Tag Archives: surveillance

NYPD: “Militarized to its bones”

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In an interesting piece by Tom Engelhart [1], he writes about “the second occupation” going on in New York City right now. By this, he is referring to the police protection of the New York Stock Exchange and its immediate vicinity, which they’ve had locked down since before the marchers arrived on September 17.

He wrote about a recent trip to Wall Street where he saw “the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it.” Continue reading →

“The Whole World Is Watching”: Protest Videos as Techno-Fix

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“People don’t want to get involved. They’d rather watch on TV,” said Troy Simmons, 47, who joined demonstrators as he left work. [1]

“The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”

The crowd resounds, chanting condemnation in unison to an army of police abusing Occupy Wall Street protesters.They are, of course, referring to a contingent of protesters and media armed with still and video cameras, who appear to outnumber those protesters without.

Let’s consider this chant, and what’s being said. Continue reading →

The Information Society and Cybernetic Sexual Adventure

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Sigmund Freud posited that the pleasure principle dictates the purpose of one’s life, and the search for pleasure dominates mental processes, no matter how insurmountably the reality principle interferes (1961, 25). We can experience pleasure only as an “episodic phenomenon,” he argues, and we seek to moderate claims to happiness. We do this through multiple methods: through technology, intoxication, attempting to control our internal impulses and needs, the development of illusions, fetishizing objects, seeking enjoyment aesthetically, among others (ibid. 26-34).

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Who’s in Big Brother’s Database?

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In this review of  The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency by Matthew M. Aid, published by The New York Review of Books, we learn about one of the largest developments in cyber-surveillance and the assault on our privacy by an increasingly tyrannical government.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015.”[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

Read the full article at:  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231