In his speech at the National Defense University last May, President Obama declared that “before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set.” He added that, “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”
But the increased reliance on phone tracking and other fallible surveillance tactics suggests that the opposite is true.The Intercept
After an uproar this week when Attorney General Eric Holder wrote thattechnically speaking, the president might have the authority to kill an American citizen on U.S. soil using a drone in an "extraordinary circumstance," a newHuffPost/YouGov poll finds that Americans are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of drone strikes in the U.S., with half saying that ordering one would be unjustified even if it would prevent a terrorist attack.The Huffington Post
Only 33 percent of respondents to the new survey believe there should be circumstances in which it is legal for the president to order a drone strike against an American citizen within the U.S., while 47 percent said it should be legal under no circumstances. Majorities of both Republicans and independents said that there were no circumstances under which ordering a drone strike against an American citizen on American soil should be legal, but Democrats were more likely to say that it should be legal under extraordinary circumstances, 43 percent to 32 percent.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Wednesday that chapters in 23 states have filed over 255 open records requests pertaining to the militarization of local police departments around the country since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in what the group is calling its most concentrated effort yet to assess the growth of America’s police state.The Raw Story
You will probably want to read the whole piece. It is short and suggests how out of hand this is getting, especially with the assertion of the AG that drones can be used to assassinate Americans on US soil. So much for Obama as constitutional law professor. He joins John Yoo as a traitor to constitutional law.
It's no wonder that advocates of Second Amendment rights are so vocal. This is not just paranoia, even though there may be a lot of paranoia involved, too.
An excerpt from the new book, 'Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture.'Ian Cobain
The CIA's deadly campaign of drone strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan will be exempt from the Obama administration's attempt to codify rules for targeted killings.AlterNet
The police may soon be watching you in your garden picking your vegetables or your bottom. As police plans for increasing unmanned aerial surveillance take shape, there is a new twist. Private citizens can now buy their own surveillance drones to watch the police.
This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department. In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police. But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and "frozen zones". This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.
Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the "occucopter". It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds.Read the rest at The Guardian (UK)
