Government surveillance

(By Juan Cole) MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell interrupts former Rep. Jane Harman, speaking on NSA surveillance from Davos, for breaking news about Justin Bieber’s DUI arrest The real irony of interviewing Harman on NSA spying is that, as Ryan Gierach points out, she is both a victim of it and a big defender of it, which […]

Dissent

NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security

contributors

By Alfred McCoy | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – For more than six months, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Brazil’s O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of […]

Dissent

Gov’t used Surveillance of MLK in Bid to Destroy Him: Now they want us to just Trust Them

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Among the ironies of Barack Obama trying to sell us the gargantuan NSA domestic spying program is that such techniques of telephone surveillance were used against the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in an attempt to destroy him and stop the Civil Rights movement. Had the republic’s most notorious peeping tom, J. […]

Dissent

US Intel Officials keep Talking about Killing Snowden, then say “trust us with your data”

contributors

(By Mike Masnick) The Fact That The US Intelligence Community So Readily Admits To Fantasies Of Killing Ed Snowden Shows Why They Can’t Be Trusted (via Techdirt) We’ve mentioned things in the past like former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden “jokingly” talking about how he’d like to put Ed Snowden on a “kill list” […]

Domestic Surveillance

4 Ways Obama has Misled on NSA Surveillance

contributors

(By Kara Brandeisky) President Obama on Friday announced some reportedly limited reforms to National Security Agency surveillance programs. Since the first disclosures based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Obama has offered his own defenses of the programs. But not all of the president’s claims have stood up to scrutiny. Here are […]

Dissent

Assange on Obama Speech: “Embarrassing,” Dragged Kicking and Screaming to Reform by Snowden

Juan Cole

Julian Assange responds to Obama speech on NSA reform at CNN AFP reports: Obama surveillance pledge will change little: Assange (via AFP) WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Friday dismissed President Barack Obama’s proposals to curb the reach of the National Security Agency (NSA), saying they would change very little. In a speech intended to quell […]

Domestic Surveillance

NSA Collects Hundreds of Millions SMS Text Messages every Day

contributors

(By Mike Masnick) NSA Collecting Hundreds Of Millions Of Text Messages Daily, Looking At ‘Untargeted’ Messages & Data (via Techdirt) The latest in the ongoing revelations for the Ed Snowden leaks is that the NSA and GCHQ are collecting what appears to be hundreds of millions of text messages every day. While it does try […]

al-Qaeda

Obama NSA Defense FAIL: The al-Mihdar Red Herring

Juan Cole

In his speech on the National Security Agency domestic surveillance program on Friday, Obama offered an explanation of its origins: “The program grew out of a desire to address a gap identified after 9/11. One of the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar – made a phone call from San Diego to a known al Qaeda […]

Domestic Surveillance

Take Control of your Internet Privacy

contributors

(By Julia Angwin) In the course of writing her book, Dragnet Nation, ProPublica reporter Julia Angwin tried various strategies to protect her privacy. In this blog post, she distills the lessons from her privacy experiments into useful tips for readers. One of the easiest and simplest things you can do to protect your privacy is […]