Police Commissioners exploiting American's fears want drones & more surveillance cameras to spy on us
Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis is pushing for a city-run system of eye-level street surveillance technology and making a case for a dedicated NYPD-style anti-terrorism unit to protect Boston from another soft-target strike like the deadly marathon bombing.
“We need to gather all the information we can as to what happened and make a determination as to the overall commitment the city of Boston has to the threat of terrorism,” Davis said. “That’s very, very important to me. It’s very important to the mayor. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions about that.”
Davis said he would also consider deploying domestic reconnaissance drones to hover above next year’s Boston Marathon.
“Drones are a great idea. I don’t know that would be the first place I’d invest money, but certainly to cover an event like this, and have an eye in the sky that would be much cheaper to run than a helicopter is a really good idea,” he said.
The use of domestic surveillance drones to hunt terrorists in U.S. cities has been hotly debated, but yesterday New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said they were all but inevitable.
Davis said he’s envisioning a partnership between the city and businesses to buy and monitor lower-mounted cameras positioned more strategically to capture people’s faces. He said he has no cost estimate, and that he’s not sure whether he will request additional money or find it within the budget.
http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/davis_arm_us_with_cameras_drones
Three reasons the Boston bombing case should not change our attitudes about privacy:
1. The Boston investigation came to a successful end without needing increased surveillance power. Even if you accept the necessity of widespread surveillance, there's no sign that there wasn't enough of it. The public spaces of Boston were already filled with enough private cameras to close the net on the suspects. Ubiquitous public cameras—watched always by officials with power over us—raise obvious problems, as the American Civil Liberties Union has noted, of criminal abuse, institutional abuse, personal abuse on the part of officials, discrimination, and rampant voyeurism.
2. The Boston bombing does not represent an unprecedented mortal threat requiring unprecedented police powers. Bombings in America were slightly more common in the 1990s than after the War on Terror launched in 2001. Farther back—yet still within living memory—domestic bombings were almost a daily occurrence. In 1969 and 1970, over a thousand explosive or incendiary bombs were set off in the U.S. More recently, in 1975, terror groups from the Weather Underground to the Puerto Rican separatists of the FALN carried out several public bombings, including at a popular New York restaurant (four dead), the LaGuardia Airport baggage claim (11 dead), and the U.S. State Department (no casualties).
Bomb violence, like gun violence, is much less common in the U.S. today than it was in the recent past—a past we survived without turning the country into a fishbowl for police.
3. Universal surveillance just ain't us. For libertarians who like to reduce all questions of policy or justice to strict property rights, surveillance can be a tricky issue. There is nothing inherently rights-violating about private cameras on private property, and libertarians who aren't anarchists can make a case for government surveillance on public property too. But although it is settled law that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces—and thus no constitutional barrier per se to universal public surveillance—such a notion clearly offends something at the core of the American vision of limited government power.
Americans resonate to slogans such as "Give me liberty or give me death" and "Don't tread on me," and our Constitution deliberately limits government authority. We are the land of the free and home of the brave, not the land of the watched and home of the scared. The eagle on our national seal does not clutch a banner reading "Only the Guilty Have Reason to Fear."
Universal surveillance is a recurring theme in our cultural concept of totalitarian nightmares ("Big Brother is Watching You"), and that says something about our culture. Traditional notions of American dignity reject being watched and searched without a very good reason; and even with that reason, we want constrained methods.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/04/23/three-reasons-the-boston-bombing-case-sh
Drone industry invokes Boston bombings in PR pitch:
In the wake of the Boston bombings, the president of the largest Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) organization wasted no time in pushing for drones - as some predicted those in the industry would.
Michael Toscano, president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said UASs could have provided critical situational awareness for first responders and law enforcement in Boston.
"UAS could be an important tool in the tool kit for first responders in the event of an emergency," he assured US News and World Report. "Whether it is in response to a natural disaster or a tragedy like we saw in Boston, UAS can be quickly deployed to provide first responders with critical situational awareness in areas too dangerous or difficult for manned aircraft to reach. Our industry is working to develop technologies to provide first responders with the best tools possible to do their jobs safely as they work to protect our communities."
This came as no surprise to those worried about the loss of civil liberties and privacy concerns with the use of drones.
Shahid Buttar, the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, predicted this type of action immediately following the bombing. He told Wisconsin Reporter it was only a matter of time before someone used the event to call for drones to help in these types of situations.
http://cnsnews.com/blog/joe-schoffstall/drone-industry-invokes-boston-bombings-pr-pitch
NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly wants more surveillance cameras:
The city’s security “Ring of Steel’’ must be widened, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said yesterday.
Touring the Police Department’s Lower Manhattan Security Initiative — a center where scores of workers scour constant images from 4,000 cameras around town — Kelly said he wants to “increase significantly’’ the amount of surveillance-video equipment feeding into the site.
“We have roughly 4,000 cameras that are monitored in this center,’’ he said, referring to a surveillance system that also includes images from private security cameras.
“I’d like to see that increase significantly and to other boroughs,’’ he said of the coverage. “We’re mostly focused in Manhattan here.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/kelly_more_cameras_8P5Tsi6TpoTnuIB1xOaRMI
Boston search shines spotlight on surveillance cameras:
Ben Wizner, who directs the speech, privacy and technology project at the American Civil Liberties Union, says he doesn't object to the way police used surveillance in Boston.
