitable administration of justice.
The post ‘Big Tech’ Regulation Must Address Data Use in Criminal Investigations appeared first on Innocence Project.
A New York Times op-ed (12/28/22) takes aim at the “fashionable notion” that “a technology free of corporate and government control is in the best interest of society.”
A recent guest essay in the New York Times (12/28/22) concluded a searing takedown of “our technology overlords” with the sentence:
We have a technologically driven shift of power to ideological individuals and organizations whose lack of appreciation for moral nuance and good governance puts us all at risk.
You might think, Wow, I didn’t think the Times had it in it to take on Google, Meta and Amazon so directly. Well… you’d be right.
Because the technology overlords in this op ed—as absurd as it sounds—are the software engineers supporting the open-source messaging app Signal, and not the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The piece, “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs,” by Reid Blackman, makes the case for corporate and government surveillance, by demonizing freedom from such surveillance as a dangerous plot by unnamed “technologists” who are “developing and deploying applications of their technologies for explicitly ideological reasons.” Their ideological agenda? Privacy. The horror!
This screed is so full of obvious exaggerations and unsubstantiated claims that it reads like a caricature. That the New York Times published it, even given its ruling-class biases, is surprising as well as disgraceful.
Signal‘s website advances the “morally dangerous” precept that “championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own.”
“We believe championing user privacy means keeping your data out of anyone’s hands, including our own, rather than ‘responsibly’ managing your data,” Signal’s website says. For Blackman, this commitment to what Signal terms “privacy first” is civil libertarian extremism. He trots out predictable bogeymen demonstrating the dangers of unchecked privacy: terrorists and child predators shielded from law enforcement. “Criminals have also used this government-evading technology,” Blackman says darkly. This fear-mongering rests on an old authoritarian argument: that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to lose, from government intrusion.
What of the young woman who needs an abortion and needs to make sure her messages are not tracked? What of the undocumented USian who needs to ask a question about their rights without risking being disappeared by ICE? What of the BLM activist planning a protest who wants to avoid police sweeping up and teargassing demonstrators? What of the transgender teenager looking for support who needs to hide their identity from their parents?
They may all be “criminals” to Blackman since all of them are targeted by various state and federal laws, but to those of us who recognize that there is a wide gap between law and justice, they all have a legitimate moral right to privacy.
Moreover, they have a democratic right to privacy.
Blackman is incensed that Signal refrains from collecting metadata on its users. “The company doesn’t know the identity of users, which users are talking to one another or who is in a group message.” This is the real difference between Signal and other popular messaging apps, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, which also either default to end-to-end encryption or have that option. Why does this matter?
Imagine you are holding a meeting at your house. The conversations in your living room are private—no one can hear them. But the car parked outside can see exactly who goes into your house, when, and when they leave again; how often these gatherings happen; and whenever two people from your group talk to each other. That’s metadata. And once you understand this parallel between the offline and online worlds, you can immediately see why the right to keep that metadata private and away from whoever is parked in that car—whether it’s the NSA, the NYPD, ICE or Google—is essential to democracy.
The Department of Homeland Security’s network of “fusion centers” “abused their authorities to monitor people engaged in First Amendment–protected activities,” according to the Brennan Center (Reason, 1/6/23).
Metadata is surveillance, just as much as wiretapping or surveillance cameras are. “The Signal App and the Danger of Privacy at All Costs” would have you believe that being opposed to the tracking of metadata is an overreaction:
This response reflects a lack of faith in good governance, which is essential to any well-functioning organization or community seeking to keep its members and society at large safe from bad actors.
This is a highly revealing sentence. According to Blackman, the threat to a well-ordered society where people are safe from “bad actors” comes from a lack of faith in the good intentions of government. But for those outside ruling elite circles, the bad actors too often are government actors.
Unethical and illegal government surveillance happens all the time—from the massive NSA surveillance programs that Edward Snowden exposed in 2013, to the surveillance of Muslims by the NYPD, to the routine surveillance of people planning peaceful protests by the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers.
Moreover, much of this illegal surveillance is done with the cooperation of the corporate sector (such as the NSA programs), and companies like Amazon make and host surveillance technology like Ring and Palantir. The former is a home security surveillance service that partners with police and has a long, documented history of racist abuse. The latter is a data mining company that runs on Amazon Web Services and is used by ICE to hunt down and deport immigrants.
(Corporate digital surveillance is also a prime source of profits, as Shoshana Zuboff demonstrates in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The threats to privacy that come from this dimension of surveillance are also dismissed by Blackman.)
Reid Blackman’s website touts his book Ethical Machines.
In scolding Signal and “technologists” for being unwilling to simply trust the government with our data, Blackman is staking out an aggressive position in favor of existing relations of power, complete with their systemic biases and abuses.
He goes further. “There’s something sneaky in all this,” he says, accusing Signal of surreptitiously making its users carry out its “rather extreme” ideology of privacy. “Scaling up its technology is scaling up its ideology,” Blackman declares. Users are “witting or unwitting advocates of the moral views of the 40 or so people who operate Signal.”
But why are Signal’s politics more sinister or “ideological” than Meta’s? And does Blackman really believe that Signal users are unknowingly furthering an agenda more than Google or Amazon users?
Speaking of agendas, Reid Blackman is a corporate and government consultant whose specialty is artificial intelligence, specifically AI ethics. AI, of course, depends on metadata. So his paychecks come from those who have a vested interest in demonizing privacy and normalizing digital surveillance.
If there’s a case to be made that routine surveillance of the sort enabled by harvesting metadata is compatible with a democratic society, this op-ed is not it. It is, rather, an emotionally manipulative, intentionally alarmist and—it needs to be said—ideological attack on the idea that people have a right to online privacy.
Making Signal the poster child for this supposedly “morally dangerous” proposition is no accident: Signal is routinely used by democratic activists and organizers to exercise their constitutional First Amendment rights. Blackman is right about one thing—the values and interests of those users are at odds with digital surveillance. But as an ethicist, he’s chosen the wrong side in that battle.
The post NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
Janine Jackson: Welcome to the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I’m Janine Jackson.
All year long, CounterSpin brings you a look, as we say, behind the headlines of the mainstream news. We hope both to shine some light on aspects of news events, perspectives of those outside of power, relevant but omitted history, important things that might be pushed to the side or off the page entirely in elite media reporting.
But it’s also to remind us to be mindful of the practices and policies of corporate news media that just make it an unlikely arena for the inclusive, vital debate on issues that matter that we need.
CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role that we can play in changing it.
This is just a small selection of some of them. You’re listening to the best of CounterSpin for 2022, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.
Janine Jackson: “Supply Chain Mayhem Will Likely Muck Up 2022”—that New York Times headline got us off to a start of a year of actual hardship, and a lot of obfuscation about that hardship’s sources. The pandemic threw into relief many concerns that it did not create—and offered an opportunity to address those concerns in a serious and not a stopgap way. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. We talked with her early in the year.
Rakeen Mabud: “On these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.”
Rakeen Mabud: So we’ve essentially spent 50 years handing our supply chain over to mega corporations. These companies have built a system that works for them, right, it works for padding their own profits, jacking up their profits, all spurred on by Wall Street, who really demanded short-term profit increases over all else.
And so when you think about what a supply chain is for, usually most people would think, oh, it’s here to deliver goods and services. Well, that’s actually not what our supply chain was built to do. Our supply chain was built to really maximize what companies could get out of this, and the dividends that they can pay off to shareholders.
And what that means is that they’ve essentially built this system that has no redundancy. It has no sort of flexibility for changes in an economy, such as a pandemic, or even something like a climate shock, right, which we’re unfortunately likely to see more of over the coming years and decades.
And so there is what we call a just-in-time supply system, right? This is a supply system that is expected to deliver exactly the number of goods that are needed at exactly the moment that they’re needed.
But with something like a pandemic, all of those predictions about what goods will be needed when go out the window. And that’s when you end up with supply shortages, that’s when you end up with bottlenecks.
The consolidation piece of this is also really important. We have three ocean shipping alliances that carry 80% of the world’s cargo. So there, if one of them goes down, you can see how that massively disrupt our global supply chain, but you can also see how that might jack up prices.
And my team and I have combed through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of corporate earning calls. And you really don’t have to take my word for it. There’s obviously a big, deep story here. But on these corporate earnings calls, what we hear CEOs and CFOs saying, in sector after sector, in company after company, is we can use the cover of inflation to jack up prices on consumers, and rake in the profits for ourselves, and pay out some good dividends for our shareholders.
Embedded within that is also, let’s cut back on pay for workers. You saw Kroger do this, right? Kroger cut back on hazard pay, jacked up its prices, and then issued a bunch of stock buybacks.
And so the issues facing workers and consumers, as well as these small businesses who aren’t able to negotiate better prices for the inputs that they’re selling in their stores, and are being hit by pandemic profiteering higher up the supply chain. These are all part of the same system, and it’s all rooted in what is essentially, in short, corporate greed.
Janine Jackson: The ease with which US media step into saber-rattling mode, the confidence as they soberly suggest people other than themselves might just need to be sent off to a violent death, in service of something they can only describe with vague platitudes, should be disturbing. Bryce Greene’s piece, “What You Should Really Know About Ukraine,” got more than 3,000 shares on FAIR.org, and that’s because people needed to hear a different version of that story than what they were hearing.
Bryce Green: “Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.”
Bryce Greene: So this whole story of NATO expansion and economic expansion, it begins right after the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US and Russia made a deal that NATO, the Cold War alliance, would not expand east past a reunified Germany. No reason to escalate tensions unnecessarily.
But, unfortunately, Washington decided to expand anyway. And they were the only superpower left, there was no one to challenge them, so they decided they could do it. They ignored Russian objections and continued to enlarge the military alliance, one country at a time.
And even at the time, Cold Warriors, like the famed diplomat George Kennan, warned that this was a recipe for disaster. It would make Russia feel trapped and surrounded, and when major nuclear powers feel trapped and surrounded, it doesn’t really make for a peaceful world. But as we all know, Washington isn’t in the interest of peace, and they did it anyway.
In 2004, the US poured millions of dollars into the anti-Russian opposition in Ukraine. They funded media and NGOs supporting opposition candidates. And they did this using organizations like the NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, and USAID. These organizations are broadly understood to serve regime-change interests in the name of “democracy.”
Now, in 2004, it didn’t work exactly, but Ukraine began to start making closer ties to the EU and US. And that process continued up to 2014.
Shortly before the overthrow, the Ukrainian government was negotiating closer integration into the EU, and closer integration with the Western economic bloc. And they were being offered loans by the International Monetary Fund, the major world lending agency that represents private interests around the Western world.
So to get those loans, they had to do all sorts of things to their economy, commonly known as “structural adjustment.” This included cutting public sector wages, shrinking the health and education sectors, privatizing the economy and cutting gas subsidies for the people.
And at the time, Russia was offering a plan for economic integration to Ukraine that didn’t contain any of these strings. So when President Viktor Yanukovych chose Russia, well, that set off a wave of protests that were supported and partially funded by the United States. In fact, John McCain and Obama administration officials even flew to the Maidan Square to help support the protesters who wanted to oust the president and change the government.
And what’s worse is that right after the protests started, there was a leaked phone call between Victoria Nuland, one of Obama’s State Department advisors, and the US ambassador to Ukraine, in which they were describing how they wanted to set up a new government. They were picking and choosing who would be in the government, who would be out.
Well, a few weeks after that, the Ukrainian government was overthrown. And the guy who they designated as our guy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, became the prime minister.
So clearly, clearly, there’s a lot of US involvement in how the Ukrainian government has shifted over the last decade. After 2014, the Ukrainians opted to accept the IMF loans, they opted to further integrate with the EU economically. And Russia is watching all of this happen.
And so immediately after the overthrow, the eastern regions in Ukraine, who were ethnically closer to Russians, and they speak Russian and they favor closer ties to Russia, they revolted. They started an uprising to gain more autonomy, and possibly to separate from the Ukraine entirely.
The Ukrainian government cracked down hard. And that only fueled the rebellion, and so Russia sent in volunteers and soldiers to help back these rebels. Now, of course, Russia denies it, but we all know they are.
And so since 2014, that sort of civil war has been at a stalemate, and every so often there would be a military exercise on the border by one side or another. But really nothing much has changed. And so this current escalation started because of the US involvement in the Ukrainian government’s politics.
Janine Jackson: The Peace Corps issued a press release warning that African Americans looking to support Ukrainians should accept that they might face racism—because, sooprise, sooprise, of how we’re portrayed in US media.
We talked about the basic story the world and the US hears about Black people, thanks to journalism—with Layla A. Jones, reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer. She’s part of the papers’ “A More Perfect Union” project, online at Inquirer.com.
Layla A. Jones: “This portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers…. The way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.”
Layla A. Jones: “Eyewitness News,” and then “Action News,” which came afterwards, went to more than 200 US cities, but also went international, that format. But, yeah, when it was coming up in the late ’60s, and then “Action News” in the early ’70s, at the same time, there was this suburbanization and white flight happening in urban centers, and for a variety of reasons. We were coming off of the civil rights movement, there was a change in industry and work in cities, but also the news was broadcasting city and urban life as something scary, as something very Black, as something dangerous.
And I guess what we talk about in the piece is that this portrayal of urban environments definitely did fuel fear among viewers. They basically said, we proved in the lab that the more people watched local television news, the more likely they were to associate criminality with being Black, the more likely they were to support criminal justice policies that fuel mass incarceration, like longer sentences and even the death penalty. And so the way that TV news portrayed Black and urban communities really did affect—it does affect—people’s public opinions of Black people and of our communities.
The important point to make is that what was happening when these formats were on the rise is really multi-layered. So, first of all, it was being run at the top, and even from the top, basically all the way down, by all white people. A lot of these people were very young, because 1965, 1970, this was brand new. So they’re all learning together.
Then they’re intentionally trying to attract—and this is especially “Action News”—intentionally trying to attract a suburban audience and, locally, our suburbs are more white. So they’re trying to attract a white, suburban audience, because they believe that’s where the money is, and that’s what’s going to draw advertisers.
We also looked at the commercials. A lot of the commercials in between these news segments featured white families, and white picket fences, and things that you don’t really see in the cities that they’re reporting about.
So with all those layers going on, what “Action News” found to work for them, what shot them up past their competitor, “Eyewitness News,” was focusing happy, upbeat and community-oriented stories in the suburbs. So the stories about backyard festivals or charity events, they’ll have a photographer go out there just to cover those good events, to make those people feel seen, and to make sure they tune in and watch the news.
At the same time, the stories that can fill up the time and the newscast and are easy, quick, close by and cheap to cover, which is literally what a veteran anchor Larry Kane told me, are crime stories. He was like, you know, the photographer would just shoot the blood, shoot the scene, you shoot the victim, whatever they have to say, and you can do it in 20 seconds. And speed was another element of this format.
