They would hate life if they tracked my cell phone.  Just work meeting calls from home and trips to the golf course.  The position of my phone on the corner of my monitor table in my office is the same about 95% of the time.

Just desserts?  Not too hopeful about any actual remedies, though.

A National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program has been ruled unlawful, seven years after it was exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The surveillance of millions of Americans' telephone records first came to light in 2013.

Now, the US Court of Appeals has ruled intelligence leaders who publicly defended the program lied.

Dragnet averted, at least in one case

Officials in the Greater Chicago area were investigating a case in which stolen pharmaceuticals were sold on the black market. Investigators believed that the culprit stole the pharmaceuticals from one location--perhaps a drug store or medical clinic--then traveled to a second location--perhaps a FedEx or UPS store--to ship them to customers.

To help them identify the suspect, investigators asked Google for data about every smartphone that was near these two locations during particular 45-minute windows of time--one window at the first location and two other windows on different days at the second location.

Initially, the government asked [the court for a warrant] for all cell phones that had been within 100 meters of each establishment. When that application was rejected as too broad, the government narrowed its request to compact polygons right around the buildings. In its third request, the government agreed not to ask for names or other identifying information, instead getting the data in anonymized form with a unique identifier for each device.

The courts rejected all three requests, concluding that none of them complied with the Fourth Amendment's requirement that warrants particularly describe "the persons or things to be seized." The first location was in a busy commercial corridor, so the 100-meter radius of the first proposed search could have easily included dozens or even hundreds of smartphones owned by innocent bystanders.

So eine Überraschung: spooks conceal vital information from the government.

Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was (quite literally) owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed.

The company, which supplied high-grade encryption machines to governments and corporations around the world, was in fact owned by the US civilian foreign intelligence service the CIA and Germany's BND spy agency during the Cold War, as we reported earlier this year.

Although Swiss spies themselves knew that Crypto AG's products were being intentionally weakened so the West could read messages passing over them, they didn't tell governmental overseers until last year - barely one year after the operation ended.

Forget donuts, the NSA loves Danish.  Not only spying on allies, but on the U.S. itself.

Denmark's secret service helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a European media investigation published on Sunday revealed.

The disclosure that the US had been spying on its allies first started coming to light in 2013, but it is only now that journalists have gained access to reports detailing the support given to the NSA by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE). . . .

The Danish government knew of the involvement of their country's secret service in the NSA scandal by 2015 at the latest.

They began to collect information on the FE's cooperation with the NSA between 2012 and 2014 in the secret Dunhammer report following the disclosures by the former NSA employee and whistleblower Edward Snowden, NDR reported.

The information they gathered made it clear that the FE had helped the NSA to spy on leading politicians in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and France, as well as Germany.

Danish intelligence also helped the US agency to spy on the Danish foreign and finance ministries as well as a Danish weapons manufacturer. The FE also cooperated with the NSA on spying operations against the US government itself.

Germany and France are not amused.

square wrote:

The disclosure was the latest in a series of revelations about the Justice Department secretly obtaining records from journalists, including a CNN reporter, as well as reporters from The Washington Post and other news organizations.

I'm guessing OAN, Breitbart, Fox, and Newsmax are not on the list.

Hope you're not in the wrong place at the wrong time!

The figures, published Thursday, reveal that Google has received thousands of geofence warrants each quarter since 2018, and at times accounted for about one-quarter of all U.S. warrants that Google receives. The data shows that the vast majority of geofence warrants are obtained by local and state authorities, with federal law enforcement accounting for just 4% of all geofence warrants served on the technology giant.

According to the data, Google received 982 geofence warrants in 2018, 8,396 in 2019 and 11,554 in 2020. But the figures only provide a small glimpse into the volume of warrants received and did not break down how often it pushes back on overly broad requests. . . .

Geofence warrants are also known as "reverse-location" warrants, since they seek to identify people of interest who were in the near vicinity at the time a crime was committed. Police do this by asking a court to order Google, which stores vast amounts of location data to drive its advertising business, to turn over details of who was in a geographic area, such as a radius of a few hundred feet at a certain point in time, to help identify potential suspects. . . .

[Google's] Sensorvault is said to have the detailed location data on "at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide," collected from users' phones when they use an Android device with location data switched on, or Google services like Google Maps and Google Photo, and even Google search results. In 2018, the Associated Press reported that Google could still collect users' locations even when their location history is "paused."

Who loves the deep state now?

At the risk of feeding our resident troll, a contact-tracing app in Germany used for decidedly non-COVID tracing.

The incident concerns authorities in the city of Mainz. At the end of November, a man fell to his death after leaving a restaurant in the city, prompting police to open a case.

While trying to track down witnesses, police and prosecutors managed to successfully petition local health authorities to release data from the Luca app, which logs how long people stayed at an establishment.

Authorities then reached out to 21 potential witnesses based on the data they had unlawfully acquired from the app.

JetRx wrote:

Nothing, other than dramatically reducing size and scope of dot.gov, will slow down this nonsense.

All that will do is use Government money to fund private marketing. Brave New World...

Not just the NSA spying on Americans; CIA also wants in on the action.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, of Oregon and New Mexico respectively, on Thursday announced that in April 2021 they sent a co-signed letter to director of national intelligence Avril Haines and CIA director William Burns, seeking expedited declassification of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's (PCLOB) review of two CIA counterterrorism programs – named "Deep Dive I" and "Deep Dive II".

A long, but worth reading, case study of overreach.

Law enforcement agencies in Minnesota have been carrying out a secretive, long-running surveillance program targeting civil rights activists and journalists in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Run under a consortium known as Operation Safety Net, the program was set up a year ago, ostensibly to maintain public order as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin went on trial for Floyd's murder. But an investigation by MIT Technology Review reveals that the initiative expanded far beyond its publicly announced scope to include expansive use of tools to scour social media, track cell phones, and amass detailed images of people’s faces.

Documents obtained via public records requests show that the operation persisted long after Chauvin's trial concluded. What's more, they show that police used the extensive investigative powers they'd been afforded under the operation to monitor individuals who weren't suspected of any crime.

MIT Technology Review's investigation includes thousands of documents and more than two dozen interviews with Minnesota state employees, policing experts, and activists. Taken together, they paint a picture of a state operation intent on identifying participants through secretive surveillance operations. Though it was undertaken by nonmilitary governmental agencies using public funds, large swaths of its inner workings have gone undisclosed. We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.

square wrote:

Forget donuts, the NSA loves Danish.

Of course, can't let exposing illegal activities go unpunished.

Denmark's justice ministry said in a statement released on Thursday that it has received a recommendation from the attorney general to prosecute former Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen for leaking highly classified information. . . .

Frederiksen served as defense minister between 2016 and 2019. It was revealed in January that he had been preliminarily charged with violating a section of the penal code that includes treason for leaking state secrets.