The Informants.

"The bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies, some paid as much as $100,000 per case, many of them tasked with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States."

The American bimonthly magazine Mother Jones, known for it's investigative reporting and in-depth articles, has just published a rather unsettling story titled "The Informants" about the FBI and the Bureau's widespread use of agent provocateurs and spies "tasked with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States". In the article the question "The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?" is sought answered. It can be read in its entirety at the Mother Jones site.

Surveillance and data mining: Romas/COIN.

"For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr - the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies."

Source: Daily Kos.

Welcome to the Police State.

Why Privacy Matters.

Daniel J. Solove, professor of law at George Washington University, has a highly recommendable essay on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website in which he refutes the most common argument against privacy, namely "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about."

Alfred McCoy - Surveillance State: The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus.