Don't look to the Dems to save us

 

Fascists are determined

 

RFKJ's Big Brother vision for America

 

And shortly thereafter, perhaps during Trump's third term, they will be implants.

Both of which will make some corporation outrageously wealthy.  Apple?  TrumpKennedy Implants?

MAGA regret

Many of Trump’s own MAGA supporters are outraged about the recent report in the NYT about his plans to develop a massive database of private data on Americans. The Trump admin is using the tech firm Palantir, which was co-founded by Musk’s former mentor Peter Thiel. WH spokesman Taylor Rogers to Newsweek: "President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase govt efficiency and save hard-earned taxpayer dollars."

Jason Bassler, co-founder of The Free Thought Project: “This Palantir database isn't like the others. It will combine: Tax filings, Student debt, Social Security, Bank accounts, Medical claims, Immigration status. No previous database system has ever centralized this much personal info across various federal agencies."

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), a staunch Trump supporter, doesn’t like it: “Tolkien was a genius. Lord of the Rings conveys inevitable truths. We cannot allow one ring to rule them all to be built - or, having been built, it must be defeated and destroyed. No digital ID. No CBDC. No surveillance state.”

  Meidas Touch

Bad for the citizenry, but actually, it's the only thing I've read so far that DOGE is doing that is arguably efficient.

Surveillance

 Edward Snowden sacrificed his home for nothing.

You don't really think it will be limited to tracking immigrants, do you?

Trump 2.0 - Surveillance state

Brave New World

Ring is effectively building the largest corporate-owned, civilian-installed surveillance network that the US has ever seen.

[...]

In a 2020 letter to management, Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, said Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. We should take his claim seriously.

Ring video doorbells, Amazon’s signature home security product, pose a serious threat to a free and democratic society. Not only is Ring’s surveillance network spreading rapidly, it is extending the reach of law enforcement into private property and expanding the surveillance of everyday life. What’s more, once Ring users agree to release video content to law enforcement, there is no way to revoke access and few limitations on how that content can be used, stored, and with whom it can be shared. Amazon is cagey about how many Ring cameras are active at any one point in time, but estimates drawn from Amazon’s sales data place yearly sales in the hundreds of millions. The always-on video surveillance network extends even further when you consider the millions of users on Ring’s affiliated crime reporting app, Neighbors, which allows people to upload content from Ring and non-Ring devices.

[...]

[S]ince Amazon bought Ring in 2018, it has brokered more than 1,800 partnerships with local law enforcement agencies, who can request recorded video content from Ring users without a warrant. That is, in as little as three years, Ring connected around one in 10 police departments across the US with the ability to access recorded content from millions of privately owned home security cameras.

[...]

Ring’s cloud-based infrastructure (supported by Amazon Web Services) makes it convenient for law enforcement agencies to place mass requests for access to recordings without a warrant. Because Ring cameras are owned by civilians, law enforcement are given a backdoor entry into private video recordings of people in residential and public space that would otherwise be protected under the fourth amendment. By partnering with Amazon, law enforcement circumvents these constitutional and statutory protections, as noted by the attorney Yesenia Flores.

[...]

Although Ring doesn’t currently use facial recognition in its cameras, Amazon has sold this technology to police in the past. Following pressure from AI researchers and civil rights groups, Amazon placed a one-year pause on police use of its controversial facial recognition technology, but this moratorium will expire in June.

  Guardian

Jeff Bezos is Big Brother.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

If he gets 4 more years, we will not have a democracy

To be clear, many of the commission’s recommendations are beyond the ability of any president to implement alone. Congress could refuse to go along, and local governments could use the courts to protect their autonomy. And of course, a judge has halted the commission’s work for now. But the last four years have shown that our institutions and norms are far weaker than many realized. Even with dedicated resistance from inside institutions, legal challenges have been able to slow, but not prevent, the current administration’s cruelty.

[...]

[T]he recommendations calling for the destruction of privacy protections are perhaps the most alarming. The commission recommends providing America’s roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, from small town departments to the New York Police Department, with more money for facial recognition technologies. Because federal agencies can set the reporting requirements and selection criteria for funding to local law enforcement, they often require data sharing. In this case, that could result in data collected at the local level being entered into a national database.