And so it created this dichotomy. And, again, I like to say that I don’t believe, from talking to anyone, that it was like, “We hate Black people and we just want to make them look bad.” I just think it was a complete carelessness, and then once they were told, because the stations had been told this is harmful, they never changed their approach. And I think that’s really important, too.
Janine Jackson: As US media showed there is no playbook too dusty to pull out with their anti-Asian Covid coverage. We talked with Helen Zia, co-founder of American Citizens for Justice, and author of, among other titles, Asian-American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. We talked about the 40th remembrance and rededication of Vincent Chin’s murder, VincentChin.org.
Helen Zia: “It became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.”
Helen Zia: It was a horrific killing, and not only that, but a continued miscarriage of justice, where the justice system failed at every turn for a young man who was killed and attacked on the night of his bachelor party because of how he looked at a time of intense anti-Asian hate. And all of that was very important. It brought attention to the whole idea that Asian Americans are people, that we are humans, that we are Americans, and that we experience racism and discrimination.
But that’s not all that was important, because that event and the miscarriage of justice catalyzed a whole movement, a civil rights movement led by Asian Americans, with Detroit, Michigan, as the epicenter of that civil rights movement that reached all across America for Asian Americans, and also had a huge impact on, really, democracy in this country, in many, many different ways. And it represented the solidarity of people from all walks of life.
We were in Detroit, now a majority Black city, back then was a majority Black city, and we had incredible support from the Black community, as well as the Arab-American community, multi-faith, multi-class, people from all walks of life, not only in Detroit. And then it became a national movement, really sparked a discussion, a movement that took the moment of the killing of Vincent Chin, and then the injustice that followed, but turned it into a civil rights movement, a human rights movement, that has still an impact today.
And that’s why we’re talking about this. It’s to remember that moment, but the legacy as well—of people coming together in solidarity, with the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, and we have a basic interest in joining together to ensure each other’s safety. That we are part of a beloved community, that no community should live in fear of violence or hate. And this notion of all our communities being so divided, can we ever be allies, let alone come together.
And so that’s what we’re remembering: Let’s not forget that, actually, we have been in solidarity. And let’s take the lessons of that and move it forward to today, because we need that desperately.
And that’s why we are saying it’s more than remembrance, it’s about rededication. It’s about taking the hard work that happened, and coming together in unity and in solidarity and building a movement. There’s nothing simple about that; there’s no Kumbaya. It really takes people working hard together to bridge understandings and undo misunderstandings, break down stereotypes and build a common understanding and a common bond between communities.
And so when, as you say, communities are portrayed in the news or in TV or in movies, that this is just that community’s concern; it doesn’t involve other people…. Anti-Asian violence, well, hey, that’s just Asians. And we don’t even know that they’re Americans. We don’t even know that they were on this continent for several hundred years.
And so I think you’re right, that’s a way of pigeonholing people and keeping us apart, instead of looking at the true commonality. If we talk about Vincent Chin or violence against Asian Americans, we also talk about Buffalo and we talk about Coeur d’Alene, and how ideas of white supremacy and even active white supremacist groups, they lump us together. They don’t see us as separate groups. They connect the dots in a very negative way. And so it’s really incumbent on all thinking people, and especially our media, to be able to connect those dots too, and not keep us separate.
Janine Jackson: In September of this year, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst”—a clear message to Muslim communities and anyone who cares about them, given that as deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department, Miller told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001. We listened, instead, to Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates.
Sumayyah Waheed: “He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet.”
Sumayyah Waheed: It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.
Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.
And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.
And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a racially discriminatory classification.
So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.
Just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.
So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.
And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.
It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.
Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.
So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.
And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.
Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners understand that the news media situation in this country works against our democratic aspirations. There are many problems crying out for open, inclusive conversation in which those with the most power don’t get the biggest megaphone, and they don’t leave the vast majority of us outside of power to try and shout into the dominant noise.
Corporate media work hard, will always work hard, to tell us that their space is the only space, their conversation is the only conversation, and that’s just not true.
One of many projects we should know about that show us a way forward is one in New Jersey—that didn’t talk about shoring up old, traditional media outlets, but about instead about invigorating community information needs. The New Jersey Civic Information Consortium uses public funding to support more informed communities. We talked with an early mover on the project, Mike Rispoli, senior director of journalism policy at Free Press.
Mike Rispoli: “There are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs.”
Mike Rispoli: In 2016, New Jersey was looking to sell some old broadcast public media licenses that it held, and in the selling of those state assets, the state received $332 million.
And Free Press Action was doing some work in New Jersey at the time. We were organizing in communities, trying to find ways to have communities partner with local newsrooms, but also hold local newsrooms accountable.
And so we were doing organizing around the state, and talking to people about the future of local news in New Jersey. And at that time, they’re set to receive this windfall from the sale of these TV licenses. And so we thought, hey, what would it look like if some of that money coming into the state was reinvested back into communities to address the growing gaps in news coverage and community information needs?
And so with that, we began the idea of what became the Consortium, that ran a statewide grassroots campaign called the Civic Info Bill Campaign. And that work began in 2017.
And obviously we all have seen and experienced and have been impacted by the loss of local news, especially over the past 20 years. And many communities have never been well-served, even in the “good old days of journalism.” There are many communities who were never, never really well-served by local media.
And so when we were looking at this windfall that the state was going to receive, we thought, how could we use public funding to not just invest into local news, or to “save journalism.” But instead, what if we use public funding and public money to help rebuild and really transform what local media looks like in the state? How do we leverage public funding to invest in projects that are filling in gaps left by the commercial media market?
I think that what we knew when we began this campaign was that if this was a campaign to bail out the journalism industry, that wasn’t a thing that people were going to get behind. That was a thing we didn’t even think lawmakers were going to get behind.
But instead, really what we talked about was not the woes of one specific industry, but instead we talked about the impact on communities when local news and information is not accessible. And we know from data, when local media is deficient or disappears altogether, it has significant consequences on civic participation. Fewer people vote, fewer people volunteer, fewer people run for public office; fewer federal dollars go to districts where there’s no local media presence. Government corruption increases, government spending increases.
So there are all these really profound effects on civic participation and the overall health of our communities when local media isn’t meeting people’s needs. And so we wanted to make the campaign, as well as the bill, really centered around that, as opposed to giving government handouts to corporate media who contributed so much to the mess that we are in right now, and that we’re trying to figure our way out of.
Janine Jackson: And that’s it for the best of CounterSpin for 2022. I hope you enjoyed this look back at just some of the year’s conversations. It’s been my sincere pleasure to host them.
Remember, you can always find shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The website is also the place to learn about our newsletter Extra!, and, of course, to show support for CounterSpin if you’re able and so inclined. The show is engineered by Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson; thank you so much for listening to CounterSpin.
The post ‘It Takes People Working Together to Bridge Understandings and Undo Misunderstandings’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
The danger signs were everywhere in 2022.
With every new law enacted by federal and state legislatures, every new ruling handed down by government courts, and every new military weapon, invasive tactic and egregious protocol employed by government agents, we were reminded that in the eyes of the government and its corporate accomplices, “we the people” possess no rights except for that which the Deep State grants on an as-needed basis.
Totalitarian paranoia spiked. What we have been saddled with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it has conspired to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority. In a Machiavellian attempt to expand its powers, the government unleashed all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace in order to justify its demands for additional powers to protect “we the people” from emerging threats, whether legitimate, manufactured or overblown.
The state of our nation suffered. The nation remained politically polarized, controlled by forces beyond the purview of the average American, and rapidly moving the nation away from its freedom foundation. The combined blowback from a contentious presidential election and the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in Americans being subjected to egregious civil liberties violations, invasive surveillance, martial law, lockdowns, political correctness, erosions of free speech, strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying, and the criminalization of lawful activities.
Thought crimes became a target for punishment. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In 2022, those who criticized the government—whether that criticism manifested itself in word, deed or thought—were flagged as dangerous alongside consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information.”
Speech was muzzled. Those who want to monitor, muzzle, catalogue and censor speech continued to push for social media monitoring, censorship of flagged content that could be construed as dangerous or hateful, and limitations on free speech activities, particularly online. Of course, it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act. If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
Kill switches aimed to turn off more than just your car. Vehicle “kill switches” were sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, but they were a perfect metaphor for the government’s efforts to not only take control of our cars but also our freedoms and our lives. For too long, we have been captive passengers in a driverless car controlled by the government, losing more and more of our privacy and autonomy the further down the road we go.
Currency went digital. No matter how much money the government pulls in, it’s never enough, so the government came up with a new plan to make it even easier for its agents to seize Americans’ bank account. In an Executive Order issued in March 2022, President Biden called for the federal government to consider establishing a form of digital money. Digital currency will provide the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
The government spoke in a language of violence. Police violence killed three people a day. Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—did not make us or themselves any safer. Despite this, President Biden’s pledged to expand law enforcement and so-called crime prevention through a $30 billion “Fund the Police” program.
Cancel culture became more intolerant. Cancel culture—political correctness amped up on steroids, the self-righteousness of a narcissistic age, and a mass-marketed pseudo-morality that is little more than fascism disguised as tolerance—shifted us into an Age of Intolerance, policed by techno-censors, social media bullies, and government watchdogs. Everything has now become fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.
Homes were invaded. Government agents routinely violated the Fourth Amendment at will under the pretext of public health and safety. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways the government and its corporate partners-in-crime used surveillance technology to invade homes: with wiretaps, thermal imaging, surveillance cameras, and other monitoring devices.
Political theater kept the public distracted. Having devolved into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population, the political scene provided ample diversions with its televised Jan. 6 committee hearings, the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings, and more.
Bodily integrity was undermined. Caught in the crosshairs of a showdown between the rights of the individual and the so-called “emergency” state, concerns about COVID-19 mandates and bodily integrity remained part of a much larger debate over the ongoing power struggle between the citizenry and the government over our property “interest” in our bodies. This debate over bodily integrity covered broad territory, ranging from abortion and forced vaccinations to biometric surveillance and basic healthcare. Although the Supreme Court overturned its earlier rulings recognizing abortion as a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment, it did nothing to resolve the larger problem that plagues us today: namely, that all along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the aged—the government continues to play fast and loose with the lives of the citizenry.
The government’s fiscal insanity reached new heights. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) hit $30 trillion. That translates to roughly $242,000 per taxpayer. It’s estimated that the amount this country owes is now 130% greater than its gross domestic product (all the products and services produced in one year by labor and property supplied by the citizens). That debt is also growing exponentially: it is expected to be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2051.
Surveillance got creepier. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business was monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. In such a surveillance ecosystem, we’re all suspects and databits to be tracked, catalogued and targeted. With every new AI surveillance technology that was adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry were marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Precrime became more fact than fiction. Under the pretext of helping overwhelmed government agencies work more efficiently, AI predictive and surveillance technologies were used to classify, segregate and flag the populace with little concern for privacy rights or due process. All of this sorting, sifting and calculating was done swiftly, secretly and incessantly with the help of AI technology and a surveillance state that monitors your every move. Where this becomes particularly dangerous is when the government takes preemptive steps to combat crime or abuse, or whatever the government has chosen to outlaw at any given time.
The government waged psychological warfare on the nation. The government made clear in word and deed that “we the people” are domestic enemies to be targeted, tracked, manipulated, micromanaged, surveilled, viewed as suspects, and treated as if our fundamental rights are mere privileges that can be easily discarded. Aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation, the government weaponized violence; surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns; digital currencies, social media scores and censorship; desensitization campaigns; fear; genetics; and entertainment.
Gun confiscation laws put a target on the back of every American. Red flag gun laws (which authorize government officials to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others) gained traction as a legislative means by which to allow police to remove guns from people suspected of being threats. Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The burden of proof was reversed. Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head. Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government. The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
The Supreme Court turned America into a Constitution-free zone. Although the Court’s rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating. The bottom line: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.
The FBI went rogue. The FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people ran the gamut from surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, and intimidation tactics to harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.
The government waged war on political freedom. In more and more cases, the government declared war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
The military industrial complex waged more wars. America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.
The Deep State went global. We’ve been inching closer to a new world order for the past several decades, but COVID-19, which saw governmental and corporate interests become even more closely intertwined, shifted this transformation into high gear. This new world order—a global world order—made up of international government agencies and corporations owes its existence in large part to the U.S. government’s deep-seated and, in many cases, top-secret alliances with foreign nations and global corporations. This powerful international cabal, let’s call it the Global Deep State, is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.
Authoritarian madness escalated. You didn’t have to be a conspiracy theorist or even anti-government to recognize the slippery slope that starts with well-meaning intentions for the greater good and ends with tyrannical abuses no one should tolerate. When any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and an utter disregard for the rights of the individual, there should be reason for concern.
The takeaway: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
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 there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests—as it always has—at the local level, with “we the people.”
Unless we work together to push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse, 2023 will be yet another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom.
The post 2022’s Danger Signs first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A human rights attorney raised alarm Monday over the expansion plans of Toka, an Israeli cyber firm that sells hacking technologies capable of finding, accessing, and manipulating security and smart camera footage. Co-founded by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) cyber chief Yaron Rosen, Toka “sells technologies that allow clients to locate security…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Peacemonger, the new book published last month to celebrate the life and work of peace researcher and activist Owen Wilkes (1940-2005), is being launched in Auckland on Friday. Here a close friend from Sweden — not featured in the book — remembers his mentor in both New Zealand and Scandinavia.
COMMENT: By Paul Claesson in Stockholm
I got to know Owen Wilkes through friends in 1980, when as a 22-year-old student I ended up in a housing collective where his ex-partner lived. He was then at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), having recently arrived from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and was, in addition to his collaboration with Nils-Petter Gleditsch, already in full swing with his Foreign Military Presence project.
He hired me as an assistant with responsibility for Spanish and Portuguese-language source material.
During this time I got to know Søren MC and Kirsten Bruun in Copenhagen, who had recently launched the magazine Försvar — Militärkritiskt Magasin. I contributed a couple of articles and was then invited to participate in the editorial team.
A theme issue about the American bases in Greenland grew into a book, Greenland — The Pearl of the Mediterranean, which apparently caused considerable consternation in the Ministry of Greenland. The book resulted in a hearing in Christiansborg.
I was also responsible for a theme issue about the DEW (Early Warning Line) and Loran C facilities on the Faroe Islands. I was in Stockholm when SÄPO’s spy target against Owen started, and I was there the whole way.
SÄPO interrogated me a couple of times, and at one point during the trial, when I took the opportunity to hand out relevant material about Owen’s research — all publicly available — to journalists in the audience, I was visibly thrown out of the case by a couple of angry young men from FSÄK (the security service of the Swedish defence establishment).
