LinkBlog: surveillance

In Philadelphia, the FBI has instructed tattoo shops to rat out their customers if they demand privacy, insist on paying with cash, engage in “suspicious behavior,” make “anti-US” comments, or request tattoos that are “extremist symbols.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Earlier this week on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” former National Security Agency (NSA) analyst Russell Tice revealed that the agency had “monitored all communications” of Americans — specifically targeting journalists. To discuss this development, Olbermann yesterday hosted Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen, who famously angered the Bush administration by revealing the government’s domestic wiretapping program and its secret snooping on the financial records of thousands of Americans allegedly linked to terrorists. Since that time, the Bush Justice Department had been trying to identify Risen’s sources for his book on the nation’s spy agencies, called State of War. In April, the New York Times reported that former government officials had been called before a grand jury and confronted with phone records documenting their calls with Risen. Neither Risen nor the New York Times had received a subpoena for those records.

We are the CCTV capital of the world and more data is being held on us than ever before, with our phones, our computers, our bankcards and even our cars busily giving away information about where we go and what we do.

When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed. Faulk told ABC that certain calls were even passed around among the intercept operators like office jokes. "I was told, 'Hey, check this out, there's some good phone sex.' ... It was there, stored the way you'd look at songs on your iPod."

And there you have it. Border guards can seize data storage devices of any kind, from laptops to handwritten notes, without any grounds. They are required to give seized items back to their owners in a reasonable time, but they get to decide what's reasonable. They can make copies of your data and share it with other government agencies, but if it turns out that you're not a terrorist they are supposed to destroy their copies of your data. How would you ever know whether or not they had done so? And what would prevent them from secretly adding your data to the Main Core database? Even more disturbingly, perhaps, this is the result of policies promulgated in secrecy, implemented without any publicity, and only now coming to light. Michael Chertoff says doing it any other way would be chilling and dangerous. And not a voice is raised in opposition -- at least not in the mainstream press.

Max Obuszewski is a seasoned, nonviolent peace activist in Maryland. But to the Maryland State Police, he is suspected of committing the "primary crime" of "terrorism -- anti-war protestors" and the "secondary crime" of "terrorism -- anti-govern." That is how the Maryland State Police designated him in internal documents that the ACLU of Maryland obtained through a lawsuit and released on July 17. The documents also show that the Maryland State Police entered his name into a database dealing with "high intensity drug activity." These documents reveal an elaborate undercover operation against peace groups and anti-capital-punishment groups.

This past Sunday night I was subjected to another stark reminder of how far the UK has descended into a total police state when I was stopped on the street by "Police Community Support Officers" for putting my hand in my pocket.

Police say the chopper's sweeps of landmarks and other potential targets are invaluable in helping guard against another terrorist attack, providing a see-but-avoid-being-seen advantage against bad guys. "It looks like just another helicopter in the sky," said Assistant Police Chief Charles Kammerdener, who oversees the department's aviation unit. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said that no other U.S. law enforcement agency "has anything that comes close" to the surveillance chopper, which was designed by engineers at Bell Helicopter and computer technicians based on NYPD specifications.

Lest we forget that from this same wellspring of tyranny emerged Operation TIPS, which was supposedly nixed by Congress, a DOJ, FBI, DHS and FEMA coordinated program that would have recruited one in twenty-four Americans as domestic informants, a higher percentage than was used by the Stasi in East Germany.

The government plans to begin collecting DNA samples from anyone arrested by a federal law enforcement agency — a move intended to prevent violent crime but which also is raising concerns about the privacy of innocent people.

Although Pasdar has refused to name the carrier, and those working for the carrier who have knowledge of the Quantico Circuit's user aren't saying what they know, Wired's Threat Level blog connected the pieces and points us to the 2006 wiretapping lawsuit against the telcos, which alleges that Verizon "has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base." The lawsuit also asserts that "the transmission line provided the Quantico recipient direct access to all content and all information concerning the origin and termination of telephone calls placed on the Verizon Wireless network as well as the actual content of calls." Providing any third party with unfettered network access to such a broad spectrum of sensitive consumer data would seem to constitute a very clear violation of the Communications Act, which broadly forbids disclosure of such information.

From the American Protective League to InfraGard, it has been a long, tortuous road, one which ceaselessly destroyed liberty and individual rights. The ultimate destination has never changed: the installation of an unassailable, enormously privileged ruling elite -- which, no matter the cost in liberty or blood, will get what it wants. You need not despair, and you need not be paralyzed by depression. To change our direction, we must understand fully and completely how we arrived here, and we must appreciate just how dire our predicament is. And to change it, we need a great deal of courage.

