Finally! Some pushback against NSA spying
The Michigan government passed a landmark law in June that received very little media attention. It is mostly a symbolic law, but in this case the symbolism is important.
According to Michigan’s Fourth Amendment Rights Protection Act, also known as Public Act 71 of 2018, state and local governments can only assist or provide support to the federal government’s collection of data if there is a search warrant or the informed consent of the targeted party. The bill is set to take effect in just a few weeks on June 17th.
...“This new law guarantees no state resources will be used to help the federal government execute mass warrantless surveillance programs that violate the Fourth Amendment protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” Howrylak said soon after the bill was first passed earlier this year in March.“Michigan will not assist the federal government with any data collection unless it is consistent with the constitution,” he added.
...The only state to have passed a bill similar to Michigan’s is California, which passed the Fourth Amendment Protection Act in 2014. However, that piece of legislation protects the Fourth Amendment in name only as it bans local assistance “in response to a request from a federal agency” and “if the state has actual knowledge that the request constitutes an illegal or unconstitutional collection.”
In most cases the federal government doesn't need local assistance to violate your fourth amendment rights, but if every state passed a similar law it would both send a powerful political message, and it would cause a considerable drain on the domestic spying agencies resources.
Consider the current state of America in which a law must be passed to require authorities must act "consistent with the constitution".
Five years later, Snowden's whistleblowing is still having positive effects in the world.
GCHQ’s methods for bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights has ruled.But the ECHR found that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal, and it explicitly confirmed that bulk interception with tighter safeguards was permissible.
The ruling, which follows Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing revelations, is a comprehensive assessment by the ECHR of interception operations carried out until recently by UK intelligence agencies.
Unfortunately, unlike Europe, when Snowden's revelations finally made it to the U.S. courts, our legal system bent over backwards to protect domestic spying.
Overall this has been a bad year for fourth amendment rights.
It started with a bipartisan expansion of domestic spying.
Even before that, the NSA was dramatically expanding their spying on us.
The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon last year — more than three times what it collected in 2016, a new report revealed on Friday.
...
The new report — an annual set of surveillance-related statistics issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — did not explain why the number of records increased so dramatically.
This massive expansion of domestic spying happened even while the NSA admitted they were breaking their own rules, again.
We badly need more pushback against the abuse of our civil right in this country, and fighting back appears to be immensely popular in a bipartisan way. It looks like a political opportunity for any party that would take up the fight.
Comments
Kavanaugh's position on government spying did engender
some objections from the right. But the D's relentless IdPol made sure that things continued in the approved left v. right channels. Sigh.
chuck utzman
TULSI 2020
That's funny. All I saw was center-right vs far-right.
Meanwhile, the left in the 'Murican Empire has yet to exist.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Great diary gjohn!
Unfortunately, you are both right and wrong imho.
The federal government doesn't give a shit about states rights unless there's a corruptible local government already in place as in Michigan.
As far as a drain on government agencies resources, not to worry. They'll get all the money they need to do the will of the
peopleplutocratsRegardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
@Pricknick Actually, the federal
Actually, the federal government's "resources" sit right alongside the state resources in the "Primary" Fusion Centers in virtually every state in the U.S. (as well as Puerto Rico and Guam). The Federal Government circumvents vitrually ALL of these U.S. (constitutional) privacy laws in a myriad of ways, not the least of which being by placing federal intellgence (NSA, etc.) employees throughout the U.S. (domestic) Fusion Center Network.
1.) Our federal government originally established this "workaround" ("perfectly legal" end-run, so to speak) via their international participation in the Five Eyes Network.* (Thousands of NSA employees are working out of GCHQ headquarters in Great Britain, as well as similar intelligence agencies in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, not to mention, less officially, in many other countries, worldwide.) Now, this same ("capture everything") surveillance mentality is pervasive at the local level, right here in the U.S. So, state laws really don't apply to federal employees at "state run" fusion centers. (Read the links in this post for more on this conveniently overlooked fact.)
