The expansive post-9/11 notion of “homeland security” – manifested most concretely in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – underpins suspicionless surveillance. DHS itself, “as part of its regular operations, conducts invasive physical searches of millions of Americans and their belongings each week without any predicate.” These programs, according to the...
Tag: surveillance
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Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, Many Chose to Cooperate
In his TK News Substack newsletter, Matt Taibbi compares the relationship between U.S. news organizations and the intelligence community in 2014 and today. Fast forward seven years. Julian Assange is behind bars, and may die there. Snowden is in exile in Russia. Brennan, Clapper, and Hayden have been rehabilitated and are all paid contributors...
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China’s Top Spy is a Working Class Hero
SpyTalk on China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS in Chinese) Since its founding in 1983, the MSS has had a preeminent role in China’s vast machinery of domestic repression. But Chen appears set to turn its foreign spying arm into an increasingly effective presence in America and elsewhere during the 2020s, says Nicholas Eftimades, one...
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MI6 and CIA Are Recruiting: Diversity and Disabilities Welcome
The glamorization of intelligence work began with Ian Fleming’s James Bond series in the later 1950s. Fleming, a veteran of MI6, the British foreign intelligence agency. invented a spy who appealed The U.S. sales of Bond novels skyrocketed in March 1961 when President John Kennedy disclosed he was a fan. Spies were now seen as...
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‘Eyes in the Sky’: The Scary Realities of Wide Area Surveillance
“Someday most major developed cities in the world will live under the unblinking gaze of some form of wide-area surveillance,” writes Arthur Holland Michel in Eyes in the Sky, a startling, disturbing, and deeply reported account of the powerful new technologies that promise safety and imperil privacy on an unprecedented scale. Imagine an aerial video...