National Security State

The US isn’t just reauthorizing its surveillance laws – it’s vastly expanding them (4/16/2024)

The MAGA/Russian Plan to Track and Control Your Life (7/12/2023)

..."The mobile robot that you carry around with you, the one that knows where you are all the time and listens to all your conversations. The one that you hope isn't reporting in at headquarters but whose behavior you can only guess about ? the one that runs all that software you can't read, can't study, can't see, can't modify, and can't understand ? That one. That one is taking your confession all the time. When you hold it up to your face from now on it is going to know your heartbeat. That's an Android app right now. Micro changes to the color of your face reveal your heart rate. That's a little lie detector you're carrying around with you." Eben Moglen quoted in Journalism After Snowden.
"The Stasi (E German Secret Police) had nothing on us. We have built the most pervasive, and intrusive surveillance apparatus in human history." Chris Hedges
Snowden's revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of fascism - that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world - from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia - the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology. John Pilger
In the aftermath of 9/11, in collusion with booming technological advancements, a new and more authoritarian form of governance is supplanting liberal democracy. The creation of the Security Industrial Complex an “internal security state-within-the-state” fueled by tech companies, private security firms, and the Intelligence Community to the tune of $120 billion a year — is intruding on civil liberties to an extent never before seen in our history. Politicians tolerate it; the average citizen at times welcomes it, thinking it is the way to keep the America safe in a time of uncertainty and terrorism. But how real is the terrorist threat, and is it worth the loss of our individual privacy? As a society, the author maintains, we have yet to comprehend the meaning of universal digital connection, its impact on our psychology, and its transformation of our government and society. America is at a crossroads in contending with our overreaction to terrorism, allowing the beginnings of a police state, and the erosion of our country from a “liberal democracy” to a “secure democracy” – one where government overreaches, tramples on civil liberties, and uses great advancements in technology to spy on the populace Democracy betrayed : the rise of the surveillance security state by Keller, William W. (2017)
The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair. Elaine Scarry
Security is a "one-way ratchet." It is relatively easy for governments to decide to increase security, but It is much harder for them to decrease it. Republicans want guns in schools.
"The public tragedy of Sept. 11 dramatically shifted the focus in Washington from debates over federal privacy legislation to a mania for total information awareness, turning Silicon Valley’s innovative surveillance practices into objects of intense interest. As Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, observed, the intelligence community would have to “rely on private enterprise to collect and generate information for it,” in order to reach beyond constitutional, legal, or regulatory constraints, controversies that are central today. By 2013, the CIA’s chief technology officer outlined the agency’s mission “to collect everything and hang on to it forever,” acknowledging the internet companies, including Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Fitbit and telecom companies, for making it possible. The revolutionary roots of surveillance capitalism are planted in this unwritten political doctrine of surveillance exceptionalism, bypassing democratic oversight, and essentially granting the new internet companies a license to steal human experience and render it as proprietary data." Shoshana Zuboff "The Coup We Are Not Talking About" New York Times Jan. 29, 2021
Executive branch authorities can access congressional communications in almost undetectable ways without a warrant, just as they can retrieve emails and phone calls made by other citizens. Elected representatives risk disgrace or worse because many can be accused of fund-raising violations or sexual misconduct. Dossiers and blackmail did not go out of fashion with J. Edgar Hoover's death. Hoover's success merely showcased the effectiveness of the tool." Presidential Puppetry: Andrew Kreig
Excessive surveillance creates risks to public trust, personal privacy, individual liberty, and self-government itself. If government holds a great deal of information there is at least a risk of abuse – if not now or soon, then potentially in the future. Cass R. Sunstein quoted in 'Journalism After Snowden'
We have no evidence that any of this surveillance makes us safer. NSA Director General Keith Alexander responded to these stories in June by claiming that he disrupted 54 terrorist plots. In October, he revised that number downward to 13, and then to “one or two.” At this point, the only “plot” prevented was that of a San Diego man sending $8,500 to support a Somali militant group. We have been repeatedly told that these surveillance programs would have been able to stop 9/11, yet the NSA didn’t detect the Boston bombings—even though one of the two terrorists was on the watch list and the other had a sloppy social media trail. Bulk collection of data and metadata is an ineffective counterterrorism tool. How the NSA Threatens National Security, Bruce Schneier, The Atlantic January 6, 2014
Let us consider the implications of this case [Hedges v. Obama]. First, in staying Forrest’s injunction the circuit court effectively erases the longstanding principle of posse comitatus, which was to guarantee civilian policing within the United States and to keep the military off our streets. As we watch our domestic police departments deliberately transformed into military units by the same federal government that has fought tooth and nail to maintain the provisions of section 1021 of the NDAA, we must understand those provisions to be part of a pattern in which a de facto state of martial law has been gradually established around us. It is the federal government that is arming our police departments with assault rifles and mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicles. It is the federal government that is dressing our police officers in full body armor. And it is the federal government that is promulgating surveillance drones among our police departments. The same government that monitors our phone conversations, email and internet activity. The same government that orchestrated the simultaneous dismantling of Occupy encampments from New York to Oakland. The same government that hides in plain sight its utter supplication to Goldman Sachs and the fossil fuel industry. Taken together, these considerations leave us with no other conclusion than that, call them police or National Guard, a heavily armed host operates among us, watches us, ready to mobilize at the first sign of civil unrest, however constitutionally protected those first signs may be. The Importance of Hedges v. Obama: by Jim Caton — December 3, 2015
As Chris Hedges wrote in his riveting account of the NDAA: "There are now 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies that work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, the Washington Post reported in a 2010 series by Dana Priest and William M Arken. There are 854,000 people with top-secret security clearances, the reporters wrote, and in Washington, DC, and the surrounding area 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2011."

