Dispatches from a Small Business
Posts tagged ‘surveillance’
This, or something like it, seems to be the most popular new sign in London:
I don’t know if it is clear from this picture, but I counted 7 cameras on this building in about a 50 40 yard stretch (just above the first floor windows, click to enlarge):
Apparently the NSA is under some heat for proposing to monitor the communications of a member of Congress thought to be meeting with terrorist suspects:
While the N.S.A.’s operations in recent months have come under examination, new details are also emerging about earlier domestic-surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip, current and former intelligence officials said. . . .
The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.
The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.
I have a counter idea. Why don’t we monitor all the communications of all of Congress all the time and post it on a web site. If they want to exercise ultimate power over us, we can then exercise ultimate scrutiny over them. Unfortunately, in the world of the future, Congress is likely to be the only group exempted from monitoring.
Unchecked executive power seems to be a bad thing only when weilded by the other guy:
The Obama administration is again invoking government secrecy in defending the Bush administration’s wiretapping program, this time against a lawsuit by AT&T customers who claim federal agents illegally intercepted their phone calls and gained access to their records.
Disclosure of the information sought by the customers, “which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security,” Justice Department lawyers said in papers filed Friday in San Francisco.
Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a lawyer for the customers, said Monday the filing was disappointing in light of the Obama presidential campaign’s “unceasing criticism of Bush-era secrecy and promise for more transparency.”
“Trust Me” is not supposed to be the defining principle in the Constitution for the excercise of power.
Every defining attribute of Bush’s radical secrecy powers — every one — is found here, and in exactly the same tone and with the exact same mindset. Thus: how the U.S. government eavesdrops on its citizens is too secret to allow a court to determine its legality. We must just blindly accept the claims from the President’s DNI that we will all be endangered if we allow courts to determine the legality of the President’s actions. Even confirming or denying already publicly known facts — such as the involvement of the telecoms and the massive data-mining programs — would be too damaging to national security. Why? Because the DNI says so. It is not merely specific documents, but entire lawsuits, that must be dismissed in advance as soon as the privilege is asserted because “its very subject matter would inherently risk or require the disclosure of state secrets.”
What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face. It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior. As EFF’s Bankston put it: “President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties. But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a “secret” that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”
I am always ready to criticize the US and our steady slide into police state tactics against our own citizens. But I think that those who have some rosy picture of European countries being some sort of civil liberties ideal towards which we should aspire are mis-informed. Granted that a number of these countries have more sensible attitudes both towards drugs as well as sexual relationships that don’t fit a biblical script, but their state police forces have powers over their citizenry we (at least not yet) don’t tolerate.
Today’s object lesson is Britain:
For the past couple of years the British government has been extremely aggressive in installing surveillance cameras — CCTV on high streets, speeding cameras on highways, and so on. If you are a typical British citizen, your actions are captured on camera hundreds of times a day, and you can be watched with suspicion even without the government having any probable cause reason to suspect you of anything. Relatedly, they have also been challenging people taking pictures in public, and have recently essentially made it illegal to take pictures of police officers (with the justification being the possibility of terrorist abduction of officers). The erosion of civil liberties in Britain has been short and sharp.
Now some local authorities are witholding liquor licences from pub owners unless they agree to install CCTV inside the pub. One striking recent example is The Draper’s Arms in Islington, a borough of London. As the Londonist notes:
Nick Gibson is attempting to re-open The Draper’s Arms on Barnsbury Street, a former Evening Standard pub of the year winner that shut its doors last August. But to regain a licence, he’s been told he must fit CCTV cameras that capture the head and shoulders of everyone entering the pub, and be willing to hand over footage whenever the police ask for it.
Gibson is furious at what he sees as erosion of civil liberties. However, his local MP and the Metropolitan Police keep blithely citing ‘public safety’. We find that a bit rich, considering studies have shown CCTV is less effective than increased street lighting at cutting crime, and CCTV footage is used to help solve just 3% of London robberies.
