Whatever you say, Kyle...

Government seeks to shut down NSA wiretapping lawsuit

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:09:56 -0600

Government seeks to shut down NSA wiretapping lawsuit:

Warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency began as a Bush-era program in October 2001; in 2008, the government essentially allowed the practice in the FISA Amendments Act. The same year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed lawsuits challenging the surveillance.

At a hearing today in San Francisco federal court, the debate over whether NSA can continue its practices heated up again. Under questioning from US District Judge Jeffrey White, EFF and government lawyers sparred about how the case should move forward, or if it can at all. The Department of Justice argues the case can’t move forward—at all—without violating the “state secrets privilege.”

5 Unbelievably Creepy Surveillance Tactics

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:59:52 -0600

5 Unbelievably Creepy Surveillance Tactics:

Since the erosion of Americans’ civil liberties depends on high levels of public apathy, some of the most dangerous privacy breaches take place incrementally and under the radar; if it invites comparisons to Blade Runneror Orwell, then someone in the PR department didn’t do their job. Meanwhile, some of the biggest threats to privacy, like insecure online data or iPhone GPS tracking, are physically unobtrusive and therefore easily ignored. And it’ll be at least a year or two until the sky is overrun by spy drones.

So when a method of surveillance literally resembles a prop or plot point in a sci-fi movie, it helps to reveal just how widespread and sophisticated commercial and government monitoring has become. Here are five recent developments that seem almost unreal in their dystopian creepiness.

Exposing the US military's 'diabolical' drug experiments on its own soldiers

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:23:31 -0600

Exposing the US military's 'diabolical' drug experiments on its own soldiers:

It’s a mad scientist narrative that seems perfect for a Kubrick film or Jacob’s Laddersequel, though Ketchum’s experiments had very real consequences, leaving some soldiers with lasting psychological conditions. Now, a group of former subjects has filed a class action suit against the federal government, describing its experiments as “diabolical.” The 81-year-old Ketchum, however, fiercely defends his experiments. “I would consider it dishonest to claim regret simply to gain forgiveness by critics,” he said.

California law enforcement moves to buy drones

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:18:00 -0600

California law enforcement moves to buy drones:

Since Congress passed legislation in February ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track the approval of unmanned aerial vehicles—more colloquially known as drones—for use by law enforcement agencies, police and sheriff departments across the country have been scrambling to purchase the smaller, unarmed cousins of the Predator and Reaper drones which carry out daily sorties over Afghanistan, Yemen, and other theaters of operation.

Alameda County in California has become one of the central battlegrounds over the introduction of drones to domestic police work. Earlier this year, Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern raised the hackles of local civil libertarians (and there are quite a few of those in the county, which encompasses Berkeley and Oakland) by declaring his intention to purchase a drone to assist with “emergency response.” According to Ahern, Alameda Sheriff’s personnel first tested a UAV in fall 2011 and gave a public demonstration of the machine’s usefulness for emergency responses during the Urban Shield SWAT competition in late October.

Were Alameda County to purchase a drone, it would set a precedent in California, which has long been an innovator in law enforcement tactics: from SWAT teams (pioneered in Delano and Los Angeles) to anti-gang tactics such as civil injunctions. The first documented incident of a drone being used to make an arrest in the United States occurred in North Dakota in June 2011, when local police received assistance from an unarmed Predator B drone that belonged to US Customs and Border Protection. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration have also reportedly used drones for domestic investigations.

Police Have the Scary Capability to Track Wherever You're Driving

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:09:25 -0600

Police Have the Scary Capability to Track Wherever You're Driving:

The NYPD is but one of a growing number of local and state police agencies throughout the country engaged in the non-stop tracking of car license plates. Most troubling, the data captured through license plate reader (LPR) and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) programs are being integrated with other personal data to provide the security state with ever more detailed profiles of ordinary Americans.

No warrant, no problem: How the government can still get your digital data

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 21:04:03 -0600

No warrant, no problem: How the government can still get your digital data:

The US government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your e-mails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena. Usually you won’t even be notified. The Senate last weektook a step toward updating privacy protection for emails, but it’s likely the issue will be kicked to the next Congress.

anarcho-queer: Police Can Record Video Inside Your Home Without...