The Secret Police: A new era of law enforcement

US courts must stop shielding government surveillance programs from accountability Patrick Toomey and Alex Abdo (9/26/2022) Guardian

PRISM, Snowden and Government Surveillance: 6 Things You Need To Know by Lavanya Rathnam (10/20/2021)

ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move (9/21/2021)

Your Face Is Not Your Own (3/18/2021)

Chris Hedges: The Empire is Not Done with Julian Assange (1/4/2021)

50 Nights of Unrest in Portland (7/17/2020)

Researchers on Atrocity Prevention Warn: US on Path to Widespread Political Violence (6/10/2020)

Links

Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For (12/21/2019)

You talk about police state. Let me tell you what happens when you go to what is really a police state. You can't talk in your bedroom. You can't talk in your sitting room. You don't talk on the telephone. You don't talk in the bathroom. As a matter of fact... you can't even talk in front of a shrub. President Richard M. Nixon, April 16, 1971

Millions of Phones, Zero Privacy (12/18/2019)

Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids (10/22/2019)

There Are Cameras Everywhere. It’s Time to Reject the Surveillance State. (6/1/2019)

Our Ever-Deadlier Police State (4/22/2019)

How to Shine a Light on U.S. Government Surveillance of Americans (2/6/2019)

Are You Ready for the Trump Admin. to Know Everything about You? (8/27/2018)

How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

Sessions v. Winner, It's Just the Beginning: By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News (6/29/2018)

NSA´s Hidden Spy Hubs (6/25/2018)

ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US (1/26/2018)

Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance, What happens when digital eyes get the brains to match? (1/23/2018)

The Same Democrats Who Denounce Donald Trump as a Lawless, Treasonous Authoritarian Just Voted to Give Him Vast Warrantless Spying Powers (1/12/2018)

Police Militarization: Trump Reverses Obama Rules On Law Enforcement Military Gear (8/28/2017)

Security Breach, Trump’s tussle with the bureaucratic state (Harpers 6/17 by Michael J. Glennon)

Watching Big Brother, Turning the Tables on the Surveillance State (4/23/2017)

Donald J. Trump and the Deep State, Part 1 (2/6/2017)

A Living Nightmare of Intelligence Groupthink (1/22/2017)

The Deep State Wants to Deep Six Us (1/13/2017)

Donald Trump vs. the intelligence community: (01/11/2017)

What You Need To Know About The Government’s Newly Expanded “Hacking” Powers (12/2/2016)

Sexual Humiliation, a Tool to Control the Masses (4/12/2006)

