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| Big Comrade is watching you... (Image courtesy thetimes.co.uk.) |
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| They listen to everything, but this is the only thing they need to hear. (Image courtesy alan.com.) |
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| It didn't really stop drug dealers that much, either. (Image courtesy anyclip.com.) |
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| And we, in good conscience, shouldn't let them. (Image courtesy garymvasey.files.com.) |
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| Informed and angry. He's not wrong. (Image courtesy reddit.com.) |
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| No one cares you have nothing to hide. Something can be used against you. (Image courtesy car-memes.com.) |
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| They spelled Obama's name wrong, but everything else about this is sadly correct. (Image courtesy csnbbs.com.) |
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| They're not this overt, but they are this unpleasant. (Image courtesy wpremedy.com.) |
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| That's your tax money, getting spent to indiscriminately spy. Kill the idea that this could ever be acceptable. (Image courtesy betanews.com) |
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| There is nothing noble about blindly swinging a cyber bat at peoples' computers, hoping a pinata of prosecutable info will explode. Even if it did, that candy is probably supposed to be helping the people. (Image courtesy thehackernews.com.) |
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| Image courtesy www.aclu.org. |
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| Now they'll have to raise funds just as shady as they are. |
Government agencies are able to listen to phone conversations live and even track the location of citizens without warrants using secret cables connected directly to network equipment, admits Vodafone today.
The company said that secret wires have been connected to its network and those belonging to competitors, giving government agencies the ability to tap in to phone and broadband traffic. In many countries this is mandatory for all telecoms companies, it said.
Of course, anyone who has been paying attention knows that this is not really news, since it has been known for years that governments have been secretly tapping the telephony backbone. What is new in the present instance is that the company itself has revealed the illegal wiretaps rather than continue to engage in a conspiracy against its own users aided and abetted by criminal governments. If this is news to you, you might consider looking into AT&T Room 641A.Vodafone is today publishing its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report which will describe exactly how the governments it deals with are eavesdropping on citizens. It is calling for an end to the use of “direct access” eavesdropping and transparency on the number of warrants issued giving access to private data.
The White House has asked legislators crafting competing reforms of the National Security Agency to provide legal immunity for telecommunications firms that provide the government with customer data, the Guardian has learned.
In a statement of principles privately delivered to lawmakers some weeks ago to guide surveillance reforms, the White House said it wanted legislation protecting “any person who complies in good faith with an order to produce records” from legal liability for complying with court orders for phone records to the government once the NSA no longer collects the data in bulk.
A police department in Florida failed to tell judges about its use of a cell phone tracking tool "because the department got the device on loan and promised the manufacturer to keep it all under wraps," the American Civil Liberties Union said in a blog post today.
The device was likely a "Stingray," which is made by the Florida-based Harris Corporation. Stingrays impersonate cell phone towers in order to compel phones to "reveal their precise locations and information about all of the calls and text messages they send and receive," the ACLU noted. "When in use, stingrays sweep up information about innocent people and criminal suspects alike."All government employees who participated in these despicable acts should be tried for treason.
The tracking technology was used by the Tallahassee Police Department in September 2008 to locate a man accused of rape and the theft of a purse, which contained the alleged victim's cell phone. The man, James L. Thomas, was convicted of sexual battery and theft, but he filed an appeal "contending that evidence obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and article I, section 12 of the Florida Constitution, was introduced against him at trial," according to a court ruling in November 2013 that reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial.
Police "did not want to obtain a search warrant because they did not want to reveal information about the technology they used to track the cell phone signal," the District Court of Appeal ruling said. "The prosecutor told the court that a law enforcement officer 'would tell you that there is a nondisclosure agreement that they’ve agreed with the company.'"
Today, several companies including Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Microsoft are revealing the first information about the amount of user data they're handing over to FISA requests. The disclosures are very broad data that just gives a range of how many users had information requested on them. But it's a small victory for the group of companies, which pushed to be allowed to publish more about the data collection when they petitioned the intelligence court back in August.
A federal judge today found that Google may have breached federal and California wiretapping laws for machine-scanning Gmail messages as part of its business model to create user profiles and provide targeted advertising.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh was rendered in a proposed class-action alleging Google wiretaps Gmail as part of its business model. Google sought to have the federal case in California dismissed under a section of the Wiretap Act that authorizes email providers to intercept messages if the interception facilitated the message’s delivery or was incidental to the functioning of the service in general.
A couple years ago, we were disappointed to see a judge take the technologically wrong stance that data transmitted over WiFi is not a "radio communication," thereby making sniffing of unencrypted WiFi signals potentially a form of wiretapping. Indeed, based on that, the court eventually ruled that Google's infamous WiFi sniffing could be a violation of wiretap laws. This is wrong on so many levels... and tragically, an appeals court has now upheld the lower court's ruling.
There are serious problems with this. Under no reasonable view is WiFi not a radio communication first of all. That's exactly what it is. Second, sniffing unencrypted packets on an open network is a perfectly normal thing to do. The data is unencrypted and it's done on a network that is decidedly open. It's like saying it's "wiretapping" for turning on your radio and having it catch the signals your neighbor is broadcasting. That's not wiretapping. Third, even the court here admits that based on this ruling, parts of the law don't make any sense, because it renders those parts superfluous. Generally speaking, when a court ruling would render a part of a law completely superfluous, it means that the court misinterpreted the law . . .
The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform "a second or third hop query" through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.
"Hops" refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.
Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of "three-hop" analysis.
A federal judge today rejected the U.S. government's latest attempt to dismiss the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) long-running challenge to the government's illegal dragnet surveillance programs. Today's ruling means the allegations at the heart of the Jewel case move forward under the supervision of a public federal court.
"The court rightly found that the traditional legal system can determine the legality of the mass, dragnet surveillance of innocent Americans and rejected the government's invocation of the state secrets privilege to have the case dismissed," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Over the last month, we came face-to-face with new details of mass, untargeted collection of phone and Internet records, substantially confirmed by the Director of National Intelligence. Today's decision sets the stage for finally getting a ruling that can stop the dragnet surveillance and restore Americans' constitutional rights."
The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties . . .We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.
The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.
The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.
The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has signed a bill giving Texans more privacy over their inboxes than anywhere else in the United States. On Friday, Perry signed HB 2268, effective immediately. The law shields residents of the Lone Star State from snooping by state and local law enforcement without a warrant. The bill's e-mail amendment was written by Jonathan Stickland, a 29-year-old Republican who represents an area between Dallas and Ft. Worth.
Under the much-maligned 1986-era Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), federal law enforcement agencies are only required to get a warrant to access recent e-mails before they are opened by the recipient. As we've noted many times before, there are no such provisions in federal law once the e-mail has been opened or if it has sat in an inbox, unopened, for 180 days. In March 2013, the Department of Justice (DOJ) acknowledged in a Congressional hearing that this distinction no longer makes sense and the DOJ would support revisions to ECPA.