[...]

“One hopes that recommendations this hostile to privacy and police accountability would not find traction outside the confines of this toxic Commission,” Prof. Christy Lopez of Georgetown Law, a former Justice Department Civil Rights Division attorney who investigated police departments, told me. “But the fact that this administration would even put forward a set of recommendations so antithetical to democratic principles, all in an effort to maintain a policing status quo that the vast majority of Americans agree must be changed, is reprehensible.”

  NYT

And it will automatically have the support of every - or nearly every - Republican Congress person. All of whom would have thrown a fit had it come from a Democratic administration. It will also have the support of 35% of the electorate - Trump supporters, who think it won't be used against THEM.

According to Tracey Meares, a professor at Yale Law School, if the recommendations became law, the consequences should worry all of us. With the support of a sympathetic judge, law enforcement would face a lowered barrier to searching the contents of your phone, or adding photos of you and your friends to a nationwide facial recognition database. If the officer used excessive force in the process of obtaining that phone and claimed qualified immunity as a defense, the federal government would be obligated to regularly affirm their support for that officer’s defense regardless of the evidence.

It’s not a full-fledged surveillance state. But it’s not far off.

Reassigned, not fired

The Department of Homeland Security has reassigned its top intelligence official, according to media outlets, following news that his office compiled intelligence reports on journalists and protesters in Portland, Ore.

Brian Murphy, who had been the acting undersecretary for the department's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, was removed from that position, according to The Washington Post, which was first to report the news.

[...]

Murphy has reportedly been moved to an administrative support role within the department's management directorate.

  NPR

And what does that do?

The call for Murphy's removal was made on Friday by the acting secretary of homeland security, Chad Wolf, who, following the Post's revelations, instructed the office to stop collecting information on the press and ordered an investigation into its proceedings.

Why am I skeptical of Wolf's actions and intentions?

Another intelligence report, according to the newspaper, showed that the DHS had tracked and documented exchanges among protesters found on the Telegram messaging app.

Murphy had previously denied that his office had access to protesters' devices and messages, according to the Post.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff issued a statement Saturday saying the committee had been conducting an investigation into Murphy and the Office of Intelligence and Analysis for more than two weeks before the reassignment.

"In light of recent public reports, we are concerned that Murphy may have provided incomplete and potentially misleading information to Committee staff during our recent oversight engagement, and that the Department of Homeland Security and I&A are now delaying or withholding underlying intelligence products, legal memoranda, and other records requested by the Committee that could shed light on these actions," Schiff said.

He added that his committee would be "expanding" its oversight in the coming days.

Dems are almost as pro-surveillance as Republicans

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Finishing off America

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And others!

Bat.  Shit.

"Many Republicans" are two in Trump language:  Mike Lee and Rand Paul.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Obama spying Trump doesn't care about - Part 2

Part 1

What happens when no one responsible is held accountable?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of Devin Nunes

Recently, several members and staffers on the House Intelligence Committee, which [was] investigating Russia’s role in the Presidential election, visited the National Security Agency, in Fort Meade, Maryland. Inside the enormous black glass headquarters of America’s largest spy agency, the congressmen and their aides were shown a binder of two to three dozen pages of highly classified intercepts, mostly transcripts of conversations between foreign government officials that took place during the Presidential transition.

[...]

What the intercepts all had in common is that the people being spied on made references to Donald Trump or to Trump officials. That wasn’t even clear, though, from reading the transcripts. The names of any Americans were concealed, or “masked,” the intelligence community’s term for redacting references to Americans who are not the legal targets of surveillance when such intelligence reports are distributed to policy makers.

The binder of secret documents is at the center of the bizarre scandal created by what may be the most reckless lie President Trump has ever told.

  New Yorker

And his middle name is reckless.

On March 4th, he tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” The White House made several efforts to justify Trump’s claim, including using Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as a conduit for the documents, which allegedly offered some substantiation. A former Nunes staffer now working for the White House dug up the transcripts and shared them with Nunes. As Bloomberg View reported, earlier this month, Susan Rice, Obama’s national-security adviser, had used a process that allowed her to request that the masked names be revealed to her. Rice had to log her unmasking requests on a White House computer, which is how Trump’s aides knew about them. Nunes and the White House presented this as a major scandal.