Our world is crisscrossed with informational sentinels ... Digital security guards collect information about us, make inferences about our behavior, and control access to resources. Some are obvious and visible: closed-circuit cameras bristle on our street corners, our cell phones global positioning devices record our movements, police drones fly over political protests. But many of the devices that collect our information and monitor our actions are inscrutable, invisible pieces of code. They are embedded in social media interactions, flow through applications for government services, envelop every produce we try or buy. They are so deeply woven into the fabric of social life that, most of the time, we don’t even notice we are being watched and analyzed. The Digital Poorhouse by Virginia Eubanks (pg 5)(an excerpt from her book Automating Inequality)
"It's not really about surveillance: it's about what the public understands - how much control the public has over the programs and policies of its governments. If we don't know what our government really does, if we don't know the powers that authorities are claiming for themselves, or arrogating to themselves, in secret, we can't really be said to be holding the leash of government at all." Edward Snowden in Journalism After Snowden, The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State
“The Deep State is a shadow government whose career personnel ensures that basically the same policies remain in place regardless of who gets elected,” Mike Lofgren: Deep State.
"When the NSA's surveillance program was exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations, high officials claimed that it had prevented fifty-four terrorist acts. On inquiry, that was whittled down to a dozen. A high-level government panel then discovered that there was actually only one case: someone had sent $8,500 to Somalia. That was the total yield of the huge assault of the Constitution and, of course, on others throughout the world." link cited by Noam Chomsky: Who Rules The World ? pg 158
"The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work." Top Secret America, Washington Post, Dana Priest and William Arkin.
For much of its history, the United States has held itself out as a model of freedom, democracy, and open, accountable government. Freedoms of expression and association, as well as rights to a fair trial, are protected by the Constitution, and US officials speak with pride of the freedom of the media to report on matters of public concern and hold government to account for its actions. Yet, as this report documents, today those freedoms are very much under threat due to the government’s own policies concerning secrecy, leak prevention, and officials’ contact with the media, combined with large-scale surveillance programs. If the US fails to address these concerns promptly and effectively, it could do serious, long-term damage to the fabric of democracy in the country." With Liberty to Monitor All a report from Human Rights Watch 7/2014.
Senator Sanders
Just how did it come to this? Edwards's beautifully written narrative shows how, after 9/11 created a panic, the intelligence agencies overreached in instituting surveillance programs that violate Americans' constitutional rights. Corporations lined up to secure waste-laden government contracts to sell new technologies that grabbed and shared private customer data, all while using the bogus threat of a "cyber war" as justification. This nefarious partnership is exactly why the Justice Department isn't going after the institutions responsible for the financial collapse of 2008. From a review of Beatrice Edwards book "The Rise of the American Corporate Security State: Six Reasons To Be Afraid."
It is difficult to recognize the limits a society places on accepted thought at the time it is doing it. When everyone accepts basic assumptions, there don’t seem to be constraints on ideas. That truth often only reveals itself in hindsight. Today, the basic prerequisite to being taken seriously in American politics is to accept the legitimacy of the new national security state. The new basic American assumption is that there really is a need for a global war on terror. Anyone who doesn’t accept that basic assumption is considered dangerous and maybe even a traitor. The crackdown on leaks by the Obama administration has been designed to suppress the truth about the war on terror. Stay on the interstate highway of conventional wisdom with your journalism, and you will have no problems. Try to get off and challenge basic assumptions, and you will face punishment." James Risen speech at Colby College
EFF on NSA Spying
No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes. Initially, it is always the country's dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or are merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one." Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide
There’s a thesis in international relations theory that the prime concern of states is security. But that leaves open the question: Security for whom? If you look closely, it turns out it’s not security of the population, it’s security for privileged sectors within the society – the sectors who hold state power. Noam Chomsky
