An American Stasi?

The surveillance state.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”

What is a fusion center?

The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.

Read the rest of this entry »

More cause and effect in the War against Terrorists

The extreme paradox of our actions in the Muslim world is now well-documented: namely, the very policies justified in the name of fighting Terrorism (invasions, occupations, bombings, lawless detentions, etc.) are the precise ones that most inflame and exacerbate that threat.  With the news this morning that “American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near the southern [Afghan] city of Kandahar on Monday morning, killing as many as five civilians and wounding 18″ — a report which unsurprisingly “infuriated Kandahar leaders” and triggered anti-American demonstrations — there’s one small though revealing vignette from last week I wanted to highlight.

Read the rest of this entry »