Domestic Glance
It's an audiotape the New York Police Department hoped you would never hear.
The caller, Salil Sheth, had stumbled upon one of the NYPD's biggest secrets: a safe house, a place where undercover officers working well outside the department's jurisdiction could lie low and coordinate surveillance. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the NYPD, with training and guidance from the CIA, has monitored the activities of Muslims in New York and far beyond. Detectives infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and kept tabs on Muslim student groups, including at Rutgers.
Most of us don't think much about it, but the truth is that people are being watched, tracked and monitored more today than at any other time in human history. The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, spy agencies and big corporations monitoring tools that the despots and dictators of the past could only dream of. Previous generations never had to deal with "pre-crime" surveillance cameras that use body language to spot criminals or unmanned drones watching them from far above. Previous generations would have never even dreamed that street lights and refrigerators might be spying on them. Many of the incredibly creepy surveillance technologies that you are about to read about are likely to absolutely astound you. We are rapidly heading toward a world where there will be no such thing as privacy anymore. Big Brother is becoming all-pervasive, and thousands of new technologies are currently being developed that will make it even easier to spy on you. The world is changing at a breathtaking pace, and a lot of the changes are definitely not for the better.
Few Americans would believe that the government has the technological capability and wherewithal to monitor, track, log, and analyze the everyday activities of American citizens. The idea that the National Security Agency, an organization responsible the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligenc, would operate on US soil to turn the surveillance apparatus on the people they are tasked with protecting has up until now been reserved for conspiracy theorists and Hollywood movies.
At a festival called Peacestock in Wisconsin last weekend, I met a woman who lives in Little Falls, Minnesota. That city had forced her to take down signs in her own yard, signs that said "Occupy Wall Street," "Back the 99 Percent" and "Boycott Monsanto."
A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.
The Boy Scouts of America has said it will continue to deny membership to gay people because doing so "is in the best interest of Scouting." Its announcement followed a two-year internal study which was prompted by heated debate over the policy of excluding gay Scouts and Scout leaders.
After the first World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst testified that supervisors pressured him to concoct misleading scientific reports.
