The Digital Dispatch

From NOEBIE.net

Surveillance State

Snowden Meets Roy, Cusack and Ellsberg

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The Guardian has published Arundhati Roy’s account of her recent meeting with Edward Snowden in Moscow, along with Daniel Ellsberg and John Cusack. The entire article is a great read, but I was struck especially by this quote from Snowden about the surveillance state.

If we do nothing, we sort of sleepwalk into a total surveillance state where we have both a super-state that has unlimited capacity to apply force with an unlimited ability to know (about the people it is targeting) – and that’s a very dangerous combination. That’s the dark future. The fact that they know everything about us and we know nothing about them – because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class… the elite class, the political class, the resource class – we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future, but I think there are changing possibilities in this.

Read Roy’s Account: Edward Snowden meets Arundhati Roy and John Cusack | The Guardian

The Story of Matthew DeHart

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Cory Doctorow details the story of Matthew DeHart, a veteran from a multi-generational military/intelligence family, whose Tor server ran him afoul of our government.

DeHart once discovered an unencrypted folder of damning documents on his server, which quickly disappeared and was replaced with an encrypted folder of the same size, with the same name. The unencrypted docs detailed an FBI investigation into some very dirty CIA tricks, possibly involving the still-unsolved slew of anthrax-laced letters sent to Congress in 2001. Not long after, DeHart was spooked by a visit from the FBI to one of his contacts, and he destroyed all potentially compromising storage associated with his server. That’s when things got weird.

Read the Story: Hacktivist sees too much, FBI lock him up on child-porn charges, produce no evidence – Boing Boing

Glenn Greenwald Interview

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I’m looking forward to hearing Glenn Greenwald speak in Chicago at the Socialism 2014 conference next week. His presentation via Skype last year was one of the highlights of the conference. He recently spoke with Nicole Colson and Eric Ruder about the startling revelations of the past year, the mainstream media’s reaction and what’s still to come.

There’s a human shame that comes from doing things that people are willing to do only when they think people can’t watch them. And yet this is exactly the realm in which all forms of dissent, creativity and exploration of what it means to be a free individual reside in–when we have a private realm.

That’s why human beings instinctively seek out a private realm, a place where they can go and think and be and do without other people watching. That’s the reason why tyrannies always want to turn to surveillance–because they know that creating the perception one is always being watched is the most powerful instrument for keeping people in line and forcing people to comply with the wishes of authority.

 

Read the full interview: Unmasking Big Brother | SocialistWorker.org.