The Alyona Show: Glenn Greenwald: "Zero question we live in a surveillance state."

[stockholmer]

This Monday, Twitter released it's first ever transparency report. It revealed that just in the first six months of 2012, they've received more demands from governments for user data, than all of last year. And surprise, surprise, the United States made up the majority of the 849 requests, with a whopping 679. Alyona talks to Salon's Glenn Greenwald about the growing surveillance state and what can be done about it.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr/18/tsa-mission-creep-us-police-state

The Guardian UK: The TSA's mission creep is making the US a police state. The out-of-control Transportation Security Administration is past patdowns at airports – now it's checkpoints and roadblocks

Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that "If we can't feel your nipples, they must be a bomb", the agency's craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra "If you don't like it, don't fly!" This callous disregard for travelers' rights merely paraphrases the words of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, who shares, with the president, ultimate responsibility for all TSA travesties since 2009. In November 2010, with the groping policy only a few weeks old, Napolitano dismissed complaints by saying "people [who] want to travel by some other means" have that right. (In other words: if you don't like it, don't fly.)

But now TSA is invading travel by other means, too. No surprise, really: as soon as she established groping in airports, Napolitano expressed her desire to expand TSA jurisdiction over all forms of mass transit. In the past year, TSA's snakelike VIPR (Visual Intermodal Prevention and Response) teams have been slithering into more and more bus and train stations – and even running checkpoints on highways – never in response to actual threats, but apparently more in an attempt to live up to the inspirational motto displayed at the TSA's air marshal training center since the agency's inception: "Dominate. Intimidate. Control."

Anyone who rode the bus in Houston, Texas during the 2-10pm shift last Friday faced random bag checks and sweeps by both drug-sniffing dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs (the latter being only canines necessary if "preventing terrorism" were the actual intent of these raids), all courtesy of a joint effort between TSA VIPR nests and three different local and county-level police departments. The new Napolitano doctrine, then: "Show us your papers, show us everything you've got, justify yourself or you're not allowed to go about your everyday business."



Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee praised these violations of her constituents' rights with an explanation asinine even by congressional standards:

"We're looking to make sure that the lady I saw walking with a cane … knows that Metro cares as much about her as we do about building the light rail."

See, if you don't support the random harassment of ordinary people riding the bus to work, you're a callous bastard who doesn't care about little old ladies.

snip

[HopeHoops]

1. "Any society that would sacrifice a little liberty to gain a little security deserves neither...

... and will lose both." - Benjamin Franklin (although variously worded)

[DeSwiss]

2. K&R n/t

[phantom power]

3. There's another problem with the "I have nothing to hide" theory

One day maybe you wake up and discover that the people running your surveillance state have very different opinions about what's right and wrong than you do, and now they're knocking on your door because their surveillance has discovered that you're doing something they don't approve of.