REPUBLIC REBORN

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

Drowning, bicycle accidents, and suicide kill far more kids.  See The Intercept: School shootings have declined dramatically since the 1990’s. Does it really make sense to militarize schools?

National Review’s David French explains the unsettling development.

From, well, The Criminality of the State:

“The weaker the State is, the less power it has to commit crime. Where in Europe today does the State have the best criminal record? Where it is weakest: in Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, Monaco, Andorra. Yet when the Dutch State, for instance, was strong, its criminality was appalling; in Java it massacred 9,000 persons in one morning which is considerably ahead of Hitler’s record or Stalin’s. It would not do the like today, for it could not; the Dutch people do not give it that much power, and would not stand for such conduct. When the Swedish State was a great empire, its record, say from 1660 to 1670, was fearful. What does all this mean but that if you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness — which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe — its criminality may be safely got on with.

So it strikes me that instead of sweating blood over the iniquity of foreign States, my fellow-citizens would do a great deal better by themselves to make sure that the American State is not strong enough to carry out the like iniquities here. The stronger the American State is allowed to grow, the higher its record of criminality will grow, according to its opportunities and temptations. If, then, instead of devoting energy, time, and money to warding off wholly imaginary and fanciful dangers from criminals thousands of miles away, our people turn their patriotic fervor loose on the only source from which danger can proceed, they will be doing their full duty by their country…

…Many now believe that with the rise of the “totalitarian” State the world has entered upon a new era of barbarism. It has not. The totalitarian State is only the State; the kind of thing it does is only what the State has always done with unfailing regularity, if it had the power to do it, wherever and whenever its own aggrandizement made that kind of thing expedient. Give any State like power hereafter, and put it in like circumstances, and it will do precisely the same kind of thing. The State will unfailingly aggrandize itself, if only it has the power, first at the expense of its own citizens, and then at the expense of anyone else in sight. It has always done so, and always will.

…Stripping the American State of the enormous power it has acquired is a full-time job for our citizens and a stirring one; and if they attend to it properly they will have no energy to spare for fighting communism, or for hating Hitler, or for worrying about South America or Spain, or for anything whatever, except what goes on right here in the United States.”

The Dutch massacre Nock refers to is the 1740 Batavia Massacre in present-day Jakarta.

In an era of the rapid growth of surveillance ability by our own government, Nock exposes the true nature of the institution we are allowing to amass such power.  That governments butcher and enslave entire populations is the greatest lesson of history.  And governments always strive to obtain more convenient methods of doing so.  The phenomenon is so bizarrely consistent that you almost wonder whether the human cogs that make up the institution even know what they’re doing, almost like its part of our programming.  Once established, the State begins hoarding power the way a dragon hoards gold. And to ensure a sufficiently subjugated population, one homogeneous enough and malleable enough to hand over power willingly, this institution immediately takes over the education of children.  Every government in history has made the education of the young one of its first priorities. This ‘education’ consists mainly of instructing children to worship the State, through prayers and pledges, and the insistence that the State is a civilizing force, and the expansion of its power is necessary, and inevitable.  In the film Serenity, River Tam’s instructor presented the Alliance to her class as a necessary, civilizing force, and anyone opposed as backwater Neanderthals standing in the way of peace.  But the Alliance was borne out of a succession of bloodbaths, pogroms that cleansed the subdued populations of dissent and rebellion.  So it has been with every State in history.

McClatchy DC: CIA whistleblower loses in court, sparking warning of ‘chill’ for those seeing abuse

The Guardian: ‘Living laboratories’: the Dutch cities amassing data on oblivious residents

The Verge: Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology

Motherboard: Crypto Harlem is teaching digital security to the over-surveilled black community

The Week: The disturbing acceptance of Google’s new ‘smart’ camera

Forbes: Should Silicon Valley take a stand against governments to protect our digital rights?

Bloomberg: More than 30 Trump aides lose top-secret security clearance, sources say

Fox: Controversial aerial surveillance could take off in Baltimore

Non-gated version of yesterday’s article: The sublime and scary future of cameras with AI brains

Financial Times: US spy chiefs look to the UK for guidance in cyber security battle

American Prospect: The dark power of Big Tech

Daily Beast: ‘The Looming Tower’ takes aim at US intelligence agencies for failing to prevent 9/11

If they aren’t obligated to serve and protect the public? Asks Rutherford Institute founder John Whitehead:

“In recent years, Americans have been killed by police merely for standing in a “shooting stance,” holding a cell phone, behaving oddly and holding a baseball bat, opening the front door, running in an aggressive manner holding a tree branch, crawling around naked, hunching over in a defensive posture, wearing dark pants and a basketball jersey, driving while deaf, being homeless, brandishing a shoehorn, holding a garden hose, and peeing outdoors.

So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?

Nothing.”

Indeed.  Police from the neighboring Coral Springs PD arrived at the scene and found four Broward police hiding behind their cruisers outside while the shooting occurred inside.The Coral Springs cops, who did not hesitate to enter the school and provide aid, were reportedly upset to find the first responding cops hiding.

Despite this, US cops had no problem killing 987 citizens in 2017.

Ed: I have rarely proofread the longer posts on here before publishing, but that will change.  Thanks to the several people who pointed out the typos.  Comments can be sent to digitalsunset86@gmail.com

CNBC: Americans’ data privacy could be at stake in case between Microsoft and US government

Business Standard: About to break the law? Chinese cops are on to you with predictive policing

Techdirt: Israeli tech company says it can crack any Apple smartphone

HuffPost South Africa: As we build the ID systems of the future, where does privacy fit in?

Bend Bulletin: Cameras could be getting eerily smart

TomDispatch: The Pentagon budget as corporate welfare for weapons makers

The Intercept: A pound of flesh: The criminalization of private debt

Antimedia: Americans are horrified by mass murder…unless their government is doing it

Fox News: Why are federal salaries a State secret?

Motherboard: Hubble confirms universe is expanding faster than previously thought

Cosmos: Virus visible to the naked eye found in Brazil

Discover: Here’s how some mushrooms became ‘magic’