Tag: mass surveillance

Break the Cycle: In 2024, Say No to the Government’s Cruelty, Brutality and Abuse

“The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”—Edmund Burke

Folks, it’s time to break the cycle of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government for way too long.

Here’s just a small sampling of what we suffered through in 2023.

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

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

The cost of endless wars drove the nation deeper into debt. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense.

The courts failed to uphold justice. Time and time again, the Supreme Court failed to right the wrongs being meted out by the American police state. A review of critical court rulings over the past decade or so, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans became sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans were made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world. The Department of Homeland Security, which has led the charge to create a Surveillance State, has continued to deploy mandatory facial recognition scans at airports and gather biometric data on American travelers. Police were gifted with new surveillance gadgets. The Corporate State tapped into our computer keyboards, cameras, cell phones and smart devices in order to better target us for advertising. Social media giants such as Facebook granted secret requests by the government and its agents for access to users’ accounts. And our private data—methodically collected and stored with or without our say-so—was repeatedly compromised and breached.

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Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“EVERYTHING WE HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT THE DEMOCRATIC NATURE OF THE INTERNET IS A MARKETING PLOY.
As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown, private corporations consider it their right to use our data (and by extension, us) which ever way they see fit. Tempted by their appealing organisational and diagnostic tools, we have allowed private internet corporations access to the most intimate corners of our lives.
But the internet was developed, from the outset, as a weapon.
Looking at the hidden origins of many internet corporations and platforms, Levine shows that this is a function, not a bug of the online experience. 
Conceived as a surveillance tool by ARPA to control insurgents in the Vietnam War, the internet is now essential to our lives. This book investigates the troubling and unavoidable truth of its history and the unfathomable power of the corporations who now more or less own it.
Without this book, your picture of contemporary society will be missing an essential piece of the puzzle.”

Republican Majority Rewarded FBI-DOJ for Breaking the Law – Approved FISA Process Through Next Election Cycle

Former Defense Department Chief of Staff Kash Patel joined Maria Bartiromo this morning along with Attorney Alan Dershowitz to discuss political hitman Jack Smith and his political maneuvers to take down Donald Trump.

During their conversation Kash Patel reminded the FOX News audience that Republicans just voted to reauthorize the FISA Program through the 2024 election that was used to spy on President Trump by the FBI in 2016 and beyond.

It is well known today that the FBI knowingly and willfully lied to the FISA Court to spy on the Trump Campaign in 2016 and later on his administration and even family members.

Kash Patel: Yeah, it’s great to be with you, Maria. Look, the biggest concern I have going forward is the politicization and weaponization and creation of a two tier system of justice as a result. Back when Devin Nunes and I ran the Russia gate investigation and exposed the FISA corruption, we recommended a slew of fixes. So it never happened again. Unfortunately, Congress chose to allow 702 FISA to basically be reauthorized.

What does that mean? What is 702? It’s fancy for foreign intelligence surveillance. It means me, as a former national security prosecutor and intelligence operative, would go overseas and manhunt terrorists. That’s what it’s for. But the FISA court, in April of 2022, publicized an opinion that said the FBI used it illegally 275,000 times domestically against Americans, 16 different occasions against those affiliated with, January 6, 19,000 times domestically against donors to a congressional campaign, and, wait for it, 24,000 separate times against Americans and groups in and around January 6.

That FISA process has been turned on its head, redirected inwards. And anyone who says, oh, that’s just a Republican conspiracy speak, that’s the FISA court that rescinded Rod Rosenstein’s illegal surveillance of Donald Trump twice based on our investigation. And now they do it again, and they prove the FBI and DOJ have weaponized justice. And the Republican leadership in Congress allowed it to be reauthorized, essentially through the next election cycle…

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The NDAA’s ‘Warrantless Backdoor Surveillance’ of Americans Gets Approved by the Senate

In a last-minute rush to sanction spending before the end of the year, the Senate enacted a $886 billion defense spending proposal Wednesday, sponsored by President Joe Biden, that includes financing for Ukraine, yearly pay hikes for personnel, and most controversially, a reauthorization of the the National Defense Authorization Act

The NDAA funds Pentagon objectives such as training and equipment. The Act was approved by a bipartisan majority of 87-13 in the Senate. For the last 61 years in a row, Congress has advanced the must-pass defense budget measure.

“At a time of huge trouble for global security, doing the defense authorization bill is more important than ever,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “Passing the NDAA enables us to hold the line against Russia, stand firm against the Chinese Communist Party and ensure America’s defense remain state of the art at all times.”

The package now moves to the House, where some conservative Republicans have vowed to derail it after legislators removed disputed elements that would have changed the Pentagon’s abortion policy and provide certain so-called “transgender” medical procedures.

The NDAA approved by the Senate is a compromise version of the budget package passed by the House earlier this year. The House version includes elements aimed at the Pentagon’s transgender health care regulations, as well as an amendment to repeal a Pentagon policy that reimburses out-of-state travel for service members who have abortions.

