Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Court Spotlights the FBI’s Super-Secret National Security Letters

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Friday, October 10, 2014

Court Spotlights the FBI’s Super-Secret National Security Letters

Click here to access article by Cora Currier from The Intercept.

Can the government make demands for data entirely in secret?

That was the question yesterday before a federal appeals court in San Francisco, where government lawyers argued that National Security Letters — FBI requests for information that are so secret they can’t be publicly acknowledged by the recipients — were essential to counterterrorism investigations.

While our masters in the One Percent are slowly and quietly establishing global corporate rule through neoliberal trade negotiations, they are also pursuing the old-fashioned methods of police state surveillance to ascertain any threats to their rule that might develop among those of us in the Ninety-Nine Percent. This receives little coverage in their media for obvious reasons except when unusual citizens like Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, and Julian Assange sacrifice so much to bring it to our limited attention-spans.

You might also be interested to learn how the NSA is seducing kids into their exciting world of citizen surveillance by reading "How The NSA Plans To Recruit Your Teenagers".