Thursday 10-06-16

 Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.
Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.
It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.
Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.
According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.
"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos declined a request for an interview.
The NSA referred questions to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which declined to comment.
The request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came in the form of a classified edict sent to the company's legal team, according to the three people familiar with the matter.
U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.
"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.
"It would be really difficult for a provider to do that," he added.
                      
 Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, two major U.S. email service providers, separately said on Tuesday that they had not conducted such email searches.
"We've never received such a request, but if we did, our response would be simple: 'No way'," a spokesman for Google said in a statement.
A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement, "We have never engaged in the secret scanning of email traffic like what has been reported today about Yahoo." The company declined to comment on whether it had received such a request.

CHALLENGING THE NSA
 Under laws including the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and Internet companies to provide customer data to aid foreign intelligence-gathering efforts for a variety of reasons, including prevention of terrorist attacks.

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and others have exposed the extent of electronic surveillance and led U.S. authorities to modestly scale back some of the programs, in part to protect privacy rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged some classified surveillance before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret tribunal.
Some FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to fight last year's demand on at least two grounds: the breadth of the directive and the necessity of writing a special program to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple Inc made a similar argument earlier this year when it refused to create a special program to break into an encrypted iPhone used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre. The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked the phone with the help of a third party, so no precedent was set.
"It is deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to challenge this sweeping surveillance order, because customers are counting on technology companies to stand up to novel spying demands in court," Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement.
Some FISA experts defended Yahoo's decision to comply, saying nothing prohibited the surveillance court from ordering a search for a specific term instead of a specific account. So-called "upstream" bulk collection from phone carriers based on content was found to be legal, they said, and the same logic could apply to Web companies' mail.
As tech companies become better at encrypting data, they are likely to face more such requests from spy agencies.

 Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email providers "have the power to encrypt it all, and with that comes added responsibility to do some of the work that had been done by the intelligence agencies."

SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAM
 Mayer and other executives ultimately decided to comply with the directive last year rather than fight it, in part because they thought they would lose, said the people familiar with the matter.
Yahoo in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it conduct searches on specific email accounts without a court-approved warrant. Details of the case remain sealed, but a partially redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's challenge was unsuccessful.
Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.
They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.
The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.
When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
Stamos's announcement in June 2015 that he had joined Facebook did not mention any problems with Yahoo. (bit.ly/2dL003k)
In a separate incident, Yahoo last month said "state-sponsored" hackers had gained access to 500 million customer accounts in 2014. The revelations have brought new scrutiny to Yahoo's security practices as the company tries to complete a deal to sell its core business to Verizon Communications Inc for $4.8 billion.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSKCN1241YT

Australia Becomes First Country To Begin Microchipping Its Public

Australia may become the first country in the world to microchip its public. NBC news predicted that all Americans would be microchipped by 2017, but it seems Australia may have already beaten them to it.

Back in 2010, CBS news reported that the Australian government had a potential RFID microchipping plan in the works related to the health care system. 

 

 

Now, it seems that this plan is beginning to unfold but the push is not a result of mandated health care reforms, but rather a clever propaganda campaign that equates RFID microchipping with becoming superhuman, and people are begging for it.

Under the headline 'Australians embracing super-human microchip technology', Australia's premier media outlet news.com.au (News Corp Australia) reports:

It may sound like sci-fi, but hundreds of Australians are turning themselves into super-humans who can unlock doors, turn on lights and log into computers with a wave of the hand.

 

Shanti Korporaal, from Sydney, is at the centre of the phenomenon after having two implants inserted under her skin.

 

Now she can get into work and her car without carrying a card or keys, and says her ultimate goal is to completely do away with her wallet and cards.

She told news.com.au:

 

You could set up your life so you never have to worry about any password or PINs it’s the same technology as Paypass, so I’m hoping you’ll be able to pay for things with it.

With Opal you get a unique identification number that could be programmed into the chip. Any door with a swipe card ... it could open your computer, photocopier. Loyalty cards for shops are just another thing for your wallet.