2.) These domestic surveillance operations/capabilities are ALSO available--both indirectly, and often directly--to virtually every police department in the U.S. via their respective participation in the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force ("JTTF"). The JTTF is comprised of many federal agencies, including but not limited to:
Virtually all major police entites in our country directly participate in these programs with their own personnel, jointly assigned/appointed to do same.
And, somehow, "terrorism" is now, in fact, anything related to any crime ("criminal investigation"), potential or otherwise. So, today, it includes the reality that most political groups--and even blogs--in this country are surveilled by this infrastructure, partially described in this lengthy comment.
3.) On top of items "1" and "2," noted above, there's AT&T's Hemisphere Project, run by the DEA and (also directly) under the auspices of the White House Drug Czar.
Summing it all up, any public information anyone in the U.S. consumes regarding the ongoing government charade about "protection of personal privacy rights at the state level" is, very simply, FICTION.
Furthermore, virtually every employee of virtually every state('s) police entity and major city police organization in the U.S. knows these greater truths, too.
*=Actually, the Five Eyes program is just one of many international cooperative surveillance agreements in which the U.S. participates. There's the "Nine Eyes" Program, and the "Fourteen Eyes" Agreement, etc., etc. The major reasons these additional agreements exist are--just like the original Five Eyes program--to circumvent their respective countries' privacy laws.
"Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." --Hunter S. Thompson
In fairness to California, it did pass the first law
and four years before the only other state to pass a similar law. I have a feeling it will go as broad as any other state, if its citizens show the slightest interest.
A federal bill has a difficult time becoming law unless it has at least some bipartisan support and almost any substantive bill that gets bipartisan support is a bill I'd rather had not become law. This seems especially so of bills marketed as "reform" bills. An example is Clinton's alleged welfare reform bill, for which the owners of gofundme and similar websites must be grateful. (Who knew welfare could be privatized? Thanks, Bubba.)
So, I am starting to think that something that I'd always associated with Jim Crow and Republicans might not be such a bad idea, in the wake of Democratic Republicans and Republican Republicans: namely, leaving more to the states and leaving the states with more money to work with.
Having to move from one state to another is a heck of a lot easier than having to leave the country. Then again, maybe it's just really politicians in general that suck, federal, state, local and foreign.
hola, jtc: am i gas-lighting myself...
or have you swapped the old three-column format that was then..two column back to the old way?
sorry for the OT, gjonist, but given that 'recent comments' are left-paged, it was the only way i could inquire. did anyone else notice, or am i just another nutbar?
Yes, I switched to 2 sidebars...
for site performance purposes (faster page load speeds) and the narrower body column in the middle is easier to read.
The recent comments are still in the left sidebar where they always were.
thanks for explaining,
and i admit i'd thought the recent comments list had been disappeared. apparently i just never scrolled down far enough.
2 Qs: will the wide white margins on either side stay as they are? will tweets and videos appear smaller than they used to?
Yes...
the white margins on the side will stay.
The images and videos are responsive so they will be a bit smaller because the total width of the content body area is smaller. They are fluid, so as the body width changes so do the responsive elements.
As for tweets the blockquote box around the box may be a bit narrower but the text is the same size as always therefore the blockquote box may be longer to make up for the loss of width.
All in all the smaller content size in the middle is easier to read because your eyes don't have to travel as much to read it.
i appreciate
your answering. i reckon we'll all get used to it...in time. old dog, new tricks here for me. ; )
One of the reasons I turned against Merkel & her grand coalition
in Germany was disgust with her government’s spineless reaction to the NSA spying scandal.
Even the fact that the NSA was spying on her directly, along with other German ministries and agencies, didn’t — aside from a few feeble remarks of fake indignation — seem to “bug” her (pun intended) in the slightest.
Her Christian Democrat party and her Social Democrat coalition partners proceeded to stage a lackadaisical, perfunctory parliamentary investigation in which they used their coalition’s super-majority to whitewash the whole affair.
A demand from the opposition that Snowden be granted safe passage to Germany to allow the Bundestag to depose him as an expert witness, was of course declined.
Merkel, sorry to say, reprises the Tony Blair lapdog role all too well.