(VIDEO) Candidate Obama debates President Obama on gov't. surveillance

Nicole Wong the US’s first chief privacy officer thinks the gov't should work hand-in-hand with internet companies

The first week on the job for Nicole Wong, dubbed by many as the US’s first chief privacy officer, has been fairly, well, private. The White House has named Wong, 44, a former top lawyer for Google and Twitter, as the new deputy US chief technology officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But the appointment came with little fanfare or official communication about her role, even though Wong could have influence far and wide—not only on internet issues, but on foreign policy, trade and human rights. Here’s why.

Wong is serving as a top deputy to the White House’s chief technology officer, Todd Park, according to OSTP spokesman Rick Weiss. Beyond that, Weiss wouldn’t elaborate on what Wong will be doing. He did say, however, that characterizing her simply as a “chief privacy officer” doesn’t fully describe her role.

In the very least, Wong’s appointment appears to be part of an effort by the Obama administration to reassure citizens that their privacy rights will be protected. The White House has been under the gun about the government’s role in data mining and surveillance, thanks in part to controversy over its PRISM spying program. “The fact that this position exists reflects the importance we attach to the issue,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters last week. “I would point you to everything I just said about the president’s views on the balance that we need to strike between our national security interests and protecting the American people, as well as protecting our values and our privacy.”

Wong has a stellar reputation for aggressively protecting individual privacy rights, earned during many battles she fought against the Bush and Obama administrations during her eight years as Google’s vice president and deputy general counsel. She joined Twitter as its legal director just seven months ago. Friends and former colleagues say she has mastered the complexities of cutting-edge internet and social media technologies and how the law should or shouldn’t apply to them.

But beyond individual privacy, Wong’s real passion and expertise is in using companies like Google, Twitter and YouTube (which Google bought in 2006) to promote freedom and democracy and fight repression and censorship. At Google in particular, she fought against more than 25 countries, including China, Turkey and Pakistan, that tried to limit the flow of information and videos as a way to stifle dissent and free speech.

In 2010, Wong appeared before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee at a hearing titled, “The Google Predicament: Transforming U.S. Cyberspace Policy To Advance Democracy, Security and Trade.” In lengthy testimony, she laid out a four-point plan for how the US government should work hand-in-hand with internet companies.

Here’s her verbatim testimony:

• First and foremost, the U.S. government should promote internet openness as a major plank for our foreign policy.  The free flow of information is an important part of diplomacy, foreign assistance, and engagement on human rights.
• Second, internet censorship should be part of our trade agenda because it has serious economic implications.  It tilts the playing field towards domestic companies and reduces consumer choice.  It affects not only U.S. and global Internet companies, but also hurts businesses in every sector that use the internet to reach customers.
• Third, our government and governments around the world should be transparent about demands to censor or request information about users or when a network comes under attack.  This is a critical part of the democratic process, allowing citizens to hold their governments accountable.
• Finally, Google supports the commitment of Congress and the administration to provide funds to make sure people who need to access the internet safely have the right training and tools.

http://qz.com/98582/the-most-important-person-entering-us-government-youve-never-heard-of/

FTC commisioner wants Congress to legislate consumer data privacy

Big data brokers are "taking advantage of us without our permission." Those were the words of Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill this morning at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington.

The commissioner, often vocal on data-privacy issues, called on Congress to legislate what she calls a "Reclaim Your Name" program, one that would establish technical controls allowing people to access the information data collectors have stored about them, control how it is shared and correct it when necessary.

The commissioner suggested such a program could operate in tandem with the browser-based Do Not Track standard currently in development. That slow-moving process, however, is under intensifying scrutiny as some World Wide Web Consortium participants question the chances of reaching consensus on key tech and policy elements of DNT, like Firefox's "Do Not Track" browser.

"I urge the W3C stakeholders to forge ahead and reach consensus" on DNT, said Ms. Brill.
But there's no reason why "big data" cannot coexist with the establishment of standards for DNT and Reclaim Your Name, she added.

The Direct Marketing Association was caught off guard by Commissioner Brill's announcement.

"DMA has been in discussion with Commissioner Brill regarding ways to increase transparency in the 'data broker' industry, but was surprised to see her announcement of this new initiative," said Rachel Thomas, VP of government affairs at DMA. "The FTC's Section 6B inquiry into 'data brokers' is still ongoing, and the Commission has yet to articulate a specific problem that would justify a call for congressional action in this area," she continued in an emailed statement.

Ms. Brill indicated that the FTC believes mobile device IDs are personally-identifiable. Many of the companies using device IDs to track in-store shopping behavior and other location-based interactions hold that they are not. "Information linked to specific devices is, for all intents and purposes, linked to individuals," she said.

The FTC is calling on data companies and users of consumer data "to commit to a robust program to de-identify their information," she said, arguing that predictive analytics have rendered much of the consumer information collected as forever linked to individuals, no matter industry's claims that the information often is anonymized or aggregated.

Companies should "take both technical and behavioral steps to make sure information used in advertising is truly and completely de-identified." Ms. Brill didn't make distinctions between data collected and used by first-parties and third-parties.

Countless retailers and consulting firms that provide data services to them -- such as Acxiom, Merkle and many others -- handle terabytes of personally-identifiable consumer data on a regular basis.

Firms including Datalogix and LiveRamp enable these increasingly popular offline-to-online data linking services.
http://adage.com/article/privacy-and-regulation/ftc-s-call-legislate-data-privacy-stuns-marketers/242848/

Online tracking, is anything we do private?

Joining a social network allows the gov't access to your friends, family, and co-workers

When you join a social network, it usually asks if you’d like help finding friends who also use the service. It sounds like a nice offer—much easier than manually searching the site. So you click “yes,” put check marks next to the people you want to follow, and go merrily on your way.

Congratulations: You’ve just donated all of your friends’ and colleagues’ email addresses and phone numbers to that social network’s internal database. If you’re lucky, its employees will treat your friends’ contact information with more respect than you just did.

