By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In former FBI director James Comey’s interview with ABC News, he attempted to position himself as an upholder of the rule of law, of the constitution, and even of the truth. Human beings are very good at forgetting their own misdeeds and building narratives that justify […]
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Domestic Surveillance
Shadowy US Covert Ops & Surveillance Abroad always Come Home
By Alfred W. McCoy | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – [This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the […]
Why are Authorities treating DAPL enviro Protesters like Terrorists?
TeleSur | – – The legal activist group ACLU announced it has filed a motion to quash the warrant, which it argues violates free speech laws. A local police department in the state of Washington has obtained a warrant to search private information about a Facebook group used to share information related to the Dakota […]
WikiLeaks Vault 7 reveals staggering breadth of ‘CIA hacking’
David Glance | (The Conversation) | – – WikiLeaks today released what it claims is the largest leak of intelligence documents in history. It contains 8,761 documents from the CIA detailing some of its hacking arsenal. The release, code-named “Vault 7” by WikiLeaks, covers documents from 2013 to 2016 obtained from the CIA’s Centre for […]
Trump covers Rockwell: Sometimes it Feels like, Obama’s Watching You
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Donald Trump is angry at his predecessor, former president Barack Obama, this weekend. He says he discovered (from the digital toilet paper ‘Breitbart,’ apparently) that a FISA court ordered a wire tap of Trump Tower in fall of 2016, and that it continued even though investigators […]
Bruited Trump pick for Nat’l Intel shreds 4th Amendment, wants Total Surveillance
TeleSur | – – On Thursday multiple mainstream media outlets reported that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has picked former Republican Senator Dan Coats, an outspoken advocate of illegal domestic surveillance programs, to be director of national intelligence. While yet to be formally announced, anonymous Trump transition team members told multiple outlets that the pick would […]
Feds: We can read all your email, and you’ll never know
By Clark D. Cunningham | (The Conversation) | – – Fear of hackers reading private emails in cloud-based systems like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo has recently sent regular people and public officials scrambling to delete entire accounts full of messages dating back years. What we don’t expect is our own government to hack our […]
The FBI’s outrageous assault on the 1st Amendment and Apple
By Andrew Crocker | ( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) | – – Last week, EFF filed a brief in support of Apple’s fight against the FBI, in which we argued that forcing Apple to write—and sign—a custom version of iOS would violate the First Amendment rights of Apple and its programmers. That’s because the right […]
Trump’s call for Spying on US Muslims recalls FBI bugging of MLK, Black Churches
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – As Donald Trump supporters beat a ‘Black Lives Matter’ protester at his rally in Birmingham, Ala., Trump himself reminded us of the dark days when a paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI monitor the Rev. Martin Luther King and black Churches of the Southern Christian […]