Below is a list of horribly bad, true things that have happened, many of them perpetrated by the US government.
2020.09.17: Some prisons are using AI to monitor the contents of prisoners' phone calls.
2017.01.23: Barack Obama dropped over 26,000 bombs in 2016, in these places:
- 2017.01.22: Russia just decriminalized spousal abuse that doesn't result in "grave bodily harm":
Russian lawmakers expected to approve bill decriminalizing domestic violence not resulting in "grave bodily harm" https://t.co/luka9I5Yq5
— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) January 22, 2017
- 2016.12.05: Even within jail, minorities have it worse --
Study finds disparities *within* prisons: black and Latino inmates are more likely to be sent to solitary. https://t.co/33FUE0VdzG pic.twitter.com/raIHivVs5d
— sean. (@SeanMcElwee) December 4, 2016
- 2016.11.22: Are you an American citizen peacefully opposing the status quo, especially when lots of money is involved? Expect this treatment:
This is America. Not Russia. Not China. America. Against unarmed protesters pic.twitter.com/5EDxlnlyoX
— Grace Lidia Suárez (@gracels) November 21, 2016
2016.11.20: Half of all adult Americans' faces are in a US police facial recognition database.
2016.11.20: Trump surrogates pushing for a database of Muslims:
Trump surrogates are already citing Japanese internment camps from WW II as "precedent" for Muslim registry pic.twitter.com/DVnjtom0mc
— Brendan Karet (@bad_takes) November 17, 2016
- 2016.10.26: AT&T secretly collects data about you and sells it to police without requiring a warrant:
New report: If you use @ATT, they've been tracking you since 1987 and secretly selling it to cops without a warrant. https://t.co/QAxNrC9uqP pic.twitter.com/BF5rtCVrFY
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 25, 2016
2016.09.17: After Wisconsin governor Scott Walker received large donations from lead companies, he and his legislature "passed two laws that would effectively make it impossible for childhood victims of lead poisoning to sue lead companies". Federal courts have since "overturned key elements of them, ruling them unconstitutional and allowing legal challenges to go forward".
2016.09.06: More Hillary badness:
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 23, 2016
- 2016.09.02: Chris Hedges on what's in store for the US based on his experience covering other countries:
2016.08.28: During the 2016 Democratic primaries, after Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" said something positive about Bernie Sanders, Debbie Wasserman Schultz called up the president of MSNBC to ensure that MSNBC would be more pro-Hillary Clinton and anti-Bernie Sanders. At the time, Schultz was the head of the DNC (Democratic National Committee), which determines how many debates there are. She is Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager, and was forced to resign after WikiLeaks published proof that high-ranking DNC officials, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had abused their power within the DNC to unfairly favor Hillary over Bernie.
2016.08.21: The Nixon administration cracked down on drugs as an excuse to target black and the anti-war left:
2016.08.15: "Microsoft Pitches Technology That Can Read Facial Expressions at Political Rallies". In Orwell's 1984, "to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense." "Microsoft’s Realtime Crowd Insights could potentially pick out the stern faces of dissenters, or angry faces of future protestors, all in a matter of seconds."
2016.08.15: The world's first confirmed target of the NSA's PRISM program is a peaceful pro-democracy activist in New Zealand:
The man wrongly targeted "says he gets pulled out of airline queues for security searches every time he travels, and he has had trouble finding work since news reports following the raids in 2012 linked him to a Fiji assassination plan."
- 2016.07.30: Explicit anti-black voter disenfranchisement:
North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. "This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID..." So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people... The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting.
- 2016.06.10: As of March 2016, global warming has caused a 2°C increase in global temperature:
Going to keep tweeting this until it hits front page of the @nytimes: Today we passed 2°C.https://t.co/0DPZmRwvVy pic.twitter.com/V6tpOWYauQ
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) March 3, 2016
- 2016.06.10: FBI agents "seek out people who have somehow demonstrated radical views, and then coax them into plotting an act of terrorism — often providing weapons and money. Before the suspects can carry out their plans, though, they're arrested." ... "Very often, they [the FBI] target people who are genuinely psychotic, who are taking medication," he said.
