Privacy Matters

In our fear-ridden society, the “Land of the Free” has gone the way of the “Home of the Brave,” according to George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.

Working for an amazing organization like the ACLUm provides many perks, among them great health and dental benefits. I went to the dentist last week and was asked to fill out a bunch of forms. One of them was an acknowledgement of receipt of the dentist's privacy policy, which was attached. Since I'm a data dork, I read the privacy policy. On the top of the second page I found this paragraph, ominously titled "NATIONAL SECURITY:"

It reads: 

Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike should take note. The government thinks your upset could be a terrorism indicator.

Truthout's Jason Leopold ran a story yesterday detailing the FBI's process of "blackballing" FOIA requests. The process has benign reasons to exist, but appears to be used to inappropriately deny FOIA requesters the records they seek.

An FBI spokesman told Leopold what the term means:

Remember those creepy, listening street lights we told you about a while ago? Turns out those aren't the only Orwellian technologies that can listen to you as you walk down the street. An upcoming court case in Massachusetts highlights circumstances in which the police used the "ShotSpotter" to listen to someone shouting on a public street.

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The video above shows DHS customs agents using one of their newly acquired Predator drones monitoring the US border. The agents are operating out of a trailer that has been reconfigured as a drone command center.

The following guest blog was written by Ayesha Kazmi, an independent journalist and researcher with the UK-based human rights organization Cageprisoners.

In 2010, the director of Cageprisoners, former Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg, hired me to work on a project he had been formulating for about a years’ time: How the UK’s anti-terrorism laws affect wider British society. I have been working with Moazzam as my boss for 18 months now.

Today the ACLU of Massachusetts and cooperating attorney Peter Krupp filed a motion to attempt to break down the walls of secrecy surrounding our legal challenge to a Suffolk county subpoena to Twitter. We wrote about the secrecy surrounding the case a few weeks ago; catch up here.