We re-discovered the Spingola Files a while ago and thankfully, he's writing more often.
...The most visible sign of domestic spying initiatives are the millions of
cameras posted along interstate highways, mounted on poles at key
intersections, or those little white boxes containing cameras found, in
some instances, every mile on stretches of southeastern Wisconsin
freeways. This data is recorded and archived by the Wisconsin
Department of Transportation’s State Traffic Operations Center in
Milwaukee...
... Wisconsin has two such [fusion] centers: one operated by the Milwaukee Police
Department and the other housed in a benign office park on Madison’s
north side. The equipment used by these centers was purchased with
Department of Homeland Security grant money. Moreover, federal funds
underwrite about 20 percent of the Milwaukee fusion center’s budget.
These high-tech fusion centers can access one’s personal information
from private sector data mining companies, such as ChoicePoint, in order
to ascertain an individual’s financial transactions, book purchases,
vehicles and properties owned, credit information, as well as names and
addresses of relatives and neighbors. Fusion centers also use software
to track cellular telephones absent judicial oversight. This technology
enables an agent of the government to follow a cell phone from
room-to-room within a particular building or structure....
...In Wisconsin, over 37 law enforcement agencies use automated license
plate readers (ALPR), which are generally mounted on patrol vehicles,
although some are placed at fixed locations. These devices scan
hundreds of license plates of passing vehicles each minute to check on
the driver’s license status, possible warrants, or other fugitive data.
These devices also record the date, time, and location that the vehicle
was scanned. This information is then stored in various databases. ...
Nothing to see here. Move on, subjects.
UPDATE: What Spingola didn't mention (yet):
...The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and
local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been
reported, involves an extremely close association between the government
and the telecommunications giant.
The government pays AT&T to
place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those
employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local
detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as
1987....Ticker quoting NYT
There's no "secret court" involved here; it's all "administrative". Whatever DEA wants, they get through non-judicial warrants.
ReplyDeleteWhat he wrote.
However, in the end, he's still on the wrong side.
Why?
He's a former cop.
He's former civil serpent.
Probably retired in his early 50s, probably complained about that, and he'll spend the rest of his life cushily writing his column while he's stealing from my and your back pocket via his bloated pension and bloated benefits received in retirement.
Relinquish his criminal pension, cross the line and turn in his fellow corrupt smarmy coward little bastards in blue, and then maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to stomach his hypocrisy without a massive infusion of Alka Seltzer.
In the end, a criminal calling out the criminals.