Category: Surveillance State

Pondering the possibilities

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

So I’m wondering: Was the Charlie Hedbo event staged? Did it happen the way they’re telling us? Once the shock was over, I kept thinking there was something off about it. (Especially since, against the express wishes of the U.S., France just backed Palestine in the vote that would allow them to bring a motion to investigate Israeli war crimes. It just seems like very convenient timing.)

Someone I know posted this on Facebook, saying, “I saw Lawrence O’Donnell play this footage on his program Wednesday night — and he commented that the network censors would not allow the video to be shown without blurring, supposedly because it was too gruesome. Now we can see why it was really blurred out.”

Well, you know, I don’t believe everything I see on the internet. Who’s to say this is the real missing footage? Yet I find myself very resistant to the official version of events. And the whole thing about the alleged perpetrator’s wallet being found in the car is a hallmark of “deep state” events we’ve seen before.

What are your thoughts?

Microsoft to the U.S.: You’re not the boss of our overseas servers

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Microsoft Headquarters

Yep. Microsoft and other cloud services are furious that U.S. surveillance is ruining their overseas business:

Microsoft’s fight against the US position that it may search its overseas servers with a valid US warrant is getting nasty.

Microsoft, which is fighting a US warrant that it hand over e-mail to the US from its Ireland servers, wants the Obama administration to ponder a scenario where the “shoe is on the other foot.”

“Imagine this scenario. Officers of the local Stadtpolizei investigating a suspected leak to the press descend on Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany,” Microsoft said. “They serve a warrant to seize a bundle of private letters that a New York Times reporter is storing in a safe deposit box at a Deutsche Bank USA branch in Manhattan. The bank complies by ordering the New York branch manager to open the reporter’s box with a master key, rummage through it, and fax the private letters to the Stadtpolizei.”

In a Monday legal filing with the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, Microsoft added that the US government would be outraged.

“This case presents a digital version of the same scenario, but the shoe is on the other foot,” the Redmond, Washington-based company said in its opening brief in a closely watched appeal.

The appeal is of a July court decision demanding that Microsoft hand over e-mail stored on an overseas server as part of a US drug trafficking investigation. Microsoft, which often stores e-mail on servers closest to the account holder, said the e-mail is protected by “Irish and European privacy laws.”

But a US judge didn’t agree. “It is a question of control, not a question of the location of that information,” US District Judge Loretta Preska ruled. The order from the New York judge was stayed pending appeal.

Missing voices

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

20-3-2003

Oh sure, we all remember this. I think that’s why I got wiretapped by the Bushies — I was interviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer right before the war started, and I called Bush et al “war criminals”. I know that doesn’t sound so unusual now, but most people were cowed into silence and saying things like that back then was unusual. Even when it was really obvious that I was being tapped, I still couldn’t quite believe it. Like, “Really? One person with a small blog?” But even my mother could tell. “Susie, are they bugging your phone?” “Yes, mom, say hello to the nice man from the NSA.”

A new analysis of mainstream TV news has found there was almost no debate about whether the United States should go to war in Iraq and Syria. The group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, or FAIR, found that of the more than 200 guests who appeared on network shows to discuss the topic, just six voiced opposition to military action. On the high-profile Sunday talk shows, out of 89 guests, there was just one antiwar voice — Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation.

Here is a link to the actual study, published by FAIR
Nov 14, 2014
No Debate and the New War
Study finds little opposition to US attacks on Iraq, Syria

We’re flying and spying!

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

cesna

But don’t worry, they promised to let go of your data if you’re not a criminal. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!

The U.S. Department of Justice is putting devices that emulate cellphone towers in Cessna aircraft and flying them around the country to track the locations of cellphones, a practice that targets criminal suspects but may also affect thousands of U.S. citizens, according to a news report Thursday.

The program is run by the DOJ’s U.S. Marshals Service and has been in operation since at least 2007, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited two unnamed sources. The aircraft are flown out of at least five metropolitan-area airports and can cover most of the U.S. population, it said.

Cellphones are programmed to connect to whichever nearby cell tower has the strongest signal. The fake cell towers trick phones into thinking they have the strongest signal, then read the devices’ unique registration numbers when they connect, the Journal report says.

The goal is to locate cellphones linked to people under investigation for crimes like selling drugs, but in the process the program collects data about people not suspected of any crime, the report says. The fake cell towers determine which phones belong to criminal suspects and “let go” of those that aren’t.

I’m really glad I didn’t get FIOS

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Especially after reading this:

Verizon Wireless has been subtly altering the web traffic of its wireless customers for the past two years, inserting a string of about 50 letters, numbers, and characters into data flowing between these customers and the websites they visit.

The company—one the country’s largest wireless carriers, providing cell phone service for about 123 million subscribers—calls this a Unique Identifier Header, or UIDH. It’s a kind of short-term serial number that advertisers can use to identify you on the web, and it’s the lynchpin of the company’s internet advertising program. But critics say that it’s also a reckless misuse of Verizon’s power as an internet service provider—something that could be used as a trump card to obviate established privacy tools such as private browsing sessions or “do not track” features.

Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, a technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants Verizon to stop using the UIDH. “ISPs are trusted connectors of users and they shouldn’t be modifying our traffic on its way to the Internet,” he says. He calls the UIDH a “perma-cookie,” because it can be read by any web server that you visit and used to build a profile of your internet habits.