Portside

The Social Security Administration once again is floating an extremely ableist proposal: using social media accounts, such as Twitter and Facebook, to monitor people with disabilities who receive disability benefits from the government.

One of the biggest protests of 2016 is still underway at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, where Water Protectors and their allies are fighting Energy Transfer Partners’ plans to drill beneath contested Treaty land to finish the Dakota Access Pipeline. EFF has been tracking the effects of its surveillance technologies on water protectors’ communications and movement.

Local Surveillance: Its impact on human rights and its relationship to national and international surveillance. Statements by grassroots organizations compiled by May First/People Link https://mayfirst.org/. The document was initially submitted to the United Nations Rapporteur on Privacy and is now being released publicly. It is the first compilation of local organizations' statements on surveillance and a look at a strategically critical area of movement work.

The New York Times gets a new NSA doc confirming what some had long suspected.

June 2 was a day that the people won against the security state. US citizens took away the government’s control of nearly all of their domestic call records. And power was forced to act because their operation of a program and the operations of a secret surveillance court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, were no longer seen as legitimate. The extent of the victory, however, probably ends there.