Tag Archives | Surveillance

My 2003 piece: Surveillance State – from American Conservative

Here’s a 2003 piece from the American Conservative on out-of-control government surveillance. This was the first piece I wrote for them (the magazine was launched the previous Fall).  The editing process went more smoothly with subsequent pieces I wrote for them. 🙂 My original final paragraph: Three months after 9/11, Ashcroft announced: “To those who […]

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The American Spectator

My 2000 Article: The Rise of the Surveillance State

The American Spectator reposted online this morning a piece I wrote for them 13 years ago on the proliferation of government surveillance.  I included some of this in my 2000 book, Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years.  If memory serves, reviewers denounced my paranoia on surveillance issue […]

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warrantless-wiretapping_02

Latest Wiretap Scandal Part of Long Pattern

So Verizon has been ordered to deliver to the feds the calling records of all its customers.   Appalling but not surprising. Here’s a 2006 piece I wrote on the burgeoning wiretapping scandals for American Conservative.  Here’s a few highlights: * The latest revelations are simply one in a series of revelations of the feds […]

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Obama Muffes Title of Born-Again Privacy Champion

Reuters reports that the Obama folks will soon permit far more exploitation of the financial data the feds have vacuumed up: – The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, […]

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Dilbert Solves the Patriot Act Mystery?

  We learned in the last few weeks that a secret ruling exists which permits the federal agencies to violate far more Americans’ rights under a twisted interpretation of the Patriot Act. Are the feds using smart phones to track millions of Americans?

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New U.S. Government Motto: Controlling Us to Secure Us

“If you don’t have control of the population, you can’t secure the population,” according to Brig. Gen. Frederick Hodges, director of operations for the NATO regional command in southern Afghanistan. The front-page Washington Post piece with the above quote deals with Kandahar. But it is also the motto for the U.S. government’s approach to the […]

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