surveillance
Lysander Spooner on Government Surveillance
Put yourself in the 1830s-1840s United States. What was the most disruptive, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian activity going on at the time? Abolitionist, anti-slavery advocacy, organized nationally through written correspondence. These rabble-rousers threatened to upset the social, cultural, and economic balance of a young nation. Who cares about pesky considerations like the morality of slavery? In that …
The Nsa Surveillance Dictionary
I meant to include this wry article in my previous post on surveillance, abuse of power, and abuse of language, but then I decided that it deserves its own post. Rather in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, Philip Bump proposes that we bear in mind the NSA Surveillance Dictionary when trying to …
Language, Deception, and the People Comprising the Surveillance State
Newspeak, anyone? Language has long been a tool for persuasion and in the fight against tyranny and oppression, and in 1984 George Orwell pointed out how important language is when he featured the effects of the state’s attempts to steer and control the content and use of language. This week, more reporters are revealing the …
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Nsa Surveillance Imperils the Internet As an Economic Platform
Today’s new revelations from Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing show that the NSA can, and does, use a program that surveils our Internet behavior in a general, blanket way (much in the nature of the “general warrants” that were the whole reason the authors of the Bill of Rights put the Fourth Amendment in there in the …
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A “Stop Watching Us” Smorgasbord
If you follow Knowledge Problem on Twitter, you’ve noticed that I’ve been continuing to comment on and re-tweet various of the developments in the federal government’s surveillance of individuals without obtaining warrants, the Star Chamber-like super-secret FISA courts and our inability to oversee and monitor the lawfulness of their rulings, and this week’s House of …
The Criminal N.S.A.
From law professors Jennifer Stisa Granick and Christopher Jon Sprigman, in today’s New York Times: “We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a …
The Gutless Media
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday I posted a roundup of some of the media’s reporting on the NSA’s collection of domestic communications metadata. I concluded the post thus: But the most striking commentary is from the editors of the New York Times, who state that “the administration has now lost all credibility”. If you follow the link you …
America’s Surveillance State: Can You Hear Me Now?
Lynne Kiesling Today has seen a flurry of information in the wake of Glenn Greenwald’s breaking the news in the Guardian last night about the National Security Agency’s (dubbed in the Washington Post the “eavesdropper in chief“) collection of Verizon phone customer metadata on a daily basis. Here’s a roundup of the resources I have …
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A Great Relative Risk Graphic for Terrorism
Lynne Kiesling In previous posts on the TSA and security here, here, here, and here, I’ve argued emphatically for taking a relative risk assessment approach to our security and surveillance policies and spending. Courtesy of Meg McLain, here’s a vivid graphic representing why that’s a good idea, and why we should not be spending so …