It is now clear that the scandal was not Rice’s normal review of the intelligence reports but the coördinated effort between the Trump Administration and Nunes to sift through classified information and computer logs that recorded Rice’s unmasking requests, and then leak a highly misleading characterization of those documents, all in an apparent effort to turn Rice, a longtime target of Republicans, into the face of alleged spying against Trump.

[...]

I spoke to two intelligence sources, one who read the entire binder of intercepts and one who was briefed on their contents. “There’s absolutely nothing there,” one source said. The Trump names remain masked in the documents, and Rice would not have been able to know in all cases that she was asking the N.S.A. to unmask the names of Trump officials.

Nunes is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee because, in talking about the documents, he may have leaked classified information. But this is like getting Al Capone for tax evasion. The bigger scandal is the coördinated effort to use the American intelligence services to manufacture an excuse for Trump’s original tweet.

[...]

They put out an all-points bulletin”—a call to sift through intelligence reports—“and said, ‘We need to find something that justifies the President’s crazy tweet about surveillance at Trump Tower.’ And I’m telling you there is no way you get that from those transcripts, which are about as plain vanilla as can be.”

[...]

The law governing the N.S.A.’s collection of the content of communications of foreign targets is up for renewal this summer. Known as Section 702, part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it is perhaps the most important intelligence tool that America’s spy agencies have to gather information about potential terrorist attacks and about the intentions of regimes around the world.

Or, alternately, from the point of view of an American citizen who expects privacy, a tool for the government - advertently or inadvertently - to collect information on innocent Americans.

“Section 702 of FISA allows warrantless searches on Americans. That’s unconstitutional & must be changed,” Representative Ted Lieu, the Democrat from California, tweeted last month, during the controversy.

[...]

Some American intelligence officials are now concerned that Trump and Nunes’s wild claims about intercepts and Rice have made Section 702 look like a rogue program that can be easily abused for political purposes. The intelligence source said, “In defense of the President, Devin Nunes and some other partisans have created a huge political problem by casting doubt, in the service of Donald Trump, on these intercepts.”

[...]

“They manufactured a scandal to distract from a serious investigation,” Eric Swalwell, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, who would not comment on the N.S.A. documents, said. “And the collateral damage is the public confidence in our intelligence community when we need to count on them now more than ever. Considering the threats we are facing right now from North Korea and ISIS, it’s a pretty dangerous time to undermine the I.C.’s credibility to make a five-yard sack in the Russia investigation.”

[...]

The fake scandal created by Trump and Nunes is not over yet. The first name on the Republican list [of requested witnesses for the Intel Committee's impeachment hearings was] Susan Rice.

Well, they didn't get her.  They'll just have to wait until the Senate impeachment trial.

The Obama spying Trump doesn't care about

The movie referred to in this interview - "The Report" - is currently (December 2019) available on Amazon Prime.

UPDATE:  Part 2

Border "security"

August 25 2019, 10:00 a.m. ON THE SOUTHWESTERN END of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s reservation, roughly 1 mile from a barbed-wire barricade marking Arizona’s border with the Mexican state of Sonora, Ofelia Rivas leads me to the base of a hill overlooking her home. A U.S. Border Patrol truck is parked roughly 200 yards upslope. A small black mast mounted with cameras and sensors is positioned on a trailer hitched to the truck. For Rivas, the Border Patrol’s monitoring of the reservation has been a grim aspect of everyday life. And that surveillance is about to become far more intrusive.

[...]

U.S. Customs and Border Protection will soon construct a 160-foot surveillance tower capable of continuously monitoring every person and vehicle within a radius of up to 7.5 miles. The tower will be outfitted with high-definition cameras with night vision, thermal sensors, and ground-sweeping radar, all of which will feed real-time data to Border Patrol agents at a central operating station in Ajo, Arizona. The system will store an archive with the ability to rewind and track individuals’ movements across time — an ability known as “wide-area persistent surveillance.”

[...]

CBP plans 10 of these towers across the Tohono O’odham reservation, which spans an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Two will be located near residential areas, including Rivas’s neighborhood, which is home to about 50 people.