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House Proposal Would Expand Federal Warrantless Spying Authority

The House of Representatives could vote this week on a bill to greatly expand federal digital surveillance powers—potentially broadening both the scope of electronic communications to be scooped up and giving law enforcement more opportunities to access that data.

Edward Snowden, who exposed parts of this same federal surveillance apparatus in 2013, called the new proposal “the biggest encroachment on your privacy rights since the Patriot Act” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Civil libertarian groups have roundly criticized the bill and are encouraging lawmakers to vote against it.

That bill, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023, is one of two measures aiming to make changes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that could be brought to the House floor on Tuesday. Section 702, created after 9/11, allows federal intelligence agencies to vacuum up communications between Americans and foreigners. Under some circumstances, law enforcement is allowed to query the Section 702 database, which includes an unknown amount of “incidental” data pulled from Americans’ online communications with foreigners.

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of the year, and recent revelations about how the FBI has misused the spying program have raised hopes that Congress might rein in the program.

Despite its name, however, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act appears to expand, not reform, the program.

One portion of the bill “vastly expands the universe of U.S. businesses that can be conscripted to aid the government in conducting surveillance,” Elizabeth Goitein, director of the national security program at the Brennan Center, a liberal think tank, posted on X.

Currently, the federal government can compel only businesses that have direct access to digital communications—telecom providers, internet service providers, and the like—to turn over that data to the Section 702 database. Under the terms of the House proposal, however, any business or entity that has access to telecom or internet equipment could be forced to participate in the federal government’s digital spying regime.

“Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies,” writes Goitein.

That change would “effectively overrule” a recent decision from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret court that reviews America’s spying programs, write Steve Lane and Marc Zwillinger, two lawyers with experience arguing before the FISC.

“The new definition,” Lane and Zwillinger argued in a post on a legal blog connected to Zwillinger’s law firm, “could give the government warrantless access to any communication system in America through which any one-side-foreign communication could be found.”

The FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act would also expand how the government uses its Section 702 database.

Specifically, the bill would add a new provision to authorize Section 702 investigations as part of the process of “vetting of all non-United States persons who are being processed for travel to the United States.”

“This new authority proposes to give immigration services the ability to audit entire communication histories before deciding whether an immigrant can enter the country,” writes India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), which opposes the bill. “This is a particularly problematic situation that could cost someone entrance to the United States based on, for instance, their own or a friend’s political opinions—as happened to a Palestinian Harvard student when his social media account was reviewed when coming to the U.S. to start his semester.”

Again, that provision of the bill seems to directly overrule the FISC, which has repeatedly struck down attempts by federal officials to expand Section 702 surveillance to include greater scrutiny of immigrants, McKinney notes.

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Living Everywhere in a Carceral Surveillance State

If you live in a Chinese city, or even in London, you are probably so used to surveillance cameras all around you – on lamp posts, the corners of buildings, and so on – that you would hardly bat an eyelid. Yet what contemporary city-denizens take for granted was not always the case, and most people would be surprised to know that surveillance has a long history, and was linked to modes of punishment from early on.

The thinker who brought us the history of punishment, linked with surveillance, was Michel Foucault, who died prematurely in 1984, and whose thesis of ‘panopticism’ I referred to in an earlier post. His work is an inexhaustible source of insight regarding the way in which one enters into a relationship with history – something that is not self-evident, but requires careful consideration of the contingent, usually unpredictable factors which have contributed to the present state of affairs. This insight also opens the way for a critique of current social practices, which may otherwise seem self-justifying and necessary. 

Foucault’s writings on enlightenment suggest that there is a fundamental difference between ‘enlightenment’ in the Kantian sense, which emphasised the universal moment of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and ‘enlightenment’ in the sense of a philosophy of the contemporary present, which would do justice to both the (Kantian) universal as well as what is contingent and particular, which is not subject to historical laws, deterministically conceived.

In his essay, What is enlightenment? (in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, P., New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50), Foucault argues that Kant’s emphasis on the universal should be amplified by Baudelaire’s characterisation of the modern in terms of a tension between being and becoming (or the universal and the particular), in this way finding the ‘eternal’ (or enduringly valuable) in the transitory, historically contingent moment. For Baudelaire, this amounts to a species of self-invention.

Foucault, however, maintains that such self-invention would enable one to turn Kant’s critique into one that is pertinent for the present time, by inquiring what there is, in what we have been taught to accept as being necessary and universal, which we no longer are, or want to be, thus practising a kind of ‘transgressive’ enlightenment. This, I would like to show, is highly germane to the time in which we find ourselves, and by scrutinising the history that has brought us to our fraught present, we should be in a better position to identify what it is that we no longer want to be.

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Apple Just Confirmed Governments Are Spying on People’s Phones With Push Notifications

Governments are spying on U.S. smartphone users through the push notifications that they receive from apps, Senator Ron Wyden wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice on Wednesday and Apple confirmed. 