Distorted by media
Owen and I saw each other almost every day — sometimes I stayed with him in his little cabin in Älvsjö — and together we wondered how his various activities, such as his innocent fishing trip in Åland, were distorted in the media by FSÄK and the prosecutor’s care (SÄPO had subsequently begun to show greater doubt about Owen’s guilt).
In 1984-85, after he had been expelled from Sweden, I was Owen’s house guest at his farm in Karamea, Mahoe Farm, on New Zealand’s West Coast, at the northern end of the road. He was in the process of selling it.
With his brother Jack, he had started a commercial bee farm, and together we spent an intensive summer — harvesting bush honey, pollinating apple and kiwifruit orchards and building a small harvest house for the honey collection.
In the meantime, we sold — or ate up — the farm’s remaining flock of sheep. When the farm was sold, we moved to Wellington — I was offered a room in the Quakers’ guest house, where I joined the work at Peace Movement Aotearoa’s premises on Pirie Street.
Then Prime Minister David Lange had recently let New Zealand withdraw from ANZUS, as a result of his government’s refusal to allow US Navy ships to call at port unless they declared themselves disarmed of nuclear weapons.
As a result, PMA organised a conference with the theme nuclear-free Pacific, with participants from all over the Pacific region. Together with Owen, Nicky Hager and others I contributed to the planning and execution of the conference.
Surveying US signals intelligence
Before this, Owen and Nicky had begun surveying American signals intelligence facilities in New Zealand. I took part in this, ie. with a couple of photo excursions to Tangimoana.
Owen and I kept in touch after my return to Sweden. What I remember best from his letters from this time — apart from his musings about his work as a government defence consultant — are his often comical anecdotes about his adventures in the bush as a scout for the New Zealand Forest Service, where his task was mainly to map Māori cultural remains before they were chewn to pieces by the forest industry.
His sudden death took a toll. I got the news from his partner May Bass. I would have liked to have flown to NZ to attend the memorial services for him, but ironically they coincided with my wedding.
Owen played a very big role in my life. I admired him, and miss him all the time. More than anyone else I have known, he deserves to be remembered in writing. I was therefore very happy when I heard about the time and energy devoted to this book project. My sincere gratitude.
He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake!— “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
You’d better watch out—you’d better not pout—you’d better not cry—‘cos I’m telling you why: this Christmas, it’s the Surveillance State that’s making a list and checking it twice, and it won’t matter whether you’ve been bad or good.
You’ll be on this list whether you like it or not.
Mass surveillance is the Deep State’s version of a “gift” that keeps on giving…back to the Deep State.
Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
What these add 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.
Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother.
Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by a vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
This creepy new era of government/corporate spying—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—has been made possible by a global army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms.
Consider just a small sampling of the tools being used to track our movements, monitor our spending, and sniff out all the ways in which our thoughts, actions and social circles might land us on the government’s naughty list, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Tracking you 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. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Tracking you based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. 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. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.
Tracking you 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. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.
Tracking you 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. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Tracking you based on your spending and consumer activities: With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, 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. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become big business, a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Tracking you 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. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”
Tracking you based on your social media activities: Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. 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. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Tracking you 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. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Tracking you 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. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Tracking you based on your mail: Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
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.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands—haven’t made America any safer. And they certainly aren’t helping to preserve our freedoms.
Indeed, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.
The post The Surveillance State Is Making a List, and You’re On It first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By Veronica Koman in Sydney
As an Indonesian lawyer living in exile in Australia, I find it deeply troubling that the changes to the Indonesian Criminal Code are seen through the lens that touchy tourists will be denied their freedom to fornicate on holiday in Bali.
What the far-reaching amendments will actually mean is that hundreds of millions of Indonesians will not be able to criticise any government officials, including the president, police and military.
You can be assured that the implementation of the Criminal Code will not affect the lucrative tourism industry which the Indonesian government depends on – it will affect ordinary people in what is the world’s third largest democracy.
With just 18 out of 575 parliamentarians physically attending the plenary session, Indonesia passed the problematic revised Criminal Code last week. It’s a death knell to democracy in Indonesia.
I live here as an exile because of my work on the armed conflict in West Papua. The United Nations has repeatedly asked Indonesia to drop the politicised charges against me. One of the six laws used against me, about “distributing fake news”, is now incorporated into the Criminal Code.
In West Papua, any other version of events that are different to the statement of police and military, are often labelled “fake news”. In 2019, a piece from independent news agency Reuters was called a hoax by the Indonesian armed forces.
Now, the authors of that article can be charged under the new Criminal Code which will effectively silence journalists and human rights defenders.
Same-sex couples marginalised
Moreover, the ban on sex outside marriage is heteronormative and effectively further marginalises same-sex couples because they can’t marry under Indonesian law.
The law requires as little as a complaint from a relative of someone in a same sex relationship to be enforced, meaning LGBTQIA+ people would live in fear of their disapproving family members weaponising their identity against them.
Meanwhile, technically speaking, the heteronormative cohabitation clause exempts same-sex couples. However, based on existing practice, LGBTQIA+ people would be disproportionately targeted now that people have the moral licence to do it.
The criminal code has predictably sparked Islamophobic commentary from the international community but, for us, this is about the continued erosion of democracy under President Joko Widodo. This is about consolidated power of the oligarchs including the conservatives shrinking the civic space.
Back when I was still able to live in my home country, it was acceptable to notify the police a day prior, or even on the day of a protest. About six years ago, police started to treat the notification as if it was a permit and made the requirements much stricter.
The new Criminal Code makes snap protests illegal, violating international human rights law.
Under the new code, any discussion about Marxism and Communism is illegal. Indonesia is still trapped in the past without any truth-telling about the crimes against humanity that occurred in 1965-66. At least 500,000 Communists and people accused of being communists were killed.
Justice never served
Justice has never been served despite time running out because the remaining survivors are getting older.
It will be West Papuans rather than frisky Australian tourists who bear the brunt of the updated criminal code. The repression there, which I have seen first hand, is beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the country.
Treason charges which normally carry life imprisonment are often abused to silence West Papuans. Just last week, three West Papuans were charged with treason for peacefully flying the symbol of West Papuan independence — the Morning Star flag. The new treason law comes with the death penalty.
It’s shameful that Australia just awarded the chief of Indonesian armed forces the Order of Australia, given that his institution is the main perpetrator of human rights abuses in West Papua.
The new Criminal Code will take effect in three years. There is a window open for the international community, including Australia, to help safeguard the world’s third largest democracy.
Indonesians need you to raise your voice and not just because you’re worried about your trip to Bali.
Veronica Koman is an Indonesian human rights lawyer in exile and a campaigner at Amnesty International Australia. This article was first published by The Sydney Morning Herald and is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Over the past two years, despite President Joe Biden’s campaign promises to bring fairness to the immigration system, the current administration has quadrupled the number of people enrolled in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) so-called “alternatives to detention” (ATD) surveillance program, and has doubled the number of people held in immigration jails. There is no acceptable…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
ANALYSIS: By Htwe Htwe Thein, Curtin University
The fate of Myanmar has major implications for a free and open Indo-Pacific.
An undemocratic Myanmar serves no one’s interests except China, which is consolidating its economic and strategic influence in its smaller neighbour in pursuit of its two-ocean strategy.
Since the coup China has been — by far — the main source of foreign investment in Myanmar.
This includes US$2.5 billion in a gas-fired power plant to be built west of Myanmar’s capital, Yangon, that will be 81 percent owned and operated by Chinese companies.
Among the dozens of infrastructure projects China is funding are high-speed rail links and dams. But its most strategically important investment is the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, encompassing oil and gas pipelines, roads and rail links costing many tens of billions of dollars.
The corridor’s “jewel in the crown” is a deep-sea port to be built at Kyaukphyu, on Myanmar’s west coast, at an estimated cost of US$7 billion.
This will finally give China its long-desired “back door” to the Indian Ocean.
Natural gas from Myanmar can help China reduce its dependence on imports from suppliers such as Australia. Access to the Indian Ocean will enable China to import gas and oil from the Middle East, Africa and Venezuela without ships having to pass through the contested waters of the South China Sea to Chinese ports.
About 80 percent of China’s oil imports now move through the South China Sea via the Malacca Strait, which is just 65 kilometres wide at its narrowest point between the Malay Peninsula and Indonesia’s Sumatra.
Overcoming this strategic vulnerability arguably makes the Kyaukphyu port and pipelines the most important element of China’s Belt and Road initiative to reshape global trade routes and assert its influence over other nations.
Deepening relationship
Most of China’s infrastructure investment was planned before Myanmar’s coup. But whereas other governments and foreign investors have sought to distance themselves from the junta since it overthrew Myanmar’s elected government in February 2021, China has deepened its relationship.
China is the Myanmar regime’s most important international supporter. In April Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China would support Myanmar “no matter how the situation changes”. In May it used its veto power on the United Nations Security Council to thwart a statement expressing concern about violence and the growing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar.
Work continues on projects associated with the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. New ventures (such as the aforementioned power station) have been approved.
More projects are on the cards. In June, for example, China’s embassy in Myanmar announced the completion of a feasibility study to upgrade the Wan Pong port on the Lancang-Mekong River in Myanmar’s east.
Debt trap warnings
In 2020, before the coup, Myanmar’s auditor general Maw Than warned of growing indebtedness to China, with Chinese lenders charging higher interest payments than those from the International Monetary Fund or World Bank.
At that time about 40 percent of Myanmar’s foreign debt of US$10 billion was owed to China. It is likely to be greater now. It will only increase the longer a military dictatorship, with few other supporters or sources of foreign money, remains in power, dragging down Myanmar’s economy.
Efforts to restore democracy in Myanmar should therefore be seen as crucial to the long-term strategic interests of the region’s democracies, and to global peace and prosperity, given the increasing belligerence of China under Xi Jinping.
Xi, now president for life, this month told the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for war. A compliant and indebted Myanmar with a deep-sea port controlled by Chinese interests tips the scales towards that happening.
A democratic and independent Myanmar is a counter-strategy to this potential.
Calls for sanctions
Myanmar’s democracy movement wants the international community to impose tough sanctions on the junta. But few have responded.
The United States and United Kingdom have gone furthest, banning business dealings with Myanmar military officials and state-owned or private companies controlled by the military.
The European Union and Canada have imposed sanctions against a more limited range of individuals and economic entities.
South Korea has suspended financing new infrastructure projects. Japan has suspended aid and postponed the launch of Myanmar’s first satellite. New Zealand has suspended political and military contact.
Australia has suspended military cooperation (with some pre-existing restrictions on dealing with military leaders imposed following the human rights atrocities committed against the Rohingya in 2017.
But that’s about it.
Myanmar’s closest neighbours in the ten-member Association of South-East Asian Nations are still committed to a policy of dialogue and “non-interference” – though Malaysia and Indonesia are increasingly arguing for a tougher approach as the atrocities mount.
The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project says the only country now more violent than Myanmar is Ukraine.
Given its unique geo-strategic position, self-interest alone should be enough for the international community to take greater action.
Dr Htwe Htwe Thein, associate professor, Curtin University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s prime minister, grabbed the global limelight a few years ago, making headlines by stating she wanted to put “kindness” into politics. In 2019, Foreign Policy, a publication closely associated with the Atlantic Council and the US State Department, published the article ‘The Kindness Quotient’, a glowing promotion of Ardern.
The strategic marketing of Ardern in various publications has focused on her likeability, pro-environment stance, compassionate values and collaborative nature. To further appeal to liberal sentiments, she was said to represent everything Trump is not.
Ardern belongs to a set of global leaders who were groomed for their positions through the World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leaders programme. Yes, that WEF – the elitist organisation where hard-nose billionaires and their handmaidens gather to set out policies aligned with powerful business interests.
The charm offensive that Ardern’s promoters undertook was an investment. She delivered on COVID and is now expected to sell more questionable policies to the public.
Arden recently stated at the UN:
As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as hostile to values of free speech that we value so highly.
She went on to state:
How do you tackle climate change if people believe it does not exist? How do you ensure the human rights of others are upheld as they are subjected to hateful and dangerous ideology.
She continued by saying speech (that the authorities disagree with) can be a weapon of war.
During COVID, Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:
Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.
Throughout that period, in the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern’s government was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.
When anyone in power or any institution lays claim to ‘the truth’, history shows we are on a slippery slope to silencing thought and dissent that we disagree with.
Like other political leaders, during COVID, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’.
Clearly, Ardern is not alone here. Trudeau, Biden and others display Orwellian undertones as they talk of the need to challenge ‘misinformation’ and those who question ‘the truth’. The thin end of a very wide authoritarian wedge.
It seems critical analysis and open debate are fine as long as those involved keep within the framework of what is deemed supportive of the narrative. Chomsky was correct on that.
We are often urged to ‘trust the science’ and accept that the ‘science is decided’ on various issues. We heard this on the COVID issue, when we were told governments are ‘following the science’, while they and the big tech companies censored world-renowned scientists and opposing views and opinions. In ‘following the science’, conflicts of interest were rife and notions of objectivity, open disclosure and organised scepticism – core values of scientific endeavour – were trampled on.
Those who questioned the COVID narrative were smeared, shut down and censored – the playbook of Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Ag and authoritarian governments down the years.
Is anyone who questions and wants a more open debate on climate change or whether such change is occurring as stated or will lead to ‘extinction’ to be charged with disseminating misinformation?
Is questioning the orthodoxy of the zero-carbon policy agenda to be shut down and those who challenge it to be labelled ‘extremists’.
Ardern asks: How do you tackle climate change if people believe it does not exist?
But it is also pertinent to ask: How do you tackle it if you accept it exists?
Even if we accept humanity is in trouble and facing a genuine climate emergency, people should at least be able to question the current ‘green’ agenda based on a ‘stakeholder capitalism’ strategy (governments and others facilitating the needs of private capital) that has co-opted genuine concerns about the environment to pursue new multi-billion-dollar global investment opportunities – described in the 2020 report Nature for Sale by Friends of the Earth.
If you read that report, you might conclude that we are witnessing a type of green imperialism that is using genuine concerns about the environment to pursue a familiar agenda of extractivism, colonisation and commodification – the same old mindset, greenwashed and rolled out for public consumption.
For some, things seem set to remain the same – business as usual.
Economic crisis
But in March 2022, BlackRock’s Rob Kapito warned that a “very entitled” generation of people would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives as some goods grow scarce because of rising inflation.
We have a very entitled generation that has never had to sacrifice.
He, of course, was referring to ordinary people, not the high-flying class of the mega-carbon-footprint multi-millionaires and billionaires who will continue to live life to the max and cash in on their various investments and ventures.
Kapito talked about the situation in Ukraine and COVID being responsible for the current crisis, conveniently ignoring the inflationary impact of the trillions pumped into imploding financial markets in 2019 and 2020 (dwarfing the crisis of 2008) and a moribund economic system his ilk have milked dry to the point of collapse.
