Electronic Frontier Foundation Priorities for 2017

I’ve followed and supported the work of Electronic Frontier Foundation, and will continue to do so with even more energy in coming months and years in light of recent political events. To be fair, my position would not be much different even had Hillary Clinton been elected. The attacks on digital freedoms seem to be a defect of both Democrats and Republicans, as reflected in this recent statement by EFF:

But as EFF has learned in the course of defending our fundamental rights over four American presidencies, our civil liberties need an independent defense force. Free speech and the rights to privacy, transparency, and innovation won’t survive on their own—we’re here to ensure that government is held accountable and in check. Technological progress does not wait for politicians to catch up, and new tools can quickly be misused by aggressive governments. The next four years will be characterized by rapid developments in the fields of artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, connected homes, and smart cities. We welcome innovation, but we also expect to see an explosion of surveillance technologies designed to take advantage of our connected world to spy on all of us and our devices, all the time. That data will be used not only to target individuals but to project and manipulate social behavior. What will our digital rights look like during these uncertain and evolving times? Will our current rights remain intact when the baton is passed on once again? What follows in this EFF article is an excellent articulation of priorities and strategies for preserving digital rights of all Americans.

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Suspect CIA

Why is the US media so hyped up to believe the CIA claims that Russia hacked the US presidential election? Reverse engineering the situation reveals that this belief can be used for various political purposes, even in the absence of credible evidence. It's par for the course these days. This article in The Nation reminds us to be extremely suspect of CIA "information."

In 1977, Carl Bernstein published an exposé of a CIA program known as Operation Mockingbird, a covert program involving, according to Bernstein, “more than 400 American journalists who in the past 25 years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” Bernstein found that in “many instances” CIA documents revealed that “journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.” Fast-forward to December 2016, and one can see that there isn’t much need for a covert government program these days. The recent raft of unverified, anonymously sourced and circumstantial stories alleging that the Russian government interfered in the US presidential election with the aim of electing Republican Donald J. Trump shows that today too much of the media is all too happy to do overtly what the CIA had it once paid it to do covertly: regurgitate the claims of the spy agency and attack the credibility of those who question it.

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Rampant NSA recording of phone calls, not simply metadata

William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA: “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.” This is an excerpt from the U.K. Guardian. I'm still waiting to hear outrage from so-called liberal democrats. All I hear is murmurred "concern" and an unwillingness to speak out. In short, the Dems and the Repubs are aligned on this issue, and this really disappoints me.

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Map to NSA programs by Propublica

Per ProPublica,

This is a plot of the NSA programs revealed in the past year according to whether they are bulk or targeted, and whether the targets of surveillance are foreign or domestic. Most of the programs fall squarely into the agency’s stated mission of foreign surveillance, but some – particularly those that are both domestic and broad-sweeping – are more controversial.

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