Either Mr. McConnell is an idiot or an accomplished liar. Suffice it to say idiots are not appointed to oversee the CIA, NSA, DIA, FBI, NRO, etc. ad nauseam, a virtual alphabet soup of “intelligence” agencies.

In his journal Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the "sheepish submissiveness" with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933. Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances "saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one's telephone would be tapped, one's letters opened, and one's desk might be broken into." But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here? In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the "cowardly treachery" of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power.

The administration's demand that Congress shield the telecommunications industry from lawsuits for aiding in the systematic warrantless wiretapping of Americans has far less to do with protecting national security than its own exposed flanks. Make no mistake, telecom immunity is about keeping a flagrantly illegal program from public scrutiny and maintaining the illusion that the president ordered a small, precision surveillance program, when the opposite is true.

Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office -- to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access -- via a cable splitting device. "My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room," said Klein. "And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet."

She admits that the efforts of the 9/11 Truth Movement in holding the government accountable, in part, attracted her to the cause. That a group of people from “different strains of outrage” can be moved enough to mobilise themselves at a grassroots level interest her even more. “People of conscience see the government as having taken a wrong turn and they have begun mobilising for a different path. Elected officials have lost their principles and the American people need to reclaim the government for themselves,” she says. According to McKinney, this reality did not hit home in the aftermath of 9/11 but only in the months and now years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of New Orleans. She describes the catastrophe as a “revelation for the world” and the government’s response to it as “an insult to all intelligent American people.” “It showed the US government to be a hugely successful propagandist and a huge liar,” she says, her southern drawl suddenly reaching crescendo. “Katrina unveiled shocking statistics. Black people have known them for years but suddenly those figures meant something to white people. The pauperisation of this country at the expense of a war has moved people of conscience. It feels the same as when the American people woke up to what was happening in Vietnam.”

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer, the indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a stately room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the oldest district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a city attorney whose official title is "assistant corporation counsel." After what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively politely whether I was going to except the city's monetary offer of $8,500 -- which I had rejected the previous week-- to settle my lawsuit for false arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn't (as I had from the moment the city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of cordiality fled the room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me as a "criminal" -- declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as a "perp." Soon, he launched into a bout of remarkable bluster, threatening lengthy depositions to waste my time and monetary penalties associated with court costs that would swallow my savings. Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main courtroom, where the city's attorney hauled out a threatening prop to bolster his act -- an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with reams of "Nick Turse" documents, including copies of some of my disreputable Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious webpages from the American Empire Project -- the obviously criminal series that will be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

he FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act. The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

This is Bush America. You can voluntarily give up your civil liberties or voluntarily choose to lose your job. Those are your “choices.” Is this is what they mean when they say “get government off our backs?” Keep in mind that Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 12 is NOT A LAW. Congress and the Supreme Court have had no say in it or in its implementation (covered under FIPS 201 (PDF)). It is a declaration made by Bush, not a law legislated by Congress. Let me ask you this: When the President of a nation can make a unilateral declaration that invalidates laws passed by Congress (e.g. the Privacy Act of 1974), laws passed by the States, and the Constitution itself, what do you have: a.) a democracy, b.) a republic, c.) a dictatorship. The answer is “c.” When laws and the Constitution are subservient to the directives of a single individual, it is a dictatorship. I am sorry. But I cannot interpret this in any other way. Call it a nascent dictatorship if you prefer. But we now have a system where a directive by a single individual takes precedence over law (Federal and State) and Constitution. THAT is about as un-American as you can get.

The Bush administration wants the power to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that are slapped with privacy suits for cooperating with the White House's controversial warrantless eavesdropping program. The authority would effectively shut down dozens of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies accused of helping set up the program.

Two senior Justice Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in a teleconference with reporters, reiterated the administration's position that it was invoking the so-called "state secrets privilege" in arguing that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must dismiss the cases because they threaten to expose information authorities say is essential to the nation's security.

I wish more people in this country would really revere the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, the Sixth Amendment and the Eighth Amendment. But Cheney and Bush themselves are intolerant of the freedoms that are enshrined in our Bill of Rights. In my book, “You Have No Rights,” I tell the story of a guy named Steve Howards who was walking through Beaver Creek, Colo., an open-air mall there. Of all people, Dick Cheney is there, shaking hands. And Steve Howards goes up to the vice president, about three feet away, and says, “Mr. Vice President, I think your policy in Iraq is reprehensible.” ... And then he walked away. But the Secret Service approached him 10 minutes later and said, “Did you assault the vice president of the United States?” Steve Howards said, “No, I was just expressing my First Amendment rights.” And they responded, “No, you assaulted the vice president of the United States. You’re under arrest.”

