According to the law, three sections of the USA PATRIOT act have now expired.  The question is, will anyone bother to follow the law now, or as it is enacted in the future?

"My time on the intelligence committee has taught me to always be vigilant for secret interpretations of the law and new surveillance techniques that Congress doesn't know about," [Senator Ron] Wyden, a member of the intelligence committee, told the Guardian.

"Americans were rightly outraged when they learned that US intelligence agencies relied on secret law to monitor millions of law-abiding US citizens. The American people are now on high alert for new secret interpretations of the law, and intelligence agencies and the Justice Department would do well to keep that lesson in mind."

The USA Freedom Act is supposed to prevent what Wyden calls "secret law". It contains a provision requiring congressional notification in the event of a novel legal interpretation presented to the secret Fisa court overseeing surveillance.

Yet in recent memory, the US government permitted the NSA to circumvent the Fisa court entirely. Not a single Fisa court judge was aware of Stellar Wind, the NSA's post-9/11 constellation of bulk surveillance programs, from 2001 to 2004.

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Keep pushing the envelope.

Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance of Americans' international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified NSA documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad--including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

Here's the answer: Due Process Means Nothing.

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square wrote:

Are there any differences in what Bush and Obama have to say about the USA PATRIOT Act?

Nope, two sides of the same coin.

Spies Fan Snowden Disinformation

Who was hurt? "no evidence"
Proof?  None.

choad wrote:

Spies Fan Snowden Disinformation

Who was hurt? "no evidence"
Proof?  None.

Mr Snowden is believed to have downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he left the US.

A number that was just completely fucking made up.

square wrote:

choad wrote:

Spies Fan Snowden Disinformation

Who was hurt? "no evidence"
Proof?  None.

Mr Snowden is believed to have downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he left the US.

A number that was just completely fucking made up.

...aaaand the rest of this "news article" is completely dismantled.

square wrote:

square wrote:

choad wrote:

Spies Fan Snowden Disinformation

Who was hurt? "no evidence"
Proof?  None.

Mr Snowden is believed to have downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he left the US.

A number that was just completely fucking made up.

...aaaand the rest of this "news article" is completely dismantled.

So, now we're using one "news"/opinion agency to tear down the credibility of another "news"/opinion agency?

choad wrote:

Dickless Senator says encrypting user data impedes corporate and law enforcement spying without permission, threatening Americans' safety.

Yes, to answer the obvious question, the Senator has no dick.

dickless wrote:

companies must be able to decrypt information for police officers in case "someone with a white van kidnaps a young girl."

He's pretty specific about that...

As Crypto War II gets into full swing, a detailed review of what's happening and past battles.

square wrote:

For years, rather than reveal the true nature of the blunder, the agency has instead propagated the fable that it missed that San Diego call in 2000 for technical reasons

Can we just go ahead and go with basic procedural blunderance?  Technical failure of the non-IT sort...

Kicking the hornets' nest.

Today we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department over their unpublished rules for using National Security Letters and so-called informal "exigent letters" to conduct surveillance of journalists.

ECHELON lives!  Four decades of internal surveillance and persecution of those who reveal it using ridiculous secrets.

As our trial started, witness after witness from security sites tried to claim that openly published information was in fact secret. In a typical interchange, one Sigint unit chief was shown a road sign outside his base:

Q: Is that the name of your unit?

A: I cannot answer that question, that is a secret.

Q: Is that the board which passers-by on the main road see outside your unit's base?

A: Yes.

Q: Read it out to the jury, please.

A: I cannot do that. It is a secret.

---

Also: oops, don't admit it's torture.

Emmeran wrote:

Loved that article

It made feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Say Cheese, Ms and Mr Insurgent. Yes, You.

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Apparently they do care after all.

While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as "highly collaborative," while another lauded the company's "extreme willingness to help."

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Orwell was an optimist.

Appointed after concern about surveillance and privacy following the Edward Snowden revelations, [UN special rapporteur on privacy Joseph] Cannataci agreed that his notion of a new universal law on surveillance could embarrass those who may not sign up to it. "Some people may not want to buy into it," he acknowledged. "But you know, if one takes the attitude that some countries will not play ball, then, for example, the chemical weapons agreement would never have come about." . . .

