Conflict of interest. The presence of a conflict of interest is independent of the occurrence of impropriety.
Therefore, a conflict of interest can be discovered and voluntarily defused before any corruption occurs. A widely used definition is: "A conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgement or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest. NSA and GCHQ: the flawed psychology of government mass surveillance. Recent disclosures about the scope of government surveillance are staggering.
We now know that the UK's Tempora program records huge volumes of private communications, including – as standard – our emails, social networking activity, internet histories, and telephone calls. Much of this data is then shared with the US National Security Agency, which operates its own (formerly) clandestine surveillance operation. Similar programs are believed to operate in Russia, China, India, and throughout several European countries. While pundits have argued vigorously about the merits and drawbacks of such programs, the voice of science has remained relatively quiet. This is despite the fact that science, alone, can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance. Surveillance impairs mental health and performance For more than 15 years we've known that surveillance leads to heightened levels of stress, fatigue and anxiety.
Surveillance breeds conformity.
NSA & financial 'surveillance' Ten Things We've Learned About The NSA From A Summer Of Snowden Leaks. Who Did Obama Put In Charge Of Independent Review Of NSA? When President Obama announced a series of intelligence reforms last Friday he called for the creation of an independent advisory group made up of “outside experts” who will review controversial surveillance programs.
But based on a memorandum issued today by the White House, it’s not clear how independent the effort will be. The president has directed the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, to establish the “review group” that will be responsible for issuing a report about how surveillance programs “impact our security, our privacy, and our foreign policy.”
The review group is intended in part, as the president said last week, to “maintain the trust of the people” — so why did the president put a man at the center of the spying controversy in charge? There’s still a lot we don’t know about the review group, including the process for appointing members and who those members might be. They Know Much More Than You Think by James Bamford. The headquarters of the National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets.
Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post , revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 . On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Surveillance. Surveillance (/sərˈveɪ.əns/ or /sərˈveɪləns/)[1] is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people for the purpose of influencing, managing, directing, or protecting them.[2] This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment (such as CCTV cameras), or interception of electronically transmitted information (such as Internet traffic or phone calls); and it can include simple, relatively no- or low-technology methods such as human intelligence agents and postal interception.
The word surveillance comes from a French phrase for "watching over" ("sur" means "from above" and "veiller" means "to watch"), and is in contrast to more recent developments such as sousveillance.[3][4][5] Surveillance is very useful to governments and law enforcement to maintain social control, recognize and monitor threats, and prevent/investigate criminal activity. Types[edit] Computer[edit] ACLU: Guide to What We Now Know About the NSA's Dragnet Searches of Your Communications. Charlie Savage of The New York Times confirmed this week what we have been warning about for years, including to the Supreme Court last fall: The National Security Agency (NSA) is "searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance . . . .
" The rub: If you've sent an international email or text since 2008, chances are the government has looked inside of it. In other words, the same NSA surveillance dragnet that government officials have consistently dismissed as speculative and far-fetched is very, very real. These reports are particularly alarming in light of government officials' emphatic public statements denying that the NSA ever peeks inside the contents of Americans' communications without a warrant. We've explained why those disavowals have been misleading; now, we know they're simply untrue. Prism or Upstream (or both)? The Blast Shack. This article was first published on 22 December 2010 on Webstock.
The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia. The Ecuadorian Library — Geek Empire. Or, The Blast Shack After Three Years Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal.
So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy. In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Sure enough, things now are lots, lots worse. Judge: They Cut As Many Holes in the Constitution As They Want. Judge Napolitano To FBI Director: They Cut As Many Holes in the Constitution As They Want. Unterirdische Überwachungs durch US-Geheimdienste - Politik. Anzeige Die US-Spionage in Deutschland schneidet die Wurzeln der Grundrechte ab.
