This Knock Knock is No Joke
“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life. Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.” That was an email that Jon, a retired American from a Philadelphia suburb, fired off from his Gmail account to a prosecutor at the Dept of Homeland Security after reading a story about efforts to deport an Afghan whose life would be in immediate danger from the Taliban. The email contained no threats. It was just a measured call for caution and decency from someone who thought that people like him needed to speak up if we want to preserve America’s better values. The response was less measured. “Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone. ‘Google,’ the message read, ‘has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.’ Listed below was the type of legal process: ‘subpoena.’ And below that, the authority: ‘Department of Homeland Security.’ That’s how it began. Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be.” There are a lot of things going on in our country that we never imagined would be. Most of the coverage goes to the things happening out in the public, often captured on video. But, as the knock on Jon’s Philadelphia front door makes clear, there are a lot of things happening in the shadows as well. WaPo (Gift Article): Homeland Security is targeting Americans with this secretive legal weapon. Anything you say can and will be used against you. But that’s no longer just limited to the moments after you’ve been arrested and read your Miranda warning. Anything you say, write, buy, do, share, or send anywhere, anytime can be used against you. Just ask a guy named Jon from a Philadelphia suburb who shared this story, but who, for obvious reasons, asked that his last name not be used. In America.
+ Everything we do online, and much of what we do offline, is easily trackable. Many of us have long worried that corporations compiling and crunching all that data can use it for marketing purposes. We have something bigger to worry about now. Tressie Mcmillan Cottom in the NYT (Gift Article): ICE Is Watching You. “The companies that already use our data — to target us with advertisements, to assess our eligibility for loans or insurance — are limited largely by the concerns of business: for the most part, a company wants your wallet, not your liberty. The same cannot be said of this administration.”
+ Sometimes surveillance seems like a good thing. Flock cameras are used by cities and towns across the country to help police departments catch car thieves and other crooks. But like all other data, this material is not safe when we have a federal government that even law enforcement can’t trust. Mountain View police turn off license plate readers, allege unauthorized federal use. Last month, another Bay Area city terminated its Flock contract for the same reason.