Kapito is a co-founder of Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager which exerts enormous influence on monetary policy in the US and Europe. According to Salary.com, Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021. Of this, $1,250,000 was received as a salary, $9,700,000 was received as a bonus, $15,125,180 was awarded as stock and $675,600 came from other types of compensation.
Neither Kapito nor any of the hegemonic, unimaginably entitled and unelected billionaire class will have to experience any hardships in the coming years. No, they will be responsible for inflicting it on you. The same class of people who designed and profited from a strident neoliberalism based on deregulation and privatisation – a system now in collapse and responsible for the current crisis and the immiseration of hundreds of millions.
In the 1980s, to legitimise the neoliberal agenda, governments rolled out an ideological onslaught, pressing home the notion of individual rights and the primacy of the market. Now, there is a new ideological shift towards a great reset – again being driven by neoliberalism; this time, its collapse.
Arden’s utterances on the dangers of free speech, the singularity of ‘truth’ and the implicit shift towards authoritarianism must be viewed within the context of managing the economic crisis. What she says reveals how the financial and political elites based on Wall Street, in Washington and in the City of London are thinking.
The authorities fear blowback in terms of mass dissent and uprisings. Liz Truss, the UK prime minister, wants to place ‘legal curbs’ on striking trade unions as many of them take action to counter the ‘cost of living’ crisis. There is also the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act which came into force in June and threatens citizens’ rights, not least the right to protest.
It therefore comes as no surprise that, today, individual rights and free speech are under threat. The ultimate control mechanism would be linking central bank digital currencies to personal carbon footprints, spending and dissent in an age of economic turmoil. Trudeau gave the game away on that when he hit protesting truckers where it hurt most – denying access to their bank accounts.
How long before ‘misinformation’ and challenging ‘the truth’ becomes thought crime and – as Jacinda Ardern might put it – ‘cruel to be kind’ actions are taken against those who challenge dominant state-corporate narratives?
Well, not long because we have already witnessed it during the last few years.
Tyranny is the type of ‘kindness’ we don’t need.
The post Free Speech, Jacinda Ardern and the Tyranny of “Kindness” first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It is a stinker in terms of policy, and unconvincing in effect, but the wholesale, indiscriminate retention of telecommunications data continues to excite legislators and law enforcement. In the European Union, countries continue to debate and pursue such measures, despite legal challenges.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), passed in 2016, limits the ways personal data is collected in terms of legitimate purposes. The European Court of Justice has also made it clear that the mass retention of phone and location data violates the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Human Rights.
Despite this, EU member states continue to subvert, by varying degrees, such protections. Fixated by notions of protecting society from the unsavoury and the criminal, lawmakers continue to flirt and court the mass surveillance properties inherent in such regulations.
A neatly grim example of this arose in July, when the Belgian parliament passed laws mandating the retention of user data by telecommunications and internet providers. This was a second run by the parliament, given the invalidation in April 2021 by the Belgian Constitutional Court of the previous data retention law. That particular statute permitted the storage of every Belgian’s telecom, location and internet metadata for up to 12 months. Those behind the new law, such as the Minister of Justice Vincent Van Quickenborne, claim it to be a targeted measure that preserves privacy; in truth it permits general data surveillance.
In Germany, the debate has been particularly strident. In 2010, the Constitutional Court annulled the first data retention law. Five years later, data retention was re-introduced, though not implemented given court rulings.
Despite arguments favouring its implementation, the investigation and prosecution of crime could still take place with high degrees of success without any such regime in place. In January this year, the statistics on crime clearance rates published by the German government revealed than a mere 3% of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) investigations between 2017 and 2021 could not be pursued for want of records of IP addresses.
The current coalition agreement, while supporting the retention of communications data, specifies that it be done “on an ad-hoc basis” and only via judicial order. But the Social Democratic Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, is a steadfast devotee of such retention, a fan of indiscriminate surveillance.
Faeser and her surveillance fan club got an answer last month with the ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that Germany’s general data retention law breached EU law. The case was triggered by action taken by Deutsche Telekom unit Telekom Deutschland and the internet service provider SpaceNet AG. The CJEU’s opinion was duly sought by the German court. The judges duly found that “EU law precludes the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data, except in the case of a serious threat to national security.”
The court took issue with the law’s “broad set of traffic and location data” retention requirements to be kept over periods of 10 weeks and four weeks respectively. This could lead to “very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of persons whose data are retained, such as habits of everyday life, permanent or temporary places of residence, daily or other movements, the activities carried out, the social relationships of those persons and the social environments frequented by them and, in particular, enable a profile of those persons to be established.”
The CJEU did not do away with the idea of bulk data retention, merely noting a growing list of exceptions that states are bound to exploit. In the German case, specific contexts might involve a grave threat to national security. There would also have to be court oversight, discrimination in terms of targeting, and a specific period of time.
In another joined case, the CJEU found that financial market regulators cannot use EU laws to target insider dealing and market manipulation by forcing telecom providers to supply the personal data of suspect traders to the authorities. The French law in question, justified on the basis of fighting crime, permitted the retention of such traffic data for up to one year from the day of its recording.
National legislation requiring telecommunications operators “to retain generally and indiscriminately the traffic data of all users of means of electronic communication, with no differentiation in that regard or with no provision made for exceptions and without establishing the link required […] between the data to be retained and the objective pursued” fell outside what was “strictly necessary and cannot be considered to be justified, in a democratic society”.
While European judicial bodies with teeth rein in the way data retention is used, when and if it should even be permitted, countries such as Australia continue to show faith in the very idea. Last month’s hack of the country’s second largest telecoms company, Optus, was a reminder that unnecessary data retention measures are an incitement for unlawful access.
In 2015, when the Data Retention Bill was introduced, advocates and those in the telecommunications industry had reason to be worried. In testimony to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Telstra Director of Government Relations, James Shaw, noted that the telco’s practice over peak times such as New Year’s Eve was to only retain some data for a few hours before being overwritten. This was markedly shorter than the Bill’s proposed two-year retention period.
Telstra’s Chief Information Security Officer Michael Burgess also issued a warning that such legislative requirements would embolden hackers. “We would have to put extra measures in place … to make sure that data was safe from those that should not have access to it.”
Electronic Frontiers Australia Executive Office Jon Lawrence was even more trenchant in explaining to the Joint Committee that such data retention requirements were an “unnecessary and disproportionate invasion of privacy” and would “literally be a honeypot to organised crime, to any sort of person who can potentially access it”.
Despite such warnings, the Joint Committee approved the bill, subject to a number of vague and ineffectual recommendations about security and appropriate data use. This has left those in Australia vulnerable to data loss and unprotected by the woefully inadequate Privacy Act 1988 (Cth). But even the European example shows us that the forces of law and order remain attritive in their efforts to undermine rights and liberties via requirements for data storage. Even in the face of judicial rulings and precedents, the attempt to maintain mass surveillance through data retention regimes remains a burning, threatening issue.
The post Data Retention and the Devotees of Mass Surveillance first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In so many of the little places of everyday life in which life is lived out, somehow democracy doesn’t exist. And one of the creeping hands of totalitarianism running through the democracy is the Federal Bureau of Investigation… Because why does the FBI do all this? To scare the hell out of people… They work for the establishment and the corporations and the politicos to keep things as they are. And they want to frighten and chill the people who are trying to change things.
— Howard Zinn, historian
Discredit, disrupt, and destroy.
That is how the government plans to get rid of activists and dissidents who stand in its way.
This has always been the modus operandi of the FBI (more aptly referred to as the Federal Bureau of Intimidation): muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
Indeed, the FBI has a long history of persecuting, prosecuting and generally harassing activists, politicians, and cultural figures.
Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the FBI’s targets were civil rights activists, those suspected of having Communist ties, and anti-war activists. In more recent decades, the FBI has expanded its reach to target so-called domestic extremists, environmental activists, and those who oppose the police state.
Back in 2019, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism, without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach.
That misguided pledge sheds a curious light on the FBI’s latest nationwide spree of SWAT team raids, surveillance, disinformation campaigns, fear-mongering, paranoia, and strong-arm tactics.
For instance, just before dawn on Jan. 25, 2019, the FBI sent 29 heavily armed agents in 17 vehicles to carry out a SWAT-style raid on the Florida home of Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s longtime supporters. Stone, charged with a political crime, was taken away in handcuffs.
In March 2021, under the pretext of carrying out an inventory of U.S. Private Vaults, FBI agents raided 1400 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills, seizing “more than $86 million in cash as well as gold, jewelry, and other valuables from property owners who were suspected of no crimes.”
In April 2021, FBI agents raided Rudy Giuliani’s home and office, seizing 18 electronic devices. More than a year later, Giuliani has yet to be charged with any crimes.
In June 2022, Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump Administration, was led out of his home in pajamas while federal law enforcement officials raided his home.
In the summer of 2022, FBI agents wearing tactical gear including body armor, helmets and camouflage uniforms and carrying rifles raided multiple homes throughout Little Rock, Ark., including a judge’s home.
In August 2022, more than a dozen FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago, the winter home of Donald Trump.
And in September 2022, 25 to 30 armed FBI agents raided the home of an anti-abortion activist, pointing guns at the family and terrorizing the man’s wife and seven children.
Politics aside, the message is clear: this is how the government will deal with anyone who challenges its authority.
You’re next.
Unfortunately, while these overreaching, heavy-handed lessons in how to rule by force have become standard operating procedure for a government that communicates with its citizenry primarily through the language of brutality, intimidation and fear, none of this is new.
The government has been playing these mind games for a long time.
As Betty Medsger, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, noted in 1971, the FBI was engaged in practices that had never been reported, probably were unconstitutional, and were counter to the public’s understanding of the agency’s purpose.
The objective: target anti-government dissenters for wide-scale harassment, widespread surveillance and intimidation in order to enhance their paranoia and make them think there was an “FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
Medsger, the recipient of stolen government files that provided a glimpse into the workings of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency, would later learn that between 1956 and 1971, the FBI conducted an intensive domestic intelligence program, termed COINTELPRO, intended to neutralize domestic political dissidents.
The explicit objective, according to one FBI memo: “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.
As Congressman Steve Cohen explains, “COINTELPRO was set up to surveil and disrupt groups and movements that the FBI found threatening… many groups, including anti-war, student, and environmental activists, and the New Left were harassed, infiltrated, falsely accused of criminal activity.”
Sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, John Lennon, and hundreds more.
Among those most closely watched by the FBI was King, a man labeled by the FBI as “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country.” All told, the FBI collected 17,000 pages of materials on King.
With wiretaps and electronic bugs planted in his home and office, King was kept under constant surveillance by the FBI with the aim of “neutralizing” him. He even received blackmail letters written by FBI agents suggesting that he either commit suicide or the details of his private life would be revealed to the public. The FBI kept up its pursuit of King until he was felled by a hollow-point bullet to the head in 1968.
John Lennon, a vocal peace protester and anti-war activist, was another high-profile example of the lengths to which the Deep State will go to persecute those who dare to challenge its authority.
Lennon was singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files illegally collected on his activities and associations.
For a while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Years after Lennon’s assassination, it would be revealed that the FBI had collected 281 pages of files on him, including song lyrics.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, directed the agency to spy on the musician. There were also various written orders calling on government agents to frame Lennon for a drug bust. “The FBI’s files on Lennon … read like the writings of a paranoid goody-two-shoes,” observed reporter Jonathan Curiel.
As the New York Times notes, “Critics of today’s domestic surveillance object largely on privacy grounds. They have focused far less on how easily government surveillance can become an instrument for the people in power to try to hold on to power. ‘The U.S. vs. John Lennon’ … is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.”
Indeed, all of the many complaints we have about government today—surveillance, militarism, corruption, harassment, SWAT team raids, political persecution, spying, overcriminalization, etc.—were present in Lennon’s day and formed the basis of his call for social justice, peace and a populist revolution. As Adam Cohen of the New York Times points out, “The F.B.I.’s surveillance of Lennon is a reminder of how easily domestic spying can become unmoored from any legitimate law enforcement purpose. What is more surprising, and ultimately more unsettling, is the degree to which the surveillance turns out to have been intertwined with electoral politics.”
The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, echoed these concerns about the government’s abuses:
“Too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much information has been collected. The Government has often undertaken the 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. Investigations have been based upon vague standards whose breadth made excessive collection inevitable. Unsavory and vicious tactics have been employed—including anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings, ostracize persons from their professions, and provoke target groups into rivalries that might result in deaths. Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.”
Fifty years later, we’re still having this same debate about the perils of government overreach.
For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the threat.
The lesson to be learned is this: whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now, rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.
All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government and its henchmen today will eventually be meted out on the general populace.
At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs, it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you voted for in the last presidential election.
At that point—when you find yourself subjected to dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain, search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see fit—remember you were warned.
Frankly, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed.
These are no longer experiments on our freedoms.
These are acts of aggression by a government that is no friend to freedom.
The post Federal Bureau of Intimidation first appeared on Dissident Voice.
When discussing the topic of government electronic surveillance, I often reflect on the time during a significant AFP Counter Terrorism investigation that we had cause to install a hidden camera in the bedroom of a terrorism suspect. The surveillance device was crucial for the evidence it obtained, and ultimately assisted in bringing serious terrorism charges…
The post The confronting reality of pervasive surveillance laws appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Janine Jackson interviewed Muslim Advocates’ Sumayyah Waheed about CNN‘s John Miller for the September 16, 2022, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: In March of this year, John Miller—then deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism for the New York Police Department—told a New York City Council meeting that “there is no evidence” that the NYPD surveilled Muslim communities in the wake of September 11, 2001—”based,” he said, “on every objective study that’s been done.”
NPR (4/15/14)
At that point, media had extensively documented the unconstitutional discrimination of the NYPD’s so-called “Demographics Unit,” including installing police cameras outside mosques, and reporting store owners who had visible Qurans or religious calendars. And the NYPD had agreed to disband the unit in the face of multiple federal lawsuits.
In September, CNN hired John Miller as “chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst,” part of changes attached to CNN‘s absorption by Warner Brothers Discovery, whose most powerful shareholder is libertarian billionaire John Malone, who has stated that he would like CNN to feature more “actual journalism,” citing, as an example, Fox News.
Forget what it portends for CNN. The Miller hire is a message to Muslim communities about who it’s OK to harm under official sanction, and how eagerly some will strive to deny and erase that harm and its ongoing effects.
We’re joined now by Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sumayyah Waheed.
Sumayyah Waheed: Thank you so much for having me.
CNN‘s John Miller
JJ: I want to read just a little bit more context for the statement that John Miller made to New York City Council member Shahana Hanif, when she asked for transparency and an official apology for the NYPD surveillance and harassment of Muslims.
