Surveillance

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 […]

censorship

Johns Hopkins University Orders Cryptography Professor’s Blog Posting Removed for Classified NSA Links (Larson & Elliott)

Juan Cole

Jeff Larson and Justin Elliott write at ProPublica Citing concerns about linking to classified material, Johns Hopkins University asked a professor this morning to remove a blog post discussing last week’s revelations about the NSA’s efforts to break encryption. The post had linked to government documents published by ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times. […]

Government surveillance

NSA Spying: Indian Gov’t Bans Employee Google Use as Euro Parliament Weighs Law Fining Cooperative Firms

Juan Cole

The rest of the world is much more appalled at the spying of the National Security Agency on telephone, email, web browsers and other personal information than is the US public. As new revelations come out almost daily about the cavalier way in which the NSA has spied on the world’s presidents, parliaments and ordinary […]

Government surveillance

NSA Spying Abroad isn’t OK Either (Kurzman)

Juan Cole

Charles Kurzman writes at ISLAMiCommentary: Caption for graphic: NSAW SID Intelligence Oversight (IO) Quarterly Report – First Quarter Calendar Year 2012 (1 January – 31 March 2012) – Executive Summary, May 3, 2012, compiled by Kurzman from pages 5-6 of 13. http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/nsa-report-on-privacy-violations-in-the-first-quarter-of-2012/395/ Many Americans were upset to learn this month that the National Security Agency […]

Domestic Surveillance

Top 13 Surveillance Secrets the Gov’t Doesn’t want You to Know About (Quigley)

Juan Cole

Bill Quigley writes at Commondreams.org “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is […]

Domestic Surveillance

NSA abuses include Stalking ex-Girlfriends

Juan Cole

We have HUMINT, or human intelligence gathered from agents. We have SIGINT or signals intelligence. And now we have LOVEINT or NSA analysts occasionally reading the emails of ex-lovers. It doesn’t happen a lot, the NSA told the WSJ, but often enough that there is a word for it. The NSA only admitted this abuse […]