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Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications
On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”. The relevant material featured a […]
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Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution
Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during […]
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The State of Our Nation No One’s Talking About

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Day by day, tyranny is rising as […]
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The Global Deep State
The madmen are in power. — Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction. That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the […]
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Forget the Kids: Social Media, Congress and Child Safety
It was a struggle to see how a child’s welfare was relevant in the latest, shrill debates about technology taking place on The Hill. The Senate Judiciary Committee and the leaders of social media companies were on show to thrash out matters on technology and their threats on January 31 in a hearing titled “Big […]
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Constitutional Violations: Julian Assange, Privacy and the CIA
As a private citizen, the options for suing an intelligence agency are few and far between. The US Central Intelligence Agency, as with other members of the secret club, pour scorn on such efforts. To a degree, such a dismissive sentiment is understandable: Why sue an agency for its bread-and-butter task, which is surveillance? This […]
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The White House Goes Rogue: Secret Surveillance Program Breaks All the Laws

The government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter whether you obey every law. The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding […]
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We the Exploited

Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists. But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you. To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders. By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians […]
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We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics

Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare. The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is […]
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Meta and Privacy: The Economy of Data Transgressions
Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?) On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine […]