No one who speaks German could be an evil man.

In that election year, in September 2006, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, took an interest in the journalist's work. Agents included Zajtman's two Congolese telephone numbers in the agency's surveillance list as so-called "selectors." . . .

The Belgian journalist isn't the only reporter who was spied on. According to documents seen by SPIEGEL, the BND conducted surveillance on at least 50 additional telephone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses belonging to journalists or newsrooms around the world in the years following 1999.

Included among them were more than a dozen connections belonging to the BBC, often to the offices of the international World Service. The documents indicate that the German intelligence agency didn't just tap into the phones of BBC correspondents in Afghanistan, but also targeted telephone and fax numbers at BBC headquarters in London.

Baywolfe wrote:

WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/hacking.png

The double-edge sword of espionage.

Prepare to bend over and take it.

Data provided by the Department of Homeland Security shows that searches of cellphones by border agents has exploded, growing fivefold in just one year, from fewer than 5,000 in 2015 to nearly 25,000 in 2016.

According to DHS officials, 2017 will be a blockbuster year. Five-thousand devices were searched in February alone, more than in all of 2015.

square wrote:

You can't have nosy reporters knowing how they're spied on - that might prevent the FBI from breaking the law.

A federal judge is agreeing with the FBI's contention that publicly disclosing its methods on how it spies on journalists could hamper national security.

A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Freedom of the Press Foundation sought FBI procedures surrounding the agency's protocol when issuing National Security Letters (NSLs) against members of the media. . . .

The suit came two years after The Associated Press revealed that the Justice Department had secretly seized telephone records for as many as 20 lines used by the AP's reporters and editors as part of an investigation in 2013 into the leak of a Yemeni-based terror plot. The DOJ has also investigated phone records of a Fox News correspondent as well as a Washington Post reporter.

As part of the fallout, the Justice Department updated its media guidelines in 2013 and set new standards about when subpoenas could target journalists. But those rules did not address NSLs.

Right. And in doing so, they are simply begging for, and authorizing the next Ed Snowden, or Wikileaks disclosure. Their games, dishonesty and, at times, blatant illegality necessitate and determine the tactics from the other side. The game continues.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

Time to break out that old Nokia flip.

Not a bad idea.

"Web browsing and app usage history are not 'sensitive information,'" CTIA said in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission yesterday. CTIA is the main lobbyist group representing mobile broadband providers such as AT&T, Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA, and Sprint.

London police outsource snooping to India.

The allegations were made by an anonymous individual who says the unit worked with Indian police, who in turn used hackers to illegally obtain the passwords of the email accounts of the campaigners, and some reporters and press photographers.

The person, who says he or she previously worked for the intelligence unit that monitors the activities of political campaigners, detailed their concerns in a letter to the Green party peer Jenny Jones. The peer passed on the allegations to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), which is investigating.

Hacked passwords were passed to the Metropolitan police unit, according to the writer of the letter, which then regularly checked the emails of the campaigners and the media to gather information. The letter to Jones listed the passwords of environmental campaigners, four of whom were from Greenpeace. Several confirmed they matched the ones they had used to open their emails.

It might be more fruitful to target Neil Gorsuch instead.

Interesting, but we have pretty good statistical analysis these days that are great at filtering patterns out of noise.

Look - just create BS images called "Trump sucking donkey cock.avi", drop store it and AWS search it.

Pretty quick "Trump sucking donkey cock" becomes a top search term (yes I know there is a lot more work involved than that).

You have to play like them if you wish to humiliate them...

The war on free speech continues.  The good news seems to be that it is being waged so ineptly that the summons was withdrawn - this time, anyway.

The Trump administration is demanding Twitter expose the anonymous account holder behind the @ALT_uscis handle that has been critical of the US president's immigration policy. . . .

The Customs and Border Protection agency, which is seeking to unmask the account holder, issued Twitter a summons, unsigned by a judge, citing a section of federal law granting border officials the power to investigate importation taxes. Twitter is refusing to unmask the account holder, saying the government is "abusing" its authority by making the demand without a legal basis.

Spooks push for renewal of section 702, drop pants around their ankles.

A new factsheet by the NSA and FBI has laid bare ludicrous contradictions in how US intelligence agencies choose to interpret a law designed to prevent spying on American citizens, but which they use to achieve exactly that end.

• While noting that the law specifically bans the gathering of information on US citizens, it then defends both the gathering and retention of information on US citizens.


• While claiming that its procedures severely limit the amount of information that is gathered on individual US citizens, it claims to be unable to provide even an estimate as to how many US citizens' records are in its database.


• While noting it is illegal to specifically target US citizens using their personally identifiable information without a warrant, it then argues why it should be allowed to continue searching US citizens' personally identifiable information without a warrant.


• And while claiming that it does not use the law to undertake mass surveillance or bulk collection of information, it defends tapping the internet's backbone and gathering information where the claimed target of surveillance is neither the sender nor the receiver of the information.

Obeying the law is hard - let's go shopping in Congress for a free pass.

Amid an unexpected fight over US surveillance powers from congressional Republicans, the National Security Agency has agreed to curb its highly controversial collection of Americans' emails that discuss foreign intelligence targets, although how comprehensive that stoppage is remains unclear. . . .

It is far from the first time the NSA has conceded that its vast surveillance powers under section 702, a surveillance authority expiring in December, have surpassed the boundaries set with the Fisa [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court.

A Fisa court decision from 2011, declassified in 2013, found that the agency had overcollected tens of thousands of purely domestic US emails in violation of the law, which permits warrantless interception of Americans' international communications so long as one party to the communication is a foreigner overseas.

The NSA at the time represented the 702 overcollection as an unavoidable consequence of its collection technology - a limit it cited on Friday to warn that the agency could not fully purge its hoards of data that it now pledges no longer to collect.

