Pokemon Go is sweeping the nation and the world. Anecdotes and human interest stories abound. Like somebody who has been chasing some rare thing they can only see on their phone for hours, the public has Pokemania fatigue.
The military has been using drones in a lethal capacity for over a decade. The current administration has decided to increase the use of drones, and the number of civilian casualties overseas has increased. Drones have been used for the extrajudicial execution of American citizens overseas without trial. Senator Feinstein profits directly from the drone war. Donald Trump openly salivates about using more drones and Hillary “black teenagers are super predators that must be brought to heel” Clinton never saw an elementary school full of children of color she wouldn't bomb.
On February 24, Vice's Motherboard tech blog announced that it had discovered the FBI hacking the Tor online privacy network with a generous amount of assistance from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Motherboard's research into this attack and the resultant court cases spans six thorough articles on this topic going back to November 2015. Despite their respectable efforts, there are stones yet unturned, as the case is a metaphorical rock garden of discovery. A few more stones will be flipped below and turned into dots that connect.
If Edward Snowden says something is even worse than it looks one should look at it twice. The tweet which said this refered directly to a New York Times article from February 25 with the headline "Obama Administration Set to Expand Sharing of Data That N.S.A. Intercepts." This initiative by the President during his last few months in office is the edge of a concerted effort to expand surveillance of the global public that is being mounted by every stakeholder group within the beltway.
The Iraq and Afganistan wars produced multiple ways to watch an occupied civilian population. One of the more notable, a blimp bearing the Kestrel camera system, has already been adapted by Google to provide 4G cellular connectivity in the third world. Closer to home, law enforcement has found that there is more than one way that a Kestrel flies. Meet Miami Valley's own Persistant Surveillance Systems (PSS).
FBI director James Comey has been amplifying his efforts to gain a winning edge in his public battle to force Apple to write specialized software for cracking iPhones. Although most of the tech industry has publicly lined up aside Apple, Comey found a friend in Bill Gates and a lackey at the Pew Foundation to try and spin the conversation. The conversation about an effective right to privacy is one that Comey has been planning for years ahead of action that the White House has been planning to take.