The microchips, which are the size of a grain of rice, can act like a business card and transfer contact details to smartphones, and hold complex medical data.

 

In her interview with the Australian news outlet, Shanti claims that her friends and family are envious of her microchip lifestyle;

 

My nana wants one. I’ve had more opposition to my tattoos than I’ve ever had to the chip. My friends are jealous.

In fact, the 27-year-old has noticed a business opportunity and set up a distribution service called Chip My Life with her husband, Skeeve Stevens where for just $80 to $140, people can become so called "super humans."

On the same day this news story broke, Shanti appeared at Austarlia's launch of the much anticipated cyborg themed video game Deus Ex Mankind Divided, alongside American implantable technology pioneer Amal Graafstra.

As you can see, the push for RFID microchipping and assimilating the human population with robots and technology, is something that will most likely be sold to the public as helping them to become "super human," but clearly if you become part machine/computer, that means there will be someone who can control that technology. If you think the elites wouldn't capitalize on such an exceptional opportunity to control the population you obviously don't know  history very well.

Amal Graafstra, who became one of the world first RFID implantees back in 2005, just made headlines recently in the US with a prototype of the world’s first implant-activated smart gun and is a huge proponent for this new technology.

He’s written a book, spoken at TEDx and also appeared in a number of documentaries.

In an interview with the Australian media outlet, Amal explained that the technology he has implanted into his body has “given me the ability to communicate with machines. It’s literally integrated into who I am.”

Shanti has bought into the culture that dominates society today, which is one dominated by the fantasy of super heroes that mesmerizes the population at theaters all across the globe.

“Ever since watching movies like the Terminator, Matrix and Minority Report I wondered if we could actually live like that. I always wondered why we all weren’t living as ‘super-humans’

http://www.organicandhealthy.org/2016/10/australia-becomes-first-country-to.html?m=1

Wednesday 10-04-16

Subpoenas and Gag Orders Show Government Overreach, Tech Companies Argue

SAN FRANCISCO — It has been six months since the Justice Department backed off on demands that Apple help the F.B.I. break the security of a locked iPhone.

But the government has not given up the fight with the tech industry. Open Whisper Systems, a maker of a widely used encryption app called Signal, received a subpoena in the first half of the year for subscriber information and other details associated with two phone numbers that came up in a federal grand jury investigation in Virginia.

The subpoena arrived with a court order that said Open Whisper Systems was not allowed to tell anyone about the information request for one year.

Technology companies contend that court-imposed gag orders are being used too often by law enforcement and that they violate the Bill of Rights. The companies also complain that law enforcement officials are casting a wide net over online communications — often too wide — in their investigations.

Justice officials, for their part, argue that these gag orders are necessary to protect developing cases and to avoid tipping off potential targets. The officials say that they are simply following leads where they take them.

The information request made of Open Whisper Systems is particularly sensitive, since its encryption app is used around the world, and it is often recommended to journalists and human rights activists.

Microsoft sued the Justice Department over the gag order practice in April, arguing that law enforcement was relying on these orders too often. Specifically, the software giant said the gag orders violate the Fourth Amendment right of its customers to know if the government searches or seizes their property and also the company’s First Amendment right to speak to its customers.

Microsoft also complained that the orders often came without time limits, unlike the Open Whisper Systems order. Dozens of other technology, media and civil liberties groups filed briefs supporting Microsoft last month, and the case is pending.

Part of the gag order on Open Whisper Systems was lifted after a court challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union, and redacted versions of documents related to the information request were made public last week. But the small San Francisco company was still not allowed to tell specific account holders about the investigation.

The documents made public show that the government asked Open Whisper Systems to turn over data associated with two telephone numbers, including web browsing histories and data stored in the tracking “cookies” of the web browsers attached to those accounts. But one of Signal’s biggest draws is that it does not collect most of that information.

“The Signal service was designed to minimize the data we retain,” said Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of Open Whisper Systems. Mr. Marlinspike said Signal uses a technology called end-to-end encryption that kept the service from gaining access to the contents of its users’ messages. The company also does not store information on those with whom its users are communicating.

  

Civil liberties lawyers argue the Justice Department request fell well outside the bounds of what is typically covered by a subpoena, including basic subscriber information. Additional information, such as computer logs or content, would require a search warrant under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

“The Justice Department is pushing the envelope,” said Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Big companies like Apple and Microsoft have the wherewithal to push back, she said. But smaller companies may cave, rather than risk an expensive fight.

The Justice Department came to Open Whisper Systems with a menu of information needs, including subscriber details, addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses and method of payment. The request went on to demand information on internet addresses, browsers and internet providers that the account holders could have used, according to court records.

One of the phone numbers the government was investigating was not a Signal user after all. For the other phone number, Open Whisper Systems turned over the only pieces of data it could: the time the user’s account had been created and the last time it had connected to the service — far less than the government sought.

 

In other circumstances, the government has tried to force companies via court order to re-engineer their services to collect missing pieces of information, as it did with Apple earlier this year and in a similar case in 2013 against Lavabit, a small encrypted messaging service used by the former defense contractor Edward J. Snowden.

The government did not make that request of Open Whisper Systems. “They need to pick those cases carefully,” Ms. Granick said. “They are only picking cases where they think they’re going to have the people on their side.”

The Justice Department and F.B.I. tried to force Apple to break its own software security in the case of an iPhone used by a gunman in last year’s San Bernardino terrorist attacks, she said.

Companies are having some success in getting courts to lift gag orders. Last year, Nicholas Merrill, the owner of a now-defunct internet service provider, got a gag order lifted, though it took more than a decade. After the court decision in Mr. Merrill’s case, a federal judge in the Eastern District of New York denied gag orders in more than a dozen cases related to Facebook subpoenas last May. And in June, Yahoo was successful in getting a court to lift gag orders on a number of law enforcement information requests.

“Gag orders should be used in exceptional cases,” said Brett M. Kaufman, the staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. who represented Open Whisper Systems. “This one demonstrates that the exception has become the rule in routine proceedings.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/technology/subpoenas-and-gag-orders-show-government-overreach-tech-companies-argue.html?_r=0

 

 

SAF CALLS GUN SHOW LICENSE PLATE SCANS A ‘CIVIL RIGHTS OUTRAGE,’ WANTS PROBE

BELLEVUE, WA – The Second Amendment Foundation today is calling for a probe by the House Oversight Committee on an effort by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to record license plate information on all cars belonging to gun show customers in Southern California, calling the project a “civil rights outrage.”
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that federal agents apparently persuaded local police officers in 2010 to scan those license plates, ostensibly to detect possible gun smuggling. But SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said the effort appears to have been “one more gun control affront launched during the Obama administration.”
“Attending a gun show is not a criminal activity,” Gottlieb observed. “American citizens engaged in a perfectly legal activity should not have to worry about the government monitoring their exercise of various civil rights, including freedom of association and the right to keep and bear arms.
“Instead of worrying about people attending gun shows,” he continued, “maybe the same attention could have been paid to criminals walking guns across the border under the Fast and Furious fiasco. Oh, wait, that was a debacle created by government agents, also during the Obama administration.
“Unless there is clear evidence of criminal activity,” Gottlieb stated, “it is none of the government’s business who comes and goes at a lawfully-operated gun show. This kind of snooping should require a court order, and unless some illegal activity was detected, all license plate information gathered during this effort should be destroyed, and Congress should determine how it may have been used, or misused.
“We think this revelation by the Wall Street Journal raises enough questions that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform should launch an inquiry,” he said. “If this kind of monitoring dealt with any activity other than a gun show, you can bet the liberal media would be screaming. The Obama administration and its media cheerleaders should understand that gun owners have privacy rights, too.”