But they might not. They might use it to blast everyone from your boss to your mother-in-law with text messages at 6 a.m., like the fledgling social network Path did to at least one user in April. Or they might do something more subtle: cross-check your contacts list against their internal database, adding phone numbers and emails that your friends had chosen, for whatever reason, not to associate with their account. They might even collect the emails and phone numbers of people who aren’t members at all. And if you’re really unlucky—or rather, if your friends are really unlucky—they’ll accidentally reveal those secret phone numbers and email addresses to everyone else in your friends’ networks. That’s what Facebook was doing for the past year, until the security research site Packet Storm pointed out the gaffe last week, and Facebook scrambled to fix the bug.

Facebook apologized for the mistake, which made some 6 million users’ private contact information available to their friends and others through the site’s Download Your Information feature. The leak was clearly unintentional and quite rare for Facebook, which is among the best in the business at data security.

Everyone knows that the personal data he or she stores on the servers of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon is never 100 percent secure. But you’re probably somewhat less inured to the idea that your friends and associates are storing personal information about you there as well. On social networks, that information is part of what’s called your “shadow profile.” It’s data about you that’s stored on Facebook’s servers but not revealed to anyone other than the people who uploaded it—not even you.

Here’s where it gets a little Kafkaesque: Even if you knew that your phone number and secondary email addresses were being added to your Facebook shadow profile without your consent, you couldn’t do anything about it. Technically, once you gave your phone number or email address to your friends and they added it to their address book, it became their personal information, not yours—and when they granted Facebook access to that address book, it became Facebook’s information, too. Facebook won’t delete it even if you ask, because it’s not yours to delete. As Packet Storm put it, “Facebook feels that your friends should have more control over your data than you.”

Believe it or not, though, this isn’t some malicious scheme that Facebook dreamed up to steal your data. From Facebook’s perspective, it’s actually a service. It makes it easier for friends to find one another, and it helps Facebook avoid sending you useless emails and notifications. If Facebook didn’t attach that secondary email to your “shadow profile,” then friends who looked you up at that address would think you weren’t already on Facebook, and they might invite you to join.

The existence of shadow profiles was among the alleged privacy violations raised in an investigation of Facebook by the Irish government in 2011. But the Irish authorities cleared Facebook on that count, because they found that the company wasn’t using the hidden data for any nefarious purposes. It wasn’t using those extra addresses and phone numbers to target anyone with ads, it wasn’t selling them to third-party marketers, and it wasn’t disclosing them to anyone else on the site (until the data leak, anyway). It was just using them in the way it said it would use them when they were uploaded in the first place—i.e., to help people find their friends on the site.

Not everyone finds that logic compelling. Packet Storm’s researchers noted that the information could be targeted by hackers or government spies. Sarah Downey, analyst at the online privacy company Abine, took issue with Facebook’s claim that its users know what they’re doing when they grant access to their contacts via the Find Friends feature. “I’d assume I’m using it to find friends, not to help them build up a database on my friends,” she told me.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/facebook_data_breach_how_social_networks_use_find_friends_to_mine_your_contacts.html

FISA court works with the NSA allowing the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans

The Guardian (U.K.)  newspaper that broke the story of the NSA’s activities as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden published on June 20 “two full documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” Both documents were signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and were issued in July 2009.

According to the article written by Glenn Greenwald and James Ball, the documents “detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.”

Not surprisingly, neither the Fourth Amendment nor the freedoms against tyranny that it protects are honored by Holder or the other architects and construction crews erecting the surveillance state.

As Greenwald and Ball report, the leaked documents demonstrate that when the NSA is conducting surveillance under the pretense of monitoring foreign targets, any U.S. communication caught in the dragnet is “collected, retained and used.”

Using Section 215 of the Patriot Act as justification, the NSA is now known to monitor and seize the phone records of millions of Americans who are not now or ever have been suspected of any crime that would justify the issuing of a search warrant. This wholesale watching of the telephone activities of citizens was revealed by The Guardian a few weeks ago as part of Snowden’s release of information on his former employer.

With regard to the lack of oversight provided by the so-called FISA court, The New American reported in May that, as required by provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments of 2008 (FISA) and the Patriot Act (as amended in 2005), the Department of Justice revealed to Congress the number of applications for eavesdropping received and rejected by the FISA court.

The letter addressed to Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) reports that in 2012, of the 1,789 requests made by the government to monitor the electronic communications of citizens, not a single one was rejected.

That’s right. The court, established specifically to judge the merits of applications by the government to spy on citizens, gave a green light to every government request for surveillance.

Not content to be a mere formality for electronic surveillance, the FISA court also held the coats of the FBI while that agency carried out the constitutionally suspect searches and seizures set out in 212 applications.

The documents released last week by The Guardian go beyond merely recounting the secret combination of the FISA court with the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic spying program, however.

As Greenwald and Ball write, The top secret documents detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the FISA court’s collusion with the NSA to eradicate the Bill of Rights is the policies of the latter rubber stamped by the former. The Guardian provided a summary of what the FISA court allowed the NSA to get away with. According to the newspaper’s report, the FISA court-approved NSA petitions allow the spy agency to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

All these activities violate the Fourth Amendment requirement that “no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” In practical terms, that means that the federal government cannot purposely monitor the phone or Internet communications carried on by an American or a person inside the United States without a qualifying warrant.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/15830-fisa-court-colludes-with-nsa-to-allow-unconstitutional-surveillance 
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/06/a-visual-look-into-the-nsas-surveillance-program.html

(VIDEO) NSA parody commercial with Sasha Grey:
http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/14dc1b13fa/sexy-nsa-commercial-with-sasha-grey 

What you need to know about the NSA’s surveillance programs:
http://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq

NSA data harvesting continues and is actually expanding, despite the Obama administration’s claims:

http://endthelie.com/2013/06/27/nsa-data-harvesting-continues-and-is-actually-expanding-despite-the-obama-administrations-claims/#axzz2XVy9pG9l

The 2014 version of the National Defense Authorization Act allows the gov't. to detain American's indefinitely

The annual renewal of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is underway on Capitol Hill.

