#transparencyforthemasses

Nursery staff and childminders are given ‘duty’ to report toddlers they suspect of being at risk of becoming terrorists under new Home Office measures.

A non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years with the maker of a cell-phone spy tool explicitly prohibits the law enforcement agencies from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the secretive equipment, according to one of the agreements obtained by an Arizona journalist.

"Iranian Living Room" is a new photojournalism project we've produced and self-published. Enrico Bossan, our brilliant head of photography, sought out 15 young Iranian photographers to take pictures of "interior life" in Iran (mainly Tehran.) We wanted to coincide with the Iranian election as we knew much of the associated imagery would be CNN and BBC cameras on the streets. But we also knew that the real discussions amongst Iranians would take place in private, off the streets, in the relative freedom of the "living room", away from the prying eyes of the world's media, and the state. [...] I was told that [PayPal's] shopping cart code was blocking the order because the book had the word "Iranian" in the title. And that word is on a "blacklist" (their word, not mine) as PayPal is based in the USA. And that was that. Our PayPal account manager on the phone in Dublin—who was vaguely helpful and evasive in equal measure—said that he could tell by my accent that I was American and I would understand the issue.

But it is the concept which runs alongside the constant and essentially unconsented gathering of data which is most mendacious: the contention that privacy is a luxury, a bygone; an unnecessary and even regressive notion in a technological age of openness and a hinderance to the safeguarding of a just society. It is precisely in a technological society that privacy emerges as a central, vital plank of legitimate democratic function. It might be different if openness were universal, if we could scrutinize the choices of our leaders and hold them to account; if we could get unvarnished access to information about the things we buy and the services to which we subscribe, and know the probable consequences of our decision rather than be soothed with pablums and misdirections; if we were encouraged and enabled to participate in the creation of the world, rather than sidelined as the governed, the consumers. But this is not an era of radical transparency across the board. It is not an era of growing direct democracy. It is the era of transparency for the masses, of autocracy dressed as liberty. The powerful are concealed by law and contract, and by power. The rest of us are exposed and encouraged to think of this exposure as freedom.

To query the huge pools of metadata, authorities say they need to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of an association with a terrorism organization. That standard is approved by the FISA court but the court does not review each query. Rather, the senior administration official said, the queries are documented and a sample of them is audited by the Justice Department's National Security Division and the Director of National Intelligence.

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Tight security restrictions at Thursday's Google shareholder meeting led even the company's much-hyped Google Glass technology to be banned, infuriating a consumer watchdog group who accused the tech giant of hypocrisy.

“There are situations in life that it’s better that they don’t exist. Especially if there is stuff you did when you were a teenager. Teenagers are now in an adult world online.”