There is, in fact, a strong case to be made that a prime concern of government is the security of state power from the population. As those who have spent time rummaging through archives should be aware, government secrecy is rarely motivated by a genuine for security, but it definitely does serve to keep the population in the dark. And for good reasons, which were lucidly explained by the prominent liberal scholar and government adviser Samuel Huntington, the professor of the science of government at Harvard University. In his words: “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.” Noam Chomsky
the government does not think you have any right to privacy when it comes who you talk to, or when, or for how long, or where you are while you're talking. Now the government has said, in court, that you don't have any right to the content of private conversations with anyone who is located outside the United States – or to any domestic communication remaining private if it is, at some point, transmitted overseas, which happens often.Trevor Timm (5/17/2014)
Close Fusion Centers That Violate Our Rights
Executive branch authorities can access congressional communications in almost undetectable ways without a warrant, just as they can retrieve emails and phone calls made by other citizens. Elected representatives risk disgrace or worse because many can be accused of fund-raising violations or sexual misconduct. Dossiers and blackmail did not go out of fashion with J. Edgar Hoover's death. Hoover's success merely showcased the effectiveness of the tool." Presidential Puppetry: Andrew Kreig
The National Security Agency (NSA) and some of the other intelligence agencies are out of control. We cannot talk about America as a "free country" when the government is collecting information on virtually every phone call we make, intercepting our emails, and monitoring the websites we visit. Clearly, we need to protect this country from terrorism, but we must do it in a way that does not undermine our constitutional rights. (Senator Bernie Sanders)
"The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use." Richard Stallman
One month before he was killed, John F. Kennedy, through Arthur Krock, publicly expressed concern that the CIA was plotting a coup to take over the US government. Video: http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/26327.html
... Obama fears what the intelligence community officials may do to him, and the proof is that James Clapper, director of the NSA, lied under oath and was allowed to keep his job. Information Clearing House 3/27/2014
...security is a high priority for government planners: security, that is, for state power and its primary constituency, concentrated private power - all of which entails that official policy must be protected from public scrutiny. In these terms, government actions fall in place as quite rational, including the rationality of collective suicide. Even instant destruction by nuclear weapons has never ranked high among the concerns of state authorities. Noam Chomsky
In the United States, for example, one of our immediate legislative goals should be to sunset the immunity given to the telecommunication operators for assisting illegal listening in the United States. Immunity was extended by legislation in 2008. Barack Obama when he was running for President said that he was going to filibuster that legislation in the United States Senate because it was so Constitutionally well I won t put a word in his mouth. Then, in August 2008, when it became clear that he was going to become the next President of the United States, he changed his mind. Not only did he drop his threat to filibuster the legislation, he flew back from campaigning to Washington D.C. in order to vote for it in the United States Senate one of the few things that he felt was worth his time to vote on in the United States Senate as a Presidential candidate in 2008. Eben Moglen
The eerie dislocations of journalism and criminal justice are only the most recent developments since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, the perpetration of the Iraq War, the capitalist predation and regulatory defaults that have thrown millions of Americans out of their homes and jobs, the revelations about Orwellian state and corporate surveillance that have coalesced into a crisis of legitimacy for the American constitutional system and capitalist republic." Jim Sleeper
"The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. [...] There would be no place to hide."--Frank Church
"...when the Snowden revelations came out, the immediate reaction from the government, the highest level—Keith Alexander, others—was that these NSA programs had stopped, I think they said, 54 or so acts of terror. Gradually, when the press started asking questions, it was whittled down to about 12. Finally, it came down to one. And that act of terror was a man who had sent, I think, $8,500 to Somalia. That’s the yield of this massive program. And it is not intended to stop terrorism. It’s intended to control the population. That’s quite different. You have to be very cautious in accepting claims by power systems. They have no reason to tell you the truth. And you have to look and ask, "Well, what is the truth?" And this system is not a system for protecting terrorism." Chomsky on Snowden & Why NSA Surveillance Doesn’t Stop Terror While the U.S. Drone War Creates It (3/3/2015)