 

https://www.saf.org/saf-calls-gun-show-license-plate-scans-a-civil-rights-outrage-wants-probe/

 

 

Wednesday 09-28-16

THE SPY WHO SNAPPED ME

Snapchat in privacy storm over ‘surveillance sunglasses’ fitted with tiny video camera

Critics fear controversial device will be used to snap people without their consent

The glasses can record 10 seconds of video and are operated by tapping a button on the device.

1

The Snapchat spectacles have sparked privacy and surveillance fears

Video is then automatically uploaded to the ‘Memories’ section of the popular app via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
The devices have already sparked surveillance and privacy fears among social media user.
Tremecca D. Doss, an American attorney, wrote: “Very interested to see if new privacy and surveillance issues in the workplace and at schools arise from Snapchat Spectacles.”
“When we’re under 24/7 inescapable surveillance, we will have done it to ourselves,” wrote another Twitter user.
Young people living today are the most surveilled generation in human history and it’s necessarily the government or spooks that are doing the snooping.

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Edward Snowden famously revealed the scary reach of the US and UK's surveillance state, but youngsters' privacy is actually threatened more by other children more than it is by shadowy spy agencies.

Snapchat and Instagram have already helped to create a society where every single moment is documented and shared online.
But the release of the new glasses could be a concerning escalation of the apparently voluntary youth-led surveillance society, because they allow photos and videos to be snapped even more subtly.
Experts have said "the knowledge, or even the perception, of being surveilled can have a chilling effect", making people less likely to express themselves freely or act in ways which are not considered normal by mainstream society.

The glasses are the first hardware from the Los Angeles-based company. The company says it’s changing its name to Snap.inc since it now has more than one product.
The glasses record so-called “circular video,” meaning it plays full-screen on any device in any orientation.
They will be available in the U.S. in the autumn on a limited basis and cost $130.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1854249/snapchat-in-privacy-storm-after-releasing-surveillance-sunglasses-fitted-with-tiny-video-camera/

Tuesday 09-27-16

Toronto: Oliver Stone Unhappy with Obama and Says Surveillance "In the Hands of the Wrong President, It's Very Dangerous

"Obama has managed to put together the most intensive surveillance state in the history of the world," the 'Snowden' director told THR while discussing his film at the Toronto Film Festival. "This is pretty frightening when you think about the implications."
Oliver Stone warned against the dangers of global surveillance in a sit-down with The Hollywood Reporter at the Toronto Film Festival.
The Snowden director, in discussing his biopic of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, spoke about the current state of the country's surveillance system, which he says has intensified under the Obama Administration.
"I thought Obama, like everyone else, was going to be a reformer. He had criticized the surveillance prior," Stone told THR. "Since 2013, I have to tell you, it’s gotten a lot more serious because they’ve expanded the surveillance. It's gotten better."
 He continued, "Obama has managed to put together the most intensive surveillance state in the history of the world. This is pretty frightening when you think about the implications. In the hands of the wrong president, it’s very dangerous what we’re doing."
Despite Snowden's real-life ties with the U.S. government and NSA, the director clarified that the biopic wasn't made for a "political purpose," but rather to simply "tell the story."
"How do you keep a technical story like this — which was complicated — and keep it thrilling?" Stone asked. "There are no car chases, there’s no James Bond moment, there’s no violence. So, if it works as a thriller, the people who saw Bourne will go to this movie. Yes, I think so."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/snowden-director-oliver-stone-dangers-927334

 

