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ACLU Study Highlights U.S. Surveillance Society
Welcome to the surveillance society.
That’s what the American Civil Liberties Union concluded Tuesday with a report chronicling government spying and the detention of groups and individuals “for doing little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.”
The report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), surveys news accounts and studies of questionable snooping and arrests in 33 states and the District of Columbia over the past decade.
The survey provides an outline of, and links to, dozens of examples of Cold War-era snooping in the modern age.
“Our review of these practices has found that Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by the police just for deciding to organize, march, protest, espouse unusual viewpoints and engage in normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public,” Michael German, an ACLU attorney and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said in a statement.
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/aclu-surveillance/#ixzz0sMTMEdkU
Categories: Changing Society, Civil Rights, Community, Government & Politics, Law Enforcement, Social Change, Society and Culture Tags: ACLU, Surveillance Society
Every Click You Make, Big Brother Is Watching You
— By Kevin Drum
| Fri Aug. 13, 2010
— Illustration: 1984 movie prop.Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a terrific series of stories called “What They Know.” The general subject was personal privacy—or the lack of it—in the digital world, and the first article in the series explained how websites routinely track your movements on the web and collect a genuinely astonishing amount of personal information about you in the process. The Journal examined 50 sites using a test computer and discovered that these sites collectively installed a total of 3,180 tracking files—an average of 63 tracking files per site:
The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.
….Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.
A full list of the sites they examined is here. The most intrusive were dictionary.com and msn.com, which installed over 200 tracking files each. The least intrusive were craigslist.org and wikipedia.org.
What to do about this? Read more…
Categories: Changing Society, Civil Rights, Community, Government & Politics, Social Change, Society and Culture, Technology Tags: Big Brother, Kevin Drum, personal privacy
What if Verizon Could Censor Your Telephone Conversations: Why Net Neutrality Matters
Paul Rogat Loeb
Imagine if you were talking on the phone and Verizon or ATT decided they didn’t like where your conversation was going. You’d be in the middle of a sentence and suddenly disconnected. Or maybe they didn’t like the person you were talking to, or the subject. You’d be unable to connect or your conversation would become so slow and poor quality you’d give up and call someone else. Or maybe you lived in an area of the country where they didn’t want to give you telephone service. So you’d be unable to call at all. The telecom companies would justify all this by explaining that the fiber optic lines or wireless frequencies were simply their private property. They had a right, they’d say, to do whatever they wanted with them.
They can’t do this because telephone service has long been held to common access standards. The Internet has similarly developed and flourished as a commons open to everyone, through what we’ve come to call Net Neutrality. But Bush’s FCC ruled that all our new communications technologies were in a different category, effectively the property of their physical carriers. In the wake of this decision Verizon refused to distribute a text message alert from NARAL Pro Choice America and AT&T muted singer Eddie Vedder’s criticism of President Bush during a live Pearl Jam webcast. The telecom companies are also pushing to be able to Read more…
Categories: Government & Politics Tags: ATT, Paul Rogat Loeb, Verizon
The L.A. Free Press Presents The Two Sides Of The “Libertarian” Cato Institute
By Art Kunkin
Below we reprint two documents. The first is a statement by the Cato Institute opposing government violations of individual freedom, entitled “How Big Brother Began“. The second is by critics of the Cato Institute revealing that the Cato Institute opposition to government is only a public relations cover-up of abuse of the public by powerful corporate funders in the tobacco industry, fossil fuel firms, investment bankers, media owners and others.
Links to downloadable documents made available by the critics show that the Cato Institute, funded by tobacco companies, has hired lawyers and public relation firm to denounce accurate statistics about smoking related deaths. Other documents reveal that media giants have used Cato to lobby Congress for corporate welfare. Women’s organizations and taxpayer groups have opposed Cato’s distortion of their campaigns for social justice.
We present our readership with both sides so you can judge for yourself the damage that can be done to our society by clever propagandists.
Categories: Changing Society, Civil Rights, Community, Government & Politics, Social Change, Society and Culture Tags: Art Kunkin, CATO Institute, L.A. Free Press, Los Angeles Free Press
How Big Brother Began
by Solveig Singleton
(Director of information studies at the Cato Institute)
This article appeared on cato.org on November 25, 1997.
The nightmare world of constant video surveillance described by George Orwell in 1984 is one of the most compelling images of the 20th century. Big Brother is an icon of totalitarianism more familiar than real-world dictators. But policymakers who have forgotten Orwell’s lessons are even now creating government databases containing information about private citizens.
Under the welfare reform law passed in 1996, employers must report identifying information about all new employees for inclusion in a massive federal database with a name that’s pure Newspeak: the National Directory of New Hires. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 mandated a new federal medical records database, and police insist on the right to view that information without a warrant.
Our privacy is in danger because we have missed Orwell’s point — “Big Brother” is not Read more…
Categories: Changing Society, Civil Rights, Community, Government & Politics, Social Change, Society and Culture Tags: Big Brother, CATO Institute, Solveig Singleton
