Can the government make demands for data entirely in secret?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.
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.
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".