On June 14, by a vote of 315-108, the House of Representatives passed the Fiscal Year 2014 version of the NDAA (HR 1960). Several amendments to the defense spending legislation were proposed, many of which were approved either by voice vote or en bloc. The first method of voting requires no report on how individual members voted, while the second method aggregates amendments, allowing them to be voted on in groups.

A few of the amendments represent significant improvements to the NDAA of 2012 and 2013. The acts passed for those years infamously permitted the president to deploy U.S. military troops to apprehend and indefinitely detain any American he alone believed to be aiding enemies of the state.

While the 2014 iteration doesn’t go far enough in pushing the federal beast back inside its constitutional cage, there are at least a few congressmen willing to try to crack the whip and restore constitutional separation of powers and shore up a few of the fundamental liberties suspended by the NDAA of the past two years.

First, there is the amendment offered by Representative Trey Radel (R-Fla.). Radel’s amendment requires the Department of Defense to submit to the Congress a report every year containing: (1) the names of any U.S. citizens subject to military detention, (2) the legal justification for their continued detention, and (3) the steps the Executive Branch is taking to either provide them some judicial process, or release them. Requires that an unclassified version of the report be made available, and in addition, that the report must be made available to all members of Congress.

Radel’s amendment was passed by voice vote.

Next, an amendment offered by Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) would require the federal government, in habeas proceedings for U.S. citizens apprehended in the United States pursuant to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), to prove by “clear and convincing evidence” that the citizen is an unprivileged enemy combatant and there is not presumption that the government's evidence is accurate and authentic.

The House approved the Goodlatte amendment by a vote of 214-211.

Finally, an amendment by Representative Paul Broun (R-Ga.) forbids the Department of Defense from killing a citizen of the United States by a drone attack unless that person is actively engaged in combat against the United States.

This trio of amendments represents a laudable attempt to restrain the power of the executive. As constitutionalists and civil libertarians are aware, recent occupants of the Oval Office have usurped sweeping unconstitutional powers, including the authority to target Americans for indefinite detention, to withhold from them rights that have been recognized as unalienable since before the Magna Carta, and to kill American citizens who have been charged with no crime and been given no opportunity to defend themselves from the accusations that qualified them for summary assassination.

Despite these small victories in the battle to restore constitutionally protected liberty, the debate on the 2014 NDAA provided several examples of Congress violating their oaths of office by shrinking the scope of basic rights and expanding the power of the president to act as de facto (and now, de jure) judge, jury, and executioner.

For example, two amendments offered by Representative Adam Smith (D-Wash.) were rejected by his colleagues, to their dishonor.

Smith’s first proposed amendment would have prohibited indefinite military detention of any person detained under AUMF authority in the United States, territories, or possessions by providing immediate transfer to trial and proceedings by a court established under Article III of the Constitution or by an appropriate state court.

Not surprisingly, Smith’s amendment failed to garner approval, being voted down by a vote of 200-226 (213 Republicans voted against Smith’s amendment).

This was not the first time the “conservatives” in Congress rejected a proposal by Representative Smith that would have protected due process and disgorged the president of powers to which he is not entitled. During last year’s deliberations on the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2013, the House of Representatives voted to perpetuate the president’s power to indefinitely detain American citizens.

By a vote of 238-182, members of Congress rejected the amendment offered by Smith and Justin Amash (R-Mich.) that would have repealed the indefinite detention provision passed overwhelmingly in 2011 as part of the 2012 NDAA.

The Fiscal Year 2013 NDAA retained the indefinite detention provisions, as well as the section permitting prisoners to be transferred from civilian jurisdiction to the custody of the military.

"The frightening thing here is that the government is claiming the power under the Afghanistan authorization for use of military force as a justification for entering American homes to grab people, indefinitely detain them and not give them a charge or trial," Representative Amash said during House debate last year.

In his impassioned speech supporting the amendment he proposed last year, Representative Smith reminded his colleagues that the NDAA granted to the president “extraordinary” powers and divested the American people of key civil liberties, as well as divesting civilian courts of their constitutional jurisdiction.

Smith pointed out that there was no need to transfer suspects into military custody as “hundreds” of terrorists have been tried in federal courts since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Members of Congress — mostly Republican members — have united in firm defense of the president’s unconstitutional power to apprehend and indefinitely detain Americans.

There are very few more powerful reminders that there is no party in Washington, D.C., that is committed to faithfully adhering to the oath of office or to the upholding of the manifold God-given rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution.

Finally, there is in the NDAA for 2014, a frightening fusion of the federal government’s constant surveillance of innocent Americans and the assistance it will give to justifying the indefinite detention of anyone labeled an enemy of the regime.

Section 1061 of the 2014 NDAA approved by the House expands on the scope of surveillance established by the Patriot Act and the AUMF. Sec. 1061(a) authorizes the secretary of efense to "establish a center to be known as the 'Conflict Records Research Center.’” According to the current text of the NDAA, the center would be tasked with compiling a “digital research database including translations and to facilitate research and analysis of records captured from countries, organizations, and individuals, now or once hostile to the United States.”

In order to accomplish the center’s purpose, the secretary of defense will create an information exchange in cooperation with the director of national intelligence.

Key to the functioning of this information exchange will be the collection of “captured records.” Section 1061(g)(1), defines a captured record as "a document, audio file, video file, or other material captured during combat operations from countries, organizations, or individuals, now or once hostile to the United States."

