Tag Archives: surveillance

Homeland insecurity

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concordmilitiaWe have changed our definition of what’s freedom.

I stand in court rooms in defense of the Accused and invoke the presumption we are all innocent including those charged.

Our government treats us, however, as if we are all presumed guilty, that we must prove otherwise, and we are all treated as suspect for the commission of some unstated possible terrorist act – without any evidence whatsoever.

We have become accustomed to being searched and radiated at airports and public buildings, though we comply reluctantly.

For years now the government, “our” government, has also been collecting every bit of information it can about who we are, what we do, what we say, where we go, what we write, our financial holdings, and with whom we associate.

Our personal information is being inhaled into the government’s mammoth data banks at the cost of our expectation and right to be let alone.

Yet, we brag our freedom is the envy of the world.

The fear of those who would govern this nation is compromising the freedom of the governed.

When 9-11 occurred, I was ashamed of the members of Congress.  Little has changed since. Continue reading →

Unprotected text

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iosEncryptionIf you have a cell phone with robust encryption, it may deny entry to unwanted intruders who wish to rifle through your most personal information.

Our government prefers to be opaque when it comes to telling us what it’s doing, and yet is astonished when we cherish personal privacy, and defend it with various tools including encryption.

According to former CIA analyst, Edward Snowden, a fugitive somewhere in Russia these days, our government didn’t ask permission or authority when it invaded our Google and Yahoo accounts, nor when the NSA helped conduct global surveillance programs in conjunction with pliable Telcom companies and foreign governments.

When we were a collection of colonies, English authorities sought to enforce the tax laws using “writs of assistance” to enter any house they chose, to look for “contraband,” and to demand that you help them to invade your privacy.

When we won our revolution, we wrote a bill of rights to guard against these unwarranted invasions.

But now our privacy can be compromised without physically entering a home, given modern technological “progress.”

Aldous Huxley wrote, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

In a fairly recent Supreme Court opinion, Riley v. California, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote that ninety percent of Americans have cell phones and they contain “a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives — from the mundane to the intimate.” Continue reading →

Freedom of religion – not really! – ask any Muslim!

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A famous Muslim temple – photo by John P. Flannery

A famous Muslim temple – photo by John P. Flannery

Bigots conceal their religious prejudice under the guise that they want to keep us safe and secure.

In fact, they compromise individual freedom, violate our constitution’s promise, foster more prosecutorial misconduct, and, prove what they’re really about is religious discrimination.

We’re talking about the reckless political trash talk demanding that our government surveil every Muslim Mosque in America.

America says it’s tolerant of all religions, and bound by our constitution to make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but our historic record reveals a different story.

Starting in colonial times, America was brutal to Roman Catholics. Catholics were ridiculed for their beliefs, their churches burned, believers killed. A groundless fear that the papacy might direct our government almost kept that “upstart from Massachusetts,” Senator John F. Kennedy, from becoming President, even though our Constitution says – “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office…”

We decry anti-Semitism abroad but Jews in America have been denied access to jobs, clubs, colleges, and neighborhoods.

We are now focusing on the most recent assault by wrong-headed candidates and elected officials demanding a nationwide surveillance net cast over every mosque as a suspect harbor for Islamist terrorists.

No matter that President John Adams, in the Treaty with the Barbary States in 1797, assured Tripoli that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” and, further, that the United States had no “enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims].”

But does that mean we may not investigate a place of worship?

Not so but the devil is in the details as to how and when.

As a New York federal prosecutor, I tried a case with a pay-off to the French connection for a heroin shipment, the parking ticket for a heroin laden car for the “buy money,” passed in the first pew at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

We didn’t know about it beforehand and no decent investigator was going to keep St. Patrick’s under surveillance ever after on the highly unlikely possibility it would ever happen again.

Compare how NSA identified Muslim “suspects” from 2002 to 2008.

The Snowden materials released to the Guardian in 2014 disclosed that NSA’s surveillance “training” materials referred to any individual “suspect” as “Mohammed Raghead,” quite revealing, and a “suspect” was anyone, (a), of Muslim faith, and, (b), politically active, despite the First Amendment prohibitions against the government “chilling” either speech or religion.

The real rub is that this “surveillance” required no suspicion of actual terrorism.

Worse, when our federal law enforcement finds no crime, they may create it, with promised grandiose rewards for doing things the FBI dictates be done. Continue reading →

Resolution – to be honest and fair

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wethepoeple

What ever happened to honesty and fairness as bedrock principles in American politics?

