Friday, October 26, 2012

But I'M not being SPIED on, right? (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Sonali Kolhatkar, UprisingRadio.org (Oct. 25, 2012, KPFK.org)
Kilroy is watching: "fusion centers" gather info to facilitate homeland spying (American Dad).

 
Hostess Sonali Kolhatkar (So-nah-lee Coal-hat-car) invites the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (bordc.org) Shahid Buttar to discuss privacy in America.

While dwindling civil liberties were a serious issue during the tenure of Pres. G.W. Bush [now in his third term in the guise of B.S. Obama, who has done more to solidify Bush’s draconian gains than Dick Cheney ever could have].
  
"We only burn villages to save them."
The past three terms saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Now there is little public discourse about ongoing infringements on the rights we once took for granted.
  
The Obama administration has largely continued and, in some arenas, expanded on Bush-era intrusions into American lives via warrantless wiretapping and other secret initiatives of the National Security Agency (NSA) and through “fusion centers” scattered throughout the country.
Social media aids and abets spying by design.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently issued a scathing report on fusion centers saying that, while the Department of Homeland Security has spent billions of dollars on them, the centers have actually produced “useless, irrelevant, or inappropriate intelligence reporting.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano called these fusion centers “one of the centerpieces” of her department’s counter-terrorism efforts.
   
Constitutional and privacy advocates have added their concerns to those of the Senate Panel, asserting that fusion centers violate everyone’s privacy.
  
Many city governments also think so: The Berkeley City Council recently voted to limit their local police department’s collaboration with a fusion center. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has been accused of violating civil liberties by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for feeding reports into a local fusion center. More

Inside the real NSA? Its vast underground facilities are never shown to public (Reuters).

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