You Will Be Poor

There has been a progression through each iteration of monetary theft. A trial balloon launches, usually from academia, which proposes an “innovation” contrary to reigning practice and orthodoxy. A curmudgeonly minority reject it; the majority, securing their places on the intellectual fashion forefront, excoriate the old and after a suitable time for faux consideration and discussion, embrace the new.
The public, insufficiently appreciative of the arcane language, abstruse reasoning, and self-evident erudition and brilliance of the experts, sometimes presents an obstacle. It was hostile towards the US’s first foray into monetary theft: central banking. The anti-central bank contingent won battles for 137 years, but lost the war in 1913. J.P. Morgan and cronies laid the intellectual groundwork: conferences, scholarly papers, legislative proposals, and a Greek chorus of the day’s one-percenters singing at the top of their lungs that America needed to join the civilized world and establish its own central bank.
If you understand the main purpose of central banks, then notwithstanding obfuscatory “Fedspeak,” endless media drivel, and academics’ Greek-letter-laden equations, you know all you need to know about these larcenous institutions. They exist to make it easier for governments to steal, and everything else is window dressing. Gold is finite and requires real resources to find, mine, and mint; central banks’ fiat debt can be produced in infinite quantities at virtually zero cost and exchanged for the government’s fiat debt.
Substitute central bank “notes” for gold and the resources available to the government expand dramatically. It can, in conjunction with the central bank, conjure its own money. Couple a central bank with 1913’s other “innovation”—the income tax—and lovers of government had the wherewithal for their fondest dreams, one of which was American empire. World War I, the US’s first involvement in Europe’s wars, followed close after 1913’s depredations, notwithstanding President Wilson’s vow to stay out in his 1916 reelection campaign.
Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon completed the switch from a gold-backed currency to fiat debt. After Nixon slammed shut the gold window in August, 1971, there have been no legal constraints (aside from the farcical debt ceiling) on either the creation of government debt or Federal Reserve purchases of that debt. The only constraints are political and those policy makers and central bank bureaucrats impose upon themselves, in other words none.
Whatever jolt debt monetization once might have given the economy has disappeared since the economy reached debt saturation before the last financial crisis. The increasing debt burden is slowing rather than promoting economic growth, and will soon, if it has not already, stop and reverse it. Elevation of financial asset and real estate prices (aka “bubble blowing”) supposedly promotes wealth effects that trickle down to the broader economy. The claim was dubious when first made during the housing bubble. Rising wealth inequality since then has revealed its absurdity. Whatever debt-based speculative “wealth” has been created has gone mostly to the financially well-connected who can borrow at negligible rates.
Quantitative easing was an application from central banking’s conventional tool kit—debt monetization—although its magnitude and global scale were unprecedented. More recent central bank “innovations”—zero and negative interest rates (ZIRP and NIRP) and now, proposed bans on cash—amount to outright theft. It is doubtful that even proponents believe their own transparently phony rationalizations for these measures. ZIRP and NIRP destroy the return on saving while rewarding debtors. And who are the world’s biggest debtors? Profligate governments, who are financing their unsustainable improvidence at history’s lowest interest rates and picking the pockets of individuals, companies, pension funds, insurance companies, and other entities that must generate a reasonable safe current return to meet future liabilities.
Proposed bans on cash, or even active discouragement of its use, are the next milestone in governmental larceny. Once all “money” (a misnomer, it’s really debt; there has been no “real money” in the global financial system since 1971) is forced into the banking system, it doesn’t take much imagination or foresight to see what comes next. The civil liberties’ implications of the government keeping track of everyone’s money and how it’s spent are of course ominous. However, the main reason the government wants financial assets confined to the banking and financial system is so that it can purloin them. Once bank accounts, brokerage accounts, insurance accounts, pension funds, and other easy-to monitor repositories of financial assets become the only stores of value, the government can partially or wholly nationalize—steal—assets and perhaps the repositories themselves.
At every juncture, the government runs into the self-defeating consequences of its policies, ongoing larceny threatens future larceny. Increase debt, taxes, and regulation enough and the economy collapses, putting a dent in government’s revenues. Nobody worries about grandpa and grandma eating cat food because ZIRP and NIRP deprive them of retirement income, but when those policies threaten the solvency of the insurance industry and pension funds and the government may be called upon to bail them out, it’s cause for concern. Any future moves by central banks to raise interest rates will be driven by that unacknowledged concern.
The financial system as a whole is heavily leveraged, its liabilities are many times its equity. Economic collapse would wipe out financial system equity, as it did in 2008, whether deposits are forced to stay in the system or not. The government has no equity to wipe out. Forced to stay, deposits will be expropriated by the government for its benefit or the benefit of the financial repositories (so-called bail-ins). That’s obviously only a one-time expedient that will temporarily forestall, but not prevent, ultimate insolvency for either the government or the financial system.
Governments can outlaw or seize any asset, including cash, precious metals, real estate, chattels, overseas accounts, or intellectual property. In its desperate rapacity nothing is off the table. For individuals, reducing deposits within the financial system and converting them to precious metals or cash while ownership is still legal makes some sense. However, outlawing the former has the weight of Roosevelt’s 1933 precedent, and outlawing the latter is under consideration, so their value as mediums of exchange may be set in the black markets that will inevitably arise as the government continues to expand its destructive domination of the economy.
Absent the kind of collective, preemptive measures described in “Revolution in America” to leverage the government and financial system’s indebtedness, bankrupting them before they bankrupt us, your assets are sitting ducks. If inertia, wishful thinking, the “you go first” problem, and fear of legal consequences prevent the revolutionary initiative, the government will still give up the ghost…but not before it makes you poor.
The sole capital that is 100 percent safe is intellectual capital: what you know. They can’t nationalize self-reliance and your self may be the only one on which you can rely. If you have not already started, expanding your knowledge of skills useful in a time of collapse and chaos would be well-advised.'

