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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNowhere to Hide: The Government's Massive Intrusion Into Our Lives
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/nowhere-hide-governments-massive-intrusion-our-lives?akid=10963.277129.1Y3NxR&rd=1&src=newsletter899822&t=5For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with burner phones (prepaid mobile phones easy to buy, use, and quickly dispose of), which are popular with drug dealers. The secret information gleaned from this relationship with the telecommunications giant has been used to convict Americans of various crimes, all without the defendants or the courts having any idea how the feds stumbled upon them in the first place. The program is so secret, so powerful, and so alarming that agents are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document, according to a recently released government PowerPoint slide.
Youre probably assuming that were talking about another blanket National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program focused on the communications of innocent Americans, as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. We could be, but were not. Were talking about a program of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a domestic law enforcement agency.
While in these last months the NSA has cast a long, dark shadow over American privacy, dont for a second imagine that its the only government agency systematically and often secretly intruding on our lives. In fact, a remarkable traffic jam of local, state, and federal government authorities turn out to be exploiting technology to wriggle into the most intimate crevices of our lives, take notes, use them for their own purposes, or simply file them away for years on end.
"Technology in this world is moving faster than government or law can keep up," the CIAs Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt told a tech conference in March. "It's moving faster I would argue than you can keep up: You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data."
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Nowhere to Hide: The Government's Massive Intrusion Into Our Lives (Original Post)
xchrom
Sep 2013
OP
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)1. K&R
woo me with science
(32,139 posts)2. kick