Just send it down the memory hole.

Over the last few months, a battle has played out over what will happen to the 6,700 page "CIA Torture Report" that the Senate Intelligence Committee spent many years and approximately $40 million producing. The report apparently reveals all sorts of terrible details about how the CIA tortured people for little benefit (and great harm in other ways) and lied to Congress about it. While a heavily redacted executive summary was released, there is apparently significantly more in the full report. And if we, as a country, are to actually come to terms with what our nation did, this report should be made public and there should be a public discussion on our past failings.

Instead, it looks like the report is going to be returned and destroyed.

square wrote:

This topic is about government surveillance and lack of transparency.  The last five posts stray well away from that subject.  Please start a new topic if you want to engage in endless red team vs. blue team arguments.

---

Now back to our regularly-scheduled snooping:

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

Nibbling at the margins of Smith v. Maryland: Supremes to review collection of cell-site data.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide its biggest privacy dispute in years, a case that asks whether the authorities need a probable-cause court warrant to access people's mobile phone location history.

"Because cell phone location records can reveal countless private details of our lives, police should only be able to access them by getting a warrant based on probable cause," said Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. "The time has come for the Supreme Court to make clear that the longstanding protections of the Fourth Amendment apply with undiminished force to these kinds of sensitive digital records."

For years, the authorities have been obtaining data pinpointing the cell towers that a suspect's mobile phone pinged--all without a warrant.

The snooping is coming from inside the house!

Home routers from 10 manufacturers, including Linksys, DLink, and Belkin, can be turned into covert listening posts that allow the Central Intelligence Agency to monitor and manipulate incoming and outgoing traffic and infect connected devices. That's according to secret documents posted Thursday by WikiLeaks.

square wrote:

Why should you mere peons be allowed to know what the law is?

The U.S. government's foreign surveillance law is so secretive that not even a service provider challenging an order issued by a secret court got to access it.

This kind of thing is why I laugh ruefully at the idea of a 2 party system in America. This kind of shit has been going down under both parties in control of both the white house and congress, yet each side acts like the last guy is to blame for it.

But hey, it's only because of the japs, commies, hippies, drugs, wetbacks, terrorists

Rhode Island soon to see increased insurance rates

Surreptitiously planned eye in the sky receives a poke.

The details of Miami-Dade County's proposed plan to surveil poor, black neighborhoods with semipermanent spy planes were grotesque. MDPD had asked for a federal grant for so-called wide-area surveillance (WAS) planes, which can record up to 32 square miles at once and were first used to track Iraqi insurgents. Even worse, MDPD buried its Department of Justice grant deep in a county document and somewhat clandestinely asked county commissioners to "retroactively" approve the fact that the department had asked for the spy planes.

But after New Times broke news of the plan two weeks ago, MDPD Director Juan Perez announced in an email to the American Civil Liberties Union today that he's scrapping the program.

Ninth Circuit teams up with the secret police.

A lower court and now a federal appeals court have concluded that the revised gag rule does not infringe the First Amendment rights of companies that receive NSL [National Security Letter] user-data requests.

Under the revised silencing protocol, the FBI must review the need for the nondisclosure requirement of an NSL three years after the initiation of a full investigation and at the closure of the investigation. The bureau must terminate the nondisclosure requirement when the investigation is closed or when the "facts no longer support nondisclosure," a lower court had ruled.

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld that ruling and said that because of those alterations, the nondisclosure requirement "does not run afoul of the First Amendment."

Yes, I'm sure that people are just dying to be spied on by their vacuum cleaners.

The Roomba robotic vacuum has been whizzing across floors for years, but its future may lie more in collecting data than dirt. . . .

"There's an entire ecosystem of things and services that the smart home can deliver once you have a rich map of the home that the user has allowed to be shared," said [iRobot CEO Colin] Angle.

Billions of dollars to record your and my every move, but too poor to keep documents that might embarrass themselves.

The CIA is scheduled to begin destroying old records related to leaks of classified information in August unless critics convince the National Archives to scuttle the plan. . . .

Jones warns that NARA and the CIA should err on the side of preservation, even if they believe the files at issue are backed up elsewhere. "History has shown that they are too eager to destroy their records," he said of CIA officials. "The CIA does not have a lot of good will for preserving historically relevant documents."

For example, just last month, it came to light that the spy agency chucked records about this country's secret role in the 1953 Iran coup during an office move, when it believed copies existed someplace else.

Sure, we should renew Section 702 when the spooks take its provisions so seriously.

The National Security Agency and FBI violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama administration by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies' ability to obey their own rules. . . .

The Hill reviewed the new ACLU documents as well as compliance memos released by the NSA inspector general and identified more than 90 incidents where violations specifically cited an impact on Americans. Many incidents involved multiple persons, multiple violations or extended periods of time.

For instance, the government admitted improperly searching the NSA's foreign intercept data on multiple occasions, including one instance in which an analyst ran the same search query about an American "every work day" for a period between 2013 and 2014. . . .