"Because of the limits of its current technology, [NSA] is unable to completely eliminate `about' communications from its upstream 702 collection without also excluding some of the relevant communications directly `to or from' its foreign intelligence targets. That limitation remains even today," it said.

Yet the NSA's authorities under executive order 12333 are vast, undisclosed and unconstrained by any need to explain its collections to the Fisa court. A former state department official who has warned Congress about 12333, John Napier Tye, has alleged that the NSA uses 12333 as a backup plan to route around legal restrictions on US surveillance.

Collect it all is alive and well.

A report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) yesterday provides a sobering set of statistics on the breadth and depth of US intelligence surveillance of targets both overseas and within the United States. Even after steps were taken to reduce the collection of phone call metadata--ending bulk collection of phone company records and limiting collection to specific requests against records held by telecommunications providers--the National Security Agency collected over 151 million phone call records while tracking only 42 targets.

GooberMcNutly wrote:

square wrote:

Collect it all is alive and well.

...the National Security Agency collected over 151 million phone call records while tracking only 42 targets.

That's just the 42 suspects' "social network". List them as People of Interest. Pertinent to the Investigation. Boom, done!

Soon the crime will be to have once liked someone who has just been declared an Agent of the Eurasia empire!

Nonsense, we're fighting Eastasia, we've always been fighting Eastasia.

I just keep getting sicker and sicker. It feels like the world is running away from me. It's like the darkness coming out of Mordor in Lord Of the Rings; it's taking over.

Baywolfe wrote:

I want to live just long enough to see the GOP regret allowing practically everybody in America to buy as many guns as they want.  Because, some day, they're coming for the rich people.

(Nodding my head...)

This made quite a boom while landing. Any guesses what the USAF is doing with a returnable payload in space for 2 year stretches?

As many of you already know, Verizon is flushing its email service - for cost reasons, they say - and telling subscribers they can keep their existing addresses by migrating to Verizon's newly acquired AOL unit... where rest assured they'll scan the living shit out of your mail and flog it to highest bidder.

Brave new world, huh?

George Orr wrote:

choad wrote:

As many of you already know, Verizon is flushing its email service - for cost reasons, they say - and telling subscribers they can keep their existing addresses by migrating to Verizon's newly acquired AOL unit... where rest assured they'll scan the living shit out of your mail and flog it to highest bidder.

I have remained a Luddite in certain aspects; one of those is that I have not transferred my life to my smartphone (although I do, of course, own one).

My current handset was made by Western Electric in Sept 1975. Replacement parts, never a problem. I tried a cell phone about 6 months and gave up in disgust. I am pathologically cheap. It was our only shared creed in this town. I acquired my first food processor and trash picked microwave within the last ten years. One man's rubbish...

There is a saying in Silicon Valley that there is no such thing as a free app—that is, if you use an app that comes without a cost, then you are the product.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

Obama's war on whistleblowers continues apace.

Under intense pressure from the White House, the Justice Department is prepared to aggressively prosecute government officials who leak classified information. Justice Department officials told The Daily Beast that targeting leakers will be a priority during Jeff Sessions' time as attorney general--a posture that will hearten national security hawks, while concerning advocates of whistleblower protections.

Of course, the primary deciding factor is whose political side you're on.

"The fact that the president shared classified information with a foreign government official, in and of itself, is classified," a former senior intelligence official told The Daily Beast. "So whoever was trying to burn him for thinking he's doing something wrong actually is the only one that committed a crime here."

Baywolfe wrote:

That's a lot of reaction for Montana, with its 3 electoral votes.  And many Republicans/Conservatives looked at Massachusetts continuing to elect Ted Kennedy with the same horror.

You should reread the article (I suspect you just gave it a glance). It's not about Montana's politics, but it is about the increasing double standards (when I do it, it's fine; when you do it, it's a crime) which have become the rule rather than the exception in American politics -- most especially coming from the right.

I realize that I'm the seven zillionth person to make the connection (and I've made it more than once myself in the past) but this continuous erosion of principals of fair play, and destruction of democratic institutions is reminiscent of Germany's evolution between the World Wars.

This is how fascism happens; not in a big sudden shift, but in the slow drip of incremental changes, none of which in and of themselves ring the alarm bells but which have a cumulative effect that is staggering.

I think the author's on the right track.

Last edited by Smudge (2017-05-31 11:52:27)

Smudge wrote:

Baywolfe wrote:

That's a lot of reaction for Montana, with its 3 electoral votes.  And many Republicans/Conservatives looked at Massachusetts continuing to elect Ted Kennedy with the same horror.

You should reread the article (I suspect you just gave it a glance). It's not about Montana's politics, but it is about the increasing double standards (when I do it, it's fine; when you do it, it's a crime) which have become the rule rather than the exception in American politics -- most especially coming from the right.

I realize that I'm the seven zillionth person to make the connection (and I've made it more than once myself in the past) but this continuous erosion of principals of fair play, and destruction of democratic institutions is reminiscent of Germany's evolution between the World Wars.

This is how fascism happens; not in a big sudden shift, but in the slow drip of incremental changes, none of which in and of themselves ring the alarm bells but which have a cumulative effect that is staggering.

I think the author's on the right track.

I still think that's only true if you ignore a rather rich and long period of our history.  I do agree that religious fanaticism, which appears to be one of the underlying causes here, needs to be put down.  I grow weary of the "righteous anger" of these fools.  However, one only needs to look back to the 1968 Democratic Convention, held in Chicago a largely liberal and democratic town, to see that fascism rears its ugly head even in unexpected places.  And many black people would argue that your fear has been their reality for a very long time.  "Chickens coming home to roost" is the way that Brother Malcolm put it.