"I think, in some ways, this is an easy case because when there's a crime of this nature, there's no problem whatsoever for the police to get any kind of permission they need from judges in order to conduct surveillance," Wizner says.
Wizner says that means going to a judge to get a warrant for the images on privately owned cameras or taking advantage of an emergency exception in the law to get that footage more quickly. But he warns that surveillance can go too far.
"The questions that we have are: Do we want a society in which cameras are literally everywhere and we can't walk down the street holding someone's hand without being recorded in a government database? And then, what happens to all of this personal footage, almost all of which does not capture terrorists, when the event has been solved?" he adds.
The ACLU says it wants authorities to be careful about storing those images of innocent people in law enforcement databases with no time limit for erasing them.
http://www.npr.org/2013/04/23/178599913/boston-search-shines-spotlight-on-surveillance-cameras
Reporter asks White House if U.S. airstrikes that kill Afghan civilians qualify as ‘Terrorism’
Matthew Keys, the social media editor at Reuters, posted audio of a reporter asking White House Press Secretary Jay Carney if U.S. bombings that kill innocent civilians in Afghanistan constitute an “act of terror” given the labeling of the Boston Marathon bombing as “terrorism”. She specifically refers to a U.S. airstrike earlier this month that killed 11 children, just the latest in a seemingly endless line of Afghan civilian deaths at the hands of the U.S. government.
Carney completely dodged the questions, pointing instead to the 9/11 terrorist attacks to justify U.S. bombings in Afghanistan. After a long-winded answer excusing U.S. conduct, Carney concludes, “ we take great care in the prosecution of this war.”
Here's the transcription:
REPORTER: I send my deepest condolence to the victims and families in Boston. But President Obama said that what happened in Boston was an act of terrorism. I would like to ask, Do you consider the U.S. bombing on civilians in Afghanistan earlier this month that left 11 children and a woman killed a form of terrorism? Why or why not?
JAY CARNEY: Well, I would have to know more about the incident and then obviously the Department of Defense would have answers to your questions on this matter. We have more than 60,000 U.S. troops involved in a war in Afghanistan, a war that began when the United States was attacked, in an attack that was organized on the soil of Afghanistan by al Qaeda, by Osama bin laden and others and more than 3,000 people were killed in that attack. And it has been the President’s objective once he took office to make clear what our goals are in Afghanistan and that is to disrupt, dismantle and ultimately defeat al Qaeda. And with that as our objective to provide enough assistance to Afghan National Security Forces and the Afghan government to allow them to take over security for themselves. And that process is underway and the United States has withdrawn a substantial number of troops and we are in the process of drowning down further as we hand over security lead to Afghan forces. And it is certainly the case that I refer you to the defense department for details that we take great care in the prosecution of this war and we are very mindful of what our objectives are.
At the very least, this serves as another example of the utter meaninglessness of the word “terrorism”.
http://raniakhalek.com/2013/04/17/reporter-asks-white-house-if-u-s-airstrikes-that-kill-afghan-civilians-qualify-as-terrorism/
Manufacturing hysteria: A history of scapegoating, surveillance, and secrecy in modern America:
Historian and writer Jay Feldman spends little time on the administrations of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, but touches on the George W. Bush years, when the USA Patriot Act was passed and the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, a sophisticated nationwide snitch operation, failed to gain purchase; apparently many Americans balk at the notion of spying on each other.
At the same time, increasing technological sophistication facilitates the systematization of political paranoia and makes surveillance harder to detect. “Manufacturing Hysteria” is a cautionary, liberalizing history – and a book that serves as a philosophical call to arms.
The picture he paints about surveillance, and secrecy in modern America is dark.
Too often politicians and their minions have tried to scare the hell out of the American people in order to advance considerably less exalted goals: the propaganda campaign during World War I aimed at stirring hatred of all things German; the Red Scare of the 1920s engineered by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; the forced deportation of Mexican immigrants during the same decade; the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II;the anti-Communist hysteria whipped up during the late 1940s and early ’50s by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joe McCarthy; the campaign against homosexuals in the State Department during the same period; the Patriot Act and other intrusions on civil liberties in the wake of 9/11; and, most recently, the anti-immigrant frenzy in Arizona. Feldman writes:
“Since World War I, this pattern has played out repeatedly in the United States in periods of real or exaggerated crisis. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have scapegoated ‘dangerous’ minorities — be they ethnic, racial, political, religious, or sexual — citing them as the excuse for using a variety of lawful and unlawful methods to stifle opposition and curb civil liberties. It is most often carried out in the name of national security. . . . Nativism, certainly, had been a force in American life since the early nineteenth century, but it was during World War I that the government established the precedent of manipulating nativist fears as a way of clamping down on civil liberties and curtailing dissent.”
The book is useful because it allows the reader to have the entire history of surveillance & secrecy outlined in a single volume. As more recent events have made plain, the susceptibility of the American populace to appeals based on fear and prejudice has not been eradicated. Indeed, the incredibly mean political mood of the moment leaves no doubt that fear and resentment — of Latino immigrants, of Arabs and Muslims, blacks and of homosexuals — remain powerful resources for unscrupulous politicians, whose numbers have not noticeably diminished since the days of McCarthy.
http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Hysteria-History-Scapegoating-Surveillance/dp/0375425349