are reporters terrorists?

Apparently so. As are Americans who travel in the Middle East. As are Red Cross and other aid workers. As are soldiers who call home.

ABC news reports that their phone calls between Americans have been monitored by the NSA, contrary to law and contrary to what they’ve previously asserted – that the only phone calls being monitored are between Americans and suspected terrorists.

The practice came to light because two intercept operators grew uncomfortable listening in on hundreds of private, often intimate conversations between Americans. Operators were sharing especially salacious ones – which reminded me of the weird frat-boy flavor of some of the Abu Ghraib photos. It’s almost as if YouTube has insensitized us to the idea of privacy. But what’s more troubling is that the NSA continued to track phone calls of aid workers and journalists – this wasn’t just an “oops” mistake, it was deliberate.

Will Congress actually take action? I’m not holding my breath. They already passed a law to excuse the government for previous illegal wiretapping.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. George Orwell, 1984.

tabling at the farmers market, exposed!

Scott McLemee’s latest essay is a good one. He writes the “intellectual affairs” column for Inside Higher Ed and often ruminates on books, trends in theory, or ideas that crop up in the news but have an iceberg-like past that’s invisible to most of us. This time he ties together the “red squad” surveillance of C.L.R. James in the 1950s, the Cointelpro shenanigans of the 1970s, and the recent release of documents describing the careful surveillance of people who were plotting against capital punishment. Planning leaflets. Tabling at a farmer’s market. Seditious stuff. And – as he always does – McLemee hearkens back to a classic article in a scholarly journal on the nature of agents provacateur and informants.

The redacted report of the police agent describes the surveilled as “socialists,” “anarchists,” and “terrorists” as if these are interchangeable categories. Nothing documented by the undercover officer was even faintly illegal or reason to take precautions to protect public safety. McLemee is right to call this “Patriot Act sensibilities at their most deranged.” But though it seems laughable, it’s important to recognize the fundamental illegality of those portions of the Patriot Act that enable this bizarre and dangerous waste of time. The Constitution has a way of cutting through the bullshit. And on this subject it’s quite clear:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The report from the surveillance is here, all 46 trivial pages of it.

our tax dollars at work (but no thanks)

City Pages has a story about planning for the RNC in the Twin Cities. The FBI is recruiting folks to infiltrate vegan potlucks so the authorities can be aware of protests before they happen. They couldn’t get anyone from the Joint Terrorism Taskforce to comment (not surprisingly) to comment for the story, but it’s not hard to believe. It’s happened before.

read all about it – now that it’s declassified

The infamous John Yoo legal  memorandum justifying  treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has finally been declassified. You can read the whole, sorry thing now, though not too long ago it was just too sensitive. Turns out it’s just too damn stupid, so poorly reasoned the feds abandoned it. Thanks to the ACLU it’s finally seeing the light of day.

Today the Pentagon has also decided to rethink its intelligence unit. Remember when “military intelligence” was the classic example of an oxymoron? And remember when we thought having the military spy on dissidents was unconstitutional?

Looks as if “constitutional” may be coming back in fashion.

privacy is not for its own sake

I have often had to explain librarians’ knee-jerk protection of privacy, because it can seem like such a peculiar passion. Is it such a big deal to know who read what? How can that impact identity theft, or anything else important? But it’s not about privacy. It’s about the freedom to read whatever you want without fear of penalty. Privacy is not important in itself, simply as a necessary condition for intellectual freedom.

Julian Sanchez has a great piece in the LA Times making a similar shift in the terms of argument. The battle over warantless wiretapping isn’t about privacy, per se. It’s about having the freedom to dissent, about having a society in which lawful dissent is not penalized or threatened by those in power.

Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can — and repeatedly have — abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.” . . .

Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.

I’ve heard from officials, so many times “oh, come on. We don’t care if you’re reading the latest James Patterson.” Of course you don’t. But that’s NOT THE POINT! You’re simply trying to trivialize the issue and appeal to “common sense.” We don’t care about your phone calls. You only need to worry if you’re a terrorist. Or if you’re opposed to the war, or concerned about the environment, or planning to offer sanctuary to undocumented workers in your church. It’s worthwhile to read the Church Committee Report – because it is a perfect predictor of what’s going on today, describing illegal activities uncovered after Watergate that lead up to the FISA laws that officials today are trying to overturn.

Trust us? No, I don’t think so.

Two Cheers!

The House has backbone! Yay for them! Even after an extraordinary secret session, they stood up to a lot of pressure and passed a bill that does not let telecoms off the hook for breaking the law just because the administration said it was legal. It wasn’t, and “I was just following orders” isn’t a defense, even when the president says it’s okay. I mean, Nixon told those plumbers B&E was legal. Bleeep! wrong answer.

