USA Freedom Act to protect USA, freedom, blanket surveillance

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 2 Comments
Hong Kong 2013

Hong Kong 2013

Last week, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, which modifies the blanket surveillance programs the NSA was totally going to tell us about before Edward Snowden committed treason by telling us first. Obviously, the USA Freedom Act is a big improvement on the Patriot Act. Look at the names. Patriotism is good, but it’s only a means to certain ends: namely, USA and freedom. Now that both those elements are secure, we can put Randy Paul back in his original packaging and sleep tight, right? That seems to be the message. If there’s one thing we know just hearing the name of the USA Freedom Act, it’s that Congress wants to assure us everything is cool. Perhaps that should give us pause.

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Patriot Act expires; collection of phone records suspended; chaos in streets

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 0 Comment
America (artist's conception)

America (artist’s conception)

At 12:01 this morning, thanks to that villain Randy Paul and, to a lesser extent, the guy who told us about it, the US government lost its authority to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk. The Patriot Act has expired. I assume you are reading this from the point of a scimitar, at the other end of which gibbers a bearded zealot. Perhaps you have already become an ISIS or, worse, a copyright infringer. Perhaps you are one of the handful of Americans who remain free, for now. Don’t panic. Probably, most major US cities will be anthraxed between now and lunch on Tuesday. But the strong can survive. You just need to take a few precautions.

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Tom Owad’s map of subversive books

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Not Tom Owad but an owl

Not Tom Owad but an owl

Remember back when the United States was an ever-richening homeland departmentally securing itself against all threats, foreign and domestic, real and perceived? It was 2006. The Patriot Act had finally established as law the relation between patriotism and the executive branch, Crank had captured America’s hearts, and George W. Bush was calmly gathering library borrowing records. Had you forgotten that last part, as I sort of did? Yes, because the library is for bums and very old people—but theoretically I was against it, if only in preparation for being a very old bum. The US government should not subject its people to data-mining. That’s the term for describing patterns in very large amounts of data, a process presumably done by vast, semi-aware supercomputers in Virgina basements. Or, as Tom Owad demonstrated, by a dude with two Powerbooks and DSL.

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