Will Griffin: Origins of the Modern Surveillance State

DC Rally Against Mass Surveillance

Image by Susan Melkisethian via Flickr

by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
July 7, 2022

“Since the dawn of capitalism, the capitalist class has had to keep an eye on the working class in order to keep them in check. This surveillance has been around for a long time but the story of the modern surveillance state begins about a century ago.”

Continue reading

Will Griffin: How Military Satellites Spy on You

Will Griffin: How Military Satellites Spy on You

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

by Will Griffin
Writer, Dandelion Salad
June 15, 2020

“Hybrid warfare is a concept that brings together conventional warfare and cyberwarfare using tactics of fake news, diplomacy, lawfare and foreign electoral intervention into a form of political warfare. Cyber attacks and hacking play a key role in both covert and overt warfare. The hacking of communication systems and eavesdropping on, for example embassies around the world, is now commonplace.” — Will Griffin

Continue reading

Edward Snowden: Maybe You’ve Heard About It–This Is Mass Surveillance

2013 DC Rally Against Mass Surrveillance 2

Image by Stephen Melkisethian via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

“It is through this sort of unholy connection of technology and sort of an unusual interpretation of contract law that these institutions have been able to transform this greatest virtue of humanity—which is this desire to interact and to connect and to cooperate and to share—to transform all of that into a weakness.

Continue reading

America’s Surveillance State, Part 4: The Surveillance Industrial Complex

Dandelion Salad

Replaced video June 15, 2020

True Story Documentary Channel on Sep 7, 2019

Stop CISPA

Image by Free Press via Flickr

We live in the United States of Surveillance — with cameras increasingly positioned on street corners and with much more invisible spying online and on the phone. Anyone who is paying attention knows that privacy could be out the window. All of this is not happening by accident -well funded powerful agencies and companies are engaged in the business of keeping tabs on what we do, what we say, and what we think.

To many in the world, today, the face of America also has A BIG NOSE for sniffing and sifting mountains of data—phone calls, emails and texts. And with many mouths silenced by paranoia to keep what they decide is secret, secret. America has become a Surveillance-Industrial State where everyone’s business has become its business, and where one huge US intelligence Agency has been given the sanction and unlimited amounts of money to spy on the whole world.

Mass Surveillance is the focus of this new 6 part investigative documentary series examining who is watching whom and why.

Continue reading

America’s Surveillance State, Part 2: Inside The NSA: How Do They Spy?

Dandelion Salad

Replaced video June 15, 2020

True Story Documentary Channel on Sep 7, 2019

The Bug Stops Here

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

We live in the United States of Surveillance — with cameras increasingly positioned on street corners and with much more invisible spying online and on the phone. Anyone who is paying attention knows that privacy could be out the window. All of this is not happening by accident -well funded powerful agencies and companies are engaged in the business of keeping tabs on what we do, what we say, and what we think.

To many in the world, today, the face of America also has A BIG NOSE for sniffing and sifting mountains of data—phone calls, emails and texts. And with many mouths silenced by paranoia to keep what they decide is secret, secret. America has become a Surveillance-Industrial State where everyone’s business has become its business, and where one huge US intelligence Agency has been given the sanction and unlimited amounts of money to spy on the whole world.

Mass Surveillance is the focus of this new 6 part investigative documentary series examining who is watching whom and why.

Continue reading

Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails: A Massive Surveillance State

Dandelion Salad

democracynow Jun 7, 2013

Big Brother

Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr

http://www.democracynow.org – We speak with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story Thursday that the National Security Agency has obtained access the central servers of nine major internet companies — including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Facebook. The Guardian and the Washington Post revealed the top secret program, code-named PRISM, after they obtained several slides from a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts. It explains how PRISM allows them to access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs that allow them to track a person or trace their connections to others. One slide lists the companies by name and the date when each provider began participating over the past six years. “Hundreds of millions of Americans, and hundreds of millions — in fact billions of people around the world — essentially rely on the internet exclusively to communicate with one another,” Greenwald says. “Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat, and social media messages, and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication.” This comes after Greenwald revealed Wednesday in another story that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. “They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another … that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time.”

Continue reading