Kevin Bankston, EFF’s Equal Justice Works/Bruce J. Ennis Fellow, sez, “This is an incredible, two part series in Salon about cops spying on political activists post-9/11. It is an absolute must read.”
“What we’re seeing is something much larger in scale and danger than
anything that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s,” he says. “That’s because of
computers. Now, instead of having these agencies working in semi-isolation
or occasional cooperation, there’s the equivalent of the great Alaska
pipeline running between them, and the information flows in both directions.
In addition, in the 1950s or ’60s, it took weeks of pavement pounding and
doorknobbing for the FBI or police or military to collect personal
information about people, the kind of information you need to put them under
surveillance. Today that kind of information can be obtained by a few
computer keystrokes. The harassment potential is much greater.”