News — At The Edge — 2/15
U.S. politicians are failing to protect our interests — inequality, surveillance and racism — and it is not likely to end well for us.
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Can the Government Buy Its Way Around the Fourth Amendment?-
“Department of Homeland Security has been using commercially available cell phone location records…’to help identify immigrants who were later arrested’…[and] look for cellphone activity in unusual places’…[raising] much broader set of questions…[since] nothing stops other law enforcement agencies from making use of these data sets….
The Fourth Amendment [is]…the right to be free from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures.’ Applying that rule to location data…[from] devices we carry…is still very much a work in progress…[for] cell tower pings…[and] GPS tracking and IP addresses…purchased in bulk and often ‘anonymized,’ or stripped of identifying info — although…trivially easy to connect anonymized bulk location data back to individual cell phone users….
[Big] twist here is that DHS…[is] buying them from…a data broker…[and] at least two ways in which this arrangement could violate the law. The first concerns the companies originally gathering location data….[Second] the Fourth Amendment issue….
’What courts haven’t encountered yet is whether a law enforcement agency can evade the warrant requirement by paying money….
[It’s] whether the government’s activities constituted a ‘search.’ The Supreme Court has no clear test for answering that question. Instead, judges ask whether the defendant had a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’….
Giving government as much access as it can buy raises the same prospect of ‘near perfect surveillance…[because] impact on privacy would seem to be the same…[as] subpoenaing the data….
One thing that makes it so hard to challenge this sort of surveillance is that defendants may not even know the government used it against them. That’s also true on a societal level…[with] other federal agencies, not to mention the thousands of police departments around the country….
[So] this is probably a problem for Congress to solve. The Constitution is a legal floor, but statutes can add more rights on top of it.” https://www.wired.com/story/can-government-buy-way-around-fourth-amendment/
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‘Parasite’ rich vs. poor theme evokes growing US wealth gap: ‘It’s never been this bad’ —
“America’s wealth divide…has grown substantially over the past few decades…[as wealthy] recovered since the 2008 financial crisis, the middle class hasn’t….
Income inequality the U.S. is higher than in other advanced economies…despite a stock market…and a labor market [boom]….
‘It’s never been this bad’….The top 10% of Americans made half the…household income in 2016, up from 42% in 1989, according to the Federal Reserve…[and] 400 wealthiest Americans…are now richer than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60%..[with] a record $2.96 trillion….
1989, the top 10% of Americans owned roughly two-thirds of U.S. wealth…2016, that share had grown substantially, to 77%…[while] bottom 50% of Americans — 63 million families — saw their share of total wealth decrease to 1% from 3% over that period… from about $21,000 to $16,000.
One in 10 families had a negative net worth….40% of Americans wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected $400 expense.” https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/parasite-rich-vs-poor-theme-evokes-growing-us-wealth-gap-its-never-been-this-bad/ar-BBZR4qR?ocid=spartandhp
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White Nationalist Propaganda Has Doubled Nationwide Over The Last Year: Report —
“[2019] there were 2,713…cases of white supremacist material, up from 1,214 in 2018…[and] most cases the ADL has…[seen] in a single year….
[These] hate groups are emboldened by the current [political] environment…[with] 630 incidents…on school campuses…double the number…in 2018…[with] propaganda…targeting minority groups, such as African Americans, Jews, Muslims and LGBTQ people….
The most frequent occurrences…[were] in California…New York… and Massachusetts…directed by three [groups]…Patriot Front, the American Identity Movement and the New Jersey European Heritage Association…[for] 90 percent of the incidents….
Terms such as rootless and global are for Jewish-Americans…[calling] for preserving America’s identity as a ‘white culture,’ conflating that…with an appeal to nationalism or patriotism….
[FBI] now understands the risk posed by racially motivated extremist groups to be…[equal to] foreign militant organizations such as ISIS [saying]… ‘Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting….
[Internet] contributed to compressed…period between radicalization to violent extremism and mobilization to violence.’” https://www.newsweek.com/white-nationalism-campus-anti-defamation-league-1487037
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CIA controlled global encryption company for decades, says report-
“Swiss government has ordered an inquiry into a global encryption company…owned and controlled for decades by US and German intelligence….
Encryption weaknesses added to products sold by Crypto AG allowed the CIA and its German counterpart…to eavesdrop on adversaries and allies alike while earning million of dollars from the sales….
’It was the intelligence coup of the century,’ the CIA report concluded.
‘Foreign governments were paying good money to the US and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by…(as many as five or six) foreign countries’….[Initially] codenamed Thesaurus and then renamed Rubicon in 1980s….
[Thus] suspicions of equipment made by the Chinese company Huawei….
Neither China or the Soviet Union bought Crypto encryption devices…[but] sold to more than 100 other countries….
CIA continued…company until 2018, when it sold[business].” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/11/crypto-ag-cia-bnd-germany-intelligence-report
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Doc Huston