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:19:52 -0600

anarcho-queer:

Police Can Record Video Inside Your Home Without A Warrant, Appeals Court Says

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court provided some comfort to those fearing the seemingly limitless potential of new technologies to enable government privacy invasion. In holding that police could not attach a GPS device to a car and track it for 30 days without a warrant, the court said, “At bottom, we must ‘assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.’”

But don’t get too comfortable. A federal appeals court ruled last week that police can secretly videotape a suspect’s home without a warrant. In a case about the suspected sale of bald eagle feathers and pelts – a misdemeanor crime — the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that undercover police admitted into the suspect’s home as interested buyers of pelts did not violate the Fourth Amendment when they secretly videotaped the suspect’s home:

We are persuaded that it is not “constitutionally relevant” whether an informant utilizes an audio-video device, rather than merely an audio recording device, to record activities occurring inside a home, into which the informer has been invited. When Wahchumwah invited Agent Romero into his home, he forfeited his expectation of privacy as to those areas that were “knowingly expose[d] to” Agent Romero. Wahchumwah cannot reasonably argue that the recording violates his legitimate privacy interests when it reveals no more than what was already visible to the agent.

The decision doesn’t entirely break new ground. At least one other federal appeals court has upheld the use of video recordings inside the home, and just last month, a lower federal court reached a similar conclusion.

The Police State and Your Texts: Police Groups Vie For Mandatory Collection of All Text Messages

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:14:28 -0600

The Police State and Your Texts: Police Groups Vie For Mandatory Collection of All Text Messages:

thepoliticalfreakshow:

As Congress mulls changes to an outdated law intended to protect electronic privacy, a group of law enforcement officers is lobbying for a provision that would erode privacy by requiring that text messages be saved and stored for at least two years. According to CNET, police and prosecutors’ groups say they have increasingly come to rely on text messages as evidence in criminal cases, and they are vying for a mandated storage period in amendments to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act now being considered:

[T]he Senate Judiciary committee … approved sweeping amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act last week. Unlike earlier drafts, the latest one veers in a very privacy-protective direction by requiring police to obtain a warrant to read the contents of e-mail messages; the SMS push by law enforcement appears to be a way to make sure it includes one of their priorities too.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the law enforcement proposal is to store the contents of SMS messages, or only the metadata such as the sender and receiver phone numbers associated with the messages. Either way, it’s a heap of data: Forrester Research reports that more than 2 trillion SMS messages were sent in the U.S. last year, over 6 billion SMS messages a day.

Among the groups urging the mandate are the Mayor Cities Police Chiefs Association, the National District Attorneys’ Association, the National Sheriffs’ Association, and the Association of State Criminal Investigative Agencies. These agencies are not alone in vying for more data collection and retention. The Department of Justice last year called for laws requiring Internet providers to retain data. But the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Calabrese points out that any such proposal certainly doesn’t belong in discussions of reform of the law intended to protect electronic privacy.

Evidence suggests that wireless carriers have a range of evolving policies on retaining text messages, from no retention at all to 180 days. Most companies, however, appear not to have policies that messages be stored for a time period even close to two years. A spokesman for U.S. Cellular told CNET that data is stored for just 3-5 days, due to the volume of the content.

Both wireless companies and law enforcement agencies do increasingly store and monitor other kinds of phone data. The New York City Police Department is retaining cell phone logs collected when phones are reported stolen, and other wireless carriers recently reported fielding 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for various types of data.

anarcho-queer: Interactive Map Reveals Where Drones Are Being...

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 09:12:11 -0600

anarcho-queer:

Interactive Map Reveals Where Drones Are Being Flown Inside The US Right Now

Thanks to new documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we’re starting to see a clearer picture of the rapid deployment of unmanned aerial drones by military, state and local law enforcement inside the domestic United States. Using data obtained through their Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FAA, the EFF have constructed an interactive map showing the locations where police, military, and others are currently authorized to fly drones in national airspace, as well as some details on the drones themselves and how they’re being used.

Civil rights groups have been trying to obtain as much of this information as possible after a Congressional mandate and a Department of Homeland Security initiative earlier this year made clear the US government’s intent to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption” of drones by public and private entities on US soil, including police. Use of drones has already been documented in several places, including local police in areas of Texas and Florida. But the new data reveals that both police and military drone flights have become a regular occurrence in many areas of the country, and many more public and private entities are still hoping to get in on the game.