Why only two cheers? Well, the bill still broadens the powers to spy beyond what is necessary. Still, I can’t help cheering. There haven’t been many reasons to cheer for our elected representatives since the last election.

The Senate will probably take it to pieces, and even if they don’t, the president will likely veto it, just like he vetoed a bill that instructed the CIA to stop using torture, and there weren’t enough votes to override. So it’s symbolic. But even symbols are better than rolling over and playing dead.

news break: they know you’re a dog

There was a fascinating – and troubling - story in the New York Times yesterday about how search engines and other Internet companies gather and use personal information.

The Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.

Consumers have not complained to any great extent about data collection online. But privacy experts say that is because the collection is invisible to them. Unlike Facebook’s Beacon program, which stirred controversy last year when it broadcast its members’ purchases to their online friends, most companies do not flash a notice on the screen when they collect data about visitors to their sites.

“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”

One impact is that traditional media that have gone online are unable to compete with companies that focus on data-gathering and so are losing out on the advertising revenue stream that used to fund their operations. But what is astonishing to me is the number of “data points” a company might collect – Yahoo collects an average of 811 bits of data about the average visitor each month. (????!!!!) Five corporations collect 336 billion transactions each month. And as they buy up other companies, their data pile grows. This, in spite of discomfort; surveys find 84 – 88% of people feel companies should not use personal information or resell it without opt-in consent. But that’s not what happens.

I found it intriguing (and disturbing) that the government sees this willing sharing of data as an excuse for warrantless wiretapping. In other words, if we let Google do it, we forfeit our expectation of privacy.

(largely cross-posted from the Information Fluency blog)

no to the nonopticon

Siva Vaidhyanathan has an excellent review article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the present state of privacy, and why it matters. (Alec blogged it beautifully over at Librarians at the Gate.) He describes what kinds of relationships we develop that involve our reputations, our shared selves, and then dives into a critical reading of several books on the topic. He suggests we’re now in the age of the “nonpticon” rather than the panopticon – because we cannot see who is watching us. Here’s the rousing coda:

We must demand to know the terms of surveillance by our state and its partners in the private sector. We must be allowed to be agents in the construction of our reputations. We must insist on fairness, openness, and accountability in those institutions that commit such widespread surveillance. Otherwise we will cease being citizens. We will be subjects, mere fodder for our watchers, means instead of ends.

I’m looking forward to his next book, The Googlization of Everything, about which he blogs regularly.

photo courtesy of Mr Ush

Big Business is Watching You

There’s a fascinating post over at In Reference to Murder by BV Lawson (rhymes with awesome) that could give you utopian / dystopian whiplash. She reports on two events, one which highlighted the Open Library which Tim Spalding predicts will replace Amazon in time. I can certainly live with that! But she also reports on a session at another conference on RFID – Radio Frequency ID tags – being used to keep tabs on where books are and which are being picked up in bookstores.

RFID can illuminate customers’ behavior. It can show how they flow through the store, where they stop, what they pick up, which area sells the most, how these things change during the year. As a result, booksellers can design stores “for the way customers behave, not the way you think they behave,” according to Jim Lichtenberg, president of Lightspeed consulting. [Can't you seem some jokester carrying around a copy of War and Peace for an hour, only to put it back before they leave, stopping in-between at the sections on Cookbooks, Computers, and Graphic Novels just to give the trackers a little nyah-nyah fun?]

Critics are wary of the privacy issues involved, although proponents counter this by saying that in the book world tags contain a minimal amount of data and don’t record any personal information, such as who has purchased a book or where the book goes. Hmmm. Haven’t we heard this before?

Pro or con, it may just be a matter of time before it comes to pass. In March or April there will be a big meeting of people in the book business in the U.S. to discuss how to do an RFID pilot that would take place as soon as early 2009, according to insiders.

So, what do you think—is RFID merely another tool to help the publishing industry or one more stone in the pathway heading toward the Big Brother society of tomorrow?

You probably can guess what I think. Please, God, nooooooooo!

fear ye, fear ye!

The New Yorker will have an article in its next issue written by Lawrence Wright which profiles Michael McConnell and his belief that the government must be allowed unexamined access to everything online. All of it. All of those hundreds of offers to increase the size of anatomical parts I don’t have, all the offers for watches which I don’t need, and all the web searches I perform when I really should be working. All of it. Because the only way to keep this nation safe is to ditch the constitution and let the executive branch work without all that balance of powers nonsense. The fourth amendment is just too damned risky in this day and age! Read a preview at Threat Level. And listen to Wright talk about it.