Slashdot Mirror
Electronic Surveillance Up 500% In DC Area Since 2011, Almost All Sealed Cases (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 quotes a report from Washington Post: Secret law enforcement requests to conduct electronic surveillance in domestic criminal cases have surged in federal courts for Northern Virginia and the District, but only one in a thousand of the applications ever becomes public, newly released data show. The bare-bones release by the courts leaves unanswered how long, in what ways and for what crimes federal investigators tracked individuals' data and whether long-running investigations result in charges. In Northern Virginia, electronic surveillance requests increased 500 percent in the past five years, from 305 in 2011 to a pace set to pass 1,800 this year. Only one of the total 4,113 applications in those five years had been unsealed as of late July, according to information from the Alexandria division of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which covers northern Virginia. The report adds: "The federal court for the District of Columbia had 235 requests in 2012, made by the local U.S. attorney's office. By 2013, requests in the District had climbed 240 percent, to about 564, according to information released by the court's chief judge and clerk. Three of the 235 applications from 2012 have been unsealed. The releases from the Washington-area courts list applications by law enforcement to federal judges asking to track data -- but not eavesdrop -- on users' electronic communications. That data can include sender and recipient information, and the time, date, duration and size of calls, emails, instant messages and social media messages, as well as device identification numbers and some website information."
Thanks, Obama.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
The Republicans could have run Mufasa and beat these Democrats who have been running things the last 8 years, despite the fact that Mufasa is a cartoon character. They did nominate a cartoon character, but somehow they ended up choosing the one who polls worse than Hillary.
The entire default stance for Private citizens and Public officials has been flipped.
We, as private citizens, are supposed to have our lives kept private, except in extreme cases where surveillance is required and granted sparingly and meticulously.
They, as public officials, are supposed to operating publicly, except in extreme cases of national security.
Somewhere along the lines, these roles were reversed. I'm not sure if we're ever going to get things back.
This signature is false.
Quick, deflect blame to the Republicans somehow!
Except we have no rights in America
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Yet more secret, carte blanche "warrants". Our founding fathers would be so proud.
Silence is a state of mime.
LOL.
If you demonstrate that you can't do basic math, I'm probably not going to pay much attention to the conclusions in your article. As I recall from helping my kids, this is fourth, or at most fifth, grade math.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Minor syntax error.
It increased to 240% of the previous year.
It did NOT increase by 240% from the previous year.
This signature is false.
While I grant that your syntax change corrected the problem, it is a bit forced. If the level went from 235 to 237, would we say "it increased to 101% of the previous year?" No, we we say "it increased 1%."
Apologist.
"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government." - President Barack Obama
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the...
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The most extreme problems with government power always happen in secret (as long as a society is still somewhat free), because "law" enforcement universally runs amok when nobody watches them. By its very nature, the field primarily attracts people that value control and surveillance a lot more than freedom. The progression this causes is first to a police-state (the US is already there, still on the milder end though) and then eventually full-blown fascism. Of course, fascism is about the worst thing you can do to an economy, so collapse follows a few decades later.
It is like the US, the Brits, and some others that never had Fascism now want to try it out as well. And the Germans apparently want it back.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Discussions of police state, freedom and spying aside, which are the most important considerations - how much is all this spying on me, costing me? These are direct costs foisted onto the taxpayer with questionable value in terms of service it provides.
Then there is the secondary cost via the fraud it enables that has no impact on the state and only impacts the population. The convenience of a phone in your pocket has morphed to include an array of tools to gather intelligence on you. Gathered into infrastructure paid for by internet users to telecommunications companies doing the bidding of the government acting on your behalf.
These secrets must be expensive to maintain and I wonder what burden it places on the budget provided by the taxpayer to government, to provide services? What services are underfunded as a result of these agencies maintaining this apparatus?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I disagree. I've often seen "it increased by a factor 1.01", and it doesn't seem weirder to describe it using 101%.
Maybe he shouldn't have used the verbs 'increased' or 'climbed', which he used to emphasize the change from 100% to 240% of the base value (2012). I think this is more a grammar and context issue than a mathematics issue.