Just before he said there’s no evidence, Miller said:
Perception allowed to linger long enough becomes reality. I know from my own conversation with Muslim members of the community, and Muslim community leaders, that there are people…who will believe forever…[that] there were spies in their mosques who were trying to entrap people.
It seems important to acknowledge that this isn’t just lying. This is gaslighting, right?
SW: Yeah. And it’s lying under oath. He was providing testimony under oath to the City Council.
It’s important to note he had choices in terms of how to respond to this, the request for an apology. He could have flatly refused it. He could have defended the NYPD’s program. I wouldn’t agree with that, either, but he could have done that.
Instead, he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. And as you said, specifically something that harms a marginalized community, the Muslims in the New York area, whose harms that they suffered from this massive surveillance echo through today.
Pulitzer Prizes (2012)
And this was not that long ago. This program started in the aftermath of 9/11, so about 20-plus years ago, and then the AP reported on it in, I think, 2012. They won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on it.
And they reported with a treasure trove of documents, internal documents from the NYPD, some of which our organization utilized in our lawsuit against the NYPD for their spying. And a federal appeals court explicitly said that our client’s allegations were plausible, that the NYPD ran a surveillance program with a facially discriminatory classification.
So he chose to lie about something that’s well-documented. He chose to basically spit in the face of Muslim communities who were harmed by this program. And he has basically been rewarded for it, by being hired by a major news outlet with a position that, I don’t even know how much he’s going to be compensated, but he’s now got a national platform to further spread lies.
JJ: It’s incredible, and I just want to draw you out on one piece, which is that folks, even critically thinking folks, will have heard, yes, this was a program that happened, but it was ended, despite what Miller, in his brain, which we don’t want to explore, believes. The program ended, and so therefore maybe things are better.
Could I just ask you a little bit about the harms from something like this surveillance program, which is—cameras outside of mosques, interrogating people in stores, you know? The harms don’t disappear when the program is officially ended.
CLEAR et al. (2013)
SW: Not at all. So first of all, just from our lawsuit—and our lawsuit was specifically for New Jersey Muslims who were affected by this, and there were other lawsuits for the New York Muslims, and there were Muslims outside of the New York and New Jersey area who were affected by this. But just from our lawsuit, we knew that the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools and two Muslim student associations in New Jersey.
So every aspect of Muslims’ lives was being surveilled, and the community finding out about this pervasive surveillance, that’s not something that you can just dismiss. The community basically was traumatized by this.
And the result—there’s a Mapping Muslims report that actually goes into all the effects, some of the impacts on the Muslim community from this notorious program of surveillance. And they found that Muslims suppressed themselves, in terms of their religious expression, their speech and political associations.
It sowed suspicion within the community, because people found out, you know, the person sitting next to me at the mosque was an informant. How can I go to the mosque and trust everyone there? Maybe I won’t go.
Of course, it severed trust with law enforcement, and then contributed to a pervasive fear and unwillingness to publicly engage.
So that you can’t just flip a switch on. If the NYPD actually wanted to address those harms, that would be a really long road to repair.
And by having John Miller in his position, and not actually censuring him or firing him for those comments, the NYPD signaled the opposite, right, that they’re going to back somebody who doesn’t care to address the harms of the department.
And then, of course, now he’s being further validated by a national news media company.
FAIR.org (6/21/17)
JJ: And Miller does Big Lie—a term, by the way, that is now reportedly forbidden at CNN with reference to Trump’s stolen election.
But in 2017, as Josmar Trujillo wrote for FAIR.org, Miller was on a local radio station, WNYM, saying that
activists have in their mind this idea that police departments and cities like New York run massive surveillance programs, targeting innocent civilians for no reason. Now, that’s nutty. I mean, why would we do that? How could we do that? And how would it make sense?
Again, this is beyond misinformation to disinformation. And it’s very clear that this is his jam, you know? And so CNN has to want him for that, and not despite that. It just, it’s breaking my brain.
SW: Yes, because news networks should be helping us sort fact from fiction, not further destroying the line. Otherwise they’re nothing better than propaganda machines.
And this is not just propaganda. This is specifically erasing the experiences of marginalized people —and to elevate law enforcement above any criticism, much less actually holding it accountable to ordinary people.
And we know that law enforcement has a pattern of systemically depriving communities that are already marginalized: Black communities, Latinx communities, poor communities, Muslims, disabled communities. I mean, the list goes on.
So, basically, CNN is signaling that this is where they’re putting their weight.
JJ: Yeah. And you know, at that point, Josmar Trujillo was writing about how the NYC City Council was calling on the police department to be transparent about surveillance operations. That was something called the POST Act, and the police and the right-wing media came in shrieking, like this is going to be a “roadmap for terrorists” to how to attack us.
But the point is, that hysteria pulled the goalpost to the right. So now transparency—what surveillance operations are you doing—becomes the weirdest thing that you can call for. And ending that discriminatory surveillance and harassment is pushed off the page and off the table.
And I just wonder what your thoughts are about media and journalism, and what they could do to help, or could stop doing that hurts.
Sumayyah Waheed: “News networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line.”
SW: Right. I think that, again, going back to my point that news networks are supposed to help us sort fact from fiction, not further destroy the line, and specifically with the powerful actors, whether they’re police departments or elected officials, to utilize that truth-telling, the investigatory process, to hold those actors accountable.
Because that should be the role of the news, is finding the information that might not be obvious, accessing the records that should be public, because we live in a free and open society, supposedly, and enabling people to take that information and hold their elected or public officials accountable.
So simply ceding ground because there’s a loud, screaming, radical voice out there is definitely not the answer. And to further reiterate, you know, the AP, by reporting on this, won the Pulitzer Prize. So it’s not like there’s no reward for it besides, you know, a free and well-engaged society. We should be rewarding truth-telling and proper investigations by journalists.
But you know, this is a rightward shift at CNN under the new chairman, and it comes after the firing of Brian Stelter and John Harwood for criticizing Trump and Republicans who engage in election denials.
So the story is already being told by these moves, right? So it’s just really alarming and disturbing for anyone who values truth, who values our democracy—and particularly for the marginalized communities, who know that this type of gaslighting, this type of elevating law enforcement above any kind of reproach is going to continue to harm us.
JJ: And I wish I didn’t have to note that nothing about that program made anybody safer.
SW: Yes.
JJ: Because what we’re going to hear is, “OK, yeah, we’re harming some people’s civil liberties, but it’s all about safety.”
And so I wish we didn’t have to say it, but the thing is that that harm didn’t make anybody safer.
FAIR.org (9/14/22)
SW: Right, the entire massive surveillance apparatus did not lead to one investigatory lead.
And I’ll also point out: the federal appeals court that ruled for our clients also cited the Japanese internment as a bad example of being overly deferential to the executive branch, which law enforcement is part of, and not wanting to repeat that shameful history.
So one step towards repeating history is denying it. Another step is forgetting it. But active denial just accelerates that process. So it’s very unsettling, and CNN should really just reverse course, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen, so it’s pretty discouraging.
JJ: Well, we’re going to encourage listeners to encourage that to happen.
We’ve been speaking with Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy council at Muslim Advocates. You can find their work online at MuslimAdvocates.org. Thank you so much, Sumayyah Waheed, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SW: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
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This post was originally published on FAIR.
Enter the Matrix: the New World Order Global Surveillance Documentary
The post They Know Everything first appeared on Dissident Voice.
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It took a few years of tolerable incompetence, caused fears about security, and was meant to be the great surveillance salvation to reassure us all. Instead, Australia’s COVIDSafe App only identified two positive cases of infection during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, and failed, in every sense of the term, to work.
Launched in April 2020, this AU$21 million platform was heralded as a great tool for pandemic surveillance. It was one of many such digital responses used by countries to combat viral transmission. China adopted the Alipay Health Code app, which shares location data with police authorities. Users receive various codes denoting status: red for those needing to spend two weeks in isolation; yellow for those needing to self-quarantine; and green for those able to move about freely. India has Aarogya Setu; England and Wales, the NHS COVID-19 app.
As Privacy International observes, the spread of these apps, some voluntarily applied, others not, had a range of consequences. Data might be generated without the user’s involvement. Data might also be lifted from the relevant device. Some apps might store data locally or convey it to servers. “And they can leak data to analytics firms and social media platforms.”
COVIDSafe relied on Bluetooth signals transmitted at intervals to nearby users, with those testing positive would trigger a process by which state and territory authorities could request access to the phone to identify other potential infections. The close contacts would have to be within 1.5 metres of each other for at least 15 minutes. In principle, this was meant to lead to improved contact tracing, more effective isolation protocols and enable more restrictive measures to be eased.
From the start, the project seemed plagued. There were questions about the exposure window and how viable it was, notably in the face of more infectious variants. There were concerns that user data in the national data store could become accessible to the US government, given the awarding of the data-storage contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud subsidiary of Amazon. By the end of April 2020, 3 million Australians had downloaded the app. In total, there were 7.9 million downloads. The measure of success for the program, in other words, became one of downloading an app rather than its supposed effectiveness.
Users were assured that little needed to be done for the app to successfully operate. “Your phone does not need to be unlocked for the app to work,” Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert claimed in an unconvincing statement. Users were also encouraged to “have the app running in the background when they are coming into contact with others.” This betrayed a lack of technological savvy habitual among cabinet ministers.
In the view of the Minister for Social Services Anne Ruston, the app was part of an effort to empower Australians “to proactively limit the spread of the coronavirus and protect the community.” Having such a mechanism in place would “help protect the lives and health of the Australian community to make sure that we are in a position to quickly respond and be able to trace people if they have come into contact with somebody who has the virus.”
But the government’s own assessments revealed that the app only worked effectively on locked iPhones about a quarter of the time, if that. As of late April 2020, documents from the Digital Transformation Agency found that the app’s qualities in communicating between two locked iPhones was “poor”. The same finding was made for encounters between locked Android to iOS services and active Android to locked iOS devices.
The rating for unlocked or active iPhone-to-iPhone encounters was, by way of contrast, “excellent”, logging in a success rate of 80-100 per cent. But the latter rate was fairly meaningless, given that iPhone users are, for reasons of privacy, encouraged to maintain a default lock setting.
With COVIDSafe’s effectiveness coming into question, the strategy of the Morrison government moved from the silver bullet to the general plan. The digital tool was to be but one element in the overall battle against the pandemic, complementing, in Ruston’s words, “the existing manual process by which we currently trace and track people.” It could be likened to, as Prime Minister Scott Morrison did with trivialising ease, donning sunscreen before heading out the door.
A subsequent government report into the app, released on July 29th, 2021, chose to avoid some of the more glaring problems in the enterprise. Even then, the authors had to concede that COVIDSafe was “rarely” resorted to by public health officials “except to confirm cases identified through manual processes.” This, the reasoning went, was due to low rates of community transmission and formidable manual contact tracing. The app’s failure, in other words, was a sign of the country’s success.
A less than flattering counter report by software developers Richard Nelson, Jim Mussared and Geoffrey Huntley, along with cryptographer Vanessa Teague, noted a lack of “deep discussion of changes made throughout the app’s development which heavily impacted efficacy, and fails to disclose key information such as the number of active users of the application.”
This stood in sharp contrast to the peer-reviewed study, published in Nature, which considered the epidemiological impact of the NHS COVID-19 app developed in the UK. In that case the National Health Service abandoned initial connection methods based on Bluetooth, implementing, instead, Apple and Google’s Exposure Notification Framework.
As the critical multi-authored study of COVIDSafe concludes, “Almost all of the serious security bugs, privacy issues, and bugs affecting efficacy that were present could have all been avoided by using the Exposure Notification Framework, keeping public perception high.”
A few spluttering apologias can be found in defence of the app. One effort can be found in that dullest of fora, The Conversation. That contribution, sterilised and pasteurised, tries to be optimistic about a profligate, failed exercise. “One of the goals of COVIDSafe was to automate the manual work, to help the efforts of contact tracers at scale. This goal was achieved, although the value and effectiveness are questionable, as we discuss below.”
Then comes the following, which suggests a lamentable ignorance of the implications of surveillance. “Getting so many Australians to download new and contested technology is an unparalleled achievement. While the number of downloads doesn’t tell us how many people were actively using the app, it shows some success in getting people to at least download and engage with it.”
This relish for technological utopia can only take us so far before disgust sets in. The issue for such believers is not how good the effort was, but the fact that it was tried by the unsuspecting. And not only that, “COVIDSafe struck a balance between being aesthetic and relatively easy to use.”
In future, those in the business of dolling out such health initiatives should think more carefully. These systems may be intended to keep public trust afloat but can have quite the opposite effect. Ultimately, the proof of COVIDSafe’s great demise can be found in the number of individuals who consented to having their data added to the National COVIDSafe Data Store for reasons of contact tracing. While there were 7.9 million registrations of the app between April 2020 and May 2022, fewer than 800 gave consent to that measure. As Australia’s current health minister, Mark Butler, opined, the entire endeavour was a monumental waste.
The post Stumbling Surveillance: The end of the COVIDSafe App first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Edward Snowden Gives “ALERT! Your Smartphone Is Always Spying On You.”
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Exclusive: asylum seekers in the offshore detention centre who had contact with Australian journalists, lawyers and advocates were closely watched, documents reveal
The Australian government used private security contractors to collect intelligence on asylum seekers on Nauru, singling out those who were speaking to journalists, lawyers and refugee advocates, internal documents from 2016 reveal.
Intelligence officers working for Wilson Security compiled fortnightly reports about asylum seekers “of interest”, including individuals flagged as having “links with [Australian] media”, “contact with lawyers in Australia” or “contacts with Australian advocates”.
There are no private lives…. This a most important aspect of modern life…. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
― Philip K. Dick, “The Last Interview”
Nothing is private.
We teeter on the cusp of a cultural, technological and societal revolution the likes of which have never been seen before.
While the political Left and Right continue to make abortion the face of the debate over the right to privacy in America, the government and its corporate partners, aided by rapidly advancing technology, are reshaping the world into one in which there is no privacy at all.
Nothing that was once private is protected.
We have not even begun to register the fallout from the tsunami bearing down upon us in the form of AI (artificial intelligence) surveillance, and yet it is already re-orienting our world into one in which freedom is almost unrecognizable.
AI surveillance harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and widespread surveillance technology to do what the police state lacks the manpower and resources to do efficiently or effectively: be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference, and collude.
Everything that was once private is now up for grabs to the right buyer.
Governments and corporations alike have heedlessly adopted AI surveillance technologies without any care or concern for their long-term impact on the rights of the citizenry.
As a special report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns, “A growing number of states are deploying advanced AI surveillance tools to monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of policy objectives—some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground.”
Indeed, with every new AI surveillance technology that is adopted and deployed without any regard for privacy, Fourth Amendment rights and due process, the rights of the citizenry are being marginalized, undermined and eviscerated.
