A Skeptical Survivalist

(CNN) — Governments have come knocking on Google’s door more frequently seeking people’s private usage information.

Google fielded 8,888 requests from the United States government last year asking for information on people using its services, the company wrote in a report on Monday. The total number is likely higher because the Google statistics only cover criminal investigations.

The U.S. is by far the most active, and successful, solicitor of private info from Google, accounting for about one-third of all federal requests last year, according to the data.

In the latter half of 2010, Google provided at least 4,323 pieces of info to the U.S. Google did not disclose how many requests it complied with prior to changing its policy in July 2010.

A government has a 60% average success rate for receiving the data it asked for of the 25 countries listed during the July to December time period, which is when Google began reporting that info. For the U.S., Google granted 94% of the government’s requests.

Read the rest

americanremnant:

See how your U.S. Representative voted on extending unconstitutional provisions of the Patriot Act that infringe on our 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendment rights.

If they voted “Yes”, go ahead and give them a call to inform them of their short-term employment status.

ageofperil:

A provocative appeal from The Economist yesterday calls on Americans to “save the Fourth Amendment.” While Economist blogger Lexington focuses on the constitutionality of street patdowns by police in troubled neighborhoods, it’s worth noting that the line has become increasingly blurred…

danielholter:

In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are. A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of how we’ve changed since September 11 …

• We’ve sent terrorist suspects to “black sites” to be detained without trial and tortured.
• We’ve turned terrorist suspects over to other regimes, knowing that they’d be tortured.
• In those cases when our government later learned it got the wrong guy, federal officials not only refused to apologize or compensate him, they went to court to argue he should be barred from using our courts to seek justice, and that the details of his abduction, torture, and detainment should be kept secret.
• We’ve abducted and imprisoned dozens, perhaps hundreds of men in Guantanamo who turned out to have been innocent. Again, the government felt no obligation to do right by them.
• The government launched a multimillion dollar ad campaign implying that people who smoke marijuana are complicit in the murder of nearly 3,000 of their fellow citizens.
• The government illegally spied and eavesdropped on thousands of American citizens.
• Presidents from both of the two major political parties have claimed the power to detain suspected terrorists and hold them indefinitely without trial, based solely on the president’s designation of them as an “enemy combatant,” essentially making the president prosecutor, judge, and jury. (I’d also argue that the treatment of someone like Bradley Manning wouldn’t have been tolerated before September 11.)
• The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
• The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
• Flying in America now means enduring a humiliating and hassling ritual that does little if anything to actually make flying any safer. Every time the government fails to catch an attempt at terrorism, it punishes the public for its failure by adding to the ritual.
• American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
• Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
• The Department of Homeland Security now gives terrorism-fighting grants for local police departments across the country to purchase military equipment, such as armored personnel carriers, which is then used against U.S. citizens, mostly to serve drug warrants.

kevinnj:

It is so frustrating to hear everyone cheer like we won something, we didn’t. Am I glad this scum bag is off the face of the earth and that he can no longer harm another human being? Fuck yes. Am I glad it cost over 900,000 lives to do so? No. He got EXACTLY what he wanted, even down to his death. As evil and maniacal as he was, he was still an intelligent man, and we did exactly what he thought we would. I only wish this could have happened before so many other innocent people had to die.

(Source: azspot)

The FBI recently announced that its Next Generation Identification System (NGIS) has “reached its initial operating capacity”. This vast new biometrics project, for which Lockheed Martin won a $1bn contract in 2008, encompasses not only fingerprints but also, possibly, such biometrics as iris scans, face recognition, bodily scars, marks and tattoos.

The US military has admitted it is investigating means of covertly disseminating propaganda on social media sites after army chiefs confirmed they were developing software which would allow it to create and manage fake pro- American personas on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The ruse is intended to manipulate online discussions toward the American political standpoint by having military personnel to manage the accounts of multiple personas to infiltrate and direct online debates which run counter to US policy objectives.

News of the covert operation only came to light when US Central Command (Centcom) awarded a contract to a Ntrepid to allow around 50 army controllers to operate up to 10 individual identities or “sock puppets”.

Centcom spokesman Bill Speaks confirmed the move but said they were targeting “violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US” and would be conducted in languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto.

Speaks was adamant however that all English language interventions would continue to be clearly attributed to Centcom.
The elaborate ploy will see provision of a virtual private server in the US and numerous others around the world to give credence to the government’s mouthpieces.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson refused to comment on Britain’s own cyber capability.