Laying the Groundwork for the Next Civil War

A Stout Read. Take some Antacids before hand.

The ending quote says it all:

You either believe in freedom or you don’t. It’s that simple.

Everything else is just a deadly distraction. As Orwell observed in 1984:

“All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.”

The Surveillance State: CCTV Cameras & The Internet of Things (IoT)

How Surveillance Cameras Have Become an Internet Superweapon

(click on above link to be re-directed)

Stay Alert, Stay Armed and Stay Dangerous!

The Surveillance State: Drones and The End of Society

The human race is on the brink of momentous and dire change. It is a change that potentially smashes our institutions and warps our society beyond recognition. It is also a change to which almost no one is paying attention. I’m talking about the coming obsolescence of the gun-wielding human infantryman as a weapon of war. Or to put it another way: the end of the Age of the Gun.

 You may not even realize you have been, indeed, living in the Age of the Gun because it’s been centuries since that age began. But imagine yourself back in 1400. In that century (and the 10 centuries before it), the battlefield was ruled not by the infantryman, but by the horse archer—a warrior-nobleman who had spent his whole life training in the ways of war. Imagine that guy’s surprise when he was shot off his horse by a poor no-count farmer armed with a long metal tube and just two weeks’ worth of training. Just a regular guy with a gun.

That day was the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modernity. For centuries after that fateful day, gun-toting infantry ruled the battlefield. Military success depended more and more on being able to motivate large groups of (gun-wielding) humans, instead of on winning the loyalty of the highly trained warrior-noblemen. But sometime in the near future, the autonomous, weaponized drone may replace the human infantryman as the dominant battlefield technology. And as always, that shift in military technology will cause huge social upheaval.

The advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train. In the modern day, it’s true that bombers, tanks, and artillery can lay waste to infantry—but those industrial tools of warfare are just so expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter industrialized nations from fighting protracted conflicts. Look at how much it cost the United States to fight the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, versus how much it cost our opponents. The hand-held firearm reached its apotheosis with the cheap, rugged, easy-to-use AK-47; with this ubiquitous weapon, guerrilla armies can still defy the mightiest nations on Earth.

Read the Remainder at Quartz

Surveillance State: Police CANNOT Track Your Cell Phone Without A Warrant Now

In a first, a Manhattan federal judge presiding over a narcotics case has decided that drug evidence obtained through cell phone surveillance technology called “Stingray” won’t be admissible in court.

StingRay (also known as “Hailstorm” or “TriggerFish”) is an “IMSI catcher“ basically acts like a cell phone tower, and sends out signals which force cell phones to ping them back with information showing their owner’s location and other identifying information. If an agent is tracking a suspect, the pings kind of work like the game “hot or cold.” The closer you get to the phone, the stronger (or hotter) the pings will become.

Judge William Pauley on Tuesday ruled that defendant Raymond Lambis’ rights were violated when DEA agents used a Stingray without a warrant to locate and search his Washington Heights apartment in Manhattan during a drug-trafficking investigation.

According to court documents, the DEA sent a technician with the StingRay to the area where Lambis lived. The technician walked around, sending out signals, until the strength of responding pings led him to Lambis’ apartment building. The technician entered the building and then walked up and down the hallways until he found the specific apartment where the pings were the strongest.

Later that evening, DEA agents knocked on Lambis’ door and asked his father for permission to search the apartment. In Lambis’ bedroom, agents recovered “narcotics, three digital scales, empty zip lock bags, and other drug paraphernalia.”

Privacy advocates say the use of the Stingray technology without a warrant encroaches on or even violates people’s constitutional rights. But despite concerns, the devices have become an increasingly common and popular item in law enforcement’s arsenal.

Research by the American Civil Liberties Union found that at least 13 federal agencies use StingRay technology, including the NSA, Homeland Security, the FBI and the army. In New York (and in many other states), both state and local police are equipped with Stingrays. An investigation by USA Today found that the technology was used even for routine crimes, like petty theft.

The ACLU found that the NYPD had used Stingrays more than 1,000 times between 2008 and May 2015 without any written policy on obtaining a warrant.

“If carrying a cell phone means being exposed to military grade surveillance equipment, then the privacy of nearly all New Yorkers is at risk,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the ACLU’s New York branch said earlier this year.

Pauley’s ruling on Tuesday follows what was celebrated as a landmark decision by privacy advocates in April, when Maryland’s second highest court ruled that police need a probable cause warrant to track cell phones using StingRays.

After the decision, the Baltimore office of the public defender began reviewing hundreds of cases which hinged on StingRay technology, all of which could potentially be challenged as a result of the Maryland court ruling.

Read the Original Article at Vice News

Surveillance State: Push To Expand FBI Surveillance Authority Threatens U.S. Email Privacy Bill

Not sure if you guys have been paying attention to the clowns in the Senate lately, in typical backdoor fashion (kind of like the secret night time session where they passed CISA 74 to 21) they are attempting to pass legislation that if it goes through, Online Privacy will truly be an afterthought in the United States.-SF

 

A lock icon, signifying an encrypted Internet connection, is seen on an Internet Explorer browser in a photo illustration in Paris April 15, 2014. About two thirds of all websites use code known as OpenSSL to help secure those encrypted sessions. Researchers last week warned they have uncovered a security bug in OpenSLL dubbed Heartbleed, which could allow hackers to steal massive troves of information without leaving a trace. 

An effort in the U.S. Senate to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s authority to use a secretive surveillance order has delayed a vote on a popular email privacy bill, casting further doubt on whether the legislation will become law this year.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday postponed consideration of a measure that would require government authorities to obtain a search warrant before asking technology companies, such as Microsoft and Alphabet Inc’s Google , to hand over old emails. A version of the Senate bill unanimously passed the House last month.

Currently, federal agencies do not need a warrant to access emails or other digital communications more than 180 days old due to a provision in a 1986 law that considers them abandoned by the owner.

But Republican party senators offered amendments Thursday that privacy advocates argued contravened the purpose of the underlying bill and would likely sink its chances of becoming law.

Those amendments include one by Senator John Cornyn, the second ranking Republican in the Senate, that would broaden the FBI’s authority to deploy an administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter to include electronic communications transaction records such as the times tamps of emails and their senders and recipients.

Senators Patrick Leahy and Mike Lee, the Democratic and Republican authors of the email privacy bill, agreed to postpone the vote to give time to lawmakers to review the amendments and other provisions of the bill that have prompted disagreement.

NSLs do not require a warrant and are almost always accompanied by a gag order preventing the service provider from sharing the request with a targeted user.

The letters have existed since the 1970s, though the scope and frequency of their use expanded greatly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

In 2015 requests for customer records via NSLs increased nearly 50 percent to 48,642 requests, up from 33,024 in 2014, according to a U.S. government transparency report.

The Obama administration has for years lobbied for a change to how NSLs can be used, after a 2008 legal memo from the Justice Department said the law limits them largely to phone billing records. FBI Director James Comey has said the change needed essentially corrects a typo.

The Senate Intelligence Committee this week passed a bill to fund the U.S. intelligence community that contains a similar provision that would allow NSLs to be used to gather email records.

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, voted against the proposal and said it “takes a hatchet to important protections for Americans’ liberty.”

Read the Original Article at Reuters