Outsourcing to surveillance mercenaries

Claudio Guarnieri @ Big Brother Awards 2013 from Bits of Freedom on Vimeo. opens his talk with an ad from a surveillance company billing itself as "The hacking suite for governmental interception". 


Obama's first question from the press in Sweden today was on NSA spying.
Barry still going with :

"What I can say with confidence is that when it comes to our domestic operations, the concerns that people have back home … we do not surveil the American people or persons within the US. There are a lot of checks and balances in place designed to avoid a surveillance state. 

"We." Does that include the surveillance mercenaries that collect data for you?

"And I can give assurances to the public in Europe and around the world that we're not going around snooping at people's emails or listening to their phone calls. What we try to do is to target very specifically areas of concern."

"Specific areas of concern" apparently include alleged snooping the email correspondence and listening in on the private phone calls of the presidents of Mexico and Brazil.

Last month Obama appointed NSA director James Clapper- who lied under oath about the scope of secret surveillance - to an independent review board to investigate his own agency.
Hoo ha.
In his last budget request Clapper wrote : 

 “We are investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit Internet traffic."

Also today WikiLeaks published 249 documents from 92 global intelligence contractors.

"These documents reveal how, as the intelligence world has privatised, US, EU and developing world intelligence agencies have rushed into spending millions on next-generation mass surveillance technology to target communities, groups and whole populations."

If you click on the handy map provided at WikiLeaks, you can check out the three Canadian companies named.

I've written before about US corporate surveillance of Creekside here.

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