U.S.-China Surveillance

As I prepare a paper abstract for submission to an upcoming conference on national intelligence ethics, I’ve been thinking more about the historical context in which new federal standards for US “suspicious activity reporting” (the ISE-SAR) can be understood. Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are an increasingly important tool of “domestic intelligence” distinct from the [...]

I successfully defended my dissertation, “Suspect until Proven Guilty, a problematization of state dossier systems,” late this past August and just recently started work as a post-doc at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication. Now that my dissertation is done and I’ve had time to settle in to my new routine of research and [...]

Former National Security Agency analyst turned whistleblower Russell Tice appeared on Keith Olberman’s Countdown last night, making new claims about the extent of NSA domestic surveillance during the Bush administration. Tice told Olberman that the NSA program was not only much wider than previous revelations suggested, targeting virtually everyone in America, but also that one [...]

Last week, a Supreme Court ruling deserving of much more attention than it has received to date, added to the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections Americans have been suffering since the September 11th attacks. Just how much the ruling has diluted the Fourth Amendment is open to debate, but there is little doubt that [...]

A recent blog post by Hal Roberts at the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises concerns about popular anonymizing and censorship circumvention services DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix selling their individual user data to third parties. In the post, Roberts infers from a curiously-worded FAQ entry at Edoors.com that these three partner services [...]

A federal appeals court in Oregon will hold a hearing next month on a government appeal of a 2007 judicial ruling that said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unconstitutional.
Full story at Secrecy News.

Studying how the U.S. government maintains records on its residents is not a simple matter of identifying “the dossier system” and following its history. According to the GAO, as of 2004, there were more than 122 data mining systems in over 50 government agencies and departments containing personally identifiable information on U.S. citizens. The names [...]

An interesting post in the Financial Times today talks about a new online surveillance trend in China, led by the Beijing-based company TRS Information Technology, that shifts from searching for politically sensitive keywords to “advanced text mining solutions enabling censors to monitor and forecast public opinion.” The article appears to takes a negative view [...]

A new policy for Internet cafe users to register with their real names, announced last March, appears now to be implemented on a widespread basis within the city. First time visitors to a particular Internet cafe locale must have their pictures taken and their national ID cards scanned before sitting down at a terminal. The [...]

The San Franciscos Chronicles’ “TheTech Chronicles,” along with a number of other media outlets, is reporting that Google has will “halve the time it stores logs of user web searches” from 18 to 9 months. Charitably, one could call this a misleading statement, but it really is just plain wrong. Google keeps its search logs [...]