Cue the rise of digital authoritarianism.
Digital authoritarianism, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies cautions, involves the use of information technology to surveil, repress, and manipulate the populace, endangering human rights and civil liberties, and co-opting and corrupting the foundational principles of democratic and open societies, “including freedom of movement, the right to speak freely and express political dissent, and the right to personal privacy, online and off.”
The seeds of digital authoritarianism were planted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with the passage of the USA Patriot Act. A massive 342-page wish list of expanded powers for the FBI and CIA, the Patriot Act justified broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens.
It sounded the death knell for the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment, and normalized the government’s mass surveillance powers.
Writing for the New York Times, Jeffrey Rosen observed that “before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Who could have predicted that 50 years after George Orwell typed the final words to his dystopian novel 1984, “He loved Big Brother,” we would come to love Big Brother.
Yet that is exactly what has come to pass.
After 9/11, Rosen found that “people were happy to give up privacy without experiencing a corresponding increase in security. More concerned about feeling safe than actually being safe, they demanded the construction of vast technological architectures of surveillance even though the most empirical studies suggested that the proliferation of surveillance cameras had ‘no effect on violent crime’ or terrorism.”
In the decades following 9/11, a massive security-industrial complex arose that was fixated on militarization, surveillance, and repression.
Surveillance is the key.
We’re being watched everywhere we go. Speed cameras. Red light cameras. Police body cameras. Cameras on public transportation. Cameras in stores. Cameras on public utility poles. Cameras in cars. Cameras in hospitals and schools. Cameras in airports.
We’re being recorded at least 50 times a day.
It’s estimated that there are upwards of 85 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. alone, second only to China.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Yet it’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.
We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, microbiomes, scent, gait, heartbeat, breathing, behaviors—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.
As one AI surveillance advocate proclaimed, “Surveillance is no longer only a watchful eye, but a predictive one as well.” For instance, Emotion AI, an emerging technology that is gaining in popularity, uses facial recognition technology “to analyze expressions based on a person’s faceprint to detect their internal emotions or feelings, motivations and attitudes.” China claims its AI surveillance can already read facial expressions and brain waves in order to determine the extent to which members of the public are grateful, obedient and willing to comply with the Communist Party.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the thought police.
The technology is already being used “by border guards to detect threats at border checkpoints, as an aid for detection and diagnosis of patients for mood disorders, to monitor classrooms for boredom or disruption, and to monitor human behavior during video calls.”
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government: the surveillance state.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.
The short answer: they have become one and the same entity. The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state, which has shifted into high gear with the help of artificial intelligence technologies. The COVID-19 pandemic helped to further centralize digital power in the hands of the government at the expense of the citizenry’s privacy rights.
“From cameras that identify the faces of passersby to algorithms that keep tabs on public sentiment online, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools are opening new frontiers in state surveillance around the world.” So begins the Carnegie Endowment’s report on AI surveillance note. “Law enforcement, national security, criminal justice, and border management organizations in every region are relying on these technologies—which use statistical pattern recognition, machine learning, and big data analytics—to monitor citizens.”
In the hands of tyrants and benevolent dictators alike, AI surveillance is the ultimate means of repression and control, especially through the use of smart city/safe city platforms, facial recognition systems, and predictive policing. These technologies are also being used by violent extremist groups, as well as sex, child, drug, and arms traffickers for their own nefarious purposes.
China, the role model for our dystopian future, has been a major force in deploying AI surveillance on its own citizens, especially by way of its social credit systems, which it employs to identify, track and segregate its “good” citizens from the “bad.”
Social media credit scores assigned to Chinese individuals and businesses categorize them on whether or not they are worthy of being part of society. A real-name system—which requires people to use government-issued ID cards to buy mobile sims, obtain social media accounts, take a train, board a plane, or even buy groceries—coupled with social media credit scores ensures that those blacklisted as “unworthy” are banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train. Among the activities that can get you labeled unworthy are taking reserved seats on trains or causing trouble in hospitals.
In much the same way that Chinese products have infiltrated almost every market worldwide and altered consumer dynamics, China is now exporting its “authoritarian tech” to governments worldwide ostensibly in an effort to spread its brand of totalitarianism worldwide. In fact, both China and the United States have led the way in supplying the rest of the world with AI surveillance, sometimes at a subsidized rate.
This is how totalitarianism conquers the world.
While countries with authoritarian regimes have been eager to adopt AI surveillance, as the Carnegie Endowment’s research makes clear, liberal democracies are also “aggressively using AI tools to police borders, apprehend potential criminals, monitor citizens for bad behavior, and pull out suspected terrorists from crowds.”
Moreover, it’s easy to see how the China model for internet control has been integrated into the American police state’s efforts to flush out so-called anti-government, domestic extremists.
According to journalist Adrian Shahbaz’s in-depth report, there are nine elements to the Chinese model of digital authoritarianism when it comes to censoring speech and targeting activists: 1) dissidents suffer from persistent cyber attacks and phishing; 2) social media, websites, and messaging apps are blocked; 3) posts that criticize government officials are removed; 4) mobile and internet access are revoked as punishment for activism; 5) paid commentators drown out government criticism; 6) new laws tighten regulations on online media; 7) citizens’ behavior monitored via AI and surveillance tools; 9) individuals regularly arrested for posts critical of the government; and 9) online activists are made to disappear.
You don’t even have to be a critic of the government to get snared in the web of digital censorship and AI surveillance.
The danger posed by the surveillance state applies equally to all of us: lawbreaker and law-abider alike.
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies.
As Orwell wrote in 1984, “You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”
In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, we are all guilty of some transgression or other.
No one is spared.
As Elise Thomas writes for Wired: “New surveillance tech means you’ll never be anonymous again.”
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whomever we wanted, buy whatever we wanted, think whatever we wanted, go wherever we wanted, feel whatever we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants, sold to government agencies, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
Tread cautiously: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day AI surveillance state.
Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, AI technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before Philip K. Dick’s rules for survival become our governing reality: “If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that’ll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.”
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This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Three days after the twin towers fell, then-President George W. Bush called for Americans to “unite.” What followed was the decades-long United States military-led campaign — the “war on terror” — which has resulted in the death of over 2 million Muslims; the expansion of a network of over 800 global U.S. military bases; and the creation of codified Islamophobia, the violence of which knows no bounds. The rhetoric framing and otherizing of Muslims as people inherently prone to terrorism has been embedded in the design of post-9/11 policies “overtly and covertly, domestic and external,” Maha Hilal recounts in her new book, Innocent Until Proven Muslim.
From the get-go, the Bush administration swiftly deployed a version of public morality upholding dichotomous ideological values between the West and Islam — painting any response by the U.S. as “acceptable and even necessary.” As reported in the book, the five dimensions of the war on terror are: militarism and warfare, draconian immigration policy, surveillance, federal terrorism prosecutions, and detention and torture.
The root of the war on terror — institutionalized Islamophobia laced with white supremacy — has allowed the U.S. government to carry out state-sanctioned violence without an ounce of accountability. Two decades later, Muslims abroad and in the U.S. are facing the repercussions of a plethora of xenophobic programs like the National Security Entry-Exit Registration system, the use of Guantánamo Bay prison to house and torture Muslim men, and surveillance initiatives like Countering Violent Extremism. Muslims in the U.S. are forced to reconcile with their identities, whether they’re making a trip to the mosque for Jummah prayer or calling out the U.S. government for the destruction of their homelands.
Innocent Until Proven Muslim is an accumulation of Hilal’s ongoing research and efforts to organize to dismantle the war on terror by highlighting the most devastating impacts of U.S. empire. Analyzing everything from the panoptic violence of surveillance to the ongoing violations of fundamental rights, Hilal envisions a world in which Muslims no longer live under a cloud of suspicion.
The U.S.’s narrow framing of moral culpability under the guise of national security has persisted under three successive presidencies, broadening the scope of state violence at every turn. Hilal describes the extent to which Muslim lives have been dehumanized.
Consider the pattern of performative accountability: Americans were shocked when photos from the Abu Ghraib scandal emerged, documenting extensive torture of Muslim prisoners who were punched, slapped, kicked, doused with hot water, forced into stress positions for hours, threatened with dogs, etc. In response, former President Bush stated, “The prison does not represent the America that I know,” evading any critique of the government while intentionally disregarding the livelihood of the Iraqis who were tortured.
Hilal writes, “The extent to which this has been allowed is a testament to the power of narrative to create real-world systems and the resilience that same narrative power displays to evade responsibility for the human cost of the systems it supports.”
During Barack Obama’s administration, a U.S. soldier massacred 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The immediate administrative focus, as Obama put it, was the “sacrifices that our men and women have made in Afghanistan” — sacrifices for whom? These examples illustrate how both Bush and Obama were experts at erasing the victimization of Muslims to justify the war on terror by any means. An entire infrastructure of systematic Islamophobia was designed in the early days after 9/11, and these attitudes toward counterterrorism have since been codified in law and policy. The true reach of the war on terror is difficult to imagine.
Openly glorifying in brutality, former President Donald Trump has expressed pride in state violence carried out during his presidency and laid the groundwork to leverage support for extreme policies like the Muslim ban. In 2015, Trump said the U.S. needs to “watch and study the mosques.” Four days later, he indicated that he would “certainly implement” a database to track Muslims in the U.S. Two days after that, he falsely claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheered in New Jersey when the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.
Trump’s efforts to further perpetuate harmful tropes about Muslims make their deaths seem unimportant. Hilal reminds us that, in turn, “The dominant narrative becomes more difficult to dislodge from the imagination of a public who accepts this political landscape as matter of course.”
Innocent Until Proven Muslim is not limited to describing the pattern of physical abuse against Muslim bodies. Woven together with Hilal’s critical analysis of the human cost of post-9/11 wars are countless examples of sinister surveillance methods used to racially and religiously profile whole communities. Take for example, the creation of The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, which required immigrant men from Muslim-majority countries over the age of 16 to register with the government. Although this program ended in 2011, 80,000 men were subject to intensive interrogations and not a single one was charged with a crime.
Considering the superficial construction of the war on terror, Hilal reminds us that the government was able to “establish a differential system of justice,” paving the way for the normalization of entrapment, informants and so-called “fishing expeditions” — used to create conditions that lead to an actionable offense. The Holy Land Five case is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of arbitrary domestic trial cases.
A charitable organization created to support displaced Palestinians across the Middle East, the Holy Land Five were accused of diverting donations to Hamas. Although no direct connection between them was found, all five men were sentenced to 15 to 65 years in prison, and many American Muslims are still grappling with the criminalization of Muslim charities.
During the Obama administration, the authority of the U.S. government to surveil its citizens was expanded both in intent and practice — Hilal explains how these programs “disrupted community bonds” and “the confidence that stems from a reasonable expectation of freedom.” Mere months before the government launched the Countering Violent Extremism Program, Obama declared in his state of the union address that, “Muslims Americans are part of our American family.” A quick look at what this program entailed, however, was the pairing of vulnerable Muslim youth — disproportionately Black — with police officers who were trained to pathologize mental health issues. The psychological impact on Muslim Americans since 9/11 is insurmountable.
To answer the question, “is the war on terror over?” Hilal closes with 11 interviews that feature Muslims from a variety of different backgrounds. The unmistakable message in these conversations is that collective liberation means justice for all and in that, abolishing oppressive institutions that continue to otherize Muslims. In the words of Zahra, a Somali chaplain whom Hilal quotes in the book:
Islam has always been a theology and political tool that liberates people, even when they’re caged, even when they’re enslaved, even when they’re imprisoned. Even when our bodies are caged, even when we are under apartheid and in the borders of Gaza, or in the prisons in Philadelphia, or in the cages at Gitmo, Islam allows us to survive the unsurvivable. And that inherently makes you a threat to an empire whose only function has been to dominate, oppress, pillage, and kill.
For many Muslims, it is difficult not to internalize and absorb anti-Muslim rhetoric in a climate that seeks to normalize it. Islamophobia in the U.S is baked into laws, institutions and policies. From being treated as a suspect community when going through airport security to global militarism that continues to yield unrestricted violence in countless Muslim-majority countries — imagining a better future requires rising up together. Zahra, along with the ten other interviewees, speak of the importance of unifying to dismantle anti-Muslim bigotry. Although individual Muslim communities face different degrees of state-sanctioned violence, collective liberation would ultimately free us all.
The war on terror is and always will be rooted in racism. Although Trump was able to expand its executive reach, the pathway was paved by both Bush and Obama. What has differed across administrations is not the gravity of violence or the human toll, but the preference for one form of violence over another. It was Bush who created a xenophobic immigration system with the creation of ICE, it was Obama who earned his place in history as “deporter in chief,” and it was Trump who reigned terror with a series of executive orders banning Muslims from entering the country. There’s no singular definition of justice for Muslims in the U.S and abroad, but perhaps demanding accountability from the war criminals who’ve once occupied the oval office is a start.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Both Republicans and Democratic leaders have been pushing increasingly hyped-up narratives to persuade us that crime is exploding, and calling for increased policing and police funding. This is standard Republican rhetoric across the board, and Democratic mayors like Lori Lightfoot of Chicago and Eric Adams of Chicago have been parroting a similar message. Even Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia who has received widespread support from progressives, announced Thursday that she is in favor of raising police pay.
In recent weeks, we’ve also been repeatedly told that bail reform has caused crime to skyrocket. But according to the American Civil Liberties Union, this is a “false narrative.”
Yes, homicide is up since 2020, but it is very possible that the increase is tied to the expansion of neoliberalism and the dislocations caused by the pandemic rather than the “fall guy” of minimal bail reform. It is imperative to reject this alarmist rhetoric, which obscures the racist, classist, sexist, and homophobic realities of police violence in the United States.
Even communities we may perceive to be one step removed from the harms of police-perpetrated violence can be targeted by it, and should speak out against so-called “tough–on–crime” approaches.
As an Arab American who has witnessed the chilling effect of surveillance on my community, three factors have inspired me to stand with the movement to defund the police.
First — as organizations like Chicago’s Arab American Action Network and San Francisco’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), the Abolishing the War on Terror movement, the Arabs for Black Lives Collective, and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights exemplify — Arab Americans have a responsibility to stand with Black (including Black Arab), migrant and Indigenous social movements challenging oppressive policing systems.
Middle-class Arab immigrant communities should especially be engaged in these matters, as some of us have benefited from anti-Blackness, the theft of Native land, and the exploitation of working-class migrants — perhaps not as directly as white people, but by virtue of living on stolen Indigenous land, or because our families have gained economic privileges related to anti-Black systemic racism.
We should be challenging the privileges we do hold in relation to oppressive systems. The forms of state violence Arab and Black communities face are not the same, but solidarity is both our responsibility and a means to acknowledging accountability to those upon whose backs this country was built and continues to operate.
