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
Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer.
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.
Back on March 12, we wrote here about yet another subpoena to Twitter for information about an Occupy Wall Street activist, Jeff Rae. Both he and another target, Malcolm Harris, challenged the subpoenas in court and were represented by the National Lawyers Guild.
Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long term cookie on your computer.
License plate readers. Biometric iris scans and face recognition. CCTV cameras that can track you as you move through the city. Video analytics that automatically flag "suspicious activities" and allow police or private spooks to zoom in on your location.
When President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, he said that the agency would "develop all-hazards plans and capabilities, including those of greatest importance to the security of the United States homeland, such as the prevention of terrorist attacks and preparedness for the potential use of weapons of mass destruction, and ensure that state, local, and federal plans are compatible."