The drones are being used for a variety of purposes, and come with a varying payload of surveillance and data collection equipment. In one of the creepier examples, Reaper drones being flown by the US Air Force near Lincoln County, Nevada are being outfitted with “Gorgon Stare” technology, which uses a nine-camera array capable of surveilling an entire city at once.

For law enforcement, the focus with drones remains on drug investigations. The Queen Anne County, Maryland Sheriff’s Department, for one, will be using drones equipped with special imaging technology to surveil large patches of farmland for marijuana growth. Meanwhile, police in Arlington, Texas are hoping to spot drug transactions with their Leptron Avenger drone, which EFF notes is able to be loaded with the LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) technology used by police to detect traffic violations.

The documents do show some far less ominous uses, however. The California Department of Forestry has plans to use drones to fight forest fires, and the University of Colorado applied for 200 drone licenses in 2008 with the intention of using them to aid “in the study of ad hoc wireless networks with [the drone] acting as communication relays.”

Even with all of this new information, the full picture on domestic drone use is still very much incomplete. Since their original FOIA request a year and a half ago, the EFF has only received about half of the FAA’s drone records. In the meantime, they’ve set up a site for crowdsourced reports on local drone use that hopes to fill in some of the gaps.

View EFF’s new Map of Domestic Drone Authorizations.

NSA Whistleblower: Everyone in US under digital surveillance

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 00:15:35 -0600

NSA Whistleblower: Everyone in US under digital surveillance:

RT talks to William Binney, whistleblower and former NSA crypto-mathematician who served in the agency for decades. Virtual privacy in US, Petraeus affair and whistleblowers’ odds in fight against the authorities are among key topics of this exclusive interview.

Sexual privacy under threat in a surveillance society

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:10:50 -0600

Sexual privacy under threat in a surveillance society:

Because of the Patriot Act, any of us, if we annoy or threaten powerful interests, can have our e-mails read without our knowledge. Any of us can be subject to a search that could lead from one e-mail correspondent to another until the National Security Agency or the FBI, which have both confirmed that they have invested heavily in domestic surveillance of social networks, find something — anything — that could be seen as compromising.

Senator Pushes Bill Allowing Warrantless Reading of E-Mails in the U.S.

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 15:55:31 -0600

Senator Pushes Bill Allowing Warrantless Reading of E-Mails in the U.S.:

Talk about a bait and switch. CNET is reporting that Senator Patrick Leahy (D, Vt.), who is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has revised legislation he proposed previously that originally claimed to protect e-mail privacy of American citizens. That proposal has been rewritten, and now allows for law enforcement officials to read your e-mails without a warrant.

Judge to Police: Feel Free to Invade Citizens' Property Without Warrant, Plant Cameras

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 20:52:20 -0600

Judge to Police: Feel Free to Invade Citizens' Property Without Warrant, Plant Cameras:

In a closely watched case, the federal judge ruled that the Constitutional rights of two defendants — Manuel Mendoza and Marco Magana of Green Bay, WI — were not violated when federal agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) invaded their private property without warrant to plant wireless surveillance cameras. The judge also ruled that the collected evidence could be used against the defendants.

The judge argued that the 22-acre property’s numerous “no trespassing” signs did not apply to federal agents — with or without warrant.

thepeoplesrecord: US National Archives blocks searches...

Sun, 04 Nov 2012 18:17:40 -0600

thepeoplesrecord:

US National Archives blocks searches containing ‘WikiLeaks’

November 4, 2012

The public search engine for the US National Archives appears to be blocked for the term “WikiLeaks”. The whistleblower website has already lashed out at the move, saying the Archives has turned into “Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.”

An error message pops up every time a search is performed with the word “WikiLeaks”.

It’s not entirely clear when the US National Archives decided to block these searches.

However, WikiLeaks’ has already called the whole thing a “farce”.

“The US National Archives has literally turned into Orwell’s Ministry of Truth,”a message on the site’s Twitter account reads, adding“The US state is literally eating its own brain by censoring its own collective memories about WikiLeaks.”

The block is likely to be in line with the “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act,” a form of internet censorship the US adopted back in 2010.

It did not become law, but it prompted various US government agencies such as the White House Office of Management and Budget and the US Air Force to advise their employees not to read or access classified documents being made available by sites like WikiLeaks.

The Library of Congress went further by blocking access to WikiLeaks content from its server in 2010.

The American Library Association suggested this violated the First Amendment rights of internet users to receive information.

