Archive for the 'Police State' Category
What It’s Like When The FBI Asks You To Backdoor Your Software
January 10th, 2014Via: PC Mag: At a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company—Wickr—was making drastic changes to ensure its users’ security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn’t have a backdoor for anyone. As she left the stage, […]
‘A World Made Safe for Selling Mountains of Pointless Junk to Tranquillised Shoppers’
January 7th, 2014Via: Guardian: Until the late 19th century much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes. The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town. Social reformers and democratic movements tore […]
FBI Drops Law Enforcement as ‘Primary’ Mission
January 7th, 2014Via: Foreign Policy: The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now […]
Maniac Cop Gets Only Two Years in Prison for Dozens of Forced Anal Cavity Searches
December 30th, 2013Via: Police State USA: A disgusting scandal involving police officers performing illegal anal cavity searches with the intent to “degrade and humiliate” dozens and dozens of victims has come to an apparent conclusion, which some feel amounts to little more than a slap on the wrists for those involved. Between February 2010 and February 2012, […]
“The bodies of the poor, when they are not captive, are worth little to corporations. But bodies behind bars can each generate $40,000 to $50,000 a year for corporate coffers.”
December 27th, 2013Via: Truthdig: Shares in the Philadelphia-based Aramark Holdings Corp., which contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide the food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, went public Thursday. The corporation, acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs, raised $725 million last week from the sale of the stock. […]
Who Owns the World’s Biggest Bitcoin Wallet? The FBI
December 18th, 2013Via: Wired: Who owns the single largest Bitcoin wallet on the internet? The U.S. government. In September, the FBI shut down the Silk Road online drug marketplace, and it started seizing bitcoins belonging to the Dread Pirate Roberts — the operator of the illicit online marketplace, who they say is an American man named Ross […]
Michigan Prison Guards ‘Did Nothing’ to Stop Adult Prisoners from Raping Juveniles
December 16th, 2013Via: Russia Today: Michigan prison officials needlessly housed juvenile inmates with adult convicts, where the guards then ignored allegations that the young inmates were sexually abused and essentially used as currency inside the facility, according to a new lawsuit. Brought forth by seven unnamed juvenile prisoners, the case hinges on the idea that the Michigan […]
ATF Uses Rogue Tactics in Storefront Stings Across Nation
December 13th, 2013Via: Journal Sentinel: The Journal Sentinel reviewed thousands of pages of court records, police reports and other documents and interviewed dozens of people involved in six ATF operations nationwide that were publicly praised by the ATF in recent years for nabbing violent criminals and making cities safer. Agents with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, […]
What The Government Could Do With All That Location Data
December 10th, 2013Via: ACLU: We now know that the NSA is collecting location information en masse. As we’ve long said, location data is an extremely powerful set of information about people. To flesh out why that is true, here is the kind of future memo that we fear may someday soon be uncovered…
The Criminalization of Everyday Life
December 10th, 2013Via: Tom Dispatch: If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves “solving” social problems (and even […]
