Late Night: Obama = Bush on Steroids
Posted: March 26, 2011 Filed under: Psychopaths in charge, SCOTUS, Surreality, Team Obama, torture, U.S. Military, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd | Tags: ACLU, biometrics technology, electronic police state, FBI, mass surveillance state, Miranda decision, Pentagon, SCOTUS, USA Patriot Act 18 Comments
Prepare yourself for the next stage in the enactment of Total Information Awareness. The Obama administration is in the process of enacting a “mass surveillance state.” Raw Story reports that the FBI is working on “an advanced biometrics facility” that will also be used by the Pentagon.
In an exclusive interview with Raw Story, attorney Chris Calabrese, an ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington, D.C., warned that this move in particular was indicative of a fast approaching mass surveillance state that poses a “grave danger” to American values.
The FBI’s forthcoming biometrics center will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and part of that system is already operating today in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Starting with fingerprints, and creating a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images, the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification.
To help ramp up the amount of data flooding into this center, the FBI said that electronic fingerprint scanners would be sent to state and local police agencies, which would be empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven’t been arrested or convicted of a crime.
Even more frightening is allowing the government and law enforcement to use facial mapping to keep tabs on all of us.
“Facial recognition is one of the most invasive biometrics because it allows surreptitious tracking at a distance,” Calabrese continued. “They can secretly track you from camera to camera, location to location. That has enormous implications, not just for security but also for American society. I mean, we are now at a point where we can automatically track people. Computers could do that. That’s what, we think, is a grave danger to our privacy.”
And that’s not all. You’ve probably heard that the Obama Justice Department has decided to ignore the Supreme Court Decision that requires Miranda warnings for crime suspects.
[On March 24,] the Obama DOJ unveiled the latest — and one of the most significant — examples of its eagerness to assault the very legal values Obama vowed to protect. The Wall Street Journal reports that “new rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades.” The only previous exception to the 45-year-old Miranda requirement that someone in custody be apprised of their rights occurred in 1984, when the Rehnquist-led right-wing faction of the Supreme Court allowed delay “only in cases of an imminent safety threat,” but these new rules promulgated by the Obama DOJ “give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.”
Let’s see now, the President claims the power to identify any American citizen as a terrorist, on his word only. Once you are labeled a terrorist, you can be held without charges, you have no Habeus rights, and no Miranda rights. You can be tortured in a foreign country or right here in the US of A. Not only that, but you can even be assassinated without trial if the President so orders. We even have emergency laws.
The government isn’t going to need martial law to control the population. We’ll be living in an electronic police state, our every move filmed and examined for suspicious behavior.
We might as well be living in Libya or Egypt.
Sima
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
fiscalliberal
grayslady
Minkoff Minx
mablue2
NW Luna
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Mass Surveillance and State Control
this world seems to get crazier but the day.
I guess they aren’t worried about the Iranian Government Hackers and must be relying on the honest kids, that Anonymous lot, in case the soldiers remote control is hacked and they need to regain control of the remote.😯 I never thought I would live to see the day where people are trying to remote control human beings…oh, wait, there is a less techie way, CULTS!
Good grief, it is getting a bit scientific/techie/1984ish…is it not…
Thank you BB for bringing this to the discussion.
F.B.I. Memo Instructs Delayed Miranda Warning for Terror Suspects – NYTimes.com
The Abu Zubaydah Standard in Obama’s Miranda Memo | Emptywheel
The crazier and more criminal they get, the faster the fall…
It’s like this because they are in collapse …and honestly when I think of Abu Ghraib, and what happened at our check points in in Iraq, who are we to point a fingers?
looking up the spelling of Abu Ghraib, I ran into this gem
Glenn Greenwald : Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH’s newest appointment
http://tinyurl.com/4q5t27j
help
The administration claims he hasn’t been appointed or even invited to the meetings. See Glenn’s update. But it appears they may have just rescinded the invitation because of Glenn’s post and the guy’s e-mails getting out.
You’ve made my day!
Why is this guy on the invite list?😯 I wouldn’t have let that guy do therapy on my dearly departed dog.
Shocking, that he is still on the A LIST.
We need to start all wearing those V for Vendetta masks and force them to pass a law against wearing masks in public. Or maybe there will be reaslistic silicon ones available, on the black market, of course.
That’s not a bad idea. Leader of the pact must be good with knives…..
pack not pact…..
The Rock,
A knife? I thought the danger (spreading the code…), was running around promoting Freedom and Democracy! Unless, the ‘Knife’ = ‘Information!
Did you know there is now an AnonyMiss and that recently the LibyanTNC sent out an official statement on the value of women in the New Libya! Yup, I guess they saw the consternations regarding the Egypt women issues/Women’s Rights, post revolution and they came out front and said, we value them there women folk. OK, then…🙂
Way back I suspected a Bu$h clone -now we know that is exactly what BO is. Even considering his candidacy was bizarre – then. Now the nightmare of truth is clear.
Why? What is their goal? What purpose does all this serve?
OT – Japanese officials reported a huge jump in radioactivity — levels 10 million times the norm
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110327/ap_on_bi_ge/as_japan_earthquake
Normal, everyday people realized the dangers of melt down in the beginning and there would be fall out. It’s like with the oil gushing into the Gulf – the media, instead of calmly stating all the facts, always shaves these epic events down to nothing and then the reality shite hits the fan. What are we doing to help the people of Japan? There should be a world protocol in these situations because it will effect the entire earth. Regulation needs to be in place and adhered to – that nasty word no politician wants to apply to any corporation. The fall out will be more intense in Japan.
By the fourth day of the BP “spill” my sense was it was catastrophic in measure. It was not til February of this year you read experts now considering the huge scope of BP’s gusher damages….we don’t have ‘experts’ in the media any more – just idiots who spew what corporate wants you to think.
Are all these so called leaders on drugs or just the strongest drug of all – ego mixed with stupidy? They have endangered the entire earth – it will touch them too. Everything is so manipulated and contrived – and we have vapor man as our leader – a man with no accomplishments, knowledge or understanding, no moral compass. He has surrounded himself with the Bu$h cabal participants. Each new law intrudes more in our personal lives – they’re in our underwear, minds, homes. If they ever had a life so to speak, with goals other than amassing fortunes – there is no value system now because there is no accountability. We are guilty of letting it happen – accepted the hollow so called entertain of dribble the corporate marketing departments offer as news, TV that offers up programing based on greed, unacceptable behavior, worshiping sports figures and starz, or wannabes that lead lives of depravity.
Bu$hit and BO are just symptoms – not the disease. Why are some of us so immune and others fall like flies? Sigh, sorry for the rant.
Well, some scientists were warning about the long-term dangers of the BP gusher early on, but the Obama administration did everything they could to tamp down the truth. BP even hired a lot of scientists, and quite a few did sell out and change their tune.
The parallel I see in the reactor crisis and the BP gusher is that the government is allowing the corporation to control the investigation and cleanup. It’s idiotic.
It’s been BP over again, step by step….except it’s not oil😦
BB,
🙂