Good Riddance, James Clapper (11/18/2016)

The Path to Total Dictatorship: America's Shadow Government and Its Silent Coup (10/24/2016)

New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship (4/28/2016)

The NSA won't tell Congress how many Americans it's spying on because our democracy is broken (4/22/2016)

NSA Targets World Leaders for US Geopolitical Interests (2/23/2016)

How the Powers That Be Maintain the "Deep State": (2/21/2016)

Challenge to Military Spying on Antiwar Activists Gains Support of Grassroots and Legal Groups (1/28/2016)

Mass Surveillance Isn’t the Answer to Fighting Terrorism (11/17/2015)

The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay (11/10/2015)

Snowden Vindicated As Judge Slams "Unconstitutional, Orwellian" NSA Bulk Spying (11/9/2015)

Scrap The Espionage Act (11/3/2015)

EU Parliament Votes for Dropped Charges, Asylum Protection for Snowden (10/29/2015)

The EU could be a global standard setter on surveillance reform, but actions speak louder than words (10/28/2015)

The Fog of Intelligence (10/15/2015)

Advisor to Top EU Court Slams NSA's 'Mass, Indiscriminate Surveillance' (9/23/2015)

NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’ (8/15/2015)

NSA's Stellar Wind Program Was Almost Completely Useless, Hidden From FISA Court By NSA And FBI (4/27/2015)

The Hidden Government Group Linking JFK, Watergate, Iran-Contra and 9/11(10/5/2014)

NSA program stopped no terror attacks, says White House panel member (12/20/2013)

How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? Richard Stallman (10/2013)

The NSA's War on Strong Encryption: Its All About Making You Legible to the State (9/6/2013)

‘Black budget’ summary details U.S. spy network’s successes, failures and objectives (8/29/2013)

Prosecuting Whistleblowers

Thomas Drake and Bill Binney showed us that even if you reveal classic waste, fraud and abuse, frivolous spending, things like that, and you take it to Congress, there’s a very good chance the FBI will kick in your door, pull you out of the shower naked at gunpoint in front of your family and ruin your life. Tom Drake was a senior executive at the National Security Agency, and now he works at an Apple store. Our own inspector generals in the DoD and the NSA are the ones who reported him to the DoJ. Edward Snowden

Harassment, targeting and prosecution of whistle-blowers, journalists and publishers have become a dangerous new normal — one we should refuse to accept, especially in a time when governments are becoming more powerful and less accountable. It's time to end this assault, starting with granting Snowden amnesty and withdrawing the threat of U.S. criminal prosecution of Assange. Michael Ratner (6/17/2014)

"Obama ...campaigned on a vow to have the 'most transparent administration in history,' specifically pledging to protect whistle blowers, whom he hailed as "noble" and "courageous," had done exactly the opposite." Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide

[Snowden] should be welcomed as a person who carried out the obligations of a citizen. He informed American citizens of what their government is doing to them. That’s exactly what a person who has real patriotism, not the flag-waving type, but real patriotism, would do. So he should be honored, not just allowed back. It’s the people in the government who should be on trial, not him." Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now.

Reality Winner

Pardon Snowden

John Kiriakou

Courage to Resist

Government Fears Chelsea Manning Disclosures May Lead to Indictments for War Crimes (8/12/2016)

Whistle-Blower, Beware (5/26/2016)

In Defense of a CIA Whistleblower (1/5/2015)

When the Public Has a Right to Classified Information (10/29/2014)

The Obama Administration's pursuit of Whistleblowers is Taking a Toll (12 /14/2014)

Whistleblowers Risking It All in Defiance of the Security State (5/28/2013)

Obama's War on Whistleblowers (6/12/2012)

Assange and Sweden

Government Accountability Project

Suppressing Dissent

Surveillance is usually accompanied by blacklisting. It has happened as employers targeted labor unions, as accompanied the McCarthy red scare and the election of Ronald Reagan, it has been used to target peace activists, sex offenders, or other dissidents, and it always has the potential for abuse. It is always secret, although the public gets to know about it rarely when a whistleblower like Snowden appears.

Snowden revealed that Telecoms, and internet companies were delivering everyone’s messaging and internet activity to dark American agencies. Suspicion of US telecom gear and software caused an impact on international opinion and sales. There was diplomatic fallout too as Angele Merkel and others found they were being surveilled.

Encryption works and to restore trust of clients, companies like Apple encrypted their messaging by default. It should also have caused a migration to Free Software, because it is auditable and back doors can be exposed.

Secrecy creates spies and spies beget increased security. Security has a natural tendency to tighten since loosening it is never politically expedient.

As security tightens so does secrecy. Another whistleblower, Reality Winner revealed that Russians hacked our elections. Why, exactly, was that a secret ? Possibly because it cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2016 election. There was no effort by official government to look into election problems.

Government Surveillance of Occupy Movement

FBI, the CIA, and the massive homeland security bureacracy together form the dark, unacountable part of US government. The FISA Court makes secret law.

