Surveillance – Patrick Lohier

In early September, following the release of a video showing NFL running back Ray Rice hitting his wife Janay Rice in an elevator, the Baltimore Ravens terminated Rice’s contract and the NFL suspended him indefinitely from the league.

This follows an event in April, when an audio recording of Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend V. Stiviano not to bring black people to games was made public. Sterling was banned from the NBA and the league is currently working to finalize the sale of the team to a new owner.

The following month Solange Knowles, the younger sister of Beyonce Knowles, appeared in a surveillance video attacking her brother-in-law, rap impresario Jay Z, in an elevator following the Met Ball. The footage exploded onto both gossip and news sites and sparked a storm of conjecture about what happened that night.

You’ll see a pattern here. Continue reading “The Normalization of Mass Surveillance | Sep 16, 2014”

Over the past few months, millions of Americans have discovered that their government is willing and able to spy on them as well as on the populations of other countries. This comes as a surprise to many.

For the nearly 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the majority of Americans have enjoyed strong legal supports of our civil liberties. We have lived with Constitutional amendments and legal requirements for due process designed to bar or at least curtail undue search, seizure, surveillance and other intrusions on our persons, property and privacy. These rights were perceived as congruent with our most basic tenet, that we are all equal, that no one has the right to intercept our emails, or invade our privacy other than with a legally obtained warrant, obtainable only after establishing probable cause. Many of us had come to believe that these protections were ironclad and non-negotiable.

But at some point unnoticed, or simply obscured by the fog of over a dozen years of the War on Terror, the rules changed. Our confidence that we enjoy inalienable rights to privacy is evaporating. Although every once and a while we are made aware of secret executive orders, directives and programs that delimit our civil liberties, it’s still unclear how we lost so much so fast. Continue reading “Snowden, ‘Animal Farm’ and the End of Privacy | Nov 14, 2013”