Das ist staatsgefährdend. Und was macht Innenminister Friedrich, der ja auch Verfassungsminister sein soll? Book Discussion on [Spies for Hire] Edward Snowden full statement: 'It was the right thing to do and I have no regrets' Statement by Edward Snowden to human rights groups at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, posted by WikiLeaks: Friday July 12, 15:00 UTC Hello.
My name is Ed Snowden. A little over one month ago, I had family, a home in paradise, and I lived in great comfort. I also had the capability without any warrant to search for, seize, and read your communications. Csoghoian : The best resource I've found,... NSA whistleblowers warn of secret spying programs that can target anyone - Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer. To Our Faithful Current.com Users: Current's run has ended after eight exciting years on air and online.
The Current TV staff has appreciated your interest, support, participation and unflagging loyalty over the years. Your contributions helped make Current.com a vibrant place for discussing thousands of interesting stories, and your continued viewership motivated us to keep innovating and find new ways to reflect the voice of the people. Dirty Wars: Jeremy Scahill's antidote to Zero Dark Thirty's heroic narrative. The film Dirty Wars details the stories of Afghans who have experienced attacks by drones or special forces. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival.
Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film's director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. JSoc: Obama's secret assassins. The film Dirty Wars, which premiered at Sundance, can be viewed, as Amy Goodman sees it, as an important narrative of excesses in the global "war on terror". It is also a record of something scary for those of us at home – and uncovers the biggest story, I would say, in our nation's contemporary history.
Though they wisely refrain from drawing inferences, Scahill and Rowley have uncovered the facts of a new unaccountable power in America and the world that has the potential to shape domestic and international events in an unprecedented way. The film tracks the Joint Special Operations Command (JSoc), a network of highly-trained, completely unaccountable US assassins, armed with ever-expanding "kill lists". The NDAA and the Death of the Democratic State - Chris Hedges' Columns. The NDAA and the Death of the Democratic State Posted on Feb 11, 2013 By Chris Hedges. NSA Whistleblower: Justice Department Covers Up Crimes of Obama, Bush Administrations. In a recent segment from Current TV‘s show “Viewpoint,” host Eliot Spitzer interviewed three National Security Agency whistleblowers: William Binney, a former technical director; Kirk Wiebe, former senior analyst; and Thomas Drake, a former senior official.
Each man talked about what he saw the NSA do when they were employees. Each of these whistleblowers directly explained the threats to civil liberties posed by the lawlessness of the NSA in the past decade. Much of what is shared in the segment was already shown, but since what the NSA did constitutes illegality and corruption that have gone unpunished, it is worth highlighting key points.
Drake recounts that shortly after 9/11 he discovered that “a legal regime—the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”—was now being “absolutely violated by NSA in league with the White House.” How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American - Conor Friedersdorf. Asked about the strike that killed him, a senior adviser to the president's campaign suggests he should've "had a more responsible father.
" Cornered by reporters with video cameras, former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President Obama's reelection campaign, attempted to defend the kill list that the Obama Administration uses to determine whose body should next be blown apart. American drone strikes have resulted in hundreds of dead innocents in the last four years, even as the program has killed a number of high-level al Qaeda terrorists. There are two remarkable things about the ensuing exchange, which eventually turns into a discussion about a dead 16-year-old kid: First, it's vital for the uninitiated to understand how Team Obama misleads when it talks about its drone program.
Obama Top Adviser Robert Gibbs Justifies Murder of 16 Year Old American Citizen. Mainstream Still Silent on NDAA. British-terror-suspects-quietly-stripped-of-citizenship-then-killed-by-drones-8513858. The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism. Updated June 9 to include details of the Guardian's coverage, a link to the Post's correction policy, and a quote from the Huffington Post. Amnesty: USA must not hunt down whistleblower Edward Snowden. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video. U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program. NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program.
