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Tag: surveillance state

Narendra Modi

Facebook Reports Surge in Government Demands for User Data

Facebook’s Global Government Requests Report was released on Wednesday, and it showed a tremendous surge in requests for user account data from governments around the world, topped by the government of the United States. The governments of Turkey and India were cited as the most aggressive in censoring Facebook pages.

Internet cable (Michael Bocchieri / Getty)

Study Projects 34 Billion Internet Connections by 2020

The growth of the Internet has been one of the most astounding developments in human history, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, a new report from Business Insider predicts the number of devices connected to the Internet will more than double over the next five years – from 10 billion in 2015, to 34 billion in 2020. That works out to a 28 percent compound annual growth rate.

REUTERS/EDGAR SU/FILES

China to Impose Orwellian ‘Social Credit System’ on Internet Users

The latest brainstorm from the Chinese Communist Party is a system for monitoring the Internet activity and financial transactions of its citizens, computing a “social credit” score on the acceptability of each person’s behavior, similar to the credit ratings compiled by financial institutions.

Hamilton County Sheriffs Office via AP

Despite Drug Use and Jihadi Red Flags, Chattanooga Killer Flew Under Police Radar

Questions are being asked about whether Chattanooga killer Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez should have been under surveillance by counterterrorist authorities before he launched his deadly attacks, killing four Marines and a Navy petty officer before he was brought down in a gun battle with police. Were there “red flags” that should have tipped off investigators that Abdulazeez was a potential terrorist threat?

Rand Paul

Rand Paul: NSA Supporters ‘Secretly Want There to be an Attack on the United States, So They Can Blame it on Me

Rand Paul has planted his flag on some difficult ground, and quite frankly, successful presidential candidates don’t throw themselves into heavy intra-party fire and sustain major political wounds to prove ideological points. Perhaps he would do well to reconstruct his argument to emphasize the libertarian points where more of the Republican Party agrees with him, and more of the ever-shifting middle of the American electorate would be willing to listen.

AFP PHOTO / POOL / CHARLES PLATIAU

France Approves Domestic Spying with ‘Almost No Judicial Oversight’

The Surveillance State faces stiff criticism in the United States. Limiting domestic surveillance, or at least subjecting it to more extensive oversight, is likely to be a prominent feature of several 2016 presidential campaigns. But in France, Parliament just took domestic surveillance up a notch, granting internal intelligence services “their most intrusive domestic spying abilities ever, with almost no judicial oversight,” as The New York Times puts it.

Xinhua/Yao Dawei/AFP

Emboldened By Snowden Revelations, China Plays Hardball With U.S. Tech Companies

The New York Times has a depressing article headlined “Mutual Suspicion Mars Tech Trade With China,” whose title buries the lede. The story is more about tech companies suspicious of both China and the Obama Administration. There is a serious information-technology trade war underway, and China is eating Team Obama’s lunch, in part due to continuing fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations of Obama’s digital surveillance state.

smartphone

Obama Drops Plan to Store NSA Phone-Snooping Data With Third Parties

The Obama Administration has dropped a plan to outsource the storage of cell-phone metadata to third-party vendors, but the Surveillance State is still very much interested in that data. From a public-relations standpoint, the goal of these post-Snowden reform proposals is to erase the image of phone companies “giving our phone data to the government.” If the companies are storing the data themselves and making it accessible to the government, the public’s comfort level with the process might increase.

An Alexandria Police Department squad car is seen outfitted with a license plate scanner mounted to the trunk, Tuesday, July 16, 2013, in Alexandria, Va. Local police departments across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movements of vehicles with a license plate using automated scanners. Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, dumping that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or even years. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Police Departments Quietly Equipped with Device That Lets Them See Through Walls

Modern police have radar guns that allow them to see through the walls of houses, and they’ve been using them for the past two years without telling the public. In fact, they still haven’t formally announced the technology. If no one has briefed him yet, I would like to volunteer to be the guy who tells Senator Rand Paul about the drone that can see through walls.