When read in conjunction with the provision of the AUMF that left the War on Terror open-ended and previous NDAAs’ classification of the United States as a battleground in that unconstitutional war, and you’ve got a powerful combination that can knock out the entire Bill of Rights.
www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/congress/item/15829-house-passes-14-ndaa-nsa-surveillance-will-lead-to-indefinite-detention

The NYPD is proud of its relationship with the CIA

Washington, D. C. -  Four Central Intelligence Agency officers were embedded with the New York Police Department in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, including one official who helped conduct surveillance operations in the United States, according to a newly disclosed C.I.A. inspector general’s report. 

That officer believed there were “no limitations” on his activities, the report said, because he was on an unpaid leave of absence, and thus exempt from the prohibition against domestic spying by members of the C.I.A. 

Another embedded C.I.A. analyst — who was on its payroll — said he was given “unfiltered” police reports that included information unrelated to foreign intelligence, the C.I.A. report said. 

The once-classified review, completed by the C.I.A. inspector general in December 2011, found that the four agency analysts — more than had previously been known — were assigned at various times to “provide direct assistance” to the local police. The report also raised a series of concerns about the relationship between the two organizations. 

The C.I.A. inspector general, David B. Buckley, found that the collaboration was fraught with “irregular personnel practices,” that it lacked “formal documentation in some important instances,” and that “there was inadequate direction and control” by agency supervisors. 

“While negative public perception is to be expected from the revelation of the agency’s close and direct collaboration with any local domestic police department, a perception that the agency has exceeded its authorities diminishes the trust placed in the organization,” Mr. Buckley wrote in a cover memo to David H. Petraeus, then the C.I.A. director. 

The declassification of the executive summary, in response to a Freedom of Information Act suit, comes at a time of intense interest in domestic spying after leaks by a former contractor for the National Security Agency. 

Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman, said that the lawsuits were without merit. He also said that the inspector general had found nothing illegal and that the last embedded C.I.A. official left the police in 2012. 

“We’re proud of our relationship with C.I.A. and its training,” he said, saying it was partly responsible for the absence of casualties from a terror attack in New York in the years since Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks. He added that the terrorists “keep coming and we keep pushing back.” 

The C.I.A.-Police Department partnership dates from 2002, when David Cohen, a former C.I.A. officer who became deputy commissioner for intelligence at the Police Department after the Sept. 11 attacks, reached out to his former agency in building up its counterterrorism abilities. 

The inspector general’s office began the investigation in August 2011 after The Associated Press published an article about the C.I.A.’s relationship with the Police Department’s intelligence division. It was part of a series about New York police surveillance of Muslims that was later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. 

When the classified report was completed in 2011, spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the Police Department said it had concluded that the C.I.A. had not violated a law and an executive order that prohibited it from domestic spying or performance of law-enforcement powers. But the document shows that that conclusion was not the whole story. The inspector general warned in his cover letter that the collaboration raised “considerable and multifaceted” risks for the agency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/nyregion/cia-sees-concerns-on-ties-to-new-york-police.html?_r=2&

FOIA document reveals CIA collaboration in domestic surveillance:

According to a Central Intelligence Agency Inspector General's report obtained by EPIC under the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA collaborated with the New York Police Department in domestic surveillance efforts.

The CIA is prohibited from participating in domestic surveillance, but the report finds that the agency had embedded four officers within the NYPD over the past decade and that collaboration with the NYPD was fraught with "irregular personnel practices," that it lacked "formal documentation in some important instances," and that "there was inadequate direction and control" by agency supervisors.

The Inspector General's Report was prepared in response to an investigation by the Associated Press which showed that the NYPD and the CIA had collaborated on a program of domestic surveillance targeting Muslims and persons of Arab descent. The CIA originally claimed that there was "no evidence that any part of the agency's support to the NYPD constituted 'domestic spying,'" a statement that is contradicted by the Inspector General's Report obtained by EPIC.
http://epic.org/2013/06/epic-foia-document-reveals-cia.html

Germany's warning to America: "You are entering the American sector. Your privacy ends here."

Berlin - East Germany’s Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. 

Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

“It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won’t be used,” he said. “This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html#storylink=cpy

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, tried to provide an out for President Barack Obama, offering as a possible explanation for the sweeping nature of the U.S. collection efforts that “the Internet is new to all of us.” She was roundly mocked for that statement, and her administration appeared far less forgiving more recently, when similar spying charges were leveled against the British government.

Germans are dismayed at Obama’s role in allowing the collection of so much information. Before his presidency, hundreds of thousands of Germans turned out to hear him speak in Berlin. During a visit last week, the setup was engineered to avoid criticism: Obama spoke to a small, handpicked audience, many from the German-American school. Access to the Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop for his speech, was severely limited, as was access to Berlin’s entire downtown.

As many Germans as heard Obama speak turned out at quickly arranged protests, including one by self-proclaimed tech nerds near the historic Checkpoint Charlie, where U.S. soldiers welcomed visitors from the communist sector of Berlin for four decades with a sign, “You are entering the American sector.” One demonstrator added this coda: “Your privacy ends here.”

“Everyone knows that gathering so much information is bullshit,” said Reinhard Weisshuhn, a political activist and foreign policy adviser. “It’s a total breach of trust by the government. This is how a society destroys itself.”

Germans, especially those raised in the east, are unconvinced by arguments that the sweeping collection of information is used only to track terrorists. The assertions by U.S. officials that unspecified attacks have been thwarted don’t persuade them, either. They haven’t forgotten the fear of living under a government that used vague threats to justify blanket spying. In East Germany, the threats came under the banner of disloyalty to socialist ideals. In the United States, the monitoring programs come under the banner of anti-terrorism.

Dagmar Hovestaedt is the spokeswoman for the German Stasi Records Agency, which showed 88,000 people last year what the Stasi had gathered on them. She said the U.S. should consider doing the same.

“This is a study on how to deal with the information the NSA is now gathering,” she said of her archive. “To say that the NSA is the equivalent of the Stasi is too simplistic, but the people who are spied on do have a right to know what was learned about their lives, what they had hoped to keep private that was not. Transparency is essential.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html#.UcxAgt7D-Uk 

License plate readers are recording millions of vehicles across the U.S.