Wyden wrote that the federal government had restricted Apple and other companies’ ability to share information about this process. The Senator’s office “received a tip” last year that “government agencies in foreign countries were demanding smartphone ‘push’ notification records from Google and Apple,” Wyden, a Democratic senator from Oregon, wrote in the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. “My staff have been investigating this tip for the past year, which included contacting Apple and Google. In response to that query, the companies told my staff that information about this practice is restricted from public release by the government.” 

Apple confirmed in a statement to Reuters on Wednesday that, “In this case, the federal government prohibited us from sharing any information. Now that this method has become public we are updating our transparency reporting to detail these kinds of requests.”

The process by which push notifications are generated requires the phone company to serve as a “digital post office,” Wyden wrote. Push notifications are sent through Apple and Google’s servers, which means that the companies “serve as intermediaries in the transmission process,” and can therefore be made to hand over information to governments that request it. 

According to Wyden’s letter, the information that can be gleaned from push notification requests is mostly metadata. This includes information “detailing which app received a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification was intended to be delivered,” Wyden wrote. In some cases, requesters may even receive unencrypted content such as the text that was delivered in the notification. 

The senator said that companies can therefore “be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information.” 

An unnamed source confirmed to Reuters that both foreign and U.S. government agencies had been asking the companies for push notification data, for example to tie anonymous users of messaging apps to specific accounts. They did not say which government agencies had participated in this, or for how long. 

Apple advises its developers to encrypt any sensitive data sent through a push notification, but does not require this practice. 

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Congress Prepares To Reauthorize a Warrantless Domestic Spying Program the FBI Abused

Congress is gearing up for a potential showdown over the expected reauthorization of a warrantless domestic spying program that’s been misused by the FBI and widely criticized by civil libertarians.

That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was created after 9/11 with the intention of tracking foreign spies and potential terrorists. But it has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications—the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database in 2021, according to an annual transparency report.

With the program set to expire at the end of this year, Congress has a rare opportunity to reform Section 702 by, at the very least, prohibiting law enforcement from using it to snoop on Americans. So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

The Senate voted Thursday to advance the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the 3,000-page bill contains a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702, according to Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), a longtime critic of the surveillance program.

“After all we’ve learned about the FBI in recent years, the fact that some members of Congress are still willing to reauthorize FISA 702 without reforms—not even a warrant requirement for “backdoor” surveillance of Americans—makes me wonder if they’re illiterate,” Lee posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.

Lee says he intends to vote against the NDAA when it comes to the Senate floor for a final vote. He likely won’t be the only Republican to do so, but rolling the Section 702 reauthorization into the larger military spending bill means it will be difficult to prevent its passage.

Instead, the fight will be over the language that gets added to the NDAA. While the Senate is moving forward will full reauthorization, there are competing proposals drafted in the House.

The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill on Wednesday to reauthorize Section 702 with the added requirement that the FBI and other intelligence agencies obtain a warrant before using the program to obtain information about Americans.

“The overwhelming, bipartisan vote in favor of this legislation confirms a mutual interest in protecting our Fourth Amendment privacy rights from rogue intelligence actors,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R–Ariz.), chairman of the House subcommittee on federal surveillance issues, said in a statement. “Any effort to stall consideration or pass a clean extension of the current FISA authorities is a punishment of the American people.”

However, the House Intelligence Committee passed its own version of a Section 702 reauthorization on Thursday. That bill would only require that the FBI establish probable cause before searching the Section 702 database for information about Americans, Roll Call reported.

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Due to AI, “We are about to enter the era of mass spying,” says Bruce Schneier

In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.

In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:

“Spying and surveillance are different but related things,” Schneier writes. “If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.”

Schneier says that current spying methods, like phone tapping or physical surveillance, are labor-intensive, but the advent of AI significantly reduces this constraint. Generative AI systems are increasingly adept at summarizing lengthy conversations and sifting through massive datasets to organize and extract relevant information. This capability, he argues, will not only make spying more accessible but also more comprehensive.

“This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers,” Schneier writes. “Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and ‘Hey, Google’ are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.”

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Documents Show DHS Agency “Real-Time Narrative Tracking” of Social Media Posts in 2020

Judicial Watch has come forward with newly acquired evidence of an intriguing alliance during the US 2020 election. The investigative body was able to obtain, via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit, a series of records demonstrating a comprehensive synergy between the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) and a controversial entity, the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP).

These files reveal a concerted effort to execute “real-time narrative tracking” on principal social media networks during the critical days leading up to the 2020 election. Interestingly, these records illustrate instances of social media post “takedowns” and an intentional avoidance of creating public records that would be subject to the FOIA process.

These records also allow us a peek into the operations of EIP. Originally known as the Election Misinformation Partnership, it invested in monitoring online election discourse round the clock, especially prioritizing “disinformation that is going viral.”

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