On January 16, the State of Virginia passed SB522, which would utterly gut Virginia's public records law, already one of the worst in the nation. The law, which is expected to pass the Virginia house and be signed by the governor, would make all information that would identify police immune to public records disclosure. It its the first such law in the nation, but considering the background of it's sponsor, Sen. John Cosgrove , it will likely not be the last. It is model legislation that is likely to be introduced around the country.
There is a hidden problem in warfare when it comes to information. You can actually have too much of it. It is an extension of the “can't see the forest thru the trees.” cliché. Having too much information can lead one to overlook which bit of information is important, or when a bit becomes important. That happened to Edward Snowden last night on twitter, literally right in front of me, and I could do nothing but hit [prt sc] and ponder the gravity of it.
Sometimes I have difficulty writing headlines that don't reference livestock excrement so directly as to invalidate a story. That difficulty increases when it involves any statement made by the head of a police or espionage agency. Spies are liars. This is what they are paid for. Deception is the center of the profession of espionage and the FBI is a spy agency that occasionally dabbles in law enforcement.
Google has been generating a lot of press as of late with their efforts to provide connectivity to the rural third world. Both their drone based project, which will compete with Facebook's, and their balloon based Project Loon, leverage technology to provide connectivity from via high-altitude, long endurance platforms. Both have deep privacy implications and Project Loon's original DNA and connections have roots in America's endless counterinsurgency struggle in the Middle East.
Shocking revelations by the London based Bureau of Investigative Journalism raise questions about how much power has been given over to private military contractors who, according to an examination of over 8 million documents, collect, process and analyze much of the intelligence that leads to military drone strikes – muddying the distinction between the national chain of command and corporate contractor mercenaries, when life or death targeting choices are weighe
The rash of publicity in the United States surrounding the ongoing pattern of murder of black citizens by law enforcement has prompted half-heartedcalls for reform. There is a presidential commission which already had conclusions in mind before it went to work. Those conclusions, echoed by some segments of the new civil rights movement, include body cameras on police officers.
A Washington Post article on May 5 stated that that the FBI had conducted secret surveillance flights over Baltimore during the recent protests against the police murder of Freddie Gray. Ars Technica also covered the story and covered aviation enthusiasts efforts to track the aircraft's flight patterns, registration and speculated some on their capabilities. The revealed result was the outer edge of a secret air force that rivals size of those belonging to small European nations.
The Guardian recently ran a story, which was part of a series, on Wonga. Although the legalized loan shark has received buckets of flying mud from many quarters, the Guardian missed a spot. While the public dialogue has noted Wonga’s capital backers, a detail that had been missed is that Wonga is backed by a trio of companies with a history of investment in intelligence community projects.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) has launched a lawsuit against the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency(DEA) in federal district court in California, after the DEA was revealed to have been spying on Americans since 1992. The suit, filed last week on behalf of Human Rights Watch, claims the safety and privacy of its workers and activists abroad were violated when the program illegally collected records of the organization’s telephone calls to foreign countries.