We are now manufacturing terrorism cases on a greater scale than ever before https://t.co/KbmLDMBrBx #Transparency #OpenGovernment
— FBIPressOrifice (@FBIPressOrifice) June 10, 2016
2016.06.02: Hillary Clinton asked one of her staffers to break the law by asking him to send her classified information in an insecure way as seen in this email she sent. More info and context can be found here.
2016.05.15: This article might be the scariest thing I've ever read: "The US military plans to create artificially intelligent (AI) autonomous weapon systems, which will use predictive social media analytics to make decisions on lethal force with minimal human involvement."
- 2016.05.07: Obama's hypocrisy:
Obama: Students Need to Stop Shutting Down Speech of People They Disagree With https://t.co/QpqnccJI7I (VIDEO) pic.twitter.com/rP2qH5ewhh
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) May 7, 2016
You prosecute whistleblowers & you drone killed a 16-yr-old American citizen https://t.co/n0KKCX5tCS
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) May 7, 2016
2016.04.25: At Abu Ghraib, US soldiers violently raped other men and raped young boys in front of their mothers.
2016.04.23: Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair made a multi-million-dollar per year deal with a dictator to help him improve his image.
2016.04.19: The Obama administration has sold $60 billion of weapons to Saudi Arabia, one of the worst human rights abusers in the world.
2016.04.17: New York state is employing anti-Bernie voter suppression tactics.
2016.04.17: Snapchat's new terms allow them to do whatever they want with your nude selfies.
2016.03.24: "[California Assemblyman Travis] Allen introduced legislation to the state assembly that would forbid the California state government from doing business with companies which boycott or divest from Israel." Is that even fucking legal?
2016.03.23: "President Obama has discreetly brokered and authorized the sale of more arms to foreign governments than any other US president since World War II." (Yes, the President Obama who won a Nobel Peace prize.)
2016.03.23: The US has the worst elections of any western democracy (less transparent, too much money corrupting the process, etc).
2016.03.18: The US government has tried to get US tech companies to hand over source code so they (the gov't) could look for security vulnerabilities they could exploit.
2016.03.09: About 50% of all Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing of Arabs/Palestinians.
2016.03.03: Amazon had encryption in its tablets, and is now removing it. This is unfortunate given that especially Apple is standing up to the threats to the 4th amendment currently posed; I wish Amazon would follow suit.
2016.03.01: In Brazil, authorities just arrested Facebook's Brazil CTO for not decrypting WhatsApp messages they can't decrypt.
- 2016.02.27: Lying FBI forensics people:
wow. that is a real paragraph https://t.co/pgXGv1nBPr pic.twitter.com/K2vB6Ybctq
— Zach Gage (@helvetica) February 27, 2016
2016.02.22: Hillary Clinton made sending Saudi Arabia weapons a top priority when she was in office, and once she delivered them, "...both the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Boeing made donations to the Clinton Foundation". That's right -- the Clintons get kick-backs from giving weapons to the people who back terrorists. The Saudis also backed the 9/11 hijackers; 15 of the 19 of them were from Saudi Arabia.
2016.02.20: A US judge ruled that people who use the Tor anonymity network have no expectation of privacy.
2016.02.19: GCHQ, which is the UK's equivalent of the NSA, has hacked into the web cams of 1.8 million British citizens and recorded pictures of them, many of which are nude photos. And that was all done in just one 6-month period.
2016.02.13: The CIA used its spying powers to spy on the committee tasked with holding it accountable. Here's the video of Ron Wyden making this clear and CIA director John Brennan dodging the question.
2015.10.30: Diffie-Hellman is quantum-breakable! FUCK!!!
EDIT: Sounds like there's something called "Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange" that is quantum-resistant. Whew.
2015.10.29: CISA passed.
2015.10.21: Brandon Bryant is a drone pilot turned drone whistleblower. In retaliation against him, the Air Force claimed that he and his mother are on an ISIS hit list, and that they best way the can protect themselves is to stop talking about drones.
Note
This page has been updated since October 2015, and the dates above are the dates when each entry was created/when I found out about the event noted, not necessarily when the event occurred.