Stung by criticism of China’s disturbing new “social credit system,” the state-run Global Times responded on Wednesday that such a system is necessary to fight corruption among its huge population.
CBS News on Tuesday reported on China’s plan to assign citizens a “social credit score,” a system that has already restricted the travel privileges of millions of people who were rated poor citizens due to undesirable speech and behavior. The system begins expanding nationwide next week after a limited trial run.
China’s state-run Xinhua news service brings the joyous news that China’s State Council Information Office has declared China is making “remarkable progress” on human rights. This is a remarkable development, since authoritarian communist dictatorships are usually very critical of themselves.
Westfield State University in Westfield, Massachusetts, has announced plans to install 400 surveillance cameras in an effort to catch students in the act of committing hate crimes.
On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, SiriusXM host Alex Marlow asked attorney Robert Barnes about the campaign of leaks to damage the Trump administration, described by some observers as “deep state” career bureaucrats and/or holdovers from the Obama administration acting as saboteurs. Marlow wondered if there was any legal recourse for the Trump administration to halt this operation.
As far back as the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11, civil libertarians worried about the surveillance state, the Panopticon, the erosion of privacy rights and due process in the name of national security.
The Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology recently completed an extensive study on America’s surprisingly extensive facial recognition software, and concluded half of American adults have already been tagged by systems accessible to law enforcement.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder sent a decidedly mixed message on host David Axelrod’s podcast by saying that fugitive NSA contractor Edward Snowden “harmed American interests” by revealing government secrets – even putting the lives of American agents at risk! – but saluting him for performing a “public service” anyway.
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification System is the largest biometric database ever assembled, a billion-dollar system containing information on over 52 million people, many of them never subjected to a criminal investigation. The FBI has proposed exempting this massive database from the U.S. Privacy Act, which means citizens would not be told their information was included in NGIS or given an opportunity to correct any errors their files might contain.
Earlier this week, a declassified Inspector General report suggested the National Security Agency’s controversial Internet and phone monitoring program scoops up much less data than we previously suspected, because the program has a narrower targeting list. If that made anyone feel more comfortable with the Surveillance State, news that the Obama Administration is planning to let the NSA share more of its data with other agencies might refresh their anxieties.
The New York Times used a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain a National Security Agency report from 2015, in which the agency’s Inspector General looked at those controversial Internet surveillance programs and determined they are far less extensive than widely suspected.
During the same laugh-a-minute Senate report where he said North Korea was a major nuclear threat, and that Iran would soon join them, and that ISIS was using the “torrent of migrants” from Syria to infiltrate the Western world, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also said on Tuesday that electronic surveillance would soon be possible through nearly every device in the home.
There have been several high-profile accusations that material leaked by Edward Snowden helped ISIS terrorists conceal their operations from Western intelligence agencies, including planning and execution of the horrific terrorist attack in Paris on Friday.
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.
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.
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.
In an interview that reportedly took “three months of often covert communications” to arrange, the BBC interviewed Edward Snowden in Moscow about his life as a fugitive from American justice.
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?
FBI Director James Comey announced on Thursday, as reported by Reuters, that multiple terror attacks on U.S. soil around the Fourth of July holiday were foiled by the arrest of over ten people “inspired by the Islamic State’s recruitment online” over the past four weeks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
