December 2011
27 posts
November 2011
26 posts
“Using Palantir technology, the FBI can now instantly compile thorough dossiers on U.S. citizens, tying together surveillance video outside a drugstore with credit-card transactions, cell-phone call records, e-mails, airplane travel records, and Web search information. Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, worries that Palantir will make these agencies ever hungrier consumers of every piece of personal data. “I don’t think Palantir the firm is evil,” he says. “I think their clients could be using it for evil things.”
—Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon - BusinessWeek
STOP the NDAA Bill authorizing the indefinite capture & detention of U.S. citizens, even on U.S. soil
Starting TODAY, the U.S. Senate will begin voting on amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a crucial piece of legislation that gives our men and women in uniform the tools they need to protect Americans here and abroad.
But there’s a problem. Within this year’s NDAA bill are problematic new provisions that could allow the U.S. military to capture and indefinitely detain American citizens, even here on U.S. soil.
In our rush to reauthorize important defense provisions, I believe we are threatening to undercut the very principles provided to every American under the Constitution. That’s why I’m leading the effort to amend the NDAA to remove these dangerous provisions that could harm our national security. My amendment would ensure that we don’t rush into adopting new laws that could reduce our ability to effectively combat terrorism or threaten the constitutional liberties that we hold dear.
I believe we must provide our government with the tools and flexibility it needs to keep Americans safe, but I also know there’s a way to do it that doesn’t threaten the freedoms of law-abiding citizens.
Please sign to support the Udall amendment to strip out these dangerous detainee provisions.
These new regulations would make the U.S. military the judge, jury, and jailer of terrorism suspects and could prevent the FBI and state and local law enforcement from participating in the investigation. President Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and many civil liberties groups and national security experts oppose this unwise course of action.
Even worse, advocates for these days-old provisions are rushing them through the Senate without even holding a hearing or getting valuable input from the Department of Defense. We’ve seen before what happens if we rush too quickly to change our laws in the name of protecting national security. We cannot afford to make such problematic policy changes without fully understanding what the consequences would be to the American people and to protecting our national security.
-from Mark Udall (D) Colorado
Lovely Day
Bill Withers
“Lovely Day,” Bill Withers
Play
The London River Park: place for the people or a private playground? →
guardian.co.uk
on the honesty of language in considering pseudo-public spaces and the urban landscape
“Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional super committee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.”
—Chris Hedges (via azspot)
