Revealed: Gov't Surveillance Is Much More Developed Than You Thought

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/revealed-govt-surveillance-much-more-developed-you-thought



Federal agencies tried to use vehicle license-plate readers to track the travel patterns of Americans on a much wider scale than previously thought, with new documents showing the technology was proposed for use to monitor public meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union released more documents this week revealing for the first time the potential scale of a massive database containing the data of millions of drivers, logged from automatic license plate readers around the US.

As President Obama’s nominee for attorney general prepared for a second day of confirmation hearings in Washington, senior lawmakers also called on the US Justice Department to show “greater transparency and oversight”.

Further documents released by the ACLU on Wednesday show that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials in Phoenix planned on “working closely” with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to monitor public gun shows with the automatic technology in 2009.

[woo me with science]

1. Lies, mass surveillance, corporatism, dismantling of our Bill of Rights,

criminalization of investigative journalism and whistleblowing...

And mass propaganda and disinformation campaigns denying it all.

[sendero]

2. is it..

... fascism yet?

[blackspade]

3. Exactly....

But we still have badge sniffers and authoritarians at DU who will tell us that there is nothing to see here, this is old news, and if you have nothing to hide.....or some other crap excuse.

[leveymg]

4. They intercept all of our internet and phone traffic, why not track movement? Completes the profile

Everyone has been profiled and is given a risk score for a bunch of tendencies. How else are they supposed to run a modern police state?

[DebJ]

5. The goofy thing is that while they do accumulate all this data, they lack

a sufficient work force to actually mine it. I have a relative who worked for the Treasury Dept tracking money flows for several years, now at
another fed agency. The amount of data is overwhelming. It is incredibly boring to mine it, numbs the brain so you can easily miss stuff even if you are really keen on doing the job and doing it well.... and like in every other work force there is, what, maybe 1/3 or more of workers are more often just 'there' on the job, in the chair, then actually motivated and bright enough to want to do it well.

Just making note of a mitigating factor.

[woo me with science]

6. K&R

[woo me with science]

7. kick

[Octafish]

8. Reason for wholesale surveillance is so government can arrest a certain category.

Writing about the Third Reich, Hannah Arendt pegged our situation today.

Via Chris Hedges:

The goal of wholesale surveillance, as Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” is not, in the end, to discover crimes, “but to be on hand when the government decides to arrest a certain category of the population.” And because Americans’ emails, phone conversations, Web searches and geographical movements are recorded and stored in perpetuity in government databases, there will be more than enough “evidence” to seize us should the state deem it necessary. This information waits like a deadly virus inside government vaults to be turned against us. It does not matter how trivial or innocent that information is. In totalitarian states, justice, like truth, is irrelevant.

BTW: One company's technology helped enable both regimes, IBM.

[woo me with science]

9. kick