Do You Fear the National Security Agency Surveilling You?

I am befuddled by all the faux outrage in the online media bout the National Security Agency spying on us via our internet behavior and telephone calls.  Should we really be surprised by any of this?  After all, this sort of panopticonic staring by self-anointed government elites is nothing new.

Let’s take a quick Boles Blogs trip back through time to examine our intrepid reporting on this matter of the NSA spying on us.  We begin on June 30, 2006 — You are an Electronic Jigsaw Puzzle:

It’s horrifyingly fascinating how this government effort to connect all our dots appears to be orchestrated in pieces using separate private companies to deter detection of a non-severed surreptitious intent — banks for banking records; conservative ownership of personal web portals for access to MySpace data; internet providers who reply upon government regulation to stay in business are required to help monitor and analyze internet traffic patterns and process email keyword triggers — leads the cogent among us to question who we really are and if we actually own a right to any sort of privacy whatsoever.

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Peppering the Surveillance Shaker

For the price of a US dollar, our Panopticonic universe just became a little smaller — or larger if you’re a fan of being spied upon by strangers — with the release of “Surveillance Shaker” a new iPhone App that now lets you, with the shake of your iPhone, silently surveil the world without the watched knowing you’re watching.

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Respected UK Trust Slams Government Databases

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

Sunday Times journalist David Leppard has given an important pointer to an upcoming political tug-of-war in the UK. The Jospeh Rowntree Foundation (an important ‘liberty & democracy’ campaigning funder) has produced a report – published on Monday the 23rd of March – that slams the myriad of Government-sponsored ‘giant databases’ that exist or are planned for implementation in the UK.

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Modern Liberty and Sectarian UK ID Card Schemes

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

On Saturday the 28th of February at the Institute of Education in London, the UK consensus on a fight-back against intrusions into privacy finally gets going with the inaugural Convention on Modern Liberty.

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Digital Britain and the Privacy Theory

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

As our society shapes itself around speedier and speedier flows of information – some of it useful, some of it not, much of it with only entertainment value – it could be that our legal frameworks, both sides of the Atlantic, will see developments that entail a ‘democratisation’ of democracy itself.

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Surveilling the New Information Minority

Jamie Grace wrote this article.

I’d like to put forward the idea that by using surveillance and monitoring in our society as we progress through the Information Age we are creating new ‘information minorities’ – not those who are the least monitored and overwatched, those who are subject to the most surveillance and scrutiny, for whatever reason: state security, criminal justice, politics or ‘research.’

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Watching Out For You On Liberty Island

If the NYPD Harlem Panopticon wasn’t enough of an intrusion for you into your private life, don’t step foot on Liberty Island to visit the Statue of Liberty if you hope to preserve the remaining tatters of your anonymity:

Continue reading → Watching Out For You On Liberty Island