Cointelpro

Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows (1/7/2014) See the video

Spying on Americans: Senate Intelligence Authorization Act, Would Allow Arrest of Journalists, Anti-war Activists, Academics and Students (8/8/2015)

The Mass Killer and the National Security State: (8/2/2015).

Documents Published by WikiLeaks Reveal the NSA's Corporate Priorities (7/18/2015)

Big Brother is Watching (7/6/2015)

Surveillance Will Cost US Tech Sector Over $35B by 2016 (6/10/2015)

Breaking News: Fear is a big winner for the permanent USA Police State. (6/7/2015)

Even If Patriot Act Expires, Government Will Keep Spying (5/31/2015)

Militarizing Ourselves Toward a New Dark Age (5/19/2015)

How NSA turns phone calls into searchable text (5/5/2015)

Top 5 Homeland Security Contractors Spend $107M Lobbying Congress and Federal Agencies, Receive $9B in Contracts (2/27/2015)

NSA Spied on Americans for Over a Decade: Report (12/25/2014)

Edward Snowden wins Swedish human rights award for NSA revelations (12/1/2014)

The Trials Of Growing Up In A Police State (10/5/2014)

The Snowden Reboot (10/19/2014)

Jane Mayer Interview with Edward Snowden (10/11/2014)

A Trillion Ways to Build a New Military Industrial Complex (10/11/2014)

Government Surveillance Threatens Journalism, Law and Thus Democracy (7/29/2014)

The Secret Government Rulebook For Labeling You a Terrorist (7/23/2014)

The Human Price of Neocon Havoc (7/17/2014)

The Ultimate Goal of the NSA is Total Population Control (7/10/2014)

Snowden Leak Is Devastating to NSA Defenders (7/7/2014)

Snowden Docs Expose Near Global Reach of NSA (7/1/2014)

Sunset the Patriot Act

Revealed: 'Collect It All' NSA Targets Those Seeking Web Privacy (7/4/2014)

Al Gore: NSA's Law-Breaking Worse Than Snowden's (6/11/14)

A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created in One of the Freest Countries in the World (6/2/2014)

Snowden Speaks (5/30/2014)

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA (5/17/2014)

Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras Take on America’s Runaway Surveillance State

Heading Toward A Police State (4/18/2014)

Merkel ally blasts US assurances on spying as ‘insufficient’ (4/7/2014)

10 Shameful Ways America Abuses Its Own Citizens (3/14/2014)

Former Church Committee Chief Counsel Pushes for New Investigation Into Secret Government (3/13/2014)

How the NSA Plans to Infect ‘Millions’ of Computers with Malware (3/12/2014)

You Know Who Else Collected Metadata ? The STASI (2/11/2014)

A Person Under Surveillance is No Longer Free”: Why We Care About Obama’s Speech Today (1/17/2014)

We Have to Destroy Our Constitution to Save It (1/12/2014)

Believe it or Not: A National Security State (1/5/2014)

Urban Shield, SWAT, and the Domain Awareness Center (10/24/2013)

How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? (10/14/2013)

The Origins of Our Police State (9/16/2013)

Is the top echelon of the "Intelligence Community" running the show ? (9/6/2013)

NSA Efforts to Evade Encryption Technology Damaged U.S. Cryptography Standard (9/18/2013)

You Are Our Secret (6/16/2013)

Making Alberto Gonzales Look Good (6/11/2013)

The CIA wants to spy on you through your TV: Agency director says it will 'transform' surveillance (3/16/2012)

Facebook and its connections to the CIA and DARPA (1/19/2012)

Universal Surveillance

Snowden's revelation that Washington has used Google, Facebook, Apple and other giants of consumer technology to spy on almost everyone, is further evidence of modern form of fascism - that is the "abyss". Having nurtured old-fashioned fascists around the world - from Latin America to Africa and Indonesia - the genie has risen at home. Understanding this is as important as understanding the criminal abuse of technology. John Pilger

Edward Snowden in his own words: "You're being watched"

Tracking Censorship and Surveillance

Spies in the Skies (4/6/2016)

Mass surveillance: EU citizens' rights still in danger, says Parliament (10/29/2015)

How the CIA made Google (1/22/2015)

See this video of Jacob Appelbaum

How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks World Wide (12/4/2014)

