Posts under ‘Government spying’

“How I can be sure you’re not a member of al Qaida?
Now excuse my wand while I slide it up inside ya.”
Hilarious. NOT worksafe.

Adam Curry blogs and podcasts about the new Orwellian “fear mongering campaign” in Britain, with the government running ads encouraging people to report those who, are you ready for this, take too many photos of buildings, behave suspiciously, or have too many cell phones.
You don’t have to know if they are doing any thing [...]

Danger Room on the government wanting to snoop on all Internet traffic.
Of more interest to observers of intelligence activities is the issue of quality vs. quantity and the slow creep towards doom that these efforts foretell. The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence [...]

U.S. at the bottom of global privacy rankings.

The New York Times has the files of the NYPD surveillance of groups planning protests at the 2004 Republican convention. It appears they were “monitoring” virtually every group. WitnessVideo has a searchable version.
The Bloomberg administration allowed this probably illegal spying on antiwar groups to happen, and also made every attempt to block protests in Central [...]

Washington Post
The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence.
The Partnership for Civil Justice has more. They filed the lawsuit which forced the release of the police logs.
“It really is a secret police: This is an effort [...]

Rumors that a shadowy White House task force known only as AFD has been investigating leftist organizations appear to be true. Massive COINTELPRO-like monitoring of antiwar groups has been occurring, with AFD intercepting and reading all email sent and received by organizers, as well as listening to their cell phone calls. Apparently the volume of [...]

New postal law lets Bush read your mail. But Dubya says it has to be an “emergency” -whatever that means… But the biggest emergency this country faces is the freedom-hating Constitution-shredders in the White House.
Ok Democrats, you’ve just taken power in Congress. Do something about this. Now.

Judge halts US eavesdropping program
A US federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to halt the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program of domestic eavesdropping, saying it violates the US Constitution.
Naturally, the Bushies whined that upholding the Constitution is a bad and evil thing to do.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office said Saturday he was ordering the release of dozens of intelligence reports prepared for the state Office of Homeland Security — a step that comes as lawmakers from both parties are denouncing a practice in which state intelligence agents compiled information about political and antiwar protests and rallies.
He only did this [...]

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office in charge of protecting California against terrorism has tracked demonstrations staged by political and antiwar groups, a practice that senior law enforcement officials say is an abuse of civil liberties.
This was done by a “53-person operation,” which certainly implies is a whole lot of spying on legal activities. They say they’ve [...]

Tony Blair keeps trying to out-do Bush in governmental monitoring of citizens. He may have succeeded this time. From BlairWatch.
The Government now wants to track all 12 million children in England and Wales in a new database due to become operational in two years and expected to cost £224 million. The idea of this scheme [...]

That’s what our Big Brother government wants you to think.
Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in [...]

Big Internet and telephone companies are girding to fight an unprecedented call by the Bush administration for them to keep detailed records of customers’ online activities for two years.
Well, I certainly trust them not to use this information to attack political enemies, don’t you? Yeah, right…