The new documents show that the NSA has, on occasion, exempted itself from its legal obligation to destroy all domestic communications that were improperly intercepted.

Under the law, the NSA is supposed to destroy any intercept if it determines the data was domestically gathered, meaning someone was intercepted on U.S. soil without a warrant when the agency thought they were still overseas. The NSA, however, has said previously it created "destruction waivers" to keep such intercepts in certain cases.

The new documents confirm the NSA has in fact issued such waivers and that it uncovered in 2012 a significant violation in which the waivers were improperly used and the infraction was slow to be reported to the court.

Not just Disney: 1,000 more apps spying on you.

The sample of SonicSpy most recently found on the Play Store, called Soniac, is marketed as a messaging app. While Soniac does provide this functionality through a customized version of the communications app Telegram, it also contains malicious capabilities that provide an attacker with significant control over a target device.

This includes the ability to silently record audio, take photos with the camera, make outbound calls, send text messages to attacker specified numbers, and retrieve information such as call logs, contacts, and information about Wi-Fi access points.

This is very concerning:

Web hoster DreamHost says it has been asked to hand over more than 1.3 million IP addresses on visitors to a site that helped organize anti-Trump protests earlier this year.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew … ba55894d5c

Casting the dragnet.

US telecoms giant Verizon says police are increasingly asking it to cough up massive dumps of cellphone data rather than individual records.

This according to the latest Verizon US transparency report for the first half of the 2017 calendar year. The dossier tracks government requests for phone records both of individual customers and large groups.

The latter group is becoming an increasingly popular target, said Verizon in its report this week. In particular, investigators are asking for "tower dumps," a record of everyone who connected to an individual phone tower as they passed by.

square wrote:

...the NSA vowed that it would stop gathering information on anyone and everyone...

Last edited by GooberMcNutly (2017-08-28 06:55:17)

What, you were expecting secure communications?  The new administration is no more friendly to privacy than the previous one.

The deputy US Attorney General said he wants legislators to force technology companies to decrypt people's private conversations.

Rod Rosenstein on Wednesday told a crowd of over 600 police officers that software developers should be required by law to unscrambled end-to-end encrypted chatter on demand - and if the engineers refuse, they should be strong-armed into complying.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Lawmakers assigned to oversee the sprawling U.S. intelligence apparatus rely strongly on a staff that in recent years has included scores of onetime spooks, analysts and lawyers who previously worked at the spy agencies under scrutiny.

According to a comprehensive analysis by McClatchy, at least one-third, and perhaps far more, of the professional staff members who carry out the work of the House and Senate intelligence committees are themselves veterans of the agencies that the two panels oversee. . . .

One former staff director, who declined to speak for attribution because of the sensitivity of the subject, said "all but a couple" of professional staff under him had come from intelligence agencies.

Another former House intelligence staff member, Mieke Eoyang, a lawyer who has no intelligence agency background and served from 2007 until 2010, said she thinks "maybe two-thirds, maybe 75 percent" of fellow staff members were former intelligence agency employees.

Does the U.S. intelligence community spy on Americans using a law that says they can't?  You're not allowed to know.

The unclassified letter from [Director of National Intelligence] Dan Coats to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and released by the legislator, comes in response to a simple question he has repeatedly asked Coats in public and private:

Can the government collect communications it knows are entirely domestic, under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act?

Coats refuses to answer the question, at least publicly. To do so would "cause serious damage to national security," the letter argues. "I provided you a comprehensive classified response to your question on July 24," writes Coats. "This response also discussed, at length, why the information is properly classified and cannot be publicly released." . . .

"I have asked Director Coats repeatedly to answer the question I actually asked [during an open hearing]," Wyden said in a statement on Wednesday. "But now he claims answering the question would be classified, and do serious damage to national security. The refusal of the DNI to answer this simple yes-no question should set off alarms. How can Congress reauthorize this surveillance when the administration is playing games with basic questions about this program?"

The NSA scrupulously follows the law, except for all the times it doesn't.

The FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] is not like a normal court. There are no cops patrolling the streets to make sure no one breaks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law the FISC oversees, and then charging scofflaws. Violations of FISA get discovered in just three ways. Hypothetically, defendants prosecuted using evidence collected under FISA sometimes can ask to review the underlying process for any problems, but aside from a few times prosecutors have told defendants the government spied on their conversations with lawyers, that has never once worked in practice. In very rare cases, most notably with Edward Snowden's leaks, whistleblowers will reveal details that even Congress didn't fully understand (such as that NSA sometimes bypasses FISA by stealing Google and Yahoo data from their servers overseas, rather than using the FISA program, called PRISM).

In general, however, the FISC and Congress have to rely on the NSA or DOJ to report any violations of FISA; NSA, effectively, gets to police itself.

