Spying and Surveillance
The virtually inescapable government surveillance has impaired if not eliminated the ability of news-gatherers and attorneys to communicate confidentially with their sources and their clients.
As a matter of faith, some people believe that God can see and hear everything. But as a matter of fact, the U.S. government now has the kind of surveillance powers formerly attributed only to a supreme being.
The U.S. National Security Agency was given legal authority to gather communications covering nearly the entire globe, the Washington Post has revealed. A 2010 classified document leaked by Edward Snowden and obtained by the Post shows that the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, gave the NSA allowance under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to intercept information that “concerns foreign powers” in all countries except the four that, with the United States, make up the “Five Eyes” alliance—the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The list of the 193 countries includes Afghanistan, Bolivia, France, Israel, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the Palestinian Authority.
Top security experts – including the highest-level government officials and the top university experts – say that mass surveillance actually increases terrorism and hurts security. And they say that our government failed to stop the Boston bombing because they were too busy spying on millions of innocent Americans instead of focusing on actual bad guys.
WikiLeaks has grown stronger over the last two years by building its database of leaked documents and entering into agreements with 130 media outlets, despite attempts by the US government to build a legal case against the organization and founder, Julian Assange.
Surveillance reform gained new congressional momentum as the US House of Representatives unexpectedly and overwhelmingly endorsed stripping a major post-9/11 power from the NSA.
It’s been one year since the Guardian first published the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order, leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that demonstrated that the NSA was conducting dragnet surveillance on millions of innocent people. Since then, the onslaught of disturbing revelations, from disclosures, admissions from government officials, Freedom of Information Act requests, and lawsuits, has been nonstop. On the anniversary of that first leak, here are 65 things we know about NSA spying that we did not know a year ago…
The divide that separates the ruling class from from the people who actually keep society functioning keeps getting wider and wider. Nothing illustrates this fact quite like the “debate” over the NSA’s mass surveillance and Edward Snowden’s role in exposing it. Sources and full transcript: Snowden, The NSA and a Crime of High Treason
NSA Is Creating Huge Facial Recognition Database by Taking Millions of Images Off the Internet Daily
The National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting millions of images a day for facial-recognition purposes, according to classified documents obtained from Edward Snowden by the New York Times. Of those millions of images, approximately 55,000 a day are “facial recognition quality images,” according to the documents. The documents reveal that the NSA is using new software to mine social media, emails, text messages and other digital communications for images.
The battle to retake our privacy can’t be won in the halls of Congress alone. This is the primary reason why a host of public-interest groups launched something called Reset the Net last week. The campaign calls for major websites and the general public to widely adopt end-to-end encryption tools to stem the ability of the NSA – or any other intelligence agency – to conduct mass surveillance, regardless of what our laws look like. The campaign will culminate on 5 June – the one-year anniversary of the Snowden disclosures – with a giant online push to get ordinary internet users signed up and using the tools that are so critical to keeping our information private online.
More than 30 civil liberties groups and tech companies have formed a coalition against internet surveillance and NSA spying, with a ‘Reset the Net’ day of action planned for June 5 to mark a year since Edward Snowden’s leaks.
In a hilariously pointed interview with comedian John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, Former NSA Chief General Keith Alexander gets a little help with rebranding the much-loathed agency.
The digital surveillance systems of today are far more advanced than most people understand. No longer are these machines simply recording the data and storing them in some historical archive to be pulled at a later date should the government ever have reason to take a closer look at your personal life. The next generation of systems are being used to actively monitor your digital interactions, surfing habits, conversations and daily sentiment in an effort to predict your future behavior. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the systems currently operating within the social media sphere.
The NSA knew about and exploited the Heartbleed vulnerability for two years before it was publicly exposed this week, and used it to steal account passwords and other data, according to a news report. The NSA has denied the allegations.
