Tag: Surveillance State

TSA Confirms Biometrics, Facial Recognition To Be Condition For All Air Travelers

Authored by Edward Hasbrouck via Papers, Please! blog,

Today the US Transportation Security Administration released a detailed TSA Biometric Roadmap for Aviation Security & the Passenger Experience, making explicit the goal of requiring mug shots (to be used for automated facial recognition and image-based surveillance and control) as a condition of all domestic or international air travel.

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This makes explicit the goal that has been apparent, but only implicit, in the activities and statements of both government agencies and airline and airport trade associations.

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Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans For Government Takeover Of The Internet

Authored by Elizabeth Nolan Brown via Reason.com,

All your base are belong to us.

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A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news.

To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into online press and markets, including “comprehensive (GDPR-like) data protection legislation” of the sort enacted in the E.U.

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Trump calls unauthorized NSA collection of data ‘a disgrace’

Via Politico

Donald Trump is pictured. | AP Photo

President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that the National Security Agency had violated Americans’ privacy through unauthorized collection of phone and text message data, seemingly attempting to tie the data collection to the investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller.

“Wow! The NSA has deleted 685 million phone calls and text messages. Privacy violations?” the president wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “They blame technical irregularities. Such a disgrace. The Witch Hunt continues!”

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Department Of Homeland Security Compiles List Of All Bloggers, Journalists, & “Social Media Influencers”

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

Many were hoping that once Barack Obama was out of office we would see less of this Big Brother surveillance nonsense, but instead it seems to be getting even worse.

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In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has just announced that it intends to compile a comprehensive list of hundreds of thousands of “journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.”, and collect any “information that could be relevant” about them.

So if you have a website, an important blog or you are just very active on social media, the Department of Homeland Security is going to put you on a list and will start collecting information about you.  The DHS has already announced that it will hire a contractor to aid in monitoring media coverage, and they will definitely need plenty of help because it is going to be a very big job…

As part of its “media monitoring,” the DHS seeks to track more than 290,000 global news sources as well as social media in over 100 languages, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, for instant translation into English. The successful contracting company will have “24/7 access to a password protected, media influencer database, including journalists, editors, correspondents, social media influencers, bloggers etc.” in order to “identify any and all media coverage related to the Department of Homeland Security or a particular event.”

“Any and all media coverage,” as you might imagine, is quite broad and includes “online, print, broadcast, cable, radio, trade and industry publications, local sources, national/international outlets, traditional news sources, and social media.”

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Fine-Tuning The Surveillance State

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state.

Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated.

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The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.

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The NSA Continues to Abuse Americans by Intercepting Their Telephone Calls

Guest Post by Ron Paul
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One of the few positive things in the ill-named USA FREEDOM Act, enacted in 2015 after the Snowden revelations on NSA domestic spying, is that it required the Director of National Intelligence to regularly report on its domestic surveillance activities. On Friday, the latest report was released on just how much our own government is spying on us. The news is not good at all if you value freedom over tyranny.
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Think It Can’t Happen Here? Austin Bomber’s Capture Exposes Depth Of US Surveillance State

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson via SHTFplan.com,

Many have argued that there is neither a surveillance state, nor a concerted effort to disarm the public door-to-door, house by house, etc. Some of these are far-leftists, masquerading as conservatives….. trying to appear “skeptically cynical.”

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We’ll “game” the thought, to bring everyone back from opacity to transparency.

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HOSTILES

Christian Bale in Hostiles

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I don’t like going to the movies. Too much hassle, too many commercials and previews, too expensive, and 90% of the movies are worthless drivel, SJW inspired crap, or government buoyed propaganda. Last weekend was my wife’s birthday and she wanted to see a movie. When she shockingly suggested a western, I reluctantly agreed. So my wife and one of my sons got in the car and headed to an old Franks theater in Montgomeryville that only charges $8.50. I had seen a brief review of Hostiles on-line and saw it got a decent rating on rotten tomatoes. I was looking forward to being mildly entertained.

The next two hours and fifteen minutes of this dark, somber, violent, morally ambiguous treatise about the old west cannot be described as enjoyable. But I did find it riveting and thought provoking. Christian Bale, as Captain Joseph Blocker, mournfully carries out his duties without a single smile crossing his bearded countenance for the entire movie. The tone, atmosphere and message of this film reminded me of my favorite western and subject of the final part of my five part series based on Clint Eastwood movies – Unforgiven. One of the soldiers in Hostiles even has dialogue almost matching Will Munny’s foreboding exchange at the end of Unforgiven:

“That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.”

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Spy Court Finds Surveillance Operating Outside The Law

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The NSA, CIA, and FBI are criminal organizations that should be abolished and their leaderships imprisoned. Here is proof from the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that security agencies have been operating outside the law: https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/icotr/51117/2016_Cert_FISC_Memo_Opin_Order_Apr_2017.pdf

On page 4 the federal court that oversees the spy program states that the US government has not been in compliance with procedures governing the acquisition of data from spying. Moreover, the full scope of noncompliance “had not been previously disclosed to the court.”

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NSA “Sincerely Regrets” Deleting All Bush-Era Surveillance Data It Was Ordered To Preserve

There is a growing consensus among many observers in Washington that the national security agencies have become completely politicized over the past seventeen years and are now pursuing selfish agendas that actually endanger what remains of American democracy.

As Philip Giraldi notes, up until recently it has been habitual to refer to such activity as the Deep State, which is perhaps equivalent to the Establishment in that it includes financial services, the media, major foundations and constituencies, as well as lobbying groups, but we are now witnessing an evolutionary process in which the national security regime is exercising power independently.

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The Deep State’s Christmas Present to America: Surveillance That Never Ends

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

Just in time for Christmas, the Deep State wants to give America the gift that keeps on giving: never-ending mass surveillance.

I’m not referring to the kind of surveillance carried out by that all-knowing and all-seeing Jolly Old St. Nick and his informant the Elf on the Shelf (although, to be fair, they have helped to acclimate us to a world in which we’re always being watched and judged by higher authorities).

No, this particular bit of Yuletide gift-giving comes courtesy of the Deep State (a.k.a. the Surveillance State, Police State, Shadow Government and black-ops spy agencies).

If this power-hungry cabal gets its way, the government’s power to spy on its citizens will soon be all-encompassing and permanent.

As it now stands, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal basis for two of the National Security Agency’s largest mass surveillance programs, “PRISM” and “Upstream”—is set to expire at the end of 2017.

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The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.

Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.

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The Age of No Privacy: The Surveillance State Shifts Into High Gear

Guest Post by John W. Whitehead

“We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” ― William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice (1966)

The government has become an expert in finding ways to sidestep what it considers “inconvenient laws” aimed at ensuring accountability and thereby bringing about government transparency and protecting citizen privacy.

Indeed, it has mastered the art of stealth maneuvers and end-runs around the Constitution.

It knows all too well how to hide its nefarious, covert, clandestine activities behind the classified language of national security and terrorism. And when that doesn’t suffice, it obfuscates, complicates, stymies or just plain bamboozles the public into remaining in the dark.

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The Surveillance State and Big Brother Trump

Guest Post by Kurt Nimmo

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Despite his opposition to surveillance during the campaign, Trump has flip-flopped once again and now supports the surveillance state.

His Homeland Security advisor, Tom Bossert, who worked with the Bush administration, penned an editorial for The New York Times this week calling for a reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Section 702 allows for vacuuming up emails, instant messages, Facebook messages, web browsing history, and more in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment.

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