https://straightlinelogic.com/2016/09/13/you-will-be-poor-by-robert-gore/

Monday 09-26-16

Tour New York's invisible, networked surveillance infrastructure with Ingrid Burrington's new book

Writer/artist Ingrid Burrington has published a book called Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet Infrastructure, which sketches the physical extrusions of the internet into New York City's streets and buildings, and makes especial note of how much of that infrastructure has been built as part of the post 9/11 surveillance network that NYC has erected over the past 15 years.

The Intercept's Cora Currier went on a surveillance walking tour with Burrington, learning to decode the orange-sprayed surveyors' marks on the pavement and to spot the telltales on poles and building-faces that meant that something invisible and important was going on. I did a similar walking tour once, with journalist Henrik Moltke, when we were working on publishing some of the Snowden docs, and I can confirm that it's an experience to both open your eyes and blow your minds.
 

At each intersection, we looked for NYPD cameras and information-gathering devices owned by the Department of Transportation. Burrington pointed out green boxes sporting little domes; those are signal-control boxes that collect data from traffic cameras, EZ-Pass scanners, and microwave radar sensors, in order to track the movements of cars and regulate traffic lights accordingly. There are plenty of urban planning reasons for this data collection, but Burrington notes, “every camera that belongs to a city agency is essentially also an NYPD camera.”
A lot of internet infrastructure resides in buildings that once housed earlier modes of communication, and those building still bear the aesthetic of another era. Early 20th-century communications companies liked ornate decor, especially lightning bolts, in contrast to the bland or cutesy logos that today’s internet giants hide behind. We went to 75 Broad Street, once home to the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. Over its doorway is a colorful mosaic of an angel with a lightning bolt and two globes showing the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Among other things, the building now houses a data storage center.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Tour_New_York%27s_invisible%2C_networked_surveillance_infrastructure_with_Ingrid_Burrington%27s_new_book/54290/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Thursday 09-22-16

National Effort Launches to Fight Surveillance State on Local Level

A coalition of seventeen organizations has launched an effort to combat the growing Surveillance State by supporting accountability measures in eleven cities across the United States. 
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of sixteen other civil liberties and technology firms announced the beginning of a national effort to combat the growth of secretive surveillance technology. The coalition’s aim is to “stop the unchecked, secret, and too often discriminatory use of surveillance technologies by local police and to move their approval process out of the darkness and into the light.”
The initiative, dubbed “Community Control Over Police Surveillance,” is the outgrowth of the ACLU’s TakeCTRL campaign, which was originally launched on January 20 with a focus on state legislation. The new effort focuses specifically on action to be taken on a local, city level. The ACLU is joined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the National Network for Arab American Communities, Fight For The Future, The Tenth Amendment Center, and several other organizations.

