MetaFilter posts tagged with surveillance and terror

The Age of Disaster Capitalism

y2karl — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 10:29:22 -0800

...Through all its various name changes - the war on terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the third world war, the long war, the generational war - the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged. It is limited by neither time nor space nor target. From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the war on terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture. That was the business prospectus that the Bush administration put before corporate America after September 11. The revenue stream was a seemingly bottomless supply of tax dollars to be funnelled from the Pentagon ($270bn in 2005 to private contractors, a $137bn increase since Bush took office), US intelligence agencies and the newest arrival, the department of homeland security. Between September 11 2001 and 2006, the Department of Homeland Security handed out $130bn to contractors - money that was not in the private sector before and that is more than the GDP of Chile or the Czech Republic.

Black-Bag Jobs

digaman — Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:33:48 -0800

"Don't worry Mr. President, we have Kansas surrounded." Warrantless searches: they're not just for wiretaps anymore. U.S. News and World Report probes the Bush administration's covert drive to conduct physical searches of American homes without court approval.

Secret Justice

digaman — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 10:04:39 -0800

Newsfilter: Secret arrests, secret renditions, secret interrogations in secret jails, and now, secret rulings from US federal judges. More fallout from the Bush administration's NSA domestic-spying program [recently discussed here].

Evidence of a Slippery Slope

digaman — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 06:56:58 -0800

Evidence of a slippery slope continued: Newsweek reports that White House counsel Steve Bradbury believes President Bush can order killings on US soil as part of the Terrorist-Surveillance Program^TM. Meanwhile, while Attorney General Gonzales "lashes out" at the media and insists that the TSP^TM is "not a dragnet that sucks in all conversation and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest," the Washington Post reports it's precisely that -- "computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears" -- and has led to very few leads. (See also discussion of Arlen Specter and the legality of the TSP^TM here.)

Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States ... is based on classified legal opinions...

amberglow — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:31:02 -0800

"The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny." What's the article about? The NSA, and you, if you've ever called internationally or sent email overseas: ...the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, ... (very long, NYT--and the NSA's mission is to spy only on communications abroad)

MetaFilter posts tagged with surveillance and terror

The Age of Disaster Capitalism

Black-Bag Jobs

Secret Justice

Evidence of a Slippery Slope

Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States ­...­ is based on classified legal opinions...

Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States ... is based on classified legal opinions...