Slashdot Mirror
US Pushing Local Police To Keep Quiet On Cell-Phone Surveillance Technology
schwit1 (797399) writes with this story from the Associated Press, as carried by Yahoo News: The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned. Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment. Federal involvement in local open records proceedings is unusual. It comes at a time when President Barack Obama has said he welcomes a debate on government surveillance and called for more transparency about spying in the wake of disclosures about classified federal surveillance programs.
EFF put together this great debate between Joe Biden 2006 and Barrack Obama 2013
Perhaps as a secondary rationale. Primarily, they are trying to continue to circumvent privacy protections, warrant requirements, etc. and don't want people to know how they are doing such things so they can't put together a proper case against them.
Spidey is a stingray detector app developed by the ACLU and MIT. This page is a page to get notified when it goes live. The source code is on GitHub. It works by comparing the towers you can see at any given moment against what you've seen before and data from the OpenCellID Project.
Who watches the watchers? I do.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
If you think Gitmo is a paradise you're the idiot. It's not a hell hole but it's still a prison. You can blather on about the Republicans all you want but the people that dangle the Republican puppets by their strings dangle the Democratic puppets too. You partisan fools that still believe the smoke and mirror show that is the US political two party mafia system astound me. What little shred of doubt I had about it is gone after the last six years. Obama looks like Bush version 2.0