Rand Paul vows supreme court challenge to NSA surveillance – live. Edward Snowden and the security state laid bare. Edward Snowden has given up almost everything in his previously comfortable life so that we could know at least some of the ways in which the US government is spying on us. So what will happen to him now? Connecting The PRISM Dots: Michael Arrington. Smári McCarthy. Falkvinge: Debunking The Dangerous “If You Have Nothing To Hide, You Have Nothing To Fear” Every so often, you hear the argument “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”, in order to justify increased and invasive surveillance. Falkvinge: Collected Personal Data Will Always Be Used Against The Citizens. The doctrine for authorities collecting sensitive, private data on citizens right now appears to be “your private data may be useful to us, and therefore, we shall take it by force”.
From general wiretapping to data retention to face recognition to mass tracking of individuals, the same pattern is evident: people demanding their right to privacy are treated as criminals who are obstructing justice just for the sake of it. From experience, we know that all data leaks. Csoghoian : Bravo @Rackspace: "A blanket... NSA revelations put Booz Allen Hamilton, Carlyle Group in uncomfortable limelight. Booz Allen Leader: How We See Snowden Inside the Company - Garance Franke-Ruta. Bits of Freedom: Dutch spooks must stop use of PRISM. Bruce Schneier: Prosecuting Snowden. Bruce Schneier: Government Secrets and the Need for Whistle-blowers. Bruce Schneier: Essays Related to NSA Spying Documents.
Social Media: Winter is Coming Game of Thrones. You Have No Control Over Security on the Feudal Internet - Bruce Schneier. On partisanship, propaganda and PRISM. Ioerror : #Snowden has been proven correct... NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants. GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits. Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data. NSA Surveillance and PRISM. How Dozens of Companies Know You're Reading About Those NSA Leaks. NSA surveillance: don't underestimate the extraordinary power of metadata. Daniel Ellsberg Exposes What's Different about Snowden. Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if “Anything Happens” To Him. Glenn Greenwald Schools CNN Host on NSA, Wikileaks, Controlled Media. CNN: Columnist exposes surveillance. NSA collected Americans' email records in bulk for two years under Obama.
How the NSA is still harvesting your online data. U.S. Is Pressing Latin Americans to Reject Snowden. Wikileaks : 1967 UN resolution on asylum... Charlie Rose - Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson. Edward Snowden's digital 'misuse' has created problems, says Ban Ki-moon. Let's Crowd Fund A Jet For Edward Snowden.
Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords.
Just metadata ? NSA?=?police crossing the final line. ANT = Advanced or Access Network Technology. WHISTLEBLOWER - feat. mc Edward Snowden [RAP NEWS 19] The Dragnet at the Edge of Forever « Smári McCarthy. Prism: secret surveillance could destroy democracy rather than defend it. The Service of Snowden. HJA Hofland. Intern bedreigde democratie. EFF: Bruce Schneier Joins EFF Board of Directors. EFF: Unitarian Church, Gun Groups Join EFF to Sue NSA Over Illegal Surveillance. NSA spied on Latin America for energy and military intel. Ioerror : Thanks to #Snowden, we now... Avilarenata : On April 29 2013 Germany... German Intelligence Worked Closely with NSA on Data Surveillance. Spiegel "der pakt" Stasi versus NSA. Falkvinge: Stasi vs. The NSA Back To Back: Who's Worse - A Visual Guide. 32 Autoren fordern von Merkel Aufklärung in Prism-Affäre.
PRISM Futures: Time for an Ultimatum to America ? Or: we love you guys… but enough is enough! - Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker Gerd Leonhard. NSA Spying Scandal: Focus on Edward Snowden by US Media. Schneier: Counterterrorism Mission Creep. Onweer op komst - Rob Wijnberg. The Philosophy of NSA Surveillance. Timberners_lee : Join me in calling on the NSA... Information Consumerism: The Price of Hypocrisy - EVGENY MOROZOV. NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists. Msmbc: Morning Joe interviewing Greenwald. Other Agencies Clamor for Data N.S.A. Compiles. XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'
Seven telcos named as providing fiber optic cable access to UK spies. NYT: Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower.