LANCASTER, Pa. — Horses drawing buggies regularly clop down the roads approaching Lancaster, a peaceful city in the heart of Amish country that had only three murders last year and relatively low crime.
But if the community sounds reminiscent of the past, it also has some distinctly modern technology: 165 surveillance cameras that will keep watch over thousands of residents around the clock.
In 2006, when the British police -- using (among other things)
electronic surveillance conducted by both the U.S.
It was an
odd little story, tucked well inside the front section of this past Sunday's New York Times.
An antiwar activist in the state of Washington had been exposed as an undercover informant for the US army, stationed at massive Fort Lewis, south of Tacoma. And in one of those Kafkaesque twists for which our government is renowned, the army is now investigating itself to determine how such an arrangement came to pass.
Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.
The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now just broke a story that is a piece of a larger puzzle: and that puzzle is the spying on dissidents right here in the United States.
This time it was done by someone working for the U.S. military, which may be illegal.
This summer, on
a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National Security
Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot data
warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret facility
is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone calls,
e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications intercepted
by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping operations. The
NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse, this one in San
Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.
One of former President George W. Bush's most
disastrous legacies - his warrantless wiretaps - has picked up a
curious ally in President Obama. What the new White House wants is
pretty much what the old team had: secrecy cloaking an end run around
civil liberties.
Obama may wish to move forward and not look back in many ways, an
attitude he's adopted in brushing off a full-fledged inquiry into the
excesses of the Bush anti-terror policies. But this stance is looking
more than ever like willful ignorance of history in the name of
political calm.
Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. Cell phones can capture video and send it wirelessly to the Internet. People can send eyewitness accounts, photos and videos, with a few keystrokes, to thousands or even millions via social networking sites. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.
The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.
