BoingBoing: Geek Squad’s secret spying on behalf of the FBI went on for a decade and involved constant, ongoing collaboration

The Intercept: New Orleans surveillance program gives powerful tools to a police department with a history of racism and abuse

Bloomberg: Pentagon drone program is using Google AI

More in-depth from Daily Mail: Google is working with Pentagon to equip military drones with people-tracking AI in secret “Project Maven” deal, report claims

CNN Money: Facebook robots may one day follow you around at home

ACLU: Facial recognition: A powerful tool for authoritarian surveillance

Techdirt: CIA still arguing its official leaks to journalists shouldn’t be subject to FOIA requests

The American Conservative: The new Surveillance State and the old perjury trap: “Incidental collection” is the claimed inadvertent or accidental monitoring of Americans’ communications under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. Incidental collection exists alongside court-approved warranted surveillance authorized on a specific individual. But for incidental collection, no probable causeis needed, no warrant is needed, and no court or judge is involved. It just gets vacuumed up.

While exactly how many Americans have their communications monitored this way is unknown, we know these Republican Trump supporters and staffers were caught up in surveillance authorized by a Democratic administration (no evidence of incidental surveillance of the Clinton campaign exists). Election-time claims that the Obama administration wasn’t “wiretapping” Trump were disingenuous. They in fact gathered an unprecedented level of inside information. How was it used?

BoingBoing: Six immortal superweapons the Democrats made for the President, which Trump now gets to wield: Through the Obama years and even into the Trump administration, Democrats have voted a range of powers for the president that gives him almost unlimited authority, out of a combination of the foolish conviction that no one untrustworthy would inherit Obama’s tools, and cowardice about voting against mass surveillance and being criticized by war on terror hawks.

Six of these superweapons are frankly terrifying: the power to start a war without Congressional authorization (Authorization for Use of Military Force); the power to enter into trade deals without Congressional authorization (fast-tracking); the power to lock anyone up without charge (National Defense Authorization Act); the power to assassinate Americans (AUMF — again); total control over the US election infrastructure (Obama DHS directive).

Raw Story: High-ranking GOP congressmen call for special prosecutor to look into surveillance of Carter Page Ed: This story is getting old.

Sonoma State Star: ‘Google Clips’ could be new form of surveillance

TIME: Britain says it will hit back if Russia was behind ex-spy’s sudden illness

CNET: Brace for ‘quantum supremacy’ with Google’s Bristlecone chip

Reason: The 2010’s have been a banner decade for unintended consequences of the Drug War

High Times: The UK bans medical cannabis domestically, yet remains the biggest exporter of it in the world

The Federalist: Media fight for Democrats in Washington leak wars

Wall Street Journal: Career civil servants illegitimately rule America

Techdirt: French government wants to toss far-right political leaders in jail for posting images of terrorist atrocities

BestVPN: Dutch ‘smart cities’ raise privacy concerns elsewhere

Washington Examiner: To fix FISA, appoint public advocates.  Ed: Or abolish it.

TechRadar: 8 reasons why smartphones are a privacy nightmare

DW: What if billionaires could live forever?

Alternet: These cities saw the most immigration raids during Trump’s first year in office

Reason: Trump’s steel tariffs will hurt Americans

Motherboard: Virtual slug simulator could help researchers develop better AI

Space: Should we open some sealed Apollo moon samples?

WTF Naples Daily: State attorney’s office to judge: Don’t release the Parkland surveillance footage to public

Buzzfeed: The Justice Department is trying to keep the secret surveillance court as secret as possible

IP-Watch: UN Human Rights Council to hear rapporteur’s report on government surveillance online

New Orleans Advocate: Deportation cameras? New Orleans immigrant blast Landrieu surveillance plan, possible uses

Wired: Uber ‘surprised’ by totally unsurprising Pennsylvania data breach lawsuit

CBS News: Russian convicted of spying for Britain falls ill after exposure to substance

The Drive: One of US Special Operations Command’s newest spy planes is hunting terrorists in Libya

LA Times: Separating children and parents at the border is cruel and unnecessary

FEE: Economics was invented to refute idiotic, poverty-inducing tariffs

Mises: Police: we’re the experts, and don’t you dare criticize us

JUSTIN RAIMONDO: The new Cold War is here

Nautilus: Can many-worlds theory save us from Boltzmann Brains?

