Be horrified - and ask why it is necessary at all. The ever-increasing intrusion into our lives as we all go about our daily "ordinary" business ought to be resisted.
"US government-owned airplanes that can cover most of the continental United States are covertly flying around the country, spying on tens of thousands of innocent people’s cellphones. It sounds like a movie plot, but in a remarkable report published on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal exposed that these spy planes are part of an actual mass surveillance program overseen by the Justice Department (DOJ). And it’s been kept secret from the public for years.
The Journal explained that the US Marshals Service, a sub-agency under DOJ’s control, has a small fleet of Cessna airplanes that are currently armed with high-tech surveillance gear called “dirtboxes” – essentially fake cell towers tricking your phone into connecting to them – that can vacuum the identifying information and location of ten of thousands of phones in a single flight.
The Marshalls allegedly use the mass spying planes to locate suspects, but of course the vast, vast majority of phones they end up spying on belong to completely innocent individuals. Per the Journal’s Devlin Barrett:
Continue reading this piece from The Guardian here.
And then there is this - as reported on CommonDreams:
"Undercover operations, once the domain of the FBI, have expanded to "virtually every corner of the federal government," a New York Times investigation published Saturday found—and the scope of those missions has become so wide that it risks abusing civil liberties and possible entrapment of targets.
Officers from at least 40 agencies played various roles in the operations—student protesters, doctors, business people, and welfare recipients among them—to investigate "wrongdoing," according to the Times. At the Internal Revenue Service, for example, officers posed as accountants to investigate tax evasion."
"US government-owned airplanes that can cover most of the continental United States are covertly flying around the country, spying on tens of thousands of innocent people’s cellphones. It sounds like a movie plot, but in a remarkable report published on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal exposed that these spy planes are part of an actual mass surveillance program overseen by the Justice Department (DOJ). And it’s been kept secret from the public for years.
The Journal explained that the US Marshals Service, a sub-agency under DOJ’s control, has a small fleet of Cessna airplanes that are currently armed with high-tech surveillance gear called “dirtboxes” – essentially fake cell towers tricking your phone into connecting to them – that can vacuum the identifying information and location of ten of thousands of phones in a single flight.
The Marshalls allegedly use the mass spying planes to locate suspects, but of course the vast, vast majority of phones they end up spying on belong to completely innocent individuals. Per the Journal’s Devlin Barrett:
The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program."
Continue reading this piece from The Guardian here.
And then there is this - as reported on CommonDreams:
"Undercover operations, once the domain of the FBI, have expanded to "virtually every corner of the federal government," a New York Times investigation published Saturday found—and the scope of those missions has become so wide that it risks abusing civil liberties and possible entrapment of targets.
Officers from at least 40 agencies played various roles in the operations—student protesters, doctors, business people, and welfare recipients among them—to investigate "wrongdoing," according to the Times. At the Internal Revenue Service, for example, officers posed as accountants to investigate tax evasion."
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