Many citizens no longer expect either.

It’s always been a challenge to gauge what’s true and fair but we have been in a politically toxic environment perhaps ever since we declared “the war on terror.”

Our public leaders encourage us, in response to matters off shore and here at home, to focus on individual risk and fear, and to encourage reprisal and violence.

Our worst leaders do it by being entirely dishonest and unfair.

We have one blustering presidential candidate, so nativistic, he wants a very tall thick impregnable wall across the length of our southern border with Mexico. What’s scary is so many don’t think this is a joke. Nor does anyone think it’s incredible to believe this candidate will get a border nation-state, Mexico, to pay for his wall.

We have another saber rattling candidate who wants to carpet bomb a mid-east nation and apparently believes that won’t encourage “terrorists” to come here and do the same to us.

There are those who want every citizen to buy a gun. My neighbors were shooting their guns after dark while I wrote this – “practicing,” I suppose, to defend against a home invasion or the unlikely event that ISIS might attack at or near Lovettsville’s Town Council.

The worst aspect of this dystopic demagoguery, so misleading in concept and execution, is that these “leaders” are indifferent to the devastating effect on the nation’s character, on how we may continue to make the historical claim that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. Continue reading →

For law enforcement – privacy is inconvenient

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ciaDirectorWhatever anyone thinks of former CIA network administrator, Edward Snowden, whether as a whistleblowing champ hero or a hacking chump coward, he raised the consciousness of citizens to the fact that they had very little privacy, that we all remain under constant warrantless NSA surveillance for no good reason while their secret big data haul makes the fictional Orwellian Big Brother a harsh reality.

Many are willing to surrender freedom and privacy for seeming security.

Many say they don’t care if the government is hoovering up every bit of information about them – what do they have to hide?

For all the self-asserting bluster about their individual dignity and independence, many have chosen to escape from the hard-earned freedom defined by our bill of rights to embrace humiliating subjection.

A recent declassified report, authored in 2009, but released just this past Saturday, said the IGs from five Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies couldn’t identify any specific ways that the massive surveillance, under the code name, “Stellar Wind,” exposed by Mr. Snowden, thwarted a single possible terrorist attack.

In a law school note, many years ago, I wrote for a law school journal, that the notion of privacy “implies solitude or quiet or ‘social distance,’ no doubt as a reaction to our densely populated, commercial society” and the “concept of control is fundamental to an American definition of privacy.”

Professor Allan Westin described privacy as the “claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.”

In the hallowed chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, during oral argument, the government made crystal clear its disrespect for everyone’s “right to be let alone” from the government’s intrusion. Continue reading →

The privacy snatchers

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privacyImageYou may not have known that you had a Big Brother in Virginia watching you but Virginia State Police have had automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that not only take pictures of license plates at the rate of 900 hundred a minute, no matter if it’s day or night, rainy or not, with devices that operate just fine when the police vehicle is traveling at 140 miles an hour while passing or closing.

These devices identify your vehicle, where it is, and when it’s there.  You may think that’s terrific.  But not when you consider that these devices are surveilling citizens suspected of nothing, when there’s no active criminal case, no suspect, no hint of a stolen car, no drug buy in progress.

Still, the police hoover up megabytes of data, and store it until they feel compelled to scrutinize what we may have done, with whom and when.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to associate with whomever you wish without any interference from the state that might “chill” this association.

Based on earlier FOIA requests, we know the State Police has employed these automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to know who attended political rallies for President Obama and for Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.  That’s no proper police function.  Rather, it’s a “police state” function. Continue reading →

Lock that digital back door

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banksafeIt’s time to lock that digital back door to your private information to defend against the government’s unrestricted intrusion on what was once presumed to be the safe and easy bit and byte beltway that we call the Internet.

You may not think to lock the doors to your country home until there’s a burglary or home invasion in your neighborhood.

We enjoyed that open country door freedom on the Internet until the sobering disclosures more than a year ago by former CIA computer specialist, Edward Snowden.

Snowden has since made it crystal clear that, if you’re not encrypting what your communicating, your information is likely flowing by the petabyte into NSA’s multi-million dollar data-devouring Super Cray Computer, once called “the Black Widow.”

Since the disclosures, the President, the NSA, and the Congress have lacked the resolve to discourage the government’s uninhibited surveillance of us, its citizens. Continue reading →