[...]

“Now we won’t be able to go anywhere near here without the big U.S.-Israeli eyes monitoring us, watching our every move,” [Rivas] says.

[...]

The towers on Tohono O’odham land are part of a surge in wide-area persistent surveillance systems across the borderlands. Elbit Systems of America has already built 55 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona, which company executives say cover 200 linear miles. According to information provided by a CBP spokesperson, the agency has also deployed 368 smaller surveillance towers, known as RVSS towers, in areas ranging from south of San Diego to the Rio Grande Valley, as well as along parts of the U.S.-Canadian border.

  The Intercept

In the land of the free.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deconstructing America: Pentagon's mass surveillance in the open

They're jealous of our freedoms.

Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.

Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

The balloons are carrying high tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather. The tests, which have not previously been reported, received an FCC license to operate from mid-July until September, following similar flights licensed last year.

[...]

Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

[...]

“We do not think that American cities should be subject to wide area surveillance in which every vehicle could be tracked wherever they go,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Even in tests, they’re still collecting a lot of data on Americans: who’s driving to the union house, the church, the mosque, the Alzheimer’s clinic,” he said. “We should not go down the road of allowing this to be used in the United States and it’s disturbing to hear that these tests are being carried out, by the military no less.”

  Guardian

The were doing this in Afghanistan, remember? So, why the need to "test" them domestically? New and better balloons? Or to get it through the courts?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Corporate-Government tech alliance

Apple is slated to unveil later this year a new portal that law enforcement agencies can use to submit and track requests for user data related to investigations.

[...]

In recent years, federal investigators and law enforcement agencies have begun to ramp up their information requests.

[...]

The company can provide some data to law enforcement that users store on its iCloud service, however, it doesn't have as easy access to its encrypted phones. Apple has, in the past, pushed back against law enforcement authorities who have tried to get it to provide a way into its phones.

The company has staked a firm position that introducing backdoors for law enforcement would create vulnerabilities that could be exploited by nefarious actors.

  The Hill

And they'll do it anyway now apparently. Perhaps because there isn't a Snowden-type scandal and that one has pretty much died out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

While you were distracted with the circus

Haven't we already settled that?

Resistance is futile.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

About that unsecured phone Trump uses....

A federal study found signs that surveillance devices for intercepting cellphone calls and texts were operating near the White House and other sensitive locations in the Washington area last year.

[...]

"This admission from DHS bolsters my concern about stingrays and other spying devices being used to spy on Americans’ phones," Wyden said in a statement on Thursday. "Given the reports of rogue spying devices being identified near the White House and other government facilities, I fear that foreign intelligence services could target the president and other senior officials."

  WaPo

Show of hands: who thought that wasn't happening?

And, by the way...

IMSI catchers are widely used by local, state and federal police, as well as foreign intelligence agencies.

And anybody who wants to invest in one. Why are we pretending only government connected people could be doing this?

ESD America, a defense and law enforcement technology contractor based in Las Vegas, has reported detecting IMSI catchers throughout the Washington area while conducting testing for private clients.

Thank you.

In the tests that ESD conducted for private clients, which took place over the past three years, the company said it had detected signs of IMSI catchers near the White House, the FBI headquarters, the Senate, the Pentagon, the Russian Embassy and along the collection of other foreign embassies in an area known as Embassy Row in Northwest Washington.

Pretty much where you'd place a bet they'd be.

DHS was aware of reports that a global cellular network messaging system, called SS7, was being used to spy on Americans through their cellphones. Such surveillance, which can intercept calls and locate cellphones from anywhere in the world, is sometimes used in conjunction with IMSI catchers.

[...]

When they are in range, IMSI catchers also can deliver malicious software to targeted devices for the purpose of stealing information stored on them or conducting longer-term monitoring of communications.

[...]

The surveillance devices are hard to counteract, although encrypted calling and messaging apps — such as Signal, WhatsApp or Apple's FaceTime — provide protection against IMSI catchers.

Too inconvenient, right Donald?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

P.S. It really makes me wonder who else is blackmailing Trump on any number of issues because they have his phone calls. I don't imagine we'll be told, even if that information is known.