(An image captured by a license-plate reader in 2009 shows Katz-Lacabe and his daughters stepping out of a car in their driveway. The photograph made Katz-Lacabe “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection,” he says. Credit: San Leandro Police Department photo courtesy of Michael Katz-Lacabe)

California - When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car.

The results shocked him.

The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.

That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.

At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.

With heightened concern over secret intelligence operations at the National Security Agency, the localized effort to track drivers highlights the extent to which the government has committed to collecting large amounts of data on people who have done nothing wrong.

A year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center – one of dozens of law enforcement intelligence-sharing centers set up after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records flowing in from police using the devices across 14 counties, documents and interviews show.

The extent of the center’s data collection has never been revealed. Neither has the involvement of Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm with extensive ties to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, has invested $2 million in the firm.

The jurisdictions supplying license-plate data to the intelligence center stretch from Monterey County to the Oregon border. According to contract documents, the database will be capable of handling at least 100 million records and be accessible to local and state law enforcement across the region.

Law enforcement agencies throughout Northern California will be able to access the data, as will state and federal authorities.

In the Bay Area, at least 32 government agencies use license-plate readers. The city of Piedmont decided to install them along the border with Oakland, and the Marin County enclave of Tiburon placed plate scanners and cameras on two roads leading into and out of town.

Law enforcement agencies throughout the region also have adopted the technology. Police in Daly City, Milpitas and San Francisco have signed agreements to provide data from plate readers to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. A Piedmont document indicates that city is also participating, along with Oakland, Walnut Creek, Alameda and the California Highway Patrol.

Katz-Lacabe said he believes the records of his movements are too revealing for someone who has done nothing wrong. With the technology, he said, “you can tell who your friends are, who you hang out with, where you go to church, whether you’ve been to a political meeting.”

Lt. Randall Brandt of the San Leandro police said, “It’s new technology, we’re learning as we go, but it works 100 times better than driving around looking for license plates with our eyes.”

The intelligence center database will store license-plate records for up to two years, regardless of data retention limits set by local police departments.

Many cities use license-plate readers to enforce parking restrictions or identify motorists who run red lights. Police in New York City have used the readers to catch car thieves and scan parking lots to identify motorists with open warrants.

License-plate readers are not subject to the same legal restrictions as GPS devices that can be used to track an individual's movements. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously last year that lengthy GPS tracking constitutes a Fourth Amendment search and may require a warrant.

But plate readers might not fall under such rulings if police successfully argue that motorists have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” while driving on public roads.

“Do we really want to maintain a database that tracks personal movements of law-abiding citizens in perpetuity? That’s the fundamental question here,” said former senator Joe Simitian, now a Santa Clara County supervisor. “Larger and larger amounts of data collected over longer periods of time provide a very detailed look at the personal movements of private citizens.”
http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883

Palantir denies its 'Prism' software is the NSA's 'PRISM' surveillance system:

The data analysis firm Palantir wants to make one thing clear: There’s more than one piece of software in the world called “Prism,” and Palantir’s “Prism” product is definitely not the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance system known as “PRISM.”

The leaked NSA document published Thursday by the Guardian and the Washington Post, which outlined a system known as PRISM for collecting data in real time from tech giants including Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, quickly led to suspicions that the program was in fact built by the $5 billion, CIA-funded data analysis startup Palantir, which sells a product with the same name.

But in a phone call Friday, a Palantir staffer who asked not to be named told me that Palantir has nothing to do with the NSA’s PRISM program, and that its “Prism” product is actually financial analysis software not intended for government. “It’s a name collision,” she said. “We had no knowledge of this PRISM program before the story broke, and we don’t have anything to do with it.

The Prism product, posted on a public wiki, was built for our finance program, and it has nothing to do with government.”

A description of Palantir’s Prism software on a public portion of its website doesn’t reveal much about its applications:

Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir. Specifically, it lets you build high-performance Data Engine based providers without writing any code. Instead, you define simple configuration files and then Palantir automatically constructs the data provider and database code for you.

For more information go to Palantir's site map link found at the bottom of their website, where they spell out how they work with the government. http://www.palantir.com/site-map/

Palantir isn’t the first to deny its involvement in the NSA’s spying scheme, which according to the Post extracted files directly from nine Internet companies over six years. Within hours of the story breaking, practically every tech company named in the story had denied their involvement and in some cases even denied knowing what PRISM was.

The Palantir staffer I spoke with wouldn’t comment on the startup’s customers, but it’s no secret that the company does work with intelligence agencies. A Wall Street Journal profile of the firm in 2009 said that the NSA was “eyeing” the company. It’s received investment from the CIA venture capital arm known as In-Q-Tel, as well as billionaire Peter Thiel. The company’s software was initially developed from fraud detection techniques implemented by PayPal, which Thiel co-founded.

Palantir has found itself under scrutiny for civil liberties violations before. When intruders from the hacker group Anonymous gained access to  thousands of emails stored on the servers of the security firm HB Gary Federal, the emails revealed that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors.
The company quickly apologized for its role in the plan and cut ties with HB Gary Federal.

“The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy,” Palantir chief executive Alex Karp wrote in a statement at the time. “From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system/ 

The Obama administration's "Insider Threat Program" a hallmark of a police state

The "Insider Threat Program" federal employees are encouraged to spy on co-workers in an environment of intimidation and submission to the gov't.

N.J. approved bill requiring DNA samples for disorderly persons convictions

New Jersey - A bill that would require a DNA sample from people convicted of some disorderly persons offenses co-sponsored by state Sen. Nicholas Sacco, D-North Bergen -- was approved by the full Senate today.

Sacco, also the mayor of North Bergen, and Paul Sarlo, D-Wood-Ridge, say the legislation would assist criminal investigations and deter and detect repeat offenders. Currently people convicted of felonies must submit a DNA sample that is added to the State Police database and forwarded to the FBI for inclusion in the federal Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). 

