Government surveillance

Claim on “Attacks Thwarted” by NSA Spreads Despite Lack of Evidence Justin Elliot and Theodoric Meyer write at ProPublica Two weeks after Edward Snowden’s first revelations about sweeping government surveillance, President Obama shot back. “We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, […]

Domestic Surveillance

Snowden: Federal Spying makes us Less Secure

Juan Cole

Supporters of massive National Security Agency domestic and international electronic surveillance of millions of innocent civilians justify it on the grounds that it makes us safer. It does not. Edward Snowden makes the opposite point, which is that intense government surveillance harms our security. He revealed the secret warrantless monitoring of Americans (which goes beyond […]

Domestic Surveillance

Big Brother’s little Brothers: How Surveillance Companies Mine your Info for the Gov’t (Chatterjee)

Juan Cole

Pratap Chatterjee writes at Tomdispatch.com The Data Hackers Mining Your Information for Big Brother By Pratap Chatterjee Big Bro is watching you. Inside your mobile phone and hidden behind your web browser are little known software products marketed by contractors to the government that can follow you around anywhere. No longer the wide-eyed fantasies of […]

Afghanistan

Top Ten Things Ted Cruz did to the NSA and other Security Agencies that Edward Snowden Couldn’t

Juan Cole

Edward Snowden’s revelations about the excesses of the National Security Agency have so far had no effect whatsoever on actual practices. But Ted Cruz’s conspiracy to shut down the American government as a bargaining ploy in his quest to stop the working poor from being able to see a doctor has been much more effective […]

Government surveillance

President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil at UN delivers Stinging Rebuke to Obama on NSA Spying (Lazare)

Juan Cole

Reuters reports on President Roussef’s speech condemning US spying on her country and on her personally: Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams: In a furious critique that opened the UN's General Assembly meeting Tuesday immediately before President Obama took the podium, Brazil's president Dilma Rousseff blasted U.S. secret surveillance programs for violating her country's national sovereignty, […]

Domestic Surveillance

Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ Was less Intrusive than our own Feds & We OK’d That (Calabrese and Harwood)

Juan Cole

Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood write at Tomdispatch.com For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with […]

Government surveillance

Brazilian President Snubs Obama: How US Cyber Espionage will Destroy the Internet

Juan Cole

The USG Open Source Center reports on Brazilian press reaction to President Dilma Roussef’s decision to cancel her state visit to Washington DC this fall, after revelations by Edward Snowden that the US National Security Agency not only intensively spied on all Brazilians online and engaged in industrial espionage but that special efforts were made […]

Domestic Surveillance

How the National Security State creates its own Whistleblowers, with a Letter to the Next One (Engelhardt)

Juan Cole

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com Dear Whistleblower, I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in […]

Government surveillance

US NSA Gives Israel Raw Intelligence on US Citizens (Chamberlain)

Juan Cole

Jacob Chamberlain writes at Commondreams.org The National Security Agency openly shares unfiltered intelligence files with the Israeli government, according to a classified document leaked to the Guardian newspaper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. As the Guardian reports Wednesday, the NSA memorandum details an "intelligence-sharing agreement" between the two countries and shows that the "US government […]