The Security State — American Delusions

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Post 9/11 America has increasingly become a security state. Spying on the population is now commonplace. Local police forces have been militarized. Borders, points of entry, especially airports, and border regions have become the scene of long lines with questionable outcomes.

Posts about the Security State

empire, politics, security state

How America Tortures – a new report with drawings and a movie

December 13, 2019

How America Tortures by M. P. Denbeaux, & Seton Hall University. (2019) This report includes eight drawings by Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo detainee, illustrating his experiences during torture sessions. Abu Zubaydah is also a figure in the movie discussed below. This report is really a short book, some 95 pages including extensive notes, that covers all aspects of the CIA torture program. Download the report here>>>>. Here are screen grabs of the Abu Zubaydah drawings —>> read more –>>

politics, security state

Revisiting MetaData – Your Life Made Visible

November 17, 2016

In the current moment much of the concern about privacy online and otherwise has been overwhelmed by Trump, inequality, racism and other matters. The NSA and other spies, government and corporate, are not taking a vacation. I wrote earlier about this in “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata” in July, 2013. Recently I revisited Immersion: a people-centric view of your email life, the MIT project to visualize —>> read more –>>

Footnotes

metadata = a set of data that describes and gives information about other data. In the case of email this includes date and time; to, cc, bcc recipients; and subject line.

books, security state

No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald – book review

Joe, My friend got back to me. Her contact left the Review five years ago. Sorry. Mark

June 1, 2014

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment. So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new? In fact, there is much that —>> read more –>>

Footnotes [ + ]

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NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014

security state

FISA Court – Not a Court – an Administrative Rubber Stamp – Bureaucrats Dressed Up as Judges

July 11, 2013

The government and the press continue to refer to the FISA Court as a judicial review, a third party oversight of the government’s intrusions on our privacy. This misuse of words and concepts needs correction.

security state

The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata

July 9, 2013

With the recent revelations of the NSA vacuum cleaner collecting metadata about every aspect of our lives

security state

NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors

James_R._Clapper_Director of National Intelligence

June 17, 2013

NSA’s gathering of Meta Data Compared to Corporate Use of Information In the current discussions of the government’s wholesale seizure of the meta data of our personal digital lives there is regular comparison to the acquisition and use of information about our digital lives by corporations. At the moment corporate use of individual information results in targeted advertising and increasingly location aware targeted advertising through our smart phones. The implicit, sometimes explicit, notion is that —>> read more –>>

security state

Dangers of the US Security State

LAURA POITRAS credit: Ruby Washington/New York Times photographer - borrowed w/o permission

June 16, 2013

There are those, in response to the recent revelations of the US government vacuum cleaning our lives through the NSA and other secret programs, who take the line that the innocent have nothing to fear from the government. Here is an example of why no one should take such a naive approach to the powers of government. LAURA POITRAScredit: Ruby Washington/New York Times photographer – borrowed w/o permission The New York Times reported recently (“Player —>> read more –>>

security state

US Vacuum Cleaning Our Privacy – the bigger story

June 8, 2013

There has rightfully been considerable outrage over this week’s revelations that the Federal government has been sucking up information on virtually every aspect of our lives, email, telephones calls, pictures, credit card and banking transactions, and so on. Unfortunately almost all of this discussion is taking place without a useful sense of the scope, scale, and trajectory of the government’s war on terror. META DATA Before getting to the bigger picture within which the present —>> read more –>>

empire, security state

Parallels and Prescience – on the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 and the “War on Terror”

September 12, 2011

Having successfully avoided much of the national moment for our politicians to blather on about the true meaning of 9/11, I was struck this morning by parallel between our “War on Terror” and our longest war, the “War on Drugs” (I have written earlier about this here). Some may be offended initially by this comparison. The War on Drugs was invented for the most cynical of purposes by one of our more craven Presidents, President Nixon ((I —>> read more –>>

political system, politics, security state

Naomi Wolf’s The End of America – the movie

May 27, 2011

The End of America – a film by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern Here is a summary of the ten steps discussed and illustrated by Ms. Wolf in the movie. 10 STEPS THAT CLOSE AN OPEN SOCIETY 1. invoke an internal and external threat People who are afraid are willing to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do. 2. establish secret (unaccountable) prisons where torture takes place In a secret —>> read more –>>

Footnotes [ + ]

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from the endofamericamovie.com website – 05/27/2011

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books, security state

Yottabytes and the National Security State

October 17, 2009

The current New York Review of Books has an article by James Bamford, “Who’s in Big Brother’s Database” that reviews the new book by Mathew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency . I have gotten in line at my local library to read this book and will make further comments after that. Meanwhile, the Bamford article mentions the construction boom at NSA (National Security Agency) with a doubling —>> read more –>>

empire, politics, security state

A New Thought on Terrorism

December 6, 2008

An article in today’s NYTimes about cyber crime, malware, etc. suggests to me that another line of attack may be through the Internet against our utilities, telecoms, or financial institutions. There have already been massive attacks against whole countries with successful breakdowns that lasted for hours and days. Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia were targets over the last year. My memory is that suspicions fell to the Russian government because the attacks, in these cases massive —>> read more –>>

Footnotes [ + ]

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We are forced to assume that they are collecting everything, emails, telephone calls, financial transactions, text messages, anything digital which is virtually every aspect of life unless you took to the woods before 2000 and have been subsisting in an entirely cash economy without any communications that re not face to face. The tangle of lies by every —>> read more –>>

security state

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from the endofamericamovie.com website – 05/27/2011

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