Second, the racist structures targeting Arab and Muslim migrant communities — including airport profiling and government surveillance — are part of the U.S.’s increasingly broad systems of policing and incarceration. Therefore, we should be in coalition with communities striving to end systems of policing.
U.S. policing systems are broad and work through many forms of containment and punishment, such as racist neighborhood policing, as well as surveillance like police use of gang databases and terrorist databases. Both rely on racial profiling, which civil rights groups assert is unconstitutional because the practice infringes on privacy rights.
Furthermore, the “war on terror” normalizes the militarization of the police while the military and police are increasingly pushed to share strategies, technologies and trainings to intensify repression of social justice movements and poor communities.
This is evident in military surplus equipment and gear going to police, including armored vehicles and high-powered rifles. After the police-perpetrated killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, police in combat gear made communities look like war zones. There is no evidence that this reduces crime, but the practice raises profound concerns about what we want public safety to look like and whether we are being primed to accept a more militaristic and authoritarian future. (When President Donald Trump renewed a military surplus program reformed by the Barack Obama administration and spoke with amusement about police not roughing people up too much, this sent a clear signal to police and endangered communities of color.)
Across the country, communities have been expressing concerns about how cops target people who they perceive to be Muslim, including Arab Americans who may or may not be Muslim, in Islamophobic rhetoric and actions. The well-known New York Police Department spying campaign, confirmed in 2011, entailed wholesale surveillance of Arabs and Muslims in the New York City area — from “terrorism” investigations of mosques to attempts to infiltrate the board of directors at the Arab American Association of New York.
Recent examples include two Michigan lawsuits, one involving officers who forced a Muslim woman to remove her hijab and another, where officers held three Arab Muslim men for nearly three days without charges. The men had called the police for help. Caught on a police body camera, the cops said, “the Muslims lie a lot” and tried to arrest them by fabricating information about them, according to the lawsuit.
In May 2022, Chicago’s Arab American Action Network (AAAN) released a report demanding the abolition of “Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR).” They evidence how the Department of Homeland Security’s “If You See Something Say Something” campaign encourages police officers and “the entire population to report…seeing something that they find suspicious.” They found these reports focus on suspicions “about people who are or are assumed to be Arab, Muslim, or from the Middle East” for benign activities termed “suspicious” and “promote information sharing that can enable multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct their own follow-up investigations.” Overall, the AAAN explains, they have the effect of repressing dissent and surveilling and criminalizing Arabs and Muslims while reinforcing white supremacy.
In this sense, scholars and activists working with Chicago’s working-class Arab immigrant communities have helped expand how we define policing and the communities we refer to as those targeted by policing.
Along similar lines, across the U.S., the “Countering Violent Extremism” program seeks to enlist Muslim leaders as active participants in spying on their own communities, destroying trust and dividing and undermining those very communities.
“The U.S. empire’s surveillance, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency have been imported from the global war into policing practices domestically and have always had an import/export approach to their carceral strategies,” said University of Illinois Chicago doctoral candidate Sangeetha Ravichandran. This creates a dangerous reality for communities of color, who are subjected to a violent, high-tech, white supremacist policing culture in need of abolition.
For many Arab Americans, mistrust in the police is not new. In 1993, Arab Americans filed damage claims against Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego police for sharing confidential information with the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League after hundreds of Arab Americans were notified that their names were included in files sent to them. After 9/11, FBI agents collaborated with police to gather intelligence about Arab Americans.
The third reason why we should support defunding the police is made clear by the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy’s report on the Status of Racial Justice for Arab Americans, which found that, although Arab Americans are targeted by police in different ways and to different degrees than Black and other communities of color, they are direct targets nonetheless. It is not only terrorism-related surveillance that entails harmful racial profiling practices impacting Arab and Muslim migrant communities, but the direct violence of police — rather than just the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI.
We found that some Arab Americans face police officers that cite their experience fighting in the so-called war on terror to justify threatening Arab immigrants. One research participant recalled a police officer making racist assumptions about the interviewee’s Muslim faith and said the cop intimidated him by referencing the war on terror. An officer saying, “I was crushing skulls in Iraq,” is intimidating to a Muslim and conveys more than a hint of violent intent.
Another interviewee called the police to protect them against hate speech. Rather than defend him against slurs like “camel jockey,” the cop defended the perpetrator by saying, “You have to understand, he is a veteran.”
In the context of Arab American life, radicalized veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with supercharged racist views who interact with Muslims and Arabs as police cannot be viewed as a “few bad apples.” The entire policing system promotes racism and Islamophobia.
As a result of such disturbing interactions — including a cop jokingly asking an Arab woman if she was hiding a bomb under her hijab — many Arab Americans have lost faith in the police.
In San Francisco, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center report, “Build the Block, Alternatives to Policing,” explains that day-to-day interactions with law enforcement among youth in schools coupled with the infiltration of organizations “necessitate a deeper understanding of surveillance, policing, sentencing and imprisonment… We need ways to respond to harm and fear that do not make us rely on law enforcement or on the criminalization of other communities.”
We need to ways to develop internal capacity to respond, defend, and build power in places that are most vulnerable. The work we did together has laid the groundwork for AROC to move in that direction with clarity and alignment with our values and principles.
Their report reminds us of how Arab Americans have been drawn into U.S. systems of policing. One Arab family has a parent that was a political prisoner in Palestine. They also had the FBI visit their home in the Bay Area and witnessed their son incarcerated through the same system that criminalizes young Black and Brown men and their activist daughter and her friends living with the ongoing fear of surveillance.
As more and more Arab Americans lose trust in the cops, Arab American social movements are expanding the basis of our solidarity with Black liberation movements. For decades, U.S. police departments’ collaboration with Israeli settler-colonial occupation forces has helped foster Arab American (and specifically Palestinian diasporic) resistance to policing, igniting Palestinian solidarity with Black struggle. Today, long-standing ties between Arab and Black liberation struggles remind us that it is time to depart from outdated activist frameworks that reduce “ Arab and Muslim struggle” to Palestine and the war on terror on the one hand, and “Black struggle” to defunding the police on the other. Police violence harms working class Arab migrants and refugees right here in the U.S. First and foremost though, it is crucial to affirm and resist the disproportionate impact of police violence on Black communities. At the same time, organizing from the standpoint that the struggle to free Palestine, abolish the war on terror, and abolish the police are conjoined, or more broadly, that policing is a foundational strategy of the U.S. nation-state to further its many agendas — from the prison-industrial complex, to settler–colonialism, the control of borders, and war — can go a long way in freeing more and more people.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
So, good friend, Madu, who I met decades ago, at UT-El Paso. He was coming through buildings where part-time English faculty had offices. That big smile, that large voice, and an open hand. He was working the used/discount book gig: going to colleges to get books from faculty and bookstores that might have been extra copies from the respective publishers called review copies.
So, part-time faculty like myself, in the 1980s, would order tons of these reviewer’s copies of grammar, lit, and survey collections. Then fellows like Madu might come by with hard cold cash to buy them up.
The old days when students could find alternative prices (lower) than what college bookstores would charge. Madu has that service.
We talked, and his Nigerian love, his Nigerian spirit, the fact he was in Houston, with a wife and three children, all of that, made the chats open and real. I had just had a baby girl, so we talked about her.
Then politics, Africa, my own activism around Central America, the US-Mexico border, the environment, twin plants, militarization of campuses and the border, and my own work trying to unionize part-time exploited faculty.
Global politics. Nigeria, Africa, Diasporas, evil US-backed dictators, colonialism, post-colonialism, the trauma, the long-term biopiracy of Africa, the theft of resources, and alas, imagine, 30 years later, almost, and African countries are in the grips of AFRICOM, the US vassals, the exploiters, the mining, ag, and oil thieves. Until, 2022, many are becoming failed states, famines, the entire world of data mining, Zuckerberg encircling the continent with his Metaverse, and on and on. The story of United Fruit Company, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Big Pharma, Hearts and Minds USA special forces, and proxy wars and Nationa ENdowmenr for Democracy/CIA fomenting hell.
Oh, this devil USA:
Phoenix Express 2021, the AFRICOM-sponsored military exercise involving 13 countries in the Mediterranean Sea region, concluded last week. While its stated aim was to combat “irregular migration” and trafficking, the U.S. record in the region indicates more nefarious interests. “AFRICOM military’s exercise: The art of creating new pretexts for propagating U.S. interests” (source)
Go to MR Online, and then put in AFRICOM. Or, AFRICOM and Nigeria, or pick your country. Mark my words: Everything, I say EVERYTHING, tied to the USA and UK and EU when involving African nations now, well, pure evil:
This is recent, as in Oct. 2021:
Please join us for the launch of the international month of action by attending a webinar on October 1st, titled “AFRICOM at 13: Building the Popular Movement for Demilitarization and Anti-Imperialism in Africa.” Speakers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, and the African diaspora will discuss AFRICOM and what we can do to expel imperialist forces from the continent. Following the webinar, events will take place throughout October organized by various organizations on the African continent, in the U.S., and around the world to demand an end to the U.S. and western invasion and occupation of Africa.
BAP makes the following demands in the U.S. Out of Africa!: Shut Down AFRICOM campaign:
Written by Tunde Osazua, a member of the Black Alliance for Peace’s Africa Team and the coordinator of the U.S. Out of Africa Network.
So, I was on Madu’s radio show, and he has run for Senate in Nigeria, and he wants to run for president. However, as he clearly states: “You have to have millions of dollars and militias to buy the votes.”
This is his organization:
Here’s a statement from Madu:
Not rising up by Nigerians from within Nigeria and around the world beyond ethnic, regional, religious and partisan political boundaries to save Nigeria from the hands of her mostly visionless, ignorant, insensitive, inhumane, squandermanic and most painfully, corrupt and morally bankrupt drivers of government at all levels whose actions have significantly weakened her sovereignty and territorial integrity, and made her peoples so poor and vulnerable , is a sin against God and a grave infraction against humanity for which history and unborn generations of Nigerians will judge us all harshly if we fail today to act unconditionally to save the country from an imminent collapse.
….Smart Madu Ajaja
This is a serious and long-term project, the decolonizing of the world, including all those countries’ economies, the land, the people, the cultures and the individuals:
This Special Issue aims to explore the complex and contested relationship between trauma studies and postcolonial criticism, focusing on the ongoing project to create a decolonized trauma theory that attends to and accounts for the suffering of minority groups and non-Western cultures, broadly defined as cultures beyond Western Europe and North America. The issue builds on the insights of, inter alia, Stef Craps’s book, Postcolonial Witnessing, and responds to his challenge to interrogate and move beyond a Eurocentric trauma paradigm. Authors were invited to submit papers on the theorization and representation of any aspect of postcolonial, non-Western and/or minority cultural trauma with a focus predominately, but not exclusively, on literature. (Source= Decolonizing Trauma Studies: Trauma and Postcolonialism … 200+ pages!)
I talked with Madu on his radio show, and below, the show. I do cover a lot of philosophical territory, and alas, this is about Madu and his love of his country and how quickly the country of his birth has spiraled into a country of selling people as slaves, kidnapping people for organs, murder, rape, theft.
So under the cover of counterterrorism, AFRICOM is beefing up Nigeria’s military to ensure the free flow of oil to the West, and using the country as a proxy against China’s influence on the continent. And that is the issue, too, that Madu is not happy with — his country being exploited by anyone, including China. I explained to him that the USA has the military bases, the guns, and China has the contracts, the builders. In fact, Madu is spiritually exasperated at how his own countrymen turn against their own countrymen, and how there is a overlay of trauma and laziness and desperation and inflicted PTSD, including the post-colonial trauma referenced above.
USA is like a storm of ticks, locusts, mosquitos, viruses, as the syphilitic notions of Neocon and Neoliberal anti-diplomacy hits country after country like disease. A plague.
The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire, are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.
–Hugo Chavez
The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.
–Xoài Pham
Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.
–Frantz Fanon (source)
William Blum wrote about the illegality of the USA’s direct and indirect bombing and invasions.
Here, a bit of an update:
The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2
A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).
Madu and most activist Nigerians know these facts. Big global facts. The vices the United States of America has put the world in. The dirty Empire. The global cop. And, so, Nigerians in the USA number around two million, with a few hundred thousand. Now, of course, off camera, I repeated to Madu that most Americans, oh, 90 percent of the 355 million currently residing (most illegally) here do not care about Black, Africans, Chinese, and again one American is worth a million Nigerians. It is a juggling act, being part of the Diapora, and Madu is a nurse, and he like I said ran for Senate, and lost, and he has been inspired by some youth, but again, youth are being colonized by the ticks of data. Read below the YouTube window.
So, Alison McDowell at Wrench in the Gears, and then Silicon Icarus and others are talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the next colonialization of Africa. Coltan and gold may be like gold to the Wall Streeters and Transnationalists, and water and food and good land may be like platinum to the same group of thieves, but data is worth its gigbytes/terrabytes in emeralds. “French Imperialism vs. Crypto Colonialism: The Central African Republic Experiment” and “Blockchain Technology & Coercive Surveillance of the Global South” both by Sebs Solomon
So, Madu, and great honorable youth in Nigeria who want to have a free, open, clean, sustainable, cultural-centric, food security, self-imposing, country of healthy bodies, minds and ecosystems, I am sorry to report the devils wear skinny jeans, and many come to the USA from India with work permits to work and live in Seattle/Redmond to work for Microsoft/Google/Facebook and all the other devils helping put these systems in place:
At the same time, SingularityNET partnered with UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education (IBE) to establish a new curriculum for children and teens, with an emphasis on emerging technology to prepare the youth for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. According to UNICEF:
There will never be enough money allocated in the budget, qualified teachers, or places in schools for the population we have; therefore, emerging technologies like Virtual Reality allow us to leapfrog these problems and offer the hope of more affordable, scalable and better quality education.
It is striking to read that UNICEF doesn’t believe there will ever be enough money to help all of the children in the world receive a traditional, classroom, education; therefore, it’s better to invest and scale Virtual Reality education — a rather pessimistic take from the “children’s fund” arm of the UN. UNICEF Innovation Fund, has virtual reality education programs in Chile, India, Nigeria, and Ghana. In Ghana, they noted there are “challenges to accessing the necessary teaching and learning resources for students to receive quality education; which is compounded by the lack of necessary and up-to-date education materials, huge class sizes and the lack of necessary infrastructural facilities.” (source)
How many more battlefields shall honorable people like Madu enter into with no money, no militias and the kings of capital weilding more powerful digital bombs than hydrogen bombs?
