The Obama administration has presided over the most thorough expansion of the domestic surveillance state of any U.S. presidency. Even as the nation was still absorbing the news, broken by Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on Wednesday night, that the National Security Agency has been routinely collecting phone call records for millions of Americans, the Washington Post and the Guardian published articles revealing even broader government snooping powers: Since 2007, the NSA and the FBI have had the power to watch nearly every aspect of our online life as well.
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.The nine companies are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. (PalTalk, according to the Post, “hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war.”)
The program is code-named PRISM, and while it was created during the administration of George W. Bush, the Post reports that it has experienced “exponential growth” under Obama.
This is the surveillance that we know is taking place.
You can be sure there is more that we don't know about.
Today, Obama said he wants to expand the technology in schools so that teachers can know what is going on in the brains of their students, moment to moment, and second to second.
I wrote this earlier, but I want to write it again:
Given the news about the abuses of power and domestic spying the Obama administration has engaged in, why would anybody trust any technology Barack Obama wants to put into schools?
Would this increased bandwidth and so-called technological tools really be meant to help students or would it be used to track both students and teachers?
No comments:
Post a Comment