While the government claims it does a good job self-policing, the court hasn't always agreed. Even before the FISA Amendments Act passed, the government reorganized PRISM without telling judge Reggie Walton, who was overseeing a challenge to that program. A year later, judge Thomas Hogan was surprised to learn the NSA hadn't been reporting all violations to the court, reporting only systematic ones or specific misrepresentations the government made to the court. After the government revealed two different systematic problems in 2009 and a third in 2011, affecting three different programs, FISC judge John Bates complained about "the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program." And after several delayed notifications last fall and this spring, Rosemary Collyer scoffed at the government's excuses for two different eleven- and five- month delays in notifying the FISC of violations. "Too often, however, the government fails to meet its obligation to provide prompt notification to the FISC when noncompliance is discovered."

So one reason the government ends up spying on Americans inappropriately for years at a time is because it takes that long to get around to telling the FISC it has been doing so.

Telcos are selling direct, real-time access to track any US cell phone with no oversight, or so sez...

Sure, whistleblowers can report their concerns through proper channels.

[Dan] Meyer, whose job is to talk to intelligence community whistleblowers, can no longer talk to whistleblowers. He has been barred from communicating with whistleblowers, the main responsibility of his job as the executive director for intelligence community whistleblowing and source protection. He is currently working on an instructional pamphlet for whistleblowers, and he will have no duties to perform after he's completed that work.

He can also no longer brief the agencies or the congressional committees on his work as he's done in the past, send out his whistleblower newsletter, or conduct outreach. And he has no deputy or staff. . . .

But [former intelligence community Inspector General Chuck] McCullough retired in early March, and the office is now barely functioning, according to those familiar with its role. Acting Inspector General Wayne Stone, according to four sources with knowledge of the matter, has spent the majority of his tenure at graduate school at Harvard University in Boston, with no access to a place to review classified information. Only recently has he been forced to return to Washington to perform his duties at least two days every two weeks. He has been told he most likely won't get the nomination for the permanent position.

Additionally, Acting Deputy Inspector General Jeanette McMillian while instrumental in building the office, has sidelined Meyer, the official in charge of whistleblowing complaints. . . .

One concern in particular, sources say, is Chris Sharpley, who has been nominated to serve as the top watchdog for the CIA's Office of the Inspector General. According to three sources and reporting from the Project on Government Oversight, Sharpley, who is currently the acting head of the office, has several outstanding whistleblower retaliation complaints against him and has pressured Meyer to uncover the identity of employees raising complaints outside his purview. And without an intelligence community inspector general, there is nowhere for CIA employees to turn when they feel uncomfortable approaching their agency's inspector general, have already been retaliated against, or have a complaint that applies to the community broadly.

As usual, Senator Ron Wyden is one of the few to stand up for civil liberties.

Two competing pieces of draft legislation have been pushed into the lawmaking process: one that would officially endorse domestic spying, and a second that would explicitly ban it. . . .

In direct response to [the reauthorization bill], a bipartisan group of lawmakers has proposed a new piece of legislation - the USA Rights Act - that would explicitly prevent American citizens from being targeted, as well as close the loopholes created by the security services to spy on domestic targets.

Unsurprisingly, Uncle Sam's snoops - the NSA and FBI in particular - are strongly behind the reauthorization effort, particularly since they are increasingly using their interpretation of FISA to fill in for other spying programs that were taken away after they were exposed by Edward Snowden and later ruled unconstitutional.

Despite the explicit purpose of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - keyword: foreign - the US intelligence services have used it to build a vast database of information on US citizens by tapping domestic communication lines and then claiming any information picked up on said citizens is "incidentally collected."

While pretending that such intelligence is gathered by mistake, the g-men retain it all and then claim that information does not come with constitutional protections because it has already been gathered. As a result, the FBI is allowed to search it for US citizens using identifiers like name, email address, phone number, etc.

Latest shot in the new crypto wars:

Like many career prosecutors, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is pretty sure he's more committed to upholding the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law than most of the rest of us are. This was the thrust of Rosenstein's recent October 10 remarks on encryption, delivered to an audience of midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy. . . .

Of course, he elides the fact that many who differ with his views on encryption--including yours truly, as a lawyer licensed in three jurisdictions--have also sworn, multiple times, to uphold the U.S. Constitution. What's more, many of the constitutional rights we now regard as sacrosanct, like the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, were only vindicated over time under our rule of law--frequently in the face of overreaching by law-enforcement personnel and federal prosecutors, all of whom also swore to uphold the Constitution.

The differing sides of the encryption policy debate can't be reduced to supporting or opposing the rule of law and the Constitution. But Rosenstein chooses to characterize the debate this way because, as someone whose generally admirable career has been entirely within government, and almost entirely within the U.S. Justice Department, he simply never attempted to put himself in the position of those with whom he disagrees.

Honestly, how long do I have to wait until I can die in a world that doesn't have Ollie North in it?!

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/tru … e-enemies/