President’s Obama’s new executive order enabling sanctions against foreign nationals who use the new technologies to facilitate human rights abuses might perhaps be summarized in one word — chutzpah. Obama strongly supports pervasive government surveillance of U.S. citizens by his own security state. His administration has extended the time (from 6 months to 5 years) that counter-terrorism officials may (and no doubt will) retain information collected about Americans, regardless of their lack of connection to terrorism. Meanwhile, James Bamford has warned, the National Security Agency is building a massive data center to house all our communications and other “personal data trails.”
