Six on Surveillance and Privacy: The Paradox of Employee Surveillance; The Prisoner Says No To Big Brother; Disputed N.S.A. P
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"One troubling reaction to this [putative] shift is that some companies are starting to monitor employees’ every click, word, and interaction to catch would-be trust violators. In other words, they’re trying to find a few bad apples by monitoring all of their workers.
Monitoring employees can have benefits, but it can also decimate employee morale and, paradoxically, weaken ethical behavior. Research suggests that when companies monitor an employee’s every move, they signal distrust, which can lead to employee disengagement. Disengaged employees are less productive; they can also introduce new risks to the organization as people stop actively searching for the right thing to do and focus instead on mere compliance. In other words, sometimes they miss the forest for the trees."
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Julie Bishop had every opportunity in the UK and the US to present a diplomatic solution that would bring Julian home. But this required the courage of one proud to represent a sovereign, independent state, not a vassal.
Instead, she made no attempt to contradict the British Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, when he said outrageously that Julian "faced serious charges". What charges? There were no charges.
Australia's Foreign Minister abandoned her duty to speak up for an Australian citizen, prosecuted with nothing, charged with nothing, guilty of nothing.
Will those feminists who fawn over this false icon at the Opera House next Sunday be reminded of her role in colluding with foreign forces to punish an Australian journalist, one whose work has revealed that rapacious militarism has smashed the lives of millions of ordinary women in many countries: in Iraq alone, the US-led invasion of that country, in which Australia participated, left 700,000 widows.
So what can be done? An Australian government that was prepared to act in response to a public campaign to rescue the refugee football player, Hakeem al-Araibi, from torture and persecution in Bahrain, is capable of bringing Julian Assange home.
Yet the refusal by the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra to honour the United Nations' declaration that Julian is the victim of "arbitrary detention" and has a fundamental right to his freedom is a shameful breach of the spirit of international law.
Why has the Australian government made no serious attempt to free Assange? Why did Julie Bishop bow to the wishes of two foreign powers? Why is this democracy traduced by its servile relationships, and integrated with lawless foreign power?
The persecution of Julian Assange is the conquest of us all: of our independence, our self respect, our intellect, our compassion, our politics, our culture.
So stop scrolling. Organise. Occupy. Insist. Persist. Make a noise. Take direct action. Be brave and stay brave. Defy the thought police.
War is not peace, freedom is not slavery, ignorance is not strength. If Julian can stand up to Big Brother, so can you: so can all of us.'
John Pilger gave this speech at a rally in Sydney for Julian Assange, organised by the Socialist Equality Party."
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"Companies like AT&T and MCI — later part of Verizon — initially turned over their customers’ records in response to an order by Mr. Bush. Starting in 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began issuing secret orders requiring the companies to participate, based on a novel interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which said the F.B.I. may obtain business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation.
In June 2013, the program came to light after The Guardian published the first revelation from the trove of classified files provided by Mr. Snowden: a top-secret surveillance court order to Verizon to provide its customers’ call records.
The disclosure, one of the most significant by Mr. Snowden, prompted sharp criticism of the government’s theory about why it was legal: Essentially, everyone’s phone records were relevant because the government needed to acquire the haystack so that it could hunt for needles of investigative interest. An appeals court later rejected that theory."
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Ex-NSA operatives reveal how they helped spy on targets for
the Arab monarchy — dissidents, rival leaders and journalists.
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