NSA Said to Exploit Heartbleed Bug for Intelligence for Years (4/12/2014)

NSA Spying

A Guide to the Deceptions, Misinformation, and Word Games Officials Use to Mislead the Public About NSA Surveillance (8/14/2013)

The NSA's Prism remains Opaque (6/13/2013)

NSA knows

NSA Grid

United States of Secrets (PBS Frontline 5/20/2014)

Dragnet Nation

Stingray

XKeyscore - NSA mass surveillance & espionage

The New Domestic Surveillance Regime: Ineffective Counterterrorism That Threatens Civil Liberties and Constitutional Separation of Powers


Echelon


It is clear that not only international communications, but also virtually all forms of US communications are monitored: by the NSA, internet companies, phone companies, or even the post office. It has certainly damaged the US reputation among other countries, it can cause suspicion of the internet itself since it is mostly US controlled, it is dangerous for any serious journalism, it will stop all but the most determined whistleblowers, it is very bad for U.S. business, history shows abundantly that it degrades our politics. and it most likely will bring down the law on dissenters (See Seth Rosenfields "Subversives" for an example.).

Glenn Greenwald's book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, describes how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful. The elite in the US are too big to prosecute no matter how grave their crimes.

Without change we are headed for a state that makes Orwell's vision look pale. See the NSA files. 

For an example of rogue surveillance Seth Rosenfeld's book, Subversives, details Ronald Reagan's rise to the Presidency as an informer for the FBI who furnished McCarthy' HUAC with the identities of dissidents and destroyed their careers.

Chilling Journalism

That national security state officials routinely mislead and deceive the public should never have even been in serious doubt in the first place – certainly not for journalists, and especially now after the experience of the Iraq War. That fact — that official pronouncements merit great skepticism rather than reverence — should be (but plainly is not) fundamental to how journalists view the world. Glenn Greenwald (6/14/2014)

Barrett Brown’s sentence is unjust, but it may become the norm for journalists (1/28/2015)

How Edward Snowden Changed Journalism (10/24/2014)

The Government War against Reporter James Risen (10/8/2014)

Stop the Attacks on Journalists and their Families

Jacob Applebaum (Video) Keynote for the Free Software Foundation

Real Journalism v. Big Brother (12/5/2013)

The NSA Debate Is As Much About Journalism As Surveillance (10/4/2013)

When the State Attacks Journalism (8/20/2013)

With Liberty to Monitor All (PDF from Human Rights Watch.)

Sabotaging the Dissident Press: The untold story of the secret offensive waged by the U.S. government against antiwar publications(pdf)



Assuring Conformity

No matter the specific techniques involved, historically mass surveillance has had several constant attributes, Initially, it is always the country's dissidents and marginalized who bear the brunt of the surveillance, leading those who support the government or a merely apathetic to mistakenly believe they are immune. And history shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent. A citizenry that is aware of always being watched quickly becomes a compliant and fearful one." Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide

Intelligence Services Block Activists’ Emails … And Frame Them With Fake Emails (3/24/2015)

Secret Law

"The Tea Party talks about government intrusion as if it were a Holy Grail, and yet they ignore the NSA. I would think that if you’re a true conservative that there would be nothing that would bother you more. Maybe that makes me a true conservative." Oliver Stone

Death of Privacy

Killing the internet

Militarizing Police

growing militarization now threatens American liberty. This threat is evident from
the increasing arsenal of weapons available to police units, the changing image of the police within
communities, and the growing idea that the police can and should use any means necessary to
maintain order. When viewed in a historical context, these patterns bear resemblance to those
observed in the early stages of the world's past police states. The increasing militarization of the
police poses a real threat to American civil liberties, especially First and Fourth Amendment
freedoms. In the face of the threat of an increasingly powerful police force, the American populace,
with the help of a vigilant media, must inform themselves about the issues at stake and ensure that
the police protect the order but also the liberty in their communities." Rutherford Institute

The War Comes Home (5/5/2015)

War Gear Flows to Police Departments (6/8/2014)

Law

FISA Court

America's Authoritarian Police Violently Enforce the 1%'s Rule (12/31/2014)

7 Positive Solutions to Rein in Our Out-of-Control Police State (12/01/2014)

What Are the Limits of Police Subterfuge? (12/17/2014)

SCOTUS ruled that people have robust, personal gun rights, so why be surprised that police want protective gear. It's a new arms race between people and the police. Charles Derber had it right in his book: The Wilding of America.