“The Library of Congress’s decision is a violation of the First Amendment and a violation of the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights. Moreover, it is a violation of the professional ethics of librarians to always provide free access to all information,” their statement said.

WikiLeaks exploded on to the global scene back in 2006, since then releasing hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables, including top secret documents from the US Department of Defense, and secret cables from the State Department.

Some of that classified information was seen as damaging the US government’s reputation in a number of incidents.

Recently it was revealed that the US government officially considers WikiLeaks’ and its founder Julian Assange to be enemies of the state.

Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents show that military personnel contacting WikiLeaks could face execution for “communicating with the enemy.”

The fact that WikiLeaks was treated as an enemy of state would have serious implications should Assange be extradited to the US, as he could face military detention.

Source

TV Makes Americans Passive and Accepting of Authority

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:37:08 -0500

TV Makes Americans Passive and Accepting of Authority:

Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi claim that TV addiction is “no mere metaphor” but is, at least psychologically, similar to drug addiction. Utilizing their Experience Sampling Method (in which participants carried a beeper and were signaled six to eight times a day at random to report their activity), Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi found that almost immediately after turning on the TV, subjects reported feeling more relaxed, and because this occurs so quickly and the tension returns so rapidly after the TV is turned off, people are conditioned to associate TV viewing with a lack of tension. They concluded:Habit-forming drugs work in similar ways. A tranquilizer that leaves the body rapidly is much more likely to cause dependence than one that leaves the body slowly, precisely because the user is more aware that the drug’s effects are wearing off. Similarly, viewers’ vague learned sense that they will feel less relaxed if they stop viewing may be a significant factor in not turning the set off. Mander documents research showing that regardless of the programming, viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them to a more passive, nonresistant state.

Man Faces up to 15 Years in Prison for Facebook Protest Against U.S. Gov't

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:23:08 -0500

Man Faces up to 15 Years in Prison for Facebook Protest Against U.S. Gov't:

Marine Also Imprisoned Without Trial

The case echoes the story of U.S. Marine Brandon Raub. After honorably serving his country on tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr. Raub, 26, had grown disillusioned with the U.S. federal government, and like Mr. Michael took to posting vague, frustrated, incendiary commentaries to Facebook.

Those posts led to local authorities and federal agents in Chesterfield, Virginia detaining Mr. Raub and then exploiting the state’s involuntary commitment laws to label the protester as “mentally ill”, effectively imprisoning him indefinitely and without trial in a state-run veteran’s hospital.

SCOTUS's Warrantless Wiretapping Punt is a Win for America's Ruling Parties

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 17:21:03 -0500

SCOTUS's Warrantless Wiretapping Punt is a Win for America's Ruling Parties:

Both Democratic President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney support throwing out due process (warrants) in cases where national security is viewed to be at risk — a policy first put in place by Republican President George W. Bush (with bipartisan support from America’s two ruling parties) in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

NDAA: The Biggest Election Issue No One's Talking About

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:34:00 -0500

NDAA: The Biggest Election Issue No One's Talking About:

You don’t have to live alone in the woods, reading issues of Guns and Ammo and co-writing your manifesto with beard lice, to be terrified about the state of basic freedoms in America today. Given the counterterrorism provisions in the fairly recent National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), we currently live in a country where the government can pick up American citizens and detain them indefinitely without access to a lawyer or even a criminal trial. That means locked up forever without even the basic protections we afford to rapists and murderers.

Kids Tagged With RFID Chips? The Creepy New Technology Schools Use to Track Everything Kids Do

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:19:41 -0500

Kids Tagged With RFID Chips? The Creepy New Technology Schools Use to Track Everything Kids Do:

Schools across the country are adopting a variety of different tools to monitor students both in school and outside school. Among these tools are RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags embedded in school ID cards, GPS tracking software in computers, and even CCTV video camera systems.

How the Camera On Your Cellphone Can Be Captured and Used to Spy on You

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 19:16:02 -0500

How the Camera On Your Cellphone Can Be Captured and Used to Spy on You:

As Kade Ellis of Privacy SOS and the ACLU reported, a security expert says that everyone who was at Occupy Wall Street had their cell phone surveyed by the NYPD. “[T]he identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known they were there anyway. This is routine,” private investigator Steven Rambam says in a video talk.

He continued , “[C]ell phones are now the little snitch in your pocket. Cell phones tell me where you are, what you do, who you talk to, everybody you associate with.”