Keep us up at NightPresident Eisenhower, in his
1961 farewell address, warned that the military-industrial complex could "endanger our liberties or democratic processes." A
slew of documents released by WikiLeaks highlights the dangers of the surveillance-industrial complex as well.
What WikiLeaks has dubbed the "
Spy Files" is a collection of marketing and technical documents, including previously unreleased presentations from companies that showed up at government-only conferences like ISS World Europe, billed as a gathering in 2008 for "telecom operators, law enforcement," and employees of spy agencies. Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, whose hardware was
used by the Libyan secret police, boasts in a leaked document how it can aid governments in moving from eavesdropping on one person to "full country traffic monitoring," including automatic translation and mapping of real-world social networks based on who's talking to who.
Tatiana Lucas, whose company organizes conferences where dictatorial regimes go surveillance-shopping, complained about the disclosures in a
letter to The Wall Street Journal saying that the attention will have a "negative effect on job creation in the U.S." Eisenhower, who cautioned against the "acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex, would not have been surprised.
--Caption by Declan McCullagh
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