The Snowden revelations (ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12; The Queens of Stalingrad, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) expand upon that.
Those revelations also paint a Big Brother picture of the mind of certain factions within the "American Democracy."
The new reports are more of the same type of sicko, fascist, Orwellian, dictatorial, Big Brother psychopathology:
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.(U.S. Government Plan to Track Drivers). When is accountability going to be put back in place?
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.
...
“The broad thrust of the DEA is to spread its program broadly and catch data and travel patterns on a massive scale,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with ACLU, told the Guardian. “This could be a really amazing level of surveillance that we’ve not seen before in this country.”
...
Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, said Americans would be disturbed to know that law enforcement’s quest for revenue impelled mass surveillance.
“It’s deeply concerning and creepy,” Neily said. “We’re Americans. We drive a lot.”
The ACLU followed up Monday’s tranche of DEA documents, which were obtained under Freedom of Information Act (Foia) requests, with the further documents revealing that federal agents planned to use automatic license plate readers to monitor attendees at gun shows in April 2009. The group said it did not know whether the car surveillance was still going on, or how wide it ever spread.
...
The perception that an average citizen’s car could be monitored upon entering or leaving a gun show – or any other lawful assembly – infringed upon civil rights, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
“It would be chilling,” Olson said. “You could think twice about exercising that right.”
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The license-plate readers have fed hundreds of millions of records about motorists into a national database, the first round of ACLU documents show. If license plate readers, also known as LPRs, continued to proliferate without restriction, and the DEA held ldata for extended periods, the agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people’s lives, the ACLU has warned.
Help the ACLU "sue the bastids!"
The previous post in this series is here.
"I really think that white people are from another planet ..."
More proof from Chris Hedges ...
Great write-up, Dredd. All is going according to plan. That's why your final sentence seems naive. Law enforcement is sanctioned by the very government that's supposed to be protecting us. Any lawsuit would be a waste of time because the Just Us department will back them on this like it does on most of the other spying. Secret courts, hidden agendas, and anonymous approval is given to most of these "adventures" without any of it seeing the light of day. When something like this is discovered they have policies in place to deal with the "blowback" from the plebes and any kind of reform is vetted through the compliant Congress (who is also subject to these programs - "Well senator, we have some information your wife and constituents probably wouldn't take kindly to. Now if you play ball with us, there's no reason to worry.")
ReplyDeletePrison planet, the United States of Incarceration. Orwell wasn't just correct - he gave them the playbook for Big Brother surveillance and government! They also took pages out of the Nazi system. The only thing that is going to stop it is the collapse of the entire system. When there's no food, none of this will matter.
My two cents.
Tom
Tom,
Delete"Any lawsuit would be a waste of time ..."
The information was released in a FOIA lawsuit according to the link Dredd provided in the post (link).
oh
ReplyDeleteTom (the dunce)
It won't matter in the long run in terms of civilization's predicament or paradox.
ReplyDeleteIt is not likely to bring a change of direction.
However, if we do something (e.g. steele ourselves while watching civilization bring catastrophe on itself and us) perhaps resisting those things that are unavoidable, because of taking the wrong turn, is a temporary benefit to us.
Warn more people, blow whistles, demonstrate, comment, blog, write songs, poems, essays, books (so they too can steele themselves).
Just sayin' ...