The report makes reference to London's surveillance network, known as the "Ring of Steel," which is said to have aided in the capture of suspects, including those accused of a pair of attempted car bombings in June. What it does not report however is that in addition to London being the most surveilled city in the world with 4 million cameras, it also has an extremely high crime rate. A recent report highlighted that despite one 650-yard section of a major London road being surveilled by over 100 cameras, it is also one of the most crime rid

It's hard to overstate the importance of Former Deputy AG James Comey's incredible testimony earlier this week. At a press conference today with outgoing British PM Tony Blair, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell asked President Bush about Comey's startling allegations. Needless to say, he refuses to answer the question and instead opts to remind us how much the Evil Scary Islamofascists want to kill us, and how Very Important this program is in order to "protect" us.

Hidden mini-cameras and microphones that can eavesdrop on conversations in the street are the next step in the march towards a "Big Brother" society, MPs were warned yesterday. Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, said a debate had begun about whether listening devices should be set up alongside Britain's 4.5 million CCTV cameras.

If you still believe in the notion of man-made global warming, then you should be very concerned about the fact that the leading proponents of the theory are all giant hypocrites espousing outlandish and radical measures to combat climate change while fearmongering about doomsday scenarios that will befall us unless we all drastically reduce our carbon footprints, while their own carbon footprints dwarf the average person's by a hundred times or more. The result of this will be that the mantra of man-made global warming will begin to look increasingly inane and it will eventually lose steam. People with an ounce of common sense will see through the fact that a natural cycle of warming that occurs every few hundred years does not mean the end of the world, and that hysteria is deliberately being whipped up on behalf of governments in order to grease the skids for draconian taxation and control measures that won't even do anything to combat man-made global warming even if it was real, but will do everything to aid the construction of the prison planet that the elite have planned all along. Meanwhile, real environmental issues like genetically modified garbage poisoning our very food supply, the disappearance of huge swathes of the bee populations across the world, deforestation and toxic waste dumping, all get buried while global warming monopolizes the attention of the phony environmental movement.

Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews. From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists.

Another Billionaire, Marco Ceglie, told the Times, “It was a running joke that some of the new faces were 25- to 32-year-old males asking, ‘First name, last name?’ …. Some people didn’t care; it bothered me and a couple of other leaders, but we didn’t want to make a big stink because we didn’t want to look paranoid."

In perhaps the most damning admission made by the newspaper, it fell to the Times public editor last August to admit that the editors had suppressed a story about the Bush administration’s illegal NSA electronic spying program for more than a year, publishing it only in December 2005, and had then lied about it, failing to reveal that it had quashed these revelations on the eve of the November 2004 election.

But Gonzales is not just a self-serving political hack. He’s also an ideological hack. Like Cheney, he’s done everything within his power, and a lot of things outside it, to further the agenda of the imperial Presidency, whether that included Bush’s right to violate the “quaint” Geneva Conventions, or to engage in “extraordinary renditions,” or to illegally wiretap U.S. citizens.

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Tuesday that evidence will remain sealed in the class-action lawsuit accusing AT&T of collaborating with the government to illegally spy on Americans’ communications.

One group, aside from dark-skinned people and Muslims, targeted by the internal checkpoints, are students and other young people. Persons under 18 cannot cross a U.S. border alone, unless they are with a guardian and have notarized letters from a parent, as well as a passport issued in their own name. Persons between 18 and 21 may be questioned about their intention to engage in behavior (sex or drinking or marijuana use) strongly penalized in the U.S., but either decriminalized or lightly punished in Canada. Up until three years ago, unaccompanied persons over 16 were seldom checked--and longer ago, even younger persons could travel alone or with a non-parental adult. Student groups, including bus tour groups, now report very close scrutiny from the U.S. Exit police. Some bus companies now refuse to take groups of students under 21 across U.S. borders because of hassles they face. Gone are the days when an 18 or over driver could skit across from Burlington to Montreal with a car-full of late-teens hoping to taste the more liberal morals up north.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday he will turn over secret documents detailing the government's domestic spying program, ending a two-week standoff with the Senate Judiciary Committee over surveillance targeting terror suspects.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It's employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can't "isolate the particular person or IP address" because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.) That kind of full-pipe surveillance can record all Internet traffic, including Web browsing--or, optionally, only certain subsets such as all e-mail messages flowing through the network. Interception typically takes place inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch.