But for Cannataci - well-known for having a mind of his own - it is not America but Britain that he singles out as having the weakest oversight in the western world: "That is precisely one of the problems we have to tackle. That if your oversight mechanism's a joke, and a rather bad joke at its citizens' expense, for how long can you laugh it off as a joke?"

RT and others beware: your back door will be penetrated.

square wrote:

RT and others beware: your back door will be penetrated.

Another problem: When TSA locks first became mandatory I fitted one on to my suitcase for a trip back to the States. The fuckers cut it off and threw it away, serving neither their security nor mine.

square wrote:

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina's plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

I worked the other side of the river for the VT Dept of Libraries, back when "computers" were these arthritic critters, introduced in 1963 and still in wide use 20 years later.

Anyway, ArsTechnica, Lebanon's librarian, and most especially the pilot project coordinator, are fucking idiots. Lebanon is a stone's throw from Dartmouth College's Animal Houses, a leafy redoubt inhabited by affluent retirees and my own parents not too long ago. I can't imagine any effort more vulnerable and doomed to fail.

Hosted by the People's Republic of Burlington? Maybe. If they keep their mouths shut. Better idea is to seduce and sway disgruntled state gumbies employed by the state library system, with regional branches scattered everywhere.

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Last edited by choad (2015-09-13 07:06:17)

A diamond is forever, but national security letters shouldn't be.

In 2007, an anonymous ISP owner fought back, speaking out against the whole gag order thing, but not even being able to say what ISP he was associated with, because of that gag order. In 2010, Nicholas Merrill, of Calyx Internet Access, was finally able to admit that he was the one fighting the gag order -- after reaching an agreement with the government (and that was after a number of trips back and forth between the district and appeals courts). Now, five years later, a federal court has finally ruled that the gag order, which was issued back in 2004, should be lifted, because the government has no "good reason" for keeping it in place and keeping the gag order would violate the First Amendment.

Everyone's got a dossier.  The geezers here may remember when "population-scale" surveillance was the province of evil communist regimes.

A huge volume of the Internet data [British spy agency] GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency's online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis.

Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk "unselected" surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular "selected" targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people's online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion "events" -- a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records -- with about 10 billion new entries added every day.

As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held -- 41 percent -- was about people's Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people's use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously. . . .

By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing "unprecedented" techniques to perform what it called "population-scale" data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, "the world's biggest" surveillance engine "to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference."

The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus "telephony" metadata about phone calls, cell phone locations, text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums. . . .

One secret policy paper dated from January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata -- including location data that could be used to track your movements, your email, instant messenger, and social networking "buddy lists," logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email, the passwords you use to access "communications services" (such as an email account), and information about websites you have viewed.

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They can definitely hear you now. Can you guess who will be piggybacking on this?

Verizon is giving a new mission to its controversial hidden identifier that tracks users of mobile devices. Verizon said in a little-noticed announcement that it will soon begin sharing the profiles with AOL's ad network, which in turn monitors users across a large swath of the Internet.

That means AOL's ad network will be able to match millions of Internet users to their real-world details gathered by Verizon, including -- "your gender, age range and interests." AOL's network is on 40 percent of websites, including on ProPublica.

At least you can opt out.

In order for Verizon users to opt-out, they have to log into their account or call 866-211-0874.

Obama administration still wants encryption backdoors, but instead of being forthright, will try to make backroom deals with companies to sneak them in.

After months of deliberation, the Obama administration has made a long-awaited decision on the thorny issue of how to deal with encrypted communications: It will not -- for now -- call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement.

Rather, the administration will continue trying to persuade companies that have moved to encrypt their customers' data to create a way for the government to still peer into people's data when needed for criminal or terrorism investigations.

Considering collaborating with those involved in shady dealings?  Beware, sometimes things do catch up with you.

A former CIA officer convicted for her role in the kidnapping of a terrorism suspect in Milan was detained for one day in Portugal earlier this week, and now waits to learn whether she will be returned to Italy serve her prison sentence. . . .

"I didn't want to sneak into the country. I've got nothing to hide. This thing needs to be resolved," she said. "This has gone on for 10 years. It's impacted my life. I've got relatives in Europe, and I don't see any reason to give that up. The rendition should have never taken place, and we were all thrown under the bus for it."