Just Security: New ruling shows how few options there are for intelligence community whistleblowers

American Spectator: Auto Cop: “We count on a human cop not being around to hassle (and mulct) us for scoffing such laws — and on the cop’s discretion if he is around. On being able to appeal to his sense or his humanity and hope he will ignore the law we both know is idiotic, even if that can’t be openly said or admitted to.

Auto Cop isn’t programmed to cut slack. He — it — simply records the “violation” and issues the citation.”

OC Register: How Silicon Valley went from “don’t be evil” to doing evil

NBC News: The FBI’s secret warrant to surveil Carter Page should scare all Americans and spur reform

RealClearPolicy: Data breaches pose new threat to juveniles

Sputnik: Norwegians stupefied by secret surveillance scandal featuring the US

Hartford Constant: Veterans with PTSD, less-than-honorable discharge allege bias from Navy

National Review: Congress gave away the power to level tariffs to the office of the President

Ars Technica: Why the roots of patent trolling may be in the patent office

American Thinker: Time for the new Untouchables

High Times: 13-year old denied life-saving treatment because he used CBD oil

WeTalkUAV: Are we happy moving towards a future with permanent eyes in the sky?

Zero Hedge: “Sex sells cigarettes, but fear sells government”

EFF: House vote on FOSTA is a win for internet censorship

Activist Post: Just like Vegas, authorities are hiding the surveillance footage of the Parkland shooting

The Blaze: Smartphone apps are tracking and selling your location data, often without you realizing it

Motherboard: How to ditch the news feed algorithm and take back Facebook

StrategyPage: Electronic weapons: Smart eyes that never sleep

NextBigFuture: Russia’s tsunami-creating nuclear drone would dive deeper than US subs and be faster than a torpedo

The Intercept: Baltimore wants to hold some cops personally accountable for misconduct

Reason: Are we experiencing peak gun rights?

The American Conservative: The insanity of starting a war with North Korea

Cato: This threat of a trade war is the opposite of “drain the swamp”

The Verge: ‘Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You’ is a morally challenging game about surveillance

Aeon: Stranger than sci-fi: How limbs can get a mind of their own

New York Daily News: Palantir, the company that knows too much

CNBC: ‘Red Sparrow’ was an actual phenomenon during the Cold War

Washington Examiner: Nunes breaks with Trump, welcomes DOJ inspector general investigation into FISA abuse allegations

Jerusalem Post: Israel developing cutting-edge artificial intelligence crime-fighting tools

PJ Media: Were Cuban ‘sonic attacks’ on US embassy due to malfunctioning surveillance gear?

CBS: Daniel Ellsberg on ‘Doomsday Machine’ and threat of nuclear conflict

Truthdig: Is MSNBC now the most dangerous warmonger network?

Reason: Why it’s so hard to get pervs out of politics

Intellectual Takeout: Lack of police accountability shows the “social contract” isn’t working

Activist Post: Technocracy could reign supreme after the death of alternative media

High Times: You can be killed for weed in these countries

Astronomy: What does it look like near a black hole?

ACLU: TSA tests see-through scanners on public in New York’s Penn Station

The Federalist: Did Fusion GPS’s anti-Trump researcher avoid surveillance with ham radio?