“DNA is one of the most powerful tools we have to identify perpetrators and exonerate those falsely accused of crimes,” Sacco said. “A more expansive DNA database will enable us to solve investigations with greater speed and accuracy. By adding certain serious disorderly persons offenses ... this legislation only affects a small percentage of offenders and takes a sensible approach to fighting crime.”

The measure would require DNA from those convicted of more serious disorderly persons offenses for which fingerprints are already taken under state law -- such as domestic violence, shoplifting, prostitution and some drug-related crimes. The Senate approved it, 35-3. The bill now heads to the General Assembly for final legislative approval.

Provisions of the bill would not apply to minor disorderly persons offenses that do not require fingerprinting or to persons who are arrested, but not convicted. People imprisoned or on parole or probation for a specified disorderly persons offense when the law becomes effective also would be required to submit to DNA sampling under the bill.
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2013/06/post_318.html 

DISORDERLY CONDUCT?  The Police state is here let's not forget it wasn't to long ago Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was charged with disorderly conduct.

The majority of those arrested for disorderly conduct were allegedly yelling – often screaming obscenities – in front of police before the handcuffs snapped shut. More than 60 percent of the disorderly arrests were involved in some sort of allegedly inflammatory speech, such as talking back to the police, more commonly known as “contempt of cop.”

“Disorderly is often used when people do something to piss off the cops,” said Daniel Beck, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Cambridge, MA. “Sometimes, they’re just being a drunken jerk yelling,” he said. “Often, they’re challenging the cops’ authority.”
 

New York State Senate Wants To Make It A Felony To 'Annoy' A Police Officer:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/new-york-annoy-police-law_n_3398554.html

Where does it stop, whats next random home invasions? Oops, sorry that's already happening in Washington.

WA gun bill includes police searches without warrants:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/02/19/wa-gun-bill-includes-police-searches-without-warrants/

NJ man ticketed for disorderly conduct after walking home from his job at Walmart:

Trenton, NJ -  A young man returning home from work Saturday at midnight was allegedly assaulted by Trenton police.

Ticket given to Tyrell Green after he was stopped Saturday night on his way home from work.

Tyrell Green caught audio of the alleged incident on his cell phone because he was recording a conversation with a friend when cops could be heard asking him to put his hands up.

“I didn’t do anything,” the 20-year-old black male pleads to police in the recording, repeatedly asking officers “what did I do?”

When Green told one of the cops “I want your badge number too,” a commotion could be heard, followed by an “ow” from Green.

“That’s my (expletive) badge number right there,” a cop says. “Shut the (expletive) up.”

Green could then be heard groaning shortly thereafter.

The city resident provided a photo to The Trentonian of the facial injuries from the punch he says he received in the alleged incident.

Green, who works for Walmart in Hamilton, said he had just gotten off the bus and was walking the rest of the way home on Chambers Street near Ashmore Avenue, when he was stopped by Trenton police because they were responding to a report of a man with a gun.

The only thing police found on the shipping and receiving employee was a safety knife that he is required to carry at work to open boxes, Green said.

Green said he was in police custody for two hours and was given the option to stay in jail until Monday or receive a ticket for disorderly conduct.

The Mercer High School graduate said he opted to take the ticket signed by Trenton police officer Luis E. Cosme.

Green claims he knew he did nothing wrong because a police officer told him if he showed up to the court, the charges would be dropped.
http://www.trentonian.com/article/20130613/NEWS01/130619840/city-resident-allegedly-assaulted-by-trenton-cops#1

Acxiom to allow consumers to view their personal secret files

For the first time ever, the big daddy of all data brokers is nearly ready to show consumers their intimate personal dossiers.

Since the company’s founding in 1969, Acxiom the data giant with profiles on 700 million individuals, has never allowed people to see their own commercial profiles extensively used by major companies for marketing. By the end of the summer, perhaps around Labor Day, the Little Rock, Arkansas-based company with more than a billion dollars in annual sales a year, will open up the vault, company officials say.

“I want to be open about what we are doing and I think there are some misperceptions about what happens and what does not happen,” said Tim Suther, who is leaving as Acxiom’s chief strategy and marketing officer at the end of this week. The more that we can talk in a straightforward manner, the more likely people are to understand it and draw their own conclusions based on the facts as opposed to supposition.”

What exactly does Acxiom know about you? Their files record where you live and who else lives there, your phone numbers, often including cell, general financial situation and interests. Your file might include race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, education, political affiliation and occupation. They might list what credit cards you use, as well as some health topics of interest to you such as diabetes or arthritis.

With limited U.S. regulation on data collection, Acxiom starts gathering information from public records. They add details people volunteer on warranty cards and surveys. Then they buy data from magazine publishers, retailers and catalog companies.  They may know that you are a legal professional who received a vocational or technical education who smokes, has an interest in weight loss plans, owns a cat and enjoys lotteries. They may even know minute details such as whether your house has a gravel or shingle roof. The file does not show that you bought a specific kind of mink coat, but may indicate you have an interest in high-end fashion.

The company has information on nearly one billion online users and matches 90 percent of all U.S. social profiles, CEO Scott Howe told investors last month. “We have made significant progress establishing and collecting broader and deeper data sets than any company in the world,” he said.

Suther, who spoke on one of his last days on the job before moving on after eight years with the company, said security challenges had slowed the opening up the files. “The way the information is accessed is highly, highly secure and private. It is very, very rare that there is a public interface to this so to make this information available to any individual ultimately needs to be accompanied with a corresponding significant authentication process,” he said. 

“As you can imagine, being an information company, we, like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and anybody else, we have all kinds of nefarious people and entities that are looking to try to break in, so the last thing that we want to do is to have a circumstance where information about people is inappropriately accessed.”

