Entries Tagged 'Surveillance' ↓

by Rhona Mahony. Marc Falkoff came to Stanford University last week, on May 29, to describe his Guantanamo clients. Like his colleague on the speakers’ panel, Anant Raut, he wore a fine suit and looked like a prudent member of the legal establishment. He is now a professor at Northern Illinois University’s law school. When he began to work for Guantanamo prisoners, he worked at an expensive law firm, Covington & Burling. I learned something immediately: Covington represented Fred Korematsu, the Japanese-American man whose internment during World War II was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1944 in Korematsu vs. United States. Continue reading →

By Rhona Mahony. Marcus Yallow lives in San Francisco in 2010. He is a 17 year-old high school student who likes to program, tinker, and play an elaborate game, part puzzle and part race, whose clues are hidden on the Internet and about the city.
One afternoon when he and his friends are skipping school to play the game, the Bay Bridge explodes and collapses. The Department of Homeland Security arrests Marcus and his friends as suspects in the bombing. After all, they are not where they should be. Their pockets are full of electronic gadgets, some encrypted. Marcus politely asks to call his parents to arrange a lawyer. Instead, a sack goes over his head, the drawstring is pulled tight, and he is loaded onto a boat and, hours later, off of it. Nameless government agents question him roughly for days. When he is set free, back on the sidewalk in San Francisco, his city has changed. All communication is recorded: land lines, cell phones, email, the Internet. All movement is monitored: by closed-circuit televisions, automobiles’ electronic toll booth passes, traffic check points, and frequent ID checks of pedestrians. One of Marcus’s friends was injured when they were arrested and wasn’t released with them. Where is he? Is he still alive? Marcus vows to use his technological creativity to rally the young people of San Francisco. They must thwart the lockdown. They must make adults understand how destructive and how ineffectual it really is. Continue reading →