Metro Times: The ACLU has some questions about the Project Green Light surveillance program

Reason: How government lost the crypto wars (for now)

Also Reason: Trump the “big Second Amendment person” becomes “Trump the gun grabber”

Mashable: Why social media surveillance isn’t the answer to shootings

The Hill: Warrantless surveillance a big disadvantage for US tech sector

JAMES BOVARD: Hollywood hoopla ignores the media’s history of servility to government

DAVID HARSANYI: Public-sector unions deserve to be destroyed

TheNextWeb: European researchers teach robots to anticipate human movements

Bloomberg: FBI may follow CIA, Pentagon with colossal commercial Cloud contract

City Journal: The anti-free speech mob comes to Britain

Activist Post: Court decision could lead to EPA banning water fluoridation

High Times: Cannabis activism group selling “Jeff Sessions” rolling paper

We are living, not merely in the age of rapid development in total surveillance technology, but also of monolithic, sanctimonious, corporate condescension from the creators of that technology, and nothing augurs its arrival more than Google’s adoption of the nebulous motto, “Don’t be evil”.  A deceptively simple formula that might ease the conscience of the oompa loompas of total surveillance, but it’s nothing new, as it has similarly eased the consciences of butchers and jailers since dawn of time.

Evil, as beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.  China’s government probably views “evil” in a much different light than, say, Albert Jay Nock, Friedrich Hayek, or the inhabitants of Tibet.  Hitler opposed what he saw as evil, so did Stalin.  And so did Mao. Our government has done the same, to the Plains Indians, the Vietnamese, and the citizens of the Middle East.

Really, history is nothing more than a record of evil acts committed in the name of defeating some imagined evil.

It should be alarming to us that the architects of the Surveillance State have anchored their moral compass to such a dangerously ambiguous creed.

Oxygen: NYPD faces criticism after using secret facial recognition program

The Intercept: The powerful global spy alliance you never knew existed: “The “SIGINT Seniors” is a spy agency coalition that meets annually to collaborate on global security issues. It has two divisions, each focusing on different parts of the world: SIGINT Seniors Europe and SIGINT Seniors Pacific. Both are led by the U.S. National Security Agency, and together they include representatives from at least 17 other countries. Members of the group are from spy agencies that eavesdrop on communications – a practice known as “signals intelligence,” or SIGINT.”

The Guardian: MI5 agents can commit crime in UK, government reveals: “MI5 agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged for the first time.The prime minister was on Thursday forced to publish the text of a direction to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, the spying watchdog, on governing “security service participation in criminality”.It instructs the IPCO to oversee the participation of MI5 agents in criminal activity, which was previously conducted by the now-defunct office of the Intelligence Services Commissioner, under a secret order referred to as the “third direction”. However, guidance about when British spies can commit crimes, and how far they can go, remains confidential.”

More UK news: Silicon: High court urged to force urgent changes to surveillance law

Activist Post: The weaponization of social media

The Strategist: China’s big-data Big Brother

Defense News: What is DARPA doing in the Ukraine?

Techdirt: Government says FISA court should stop wasting time considering the ACLU’s request for greater transparency

The Australian: US steps up arms sales to the Ukraine with 210 anti-tank missiles

FederalNewsRadio: DARPA: Next-gen artificial intelligence in the works

The Week: The dishonest pretext for Trump’s trade war

Live Science: A single psychedelic drug trip can change your personality for years

Air&Space: The crash that doomed Henry Ford’s flying car

MintPressNews: Inside the concerted attempt to discredit Wikileaks as a reliable option for whistleblowers

The Intercept: Norway used NSA tech for potentially illegal spying

CityLab: How cities are fighting secret surveillance

Daily Mail: State surveillance and mugshot images of MLK and civil rights movement used to intimidate activists

ACLU: Detroit police are playing Big Brother at local businesses

Activist Post: Rental cars to use facial recognition to spy on your vacation

Interesting perspective on upcoming SCOTUS decision: The Hill: Do we really need a new Constitutional amendment to protect privacy online?

LA Times: Pentagon’s new problem after years of crying poverty: Spending all that cash

This means the Pentagon is probably already testing this crap on us: DARPA Pentagon lab worries about CRISPR bioattack as China eyes genome lead

Shortlist: Facebook has a creepy data file on you.  Here’s how to see it.

National Review: Public sector unions’ First Amendment exception must end

Reason: Ben Carson spent $31,000 on a dining table, and 5 other times Trump cabinet members wasted your money