In the past Acxiom has allowed consumers to see the part of their dossier gathered from public documents, but the request process is onerous. Anyone interested has to send in their Social Security number, date of birth, driver’s license number, current address, phone number and email address, as well as a $5 check. Few have cleared this hurdle.  Between 2009 and mid 2012 when they sent information about this process to a Congressional panel, between 77 and 342 people had asked to see their files every year, with just two to 16 annually providing enough information to get access to their file.

Suther said Acxiom did not intend to charge to see the consumer file, although the exact process was still being worked out. “The amount of data and types of data that are coming to Acxiom are changing all the time. So the complete file is like an anomaly. It will never be complete because it’s always changing,” he said. “The initial release will have a pretty healthy amount of information and we intend to iterate based on top of that.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/06/25/finally-youll-get-to-see-the-secret-consumer-dossier-they-have-on-you/

FTC commissioner wants companies to reveal what user data they collect:

It's difficult to tell just how much personal information companies have picked up about us from our online trails, our smartphone and app activity, and our credit card purchases. Sure, certain sites and apps offer ways for users to see their activity data on their platforms, but going to each one individually is not convenient, to say the least. Plus, there are many companies — so called "data brokers" — that specialize in collecting and piecing together personal data about people in the background, without broadly disclosing that fact. Now one US government official is proposing a sweeping new initiative that would let people see all the data that such companies have collected about them. Called "Reclaim Your Name," the effort is still just a proposal for now, but it will become reality in the coming months if its creator, Julie Brill, a commissioner with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has her way.

In her keynote address today at the Computers Freedom and Privacy Conference in Washington, DC, Brill cited some examples of the kind of broad data collection that many companies engage in without explicitly informing consumers, including a notorious incident in which the retail chain Target accidentally revealed a teen girl's pregnancy to her parents by crawling purchase data. As Brill put it in her speech: "Imagine walking into Target and reading a sign on the wall or a disclosure on a receipt that says: 'We will analyze your purchases to predict what health conditions you have so that we can provide you with discounts and coupons you may want.' That clear statement would surprise – and alarm – most of us."

Brill's proposed solution to this seemingly alarming collection of personal data without consumers' explicit awareness or consent is a proposed initiative she calls "Reclaim Your Name." Here's how she described it in her speech:

Reclaim Your Name would empower the consumer to find out how brokers are collecting and using data; give her access to information that data brokers have amassed about her; allow her to opt-out if she learns a data broker is selling her information for marketing purposes; and provide her the opportunity to correct errors in information used for substantive decisions – like credit, insurance, employment, and other benefits.

Brill, who has challenged companies on consumer privacy before, said she discussed the prospect with others in industry, and that "they have expressed some interest," but that she hoped the entire industry would sign on. The FTC has previously taken a hard line on data brokers, so there's a good chance this plan will come into effect in some form. Still, the fine details of how such a system would work in practice — would consumers visit the FTC website? Individual websites? What format would their data be available in? Would the program be mandated or voluntary? — have yet to be determined. Brill said that she would be working with the industry over the coming months to refine the proposal. She will also need to convince the other four FTC commissioners, including newcomer Terrell McSweeny, to get on board with her plan as well. Going off the broad outlines Brill provided, the proposal is a reassuring one for the direction of the FTC, which has been criticized in the past for not taking a harder stance on companies when it comes to consumer privacy.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/26/4467298/reclaim-your-name-ftc-commissioner-wants-companies-to-reveal-what

Police chief wants to use drones to spy on citizens

 

St. Louis - In Chief Sam Dotson’s vision of modern policing, a drone would circle Busch Stadium to watch for terrorists, or silently pursue a criminal who thought the chase was over when the officer in the car behind him turned off its red lights and siren.

And Dotson is working to make it happen.

“Criminals believe, and with some truth, that if they flee from police officers, officers will not pursue and they will ultimately elude capture,” Dotson wrote in a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration. It was a preliminary step toward seeking approval for unmanned - and unarmed - flight.

“If we are serious about crime reduction strategies, we must look to new technologies which help keep officers and the public safe and apprehend criminals,” he said in the March 25 correspondence.

Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce, whose assent is required, also wrote to the FAA to offer “enthusiastic support.” She declined to elaborate, saying through a spokeswoman: “The letter speaks for itself.”

Dotson said he would seek donations and grants to pay for the miniature airplanes, which run from $60,000 to $300,000 each — pricey, but still cheaper and safer than a helicopter.

Privacy advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union — already grappling with recent news that the FBI has been selectively using drones for surveillance over U.S. soil — are balking at word of Dotson’s contact with the FAA.

“This is a significant expansion of government surveillance,” complained Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of ACLU of Eastern Missouri. “Our laws have not kept up with our privacy rights. Our Fourth Amendment privacy rights aren’t safe from unreasonable search and seizure when you’re looking at drones.”

"This is a case where our technology has gotten far ahead of our laws and our ability to protect us from unwarranted government intrusion," said Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. 

Dotson said drones are not capable of anything that helicopters don’t already do — or that existing laws don’t already protect.

“This isn’t Big Brother, this is a decision to make everyone in the community safer,” he insisted.

 "To help keep officers safe, to help keep the community safe. For monitoring public space, things like the upcoming Fair St. Louis, baseball games for terrorist, suspicious activity," said Dotson.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-louis-police-chief-wants-drones-to-monitor-city-from/article_1f0a7488-855d-52cf-9590-03129ce48a06.html
http://www.ksdk.com/news/crime/article/385622/147/St-Louis-police-chief-wants-to-use-drones-to-fight-crime

U.S. congressional leaders chose to keep the NSA surveillance program a secret

Washington - Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Monday U.S. congressional leaders he briefed in 2004 on a surveillance program recently disclosed by leaker Edward Snowden supported it, and both Republicans and Democrats wanted to keep it secret.

Cheney said he was directly involved in setting up the program, run by the National Security Agency, or NSA, in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. He said it has had “phenomenal results” in preventing terrorist attacks.