Friday, MBTA Transit Police arrested a 27-year-old man accused of robbing a passenger at gunpoint at the Back Bay station. Such cases have often gone unsolved, officials said, and the arrest would have been far less likely without digital images from a surveillance camera at the station. So far, about a dozen crimes have been solved with help from the cameras, and T police expect many more cases , including those from an investigation into a large ring of robbers.

Maine lawmakers passed a resolution urging repeal of the Real ID Act, which would create a national digital identification system by 2008. The lawmakers said it would cost Maine about $185 million, fail to boost security and put people at greater risk of identity theft.

National Security Letters have their origin in the 1970s as exceptions to laws that bar companies from divulging their customers' data. After 9/11 and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, their use greatly expanded. These letters — which government agencies can use to demand or request information about people's phone, credit and banking records — have a number of troubling features. Chief among them are that they can be issued without judicial review and that their recipients are subject to a gag order.

Under the claim that terrorism is a ubiquitous threat, the military has embroidered an unwarranted and dangerously expansive view of its own authority. The New York Times found that administrative subpoenas known as national security letters, which are issued internally with no court review, have been used since 9/11 to collect financial information in up to 500 investigations. Which means that thousands of such letters have probably been issued for personal banking and credit data. The military says all this is okay because the letters it issues are noncompulsory. You know, all those banks volunteered their customers' private information.

So what kind of "threats" does the military consider worthy of investigating? How about the Quakers or the Rhode Island Community Coalition for Peace? A new report by the American Civil Liberties Union documents nearly 200 incidents where the Pentagon accumulated and maintained in its "threat" database the activities of peace groups in the United States. The Defense Department has said it was a mistake to keep tabs on the plans of nonviolent protesters. Still, the ACLU had to sue to compel the department to disclose the extent of what it had done.

THE intelligence agencies are monitoring every Muslim who travels from Britain to Mecca on pilgrimage in a wider effort to piece together intelligence on suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist activity.

Especially after passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 – which loosened what privacy watchdogs say were already weak financial privacy laws – banks likely cannot be held liable for disclosing records to Defense Department or intelligence officials, even when those officials do not have a warrant.

"As a result of these orders, any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," Gonzales wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. "Accordingly, under these circumstances, the President has determined not to reauthorize the Terrorist Surveillance Program when the current authorization expires," the attorney general wrote.

But Krayeske and some others tell a different story. Krayeske says he was taking pictures of other dignitaries when he rode over to catch a shot of the governor. He was able to snap a picture of her smiling before he was grabbed by police. Witnesses said Krayeske's behavior was not out of the ordinary, and they confirmed that he was taking pictures when he was surrounded by police. According to his attorney, Norm Pattis, Krayeske was surprised by their approach but did not struggle. He was put in handcuffs immediately, Pattis said.

While the HR 1 bill contains some welcome provisions, including a redress of grievance process for passengers unfairly delayed or refused boarding for flights and a re-commitment to the Geneva conventions, it's largely a nightmare for opponents of big government in that it vastly increases funding and scope for Homeland Security, FEMA and further federalizes law enforcement.

The FBI, without a court order, can send a letter to any Internet provider ordering it to maintain records for an investigation, said Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that promotes free speech and privacy on the Web. "There's been no showing that mass surveillance of all Internet users, mandated by the government, is necessary for law enforcement," Bankston said. "If this passes, there would be a chilling effect on free speech if everyone knew that everything they did on the Internet could be tracked back to them."

The following letter, acquired by RAW STORY, was delivered to President Bush Monday, in response to an article published in the NY Daily News which revealed that Bush had written into a "signing statement" that the President could open Americans' mail.

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned. The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

The EFF, the ACLU of Ohio, and the Center for Democracy and Technology all filed a brief with the appeals court siding with Warshak. They point out that Americans need strong privacy protection for email since it is now used "every day for practically every type of personal business."

Under the heading, "Request for commission investigation," Cowie questioned whether Verizon Communications Inc., the state-regulated provider of local phone service in Maine, was cooperating with the National Security Agency in warrantless domestic wiretapping and the agency's data-mining program.

