Category: Surveillance

May 6, 2023

Israel Is Using a Vast Network of Biometric Cameras to Terrorize Palestinians

The facial recognition surveillance system violates Palestinians’ human rights to freedom of movement and privacy. Israel is deepening its system of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories by using artificial intelligence-powered biometric facial recognition technology to track and restrict the movements of Palestinian people. Facial recognition technology identifies and categorizes people on the basis of… Read more »

August 21, 2022

Mike Pompeo and CIA Sued for Illegal Surveillance of Assange’s Visitors

Attorneys and journalists whom the CIA spied on when they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, its former director Mike Pompeo, UC Global and its director, David Morales, in U.S. District Court. Assange is in a London prison fighting extradition to the United States. He… Read more »

October 25, 2021

UK High Court Should Deny Extradition Because CIA Planned to Assassinate Assange

Why is Joe Biden’s Department of Justice continuing Donald Trump’s persecution of WikiLeaks founder, publisher and journalist Julian Assange? Barack Obama, concerned about threats to the First Amendment freedom of the press, decided against indicting Assange for exposing U.S. war crimes. Trump did indict Assange, under Espionage Act charges that could garner him 175 years in prison…. Read more »

January 24, 2018

Congress’s Ratification of Trump’s Spying Power Is a Direct Threat to Our Privacy

“Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn wrote. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Reauthorization Act of 2017, which Congress passed on January 19, poses a serious threat to the privacy of… Read more »

June 5, 2017

The Arab American Left and Palestine: The Untold Story

President Donald Trump has twice tried to institute a travel ban on all refugees from six or seven Muslim-majority countries. During the presidential campaign, Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” slated to last “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” His Muslim ban has been struck… Read more »

September 19, 2016

Fifteen Years After 9/11, Perpetual “War on Terror” Continues Unabated

Fifteen years ago, 19 men committed suicide and took more than 3,000 people with them. The 9/11 attacks constituted crimes against humanity and should have been treated as such, with investigations and prosecutions of those who helped plan and finance the horrific crimes. If they had been armed attacks by another country, George W. Bush… Read more »

October 3, 2015

One Day Soon, That Drone Overhead May Be Pointing a Taser at You

North Dakota has just become the first state to legalize police use of drones equipped with “less than lethal” weapons, including rubber bullets, Tasers, tear gas, pepper spray and sound cannons. Now, police will be able to remotely fire on people in North Dakota from drones, much as the CIA fires on people in other… Read more »

May 13, 2015

Congress Should End Metadata Collection

Just as Congress was debating whether to reauthorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government has used to collect data on every telephone call we make, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously struck it down in ACLU v. Clapper. Congress has four days left in its current session to decide whether to… Read more »

January 31, 2014

Beyond Orwell’s Worst Nightmare

“Big Brother is Watching You,” George Orwell wrote in his disturbing book 1984. But, as Mikko Hypponen points out, Orwell “was an optimist.” Orwell never could have imagined that the National Security Agency (NSA) would amass metadata on billions of our phone calls and 200 million of our text messages every day. Orwell could not… Read more »

January 16, 2014

NSA Metadata Collection: Fourth Amendment Violation

Edward Snowden, who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA), revealed a secret order of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), that requires Verizon to produce on an “ongoing daily basis … all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within… Read more »