Privacy Matters

It is a frightening scenario. Nine heavily armed men conduct military-style training in preparation for a terrorist attack involving the bombing of a funeral for the police officer they had killed three days earlier. 

Ecological rights activist Tim DeChristopher, who is serving two years in federal prison for bidding in a land sale auction for land he never intended to pay for, has reportedly been moved to solitary confinement at the request of an unnamed Congressperson. 

It's finally happened. After scores of FBI entrapment cases in which the organization set up young Muslim men to do illegal things and then slammed them with long prison terms when they complied, it has finally happened: someone said 'no.'

UPDATE: No wonder the TSA didn't want Schneier's testimony on the record. It's damning.

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The FBI and the Department of Defense are getting close to opening their giant biometrics center, where biometric data about people as diverse as Afghan villagers, Iraqi businessmen, Pakistani farmers, immigrants to the United States, and

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Rifling through the hundreds of heavily redacted pages DHS released to the Partnership for Civil Justice and Truthout, I stumbled upon this gem:

If you make the haystack bigger, the needle will be harder to find, right?

Wrong, the government says. We are no longer on the farm. In the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the bigger the electronic mound of data, the easier to detect any shard aimed at the vitals of the “homeland.” So pile it on!

Just this week we warned about the combination of powerful surveillance technologies, arguing that each of these tools alone is troublesome but that their combined use spells privacy disaster.

We told you so.