Student associations at schools in the northeastern United States have demanded the attorney general probe the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) “secret surveillance” of students in their associations. The demand comes after investigative reporting published by the Associated Press revealed the NYPD conducted surveillance of Muslim students at Rutgers University, Yale, Columbia, New York University (NYU), University of Buffalo and other schools.

The Obama Administration wants the Supreme Court to dismiss an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenge to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, an act passed in 2008 that ACLU attorneys contend “allows dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications with none of the safeguards that the Constitution requires.” It filed a petition to the Court asking for an appeals court ruling that permits the ACLU to challenge the law to be overturned.

A congressional committee hearing is being held today on the Homeland Security Department’s (DHS) monitoring of social media. The meeting, being convened by the House Subcommittee of Counterterrorism and Intelligence, chaired by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), is being held as a result of documents on DHS monitoring that were exposed through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public research center that focuses attention on emerging issues of privacy and other civil liberties issues.

Humanitarians are taking an interest in how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones could be used to protect human rights in countries all over the world. In particular, those who believe in preventing massacres or genocide are suggesting surveillance drones be considered as a tool that organizations could deploy to save lives. But there are numerous practical and ethical problems with going down this road.

This past Sunday Occupy Chicago held a march in solidarity with Occupy Oakland after Oakland police fired various crowd-dispersal weapons at them and arrested hundreds. They marched in the evening through downtown. Like other Occupy groups, they had a person live streaming the action, Keilah [@OccupieChicago], who was seized, had her camera confiscated, and threatened with felony arrest under Illinois’ egregious Eavesdropping Act. It’s a totalitarian’s dream.

As historian Jay Feldman describes in his brilliantly researched and artfully written new book, Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America, there have indeed been a great many things wrong with this country specifically with respect to government attacks on civil liberties. Feldman pulls together a jaw-dropping historical catalogue of 20th Century examples where the United States government not only trampled the Bill of Rights, but did so while whipping up class warfare, xenophobic hysteria, and political mob violence, all on the pretext that war or the threat of war necessitated the abrogation of liberty.

This ubiquitous world-wide surveillance of anyone and everyone should serve as a wake up call for what the future may hold. Rapid deployment of the new technologies uncovered in the FOIA records brings us closer to an extensive and inescapable surveillance state, where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes, and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.

Much pundit ink has been spilled pondering why the OccupyWallStreet protest has grown so rapidly and resonated so widely. But the answer is really not difficult to apprehend. Our political system is fundamentally broken by corruption and oligarchical control. Many people know this. They have rationally concluded that voting fixes none of these systemic problems precisely because the problems are systemic. And going out into the street to protest and demand an end to this corruption is the only perceived means of redress.

Unnamed sources and materials discovered in Tripoli, where the regime’s spies monitored telecommunications, show Amesys, a unit of the French company Bull SA, assisted in the spying. Sources and materials also indicate Chinese company ZTE Corp provided equipment to Gaddafi.

Provisions slated to expire include: the “roving wiretap provision,” which permits government to obtain intelligence surveillance orders without identifying the person or the facility being tapped (Section 206 of the Act); the “Lone Wolf” provision, which permits intelligence agencies to survey non-US persons not affiliated with a foreign organization (Section 6001 of the Act); and Section 215, which grants government authorization to obtain “any tangible thing” relevant to a terrorism investigation, even if there is no evidence the “thing” pertains to the terrorist or terrorist activity under investigation.