From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale "chipping" of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory. Today we might strongly hold such beliefs, but sensibilities can, and probably will, change. How this remarkable attitudinal transformation is likely to occur is clear to anyone who has paid attention to privacy issues over the past quarter-century. There will be no 3 a.m. knock on the door by storm troopers come to force implants into our bodies. The process will be more subtle and cumulative, couched in the unassailable language of progress and social betterment, and mimicking many of the processes that have contributed to the expansion of closed-circuit television cameras and the corporate market in personal data.

We regularly highlight Google's damaging role in aiding the march towards a big brother society, but the admission that Google were planning on teaming up with the U.S. government to use microphones in the computers of an estimated 150 million-plus Internet active Americans to spy on their lifestyle choices and build psychological profiles which will be used for surveillance and minority report style invasive advertising and data mining, astounded even us.

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Without their knowledge, millions of Americans and foreigners crossing U.S. borders in the past four years have been assigned scores generated by U.S. government computers rating the risk that the travelers are terrorists or criminals. The travelers are not allowed to see or directly challenge these risk assessments, which the government intends to keep on file for 40 years.

The actions of this veterans organization have not gone unnoticed at the Pentagon. A previously secret intelligence report calls the group a "threat to military installations." The report lists the group's upcoming events and warns that while it's a "peaceful organization," "there is potential that future protests could become violent." "As to attacking any base or anything else, that is ridiculous," says Veterans for Peace group member Ron Dexter. "We support the troops one hundred percent."

Since when were long established civil liberties and the citizen's right to privacy replaced with this "new freedom", this "freedom lite" shall we call it, this guilty until proven innocent mantra?

Demonstrates how phone tapping just like so many other extensive measures the Bush Administration implements, ostensibly in the "war on terror", seem to be far better suited to controlling and manipulating law-abiding citizenry than to aprehending potential terrorists - especially if those terrorists are at all technically and intellectually savvy.

Furthermore, film of the Bin Laden speech, reported by the dominant media as new footage, was previously broadcast in the UK docudramaThe Road to Guantanamo, which was first seen on British television nearly seven months ago in March.

The Bush administration can continue its warrantless surveillance program while it appeals a judge's ruling that the program is unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

If the final nail in America's descent into fascism was the Military Commissions Act then the telltale sign across the Atlantic is the installation of Orwell's telescreens - surveillance cameras fitted with loudspeakers that bark orders at passers-by who the watcher deems suspicious.

Women and men will Google prospective dates. Neighbors check what the house next door sold for on Zillow.com. People use online satellite imagery to sneak a peek into the backyards of the rich and famous. Hidden nanny cams record baby-sitters. More than 75 percent of employers monitor what their workers do on the job - and more than a third record every computer keystroke. "You really have, in a good and bad sense, a democratization of surveillance technology," said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit technology advocacy group.

U.S. Justice Department lawyers filed an appeal Friday aimed at blocking a lawsuit by a former Islamic charity that has challenged a Bush administration secret surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Garr M. King ruled earlier this month that a lawsuit by the defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation chapter in Ashland could go forward without damaging national security.

Congress's Republican leadership yesterday threw its weight behind two of President Bush's most controversial national security programs, warrantless wiretapping and extrajudicial military tribunals.

I've been thinking back to that Camelot time, before Bush, before 9/11. One thing stands out for me as the most broad-ranging change from that time: the loss of the unobserved life.

Two whistleblowers — one in Italy, one in Greece — uncovered a secret bugging system installed in cell phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration.

A federal judge ruled yesterday that the National Security Agency’s program to wiretap the international communications of some Americans without a court warrant violated the Constitution, and she ordered it shut down.

The government denies any sinister intent, saying it is putting its anti-terrorism legislation in line with international practice. But Zimbabwe is not on the front lines of the war on terror, and government agents could use the proposed powers to monitor the communications of the political opposition, journalists and human rights activists who are critical of President Robert Mugabe.

Our prison takes on the contours of the globe. The obvious interconnection of the intelligence services of so many countries, often without the knowledge or any democratic approval of the people (witness the consternation in Italy now, around their secret services' cooperation with the CIA), means we have effectively been committed to a world-wide prison.

Marshals Say They Must File One Surveillance Detection Report, Or SDR, Per Month

A government program designed to track down terrorists and money launderers is frightening bank customers, frustrating financial institutions and inundating federal agencies with secret reports of dubious value.

A Dillon Montana man had his home raided by 40 FBI, BATF and Canadian law enforcement agents after handing out Alex Jones' material to his local Sheriff which was subsequently deemed 'subversive'.

The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.