For a rabbit hole or warren, go to: Silicon Icarus and see Alison McDowell’s work on the following: Alison McDowell. Or over at her blog: Wrench in the Gears. She’s expending lifetime hours looking into this evil web of Davos, WEF, the billionaires’ club, the taking over of humanity through transhumanism, blockchain, Singularity, and all the other topics the mainstream and leftstream media and blogs just won’t tackle.
This is what the Fourth Industrialization devils want for all children on earth (minus their kids and their sychophants’ kids). Soylent Green be damned!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
From juggling immense debt to contending with the global pandemic, being a modern college student is undeniably stressful. To make matters worse, there is a growing narrative that cheating in higher education is running rampant. This narrative has widened the divide between faculty and students, inspired stricter policies and created additional challenges for today’s students.
While cheating is never excusable, it should be addressed and punished appropriately and proportionately when it occurs. Unfortunately, due to the belief that cheating is becoming more widespread, many faculty members and administrators at colleges across the country are adopting a draconian approach to police the issue.
For example, the University of Alabama has broadly defined students using unauthorized materials, study aids or computer-related information that have not been approved by the instructor, as cheating. Depending on the professor, this can include useful online study resources like Google, YouTube and Quizlet, and the repercussions for using such tools include suspensions. The vague wording of their academic misconduct policies creates an impossible standard where students are discouraged from using online resources to help them study, even when they need additional help to achieve academic success.
The University of Alabama is not alone. While academic institutions have had honor codes for decades, during the pandemic, when colleges shifted away from physical classrooms and toward virtual learning and online test-taking, fears surrounding increased academic dishonesty in online education grew, and academic institutions began implementing stricter policies.
However, as James Orr, a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity told NPR, “Just because there’s an increase in reports of academic misconduct doesn’t mean that there’s more cheating occurring. In the online environment, I think that faculty across the country are more vigilant in looking for academic misconduct.”
Unfortunately, this hasn’t stopped colleges across the country from enacting harsher policies. These policies fail to recognize that third-party materials, study aids and online study resources are used and relied upon by millions of students, particularly non-traditional students, who have limited time and resources. After graduation, employers value resourceful employees who know how to find and use outside resources when necessary. Yet, this new wave of heavy-handed policies inhibits the use of supplemental study aids and forces students to choose between falling behind or risking severe consequences.
Higher education should aim to create an optimal environment for learning, and pitting faculty and students against one another while limiting the resources students can use is detrimental to all. So, it begs the question, why are clashes surrounding cheating becoming so pervasive, and who is benefitting from them?
One industry that has benefited immensely is the global online exam proctoring market. This sector, which was valued at approximately $355 million in 2019, is expected to be worth nearly $1.2 billion by 2027. This growth, in some part, must be attributed to increased demand caused by growing fervor over student cheating.
It’s not surprising that these proctoring companies benefit from the public, especially faculty members, believing that cheating is widespread. After all, the bigger this issue appears, the greater the need for these proctoring companies’ often invasive services. These services range from programs that capture student desktop screens and chat logs to artificial intelligence technologies that detect and analyze keywords spoken by students in real time.
These programs rarely leave room for nuance, and some students found these services went so far as to discriminate against them: Proctoring tools unfairly require test takers to have a reliable computer, fast internet and quiet testing space. Underprivileged students who lack access to these resources are put in a difficult situation because the software can’t grant accommodations for their unique circumstances.
And this is not the only way these proctoring services discriminate and worsen the experience of already disenfranchised students. Students at Miami University in Ohio found that their school’s service, Proctorio, would often accuse students with ADHD of cheating. Proctorio, which is designed to track a student’s gaze and flag students who look away from their screens as suspicious, flagged students with ADHD symptoms as potential cheaters.
Not only that, the facial recognition technology used by many proctoring services registers a preference for lighter skin, which sometimes forces students with darker skin to “shine a light on their faces to be seen,” according to Shea Swauger, a librarian and doctoral student at the University of Colorado. This is one of the many reasons why students at that university started a petition to ban the use of these proctoring services.
But due to the cheating narrative becoming ubiquitous among faculty, proctoring services also gained in popularity, often to the detriment of the very students the universities are supposed to be educating.
College students already face numerous challenges. They should not have to face a hostile learning environment, fear repercussions for using available tools or be forced to use invasive proctoring services that have been found to be discriminatory.
Higher education works best when faculty and students share mutual respect and trust. To return to a place of respect and trust, academic institutions need to take a step back, reassess the current environment and remember that students should indeed be their number one priority.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Sixteen Senators have sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to protect abortion clinic patients’ data from being sold after revelations that at least two companies had been doing so.
In the letter, first reported by Refinery29, the lawmakers asked FTC Chair Lina Khan to detail what the agency is doing to prevent data firms from putting abortion seekers at risk with their location data.
“In light of reports that the Supreme Court is set to overrule Roe vs. Wade, we are concerned about the privacy of women making decisions that should be between them, their families, and their doctors as they have for nearly five decades,” the lawmakers wrote, using the term “women” instead of more accurate language that includes trans men and nonbinary people. “Banning and criminalizing abortion in parts of our country could create added risks to those seeking family planning services in states where abortions remain legal.”
Recent reporting has found that two data firms, SafeGraph and Placer.ai, are sellling abortion clinic patients’ location data, including where patients live, how long they stayed at the clinic and where they may have gone before and after the visit.
Motherboard found that they were able to access such data using simple searches on the companies’ websites, meaning that the data is easily accessible by anti-abortion hate groups, who have used such data before to target abortion seekers. The publication was able to buy data from SafeGraph showing locations of people who had visited over 600 Planned Parenthood clinics for only $160 — mere pennies for anti-abortion groups with millions of dollars in funding, some of which comes from conservative benefactors like the Koch family.
With laws like Texas’s abortion ban, which essentially authorizes citizens to become bounty hunters, and with 26 states poised to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, the data could be used to harangue abortion seekers and providers, or even people who visit a clinic like Planned Parenthood that provides abortions along with other reproductive health services.
Anti-abortion vigilantes have waged attacks on abortion clinics for years, and clinics are bracing themselves for a rise in violence and harassment if the Roe overturn is officially issued.
Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) led the letter effort, with signatures from prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).
“As reproductive rights are under attack across the country, we must do everything possible to protect the safety and privacy of women accessing the healthcare they need,” Klobuchar told Refinery29 in a statement. “Personal decisions such as those about contraceptives or abortion should remain between a woman and her doctor, not some data company that is willing to share location tracking information to the highest bidder.”
The lawmakers asked the FTC if it is making moves to allow people to remove their data if it is being sold online and if the agency is planning on taking more general moves to “mitigate harms posed by mobile phone apps that are developed to collect and sell location data.”
Indeed, outside of data specifically related to abortions, hate groups are using data to target marginalized groups. Motherboard reported last year that the people behind the Catholic Substack newsletter The Pillar used location data tied to LGBTQ dating app Grindr in order to track and identify a priest who was using its services, which ultimately led to his resignation.
The FTC has announced measures it will be taking to protect data, especially that of children, from being sold online, but has yet to speak about abortion-related data.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Imagine, several months from now, a pregnant woman in Texas traveling to New York to obtain an abortion. When she’s about to fly back, a friend phones to warn her there’s an arrest warrant waiting for her, because police in her home state used a “keyword warrant” to monitor everyone in their area who’d searched a particular term online — say, “abortion clinics in New York” — and then obtained a “geofence warrant” to track her to a Planned Parenthood facility in Manhattan. The woman becomes part of a population the U.S. hasn’t seen in recent history: an internally-displaced person, unable to travel home under threat of arrest and prosecution.
Or imagine a woman in the Deep South, who in her last weeks of pregnancy, delivers a stillborn fetus at home, and, when she’s taken to the hospital, encounters a nurse who suspects she’d tried to end the pregnancy herself and calls the police. When prosecutors take on the case, they obtain not just her medical records — evidence of the outcome — but her online search history as well: what they cast as evidence of “intent.” Thanks to information handed over by internet providers — that the woman once searched for information about abortion medication and miscarriages — she is charged with second-degree murder, and faces 20 years to life in prison if convicted.
That latter scenario already happened, several years ago in Mississippi. The former, says civil rights attorney Albert Fox Cahn, is not just a potential threat but an imminent reality if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade in the coming weeks, as forecast in Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion earlier this month.
On Tuesday morning, Cahn’s organization, the nonprofit privacy organization Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), released a new report, “The Handmaid’s Trail: Abortion Surveillance After Roe,” laying out in blunt terms how digital and other surveillance technologies could be employed if the coming SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health makes abortion immediately illegal in numerous states.
“[R]epealing a half century of reproductive rights won’t transport Americans back to 1973,” Cahn and his co-author on the report, Eleni Manis, write. Rather, “it will take us to a far darker future, one where antiquated abortion laws are enforced with cutting edge technology.” What they envision is that the computers and smartphones of anyone who’s pregnant and seeking an abortion — or who suffers a miscarriage, ectopic pregnancy or stillbirth — could be turned into repositories of evidence for police, prosecutors and even individual bounty-hunters hoping to collect a cash reward for proving someone has had an illegal abortion.
For years, pregnant patients have been subjected to a wide array of surveillance through both routine and novel means by government, corporate and private entities. Pregnant patients at hospitals face “suspicionless” drug testing when they go for prenatal checkups while patients of clinics that offer abortion services may encounter anti-abortion activists who photograph them and license plates. These days, they also face the prospect of anti-abortion geofencing: when activists pair cell phone location data with commercial advertising databanks to text them anti-abortion messages while they’re sitting in abortion clinic waiting rooms. If they seek out or stumble upon one of the anti-abortion pseudo-clinics known as crisis pregnancy centers, in person or online, chances are anything they say could be added to the massive databases some CPC networks maintain.
Outside of such medical (or “medical”) settings, commercial retailers and big tech companies have already fine-tuned their predictive capabilities so well that they can figure out an internet user is pregnant before they’ve even told their family. And while the goal of that sophisticated technology is financial — to target expectant parents just when they’re about to start spending a lot of money — Cahn and Manis warn that “such commercial lists now will become evidence for those individuals whose pregnancies don’t come to term.”
There’s already precedent for that. As civil rights attorney Cynthia Conti-Cook wrote in a 2020 article in the University of Baltimore Law Review, “Digital evidence fills a gap for prosecutors keen on prosecuting women for their pregnancy outcomes. When medical theories fail to explain why some outcomes happen, prosecutors can now sift through an accused person’s most personal thoughts, feelings, movements and medically-related purchases during their pregnancy, even if there is little evidence supporting the conclusion that their conduct caused the pregnancy to end.”
But the re-criminalization of abortion, say Cahn and Manis, will lead to even wider use of digital technologies to prosecute both abortion seekers and those who help them.
Some of the technology is familiar: obtaining people’s search histories, shopping records, emails, chats or texts to prove they were discussing or seeking information about abortion, or even just that they were pregnant. “When purchasers pay with a credit card, an online account, or with an in-store loyalty card,” the report notes, “everyday purchases — medication, pregnancy tests, prenatal vitamins, menstrual products — can become circumstantial evidence.”
Others are less well-known. Law enforcement can use “keyword warrants” that would “cast digital dragnets, identifying large numbers of potential abortion seekers” by requiring technology companies to turn over information about anyone in a geographic area who has searched online for particular terms. They can also obtain “geofence warrants” that require those same companies to give information about all people who were in a particular place at a particular time. Both types of warrants have already been used in other contexts.
“Geofence warrants were first introduced in 2018 and since then have expanded so dramatically that they are now the majority of all warrants that Google receives in the U.S.,” said Cahn. A 2021 advocacy campaign by a coalition of civil rights groups, including S.T.O.P., compelled Google to release information that shows that this type of inquiry accounted for more than 10,000 warrants the company responded to in 2020.
To date, keyword warrants are less common, but Cahn says they were used in one case where police demanded that Google identify everyone who had searched for a particular address, using that information as part of their investigation.
Broadly speaking, these types of warrants, as well as technology like facial recognition software, says Cahn, have been justified as a necessity for addressing threats like terrorism. But their application has not been neutral. “We’ve found that facial recognition was used more to target Black Lives Matter protesters than to target those responsible for the insurrection on Jan. 6,” said Cahn. “There’s profound discrimination in how these tools are deployed.”
What’s more, Cahn said, geofence warrants simply aren’t effective for most police work — they’re good at casting “broad digital dragnets” but bad at identifying whether someone actually is a likely suspect. However, he said, they could easily prove to be a “terrifying tool” that enable “authoritarian efforts to target health care, to target protest, to target houses of worship. It’s very easy to see the potential for abuse.”
In light of that threat, S.T.O.P.’s report calls for a number of measures to address these issues, primarily in “rights-protective” states unlikely to outlaw abortion. Some states offer limited protections already. Massachusetts, for instance, bans geofencing near abortion clinics, but is the only state in the country to have done so. Illinois prohibits the sharing of some biometric data, although data related to abortion is not yet included in its provisions.
But more, the report holds, is needed. First, from companies like Google or Apple, which may voice public support for abortion rights but nonetheless could be key to undermining those rights through their information collection and warehousing practices.
“If a company doesn’t have individualized locations in a database that can be searched by a geofence, one can get all the warrants they want and you’re not going to give over any data,” said Cahn. “It’s a design choice whether Google wants to put their users at risk of this type of search.”
Likewise, he said, states must act. “This is already happening. We already see electronic surveillance being used to target pregnant people. The only question is how quickly anti-abortion policing ramps up to these search tactics.”
Two first-in-the-nation bills are currently under consideration in New York that could offer substantially more protection. One would ban both geofence and keyword warrants as well as prohibiting law enforcement from buying geolocation data from commercial companies. A second would prohibit police from creating fake social media accounts that allow them to pose as friends or medical providers in order to trick people seeking abortions into identifying or incriminating themselves.
Law enforcement agencies must also reassess their participation in inter-agency information sharing agreements, Cahn said. Current data sharing agreements require local police to share information with their counterparts in other states, which could easily enable the tracking and prosecution of abortion seekers from red states who travel to other parts of the country to get an abortion.
Such agreements have always caused tension, Cahn said, “because it’s meant that so-called immigration sanctuary jurisdictions are actually giving information to ICE in some cases. But now, if you’re part of an inter-agency information sharing agreement, and you are honestly a pro-choice jurisdiction, you can’t in good faith remain when you know the people receiving that data are going to use it to arrest pregnant people.”
For years, Cahn said, civil rights groups have fought the use of surveillance technologies like geofence warrants, arguing that certain types of information should be off-limits as policing tools. For just as long, he said, many lawmakers have been “comfortable enabling these types of abuses when different communities were being targeted.”
“Now we know the targets will include pregnant people,” he said, and “we’ll see people who once felt very far removed from the threat of mass surveillance being intimately targeted.”
“It is very much that incremental expansion of government authority,” he said. “We ignore it and we ignore it. And then suddenly, we and our families and those dearest to us are in the crosshairs.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.