read the rest at


http://www.activistpost.com/2016/09/national-effort-launches-to-fight-surveillance-state-on-local-level.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ActivistPost+%28Activist+Post%29

Wednesday 09-21-16

U-2 Spy Plane Crashes In Sutter County; 1 Pilot Killed

3:45 p.m UPDATE: Beale Air Force Base officials say a seasoned instructor and another pilot were on board the U-2 plane that crashed near the Sutter Buttes on Tuesday.
The plane was on a training mission when it crashed.
The commander at Beale AFB says it’s been an emotional day at the base. He said they are still in the process of notifying the victim’s families.
“I would match the safety record of a U-2 with any other aircraft the Air Force flies. In fact, we are going to continue flying U-2 missions around the world and around the clock,” said Col. Larry Broadwell, Commander of the 9th Reconnaissance Wing.


http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2016/09/20/military-plane-crashes-in-sutter-county/

 

“We Haven’t Seen This Since The Great Depression” – Gallup CEO Destroys The “Recovery” Lie

I’ve been reading a lot about a “recovering” economy. It was even trumpeted on Page 1 of The New York Times and Financial Times last week.
I don’t think it’s true.
The percentage of Americans who say they are in the middle or upper-middle class has fallen 10 percentage points, from a 61% average between 2000 and 2008 to 51% today.

 
Ten percent of 250 million adults in the U.S. is 25 million people whose economic lives have crashed.
What the media is missing is that these 25 million people are invisible in the widely reported 4.9% official U.S. unemployment rate.
Let’s say someone has a good middle-class job that pays $65,000 a year. That job goes away in a changing, disrupted world, and his new full-time job pays $14 per hour — or about $28,000 per year. That devastated American remains counted as “full-time employed” because he still has full-time work — although with drastically reduced pay and benefits. He has fallen out of the middle class and is invisible in current reporting.
More disastrous is the emotional toll on the person — the sudden loss of household income can cause a crash of self-esteem and dignity, leading to an environment of desperation that we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.

Millions of Americans, even if they themselves are gainfully employed in good jobs, are just one degree away from someone who is experiencing either unemployment, underemployment or falling wages. We know them all.
There are three serious metrics that need to be turned around or we’ll lose the whole middle class.

1. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of the total U.S. adult population that has a full-time job has been hovering around 48% since 2010 — this is the lowest full-time employment level since 1983.
2. The number of publicly listed companies trading on U.S. exchanges has been cut almost in half in the past 20 years — from about 7,300 to 3,700. Because firms can’t grow organically — that is, build more business from new and existing customers — they give up and pay high prices to acquire their competitors, thus drastically shrinking the number of U.S. public companies. This seriously contributes to the massive loss of U.S. middle-class jobs.
3. New business startups are at historical lows. Americans have stopped starting businesses. And the businesses that do start are growing at historically slow rates.

Free enterprise is in free fall — but it is fixable. Small business can save America and restore the middle class.
Gallup finds that small businesses — startups plus “shootups,” those that grow big — are the engine of new economic energy. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 65% of all new jobs are created by small businesses, not large ones.
Here’s the crisis: The deaths of small businesses recently outnumbered the births of small businesses. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the total number of business startups and business closures per year crossed for the first time in 2008. In the nearly 30 years before that, the U.S. consistently averaged a surplus of almost 120,000 more business births than deaths each year. But from 2008 to 2011, an average of 420,000 businesses were born annually, while an average of 450,000 per year were dying.
Bottom line: The two most trusted institutions in the U.S. are the military and small business. Most people know about our military’s importance, but not as many appreciate the role small business plays in creating the majority of new jobs and in national security itself.
America needs small business to boom again. Small businesses are our best hope for badly needed economic growth, great jobs and ultimately accelerated human development. When we get small business to boom, we can save America, restore our middle class and once again lead the world.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/09/20/we-havent-seen-this-since-the-great-depression-gallup-ceo-destroys-the-recovery-lie/