Militarized Police and the Threat to Democracy. (8/18/2014)

Police Militarization, Citizen Journalism And The Suppression Of Free Speech: The Ferguson Fiasco Highlights Systemic Problem (8/14/2014)

More Americans Killed By Police Than By Terrorists: With Crime Down, Why Is Police Aggression Up? (3/20/2014)

War Gear Flows to Police Departments (6/8/2014)

Towns Don't Need Tanks, but they have them. (3/7/2013)

Fusion Centers

The Inauguration of Police State USA 2012

The Posse Comitatus Act

Military Industrial Complex

Managed democracy is a powerful solvent for any vestiges of democracy left in the American political system, but its powers are weak in comparison with those of Superpower. Superpower is the sponsor, defender and manager of American imperialism and militarism, aspects of American government that have always been dominated by elites, enveloped in executive-branch secrecy, and allegedly beyond the ken of ordinary citizens to understand or oversee. Superpower is preoccupied with weapons of mass destruction, clandestine manipulation of foreign policy (sometimes domestic policy, too), military operations, and the fantastic sums of money demanded from the public by the military-industrial complex. (The U.S. military spends more than all other militaries on Earth combined. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion; the next closest national military budget is China's at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.) Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism: Sheldon S. Wolin

Alienating Allies

"The US government now faces a stark choice. Policymakers can continue down a path toward an ever-more intrusive security state, risking billions of dollars in economic harm to the US tech sector, undermining US diplomatic relationships, threatening the architecture of the internet, and imperiling the US Internet Freedom agenda. Or, policymakers can enact real NSA reforms designed to restore America's role as a global leader on internet security and openness, and a trusted partner to its friends and allies around the world." Sam Gustin 7/29/2014

Video

NSA Surveillance and What To Do About It - Bruce Schneier

America’s Surveillance State 1 (The Surveillance Machine)

Lawrence Lessig interviews Edward Snowden

Citizen4

Dirty Wars

United States of Surveillance

Bibliography

The Walls Have Eyes by Petra Molnar

The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine that Rules Our Lives by McKenzie Funk

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff

Data and Goliath, The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World: Bruce Schneier

Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World Tom Engelhardt

The Counterrevolution, How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens: Bernard E. Harcourt

“Homeland Security”, The Trillion-Dollar Concept That No One Can Define, Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer

Gag Rule, On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham

Democracy Betrayed, The Rise of the Surveillance Security State, William W. Keller

Wages of Rebellion, the Moral Imperative of Revolt: Chris Hedges

Rogue Justice, The Making of the Security State: Karen J. Greenberg

The Snowden Reader: Edited by David P. Fidler

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.: Mike Lofgren ( an insider’s account of who really runs Washington regardless of which party is in power.)

Pay Any Price: James Risen

Top Secret America, the Rise of the New American Security State: Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World: Tom Engelhardt

Dragnet Nation: Julia Angwin

The Rise of the American Corporate Security State: Six Reasons to be Afraid: Beatrice Edwards

Governing Through Crime: Jopnathan Simon

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko (Jul 9, 2013)

National Security Agency Surveillance: Reflections and Revelations, 2001-2013: Wayne Madsen

The Rise of the Computer State, a Chilling Account of the Computer's Threat to Society: David Burnham

No Place To Hide: Glenn Greenwald (Download it for free.)

Border Patrol Nation: Todd Miller

National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism: Mel Goodman

Crossing the Rubicon, The Decline of the American Empire and the End of the Age of Oil: Michael C. Ruppert

The Shadow Factory: James Bamford

Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance: Heidi Boghosian, Lewis Lapham

Thinking In An Emergency: Elaine Scarry

Subversives: Seth Rosenfeld

A Government of Wolves: the Emerging American Police State: John W. Whitehead

The age of surveillance : the aims and methods of America's political intelligence system: Frank J. Donner

Present at the Creation: Dean Acheson

Creating the National Security State: Douglas T. Stuart:

 

EFF on NSA Spying