But I'M not being SPIED on, right? (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Sonali Kolhatkar, UprisingRadio.org (Oct. 25, 2012, KPFK.org)

Kilroy is watching: "fusion centers" gather info to facilitate homeland spying (American Dad).

 
Hostess Sonali Kolhatkar (So-nah-lee Coal-hat-car) invites the Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (bordc.org) Shahid Buttar to discuss privacy in America.

While dwindling civil liberties were a serious issue during the tenure of Pres. G.W. Bush [now in his third term in the guise of B.S. Obama, who has done more to solidify Bush’s draconian gains than Dick Cheney ever could have].

  

"We only burn villages to save them."

The past three terms saw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Now there is little public discourse about ongoing infringements on the rights we once took for granted.
  
The Obama administration has largely continued and, in some arenas, expanded on Bush-era intrusions into American lives via warrantless wiretapping and other secret initiatives of the National Security Agency (NSA) and through “fusion centers” scattered throughout the country.

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Social media aids and abets spying by design.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently issued a scathing report on fusion centers saying that, while the Department of Homeland Security has spent billions of dollars on them, the centers have actually produced “useless, irrelevant, or inappropriate intelligence reporting.”

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano called these fusion centers “one of the centerpieces” of her department’s counter-terrorism efforts.
   

Constitutional and privacy advocates have added their concerns to those of the Senate Panel, asserting that fusion centers violate everyone’s privacy.
  
Many city governments also think so: The Berkeley City Council recently voted to limit their local police department’s collaboration with a fusion center. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has been accused of violating civil liberties by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for feeding reports into a local fusion center. More

Inside the real NSA? Its vast underground facilities are never shown to public (Reuters).

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• Pacifica Radio Archives at KPFK, Los Angeles
• Democracy Now: What can we do?

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Combating the Surveillance State (audio)

Glenn Greenwald, Esq. (Salon.com), AlternativeRadio.org (Program #GREG002, 2012)

Spying, snooping, prying, eavesdropping, using a mobile cell phone, call it what you want. The government is doing it on a scale never before seen. Massive corporations are doing a lot to help. Meanwhile, the same government and corporations are more secretive and un-transparent than ever.

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Sophisticated new technologies allow for more intrusions into our private lives. Beyond omnipresent smart phones and cell towers remotely tracking/geo-locating, recording, and even predicting all activities, there are increasingly more cameras filming, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identifying on innocent Americans. Nevertheless, drone aircraft are aiming at them from American skies.

 

The invasive monitoring of public space and the simultaneous erosion of our rights has been largely a bi-partisan affair, from Bush/Cheney to Obama/Biden. State surveillance power, undermining basic freedoms in the name of protecting them, is growing relentlessly.

 

The swelling domestic databases of the NSA (the little-known "National Security Administration," an American Gestapo/Stasi) and the FBI may contain our personal information.

  

And this burgeoning Orwellian apparatus has become a cash cow for corporations providing what are called security services. Comedian Stephen Colbert sarcastically observes, "There are bound to be casualties in the never-ending war on terror and one of them just happens to be the U.S. Constitution."

Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer and the author of How Would a Patriot Act? and Great American Hypocrites. He is the recipient of the Izzy Award from the Park Center for Independent Media for his "pathbreaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues." He also received an Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary for his coverage of U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning. Greenwald is a columnist and blogger at Salon.com and his articles appear in various newspapers and magazines.

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