Cheney did not specify which survelliance program he was referring to. Snowden, a former NSA contractor, is facing espionage charges stemming from his disclosure of U.S. surveillance programs that collect phone records and online data in the name of national security.

“There was a time when it was a very, very close hold. Unfortunately it’s become public,” said Cheney.

He was asked about Snowden’s disclosures at a forum at a Washington think tank on U.S.-Korean affairs. He said the leaks have already caused significant damage to U.S. national security as it had forced the government to declassify information to explain the surveillance program.

“If you tell the enemy how you are reading their mail, it’s going to lessen your capability to do that,” he said.

Cheney, who served as vice president in the George W. Bush administration, said that the way the program was set up, it required presidential approval for anyone outside the agency to be allowed to “read in” to it.

Cheney said he met and briefed congressional leaders — whom he did not identify — about three years after the program started and they were “unanimous” that it should continue.

“I said, ‘Do you think we ought to come back to the Congress in order to get more formal authorization?’ and they said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Everybody, Republican and Democrat, said, ‘Don’t come back up here, it will leak’,” Cheney said.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/06/24/cheney-congressional-leaders-wanted-to-keep-nsa-surveillance-a-secret/
http://www.wkbn.com/2013/06/24/cheney-lawmakers-favored-secrecy-on-surveillance/

NSA deletes surveillance 'fact' sheet:

Washington, D. C. - A day after coming under fire from congressional critics, the National Security Agency is trying to flush a controversial surveillance "fact sheet" down the memory hole.

That fact sheet was supposed to explain how the NSA interprets and uses section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the part of the law that underpins the agency's PRISM data collection program. But after Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Tom Udall (D-Colo.) asserted in a letter that the NSA's explanation contained a "significant" inaccuracy, the agency pulled the FISA fact sheet from its website on Tuesday, delivering users instead a server error.

In a letter to the senators, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said he "agree(d)" that the fact sheet "could have more precisely described the requirements for collection." He pointed them to the text of the law for further information on how the program works.

NSA spokeswoman Judith Emmel addressed the removal of the fact sheet in a statement. "Given the intense interest from the media, the public, and Congress, we believe the precision of the source document (the statute) is the best possible representation of applicable authorities," she said.

In other words, the NSA now says the public should simply rely on the text of the surveillance law to understand how the agency is using its powers. That suggestion is a far cry from the step Wyden and Udall had urged: publicly correcting the record.

Still, Udall spokesman Mike Saccone said withdrawing the fact sheet was "a step in the right direction" for the NSA. For years, Wyden and Udall have derided the NSA and the intelligence community generally for their reliance on "secret law" -- internal interpretations of written laws that twist those laws so far as to be unimaginable to even their authors.

The NSA's interpretation of FISA is so highly classified that Wyden and Udall did not feel at liberty in their letter to explain what statement on the fact sheet, still available elsewhere online, was inaccurate.
 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/25/nsa-fisa-fact-sheet_n_3499026.html

With more surveillance technology becoming available, can we stop Big Brother from spying on us?

Article first appeared in privacysos.org 

Think surveillance and communications privacy law is bad now? Just wait until the military’s “bioreactive taggants” and “smart dust” migrate back to the United States, and end up in the arsenals of the FBI, DHS, DEA, ATF, LAPD, and NYPD.

That day will come, and we couldn’t be lesser prepared.

In 2013, more than a decade after the dot com boom and bust, we still don’t have across the board standards requiring law enforcement to get warrants before reading our emails. Protections for our metadata -- records about our communications, such as who we talk to, where and when -- are effectively nonexistent, from the NSA all the way down to your local prosecutor’s office.

And it’s about to get a whole lot worse, fast. We are about to enter yet another brave new world of technological change, and we are not even close to ready. 

In Jeremy Scahill’s latest book, ‘Dirty Wars,’ he describes some innovative and frankly frightening technologies currently being fine tuned by the US Military Special Operations Command for use in the field (a.k.a. the entire world): 

Known as Continuous Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating,” or CTTL, it involved using advanced biometrics and chemistry to develop a long-range facial recognition program as well as a “Human Thermal Fingerprint” that could be isolated for any individual. They also used a chemical “bioreactive taggant” to mark people by discreetly swabbing a part of their body. The taggant would emit a signal that [the Joint Special Operations Command] JSOC could remotely monitor, enabling it to track people 24/7/365. It was like a modern version of the old spook’s tracking devices made famous in films, where spies would weave them into an enemy’s clothes or place them on the bottom of a vehicle. The taggant allowed JSOC to mark prisoners and then release them to see if they would lead the task force to a potential terror or insurgent cell. Putting them on nonprisoners was a greater challenge, but it happened. The use of such technology, along with the accelerated pace of the killings and captures, would inspire President Bush’s declaration that “JSOC is awesome.”

Click here to see the entire Special Operations Command powerpoint presentation on CTTL.

But that's only the beginning.

There’s also ‘smart dust’ -- tiny computers that pack processors, power and wireless communications into technology the size of a grain of sand. Good luck finding one of those in your car, placed just so by an FBI agent grateful you left your window open a crack.

It should go without saying that tools like these, developed by the US military at a cost of untold hundreds of millions of dollars, will migrate back to the United States for use by domestic law enforcement and intelligence. 

But the FBI has plans of its own, and isn’t waiting for the military’s futuristic spook tools to trickle down to its agents. The bureau is already working on a host of high-tech surveillance and tracking mechanisms for implementation here in the states, with a heavy emphasis on those that use a range of biometric identifiers, from scent to gait and everything in between. My personal favorite is the video sensor technology that may someday identify our heart beats from drones. (Yes, our heart beats are unique, and therefore biometrics.)

Gizmodo reports on another DOJ funded research project:

Tracer Detection Technology Corp. marks targets with a paraffin wax crayon, filled with a perfluorocarbon, a thermally-stable compound used in everything from refrigerators to cosmetics. The perfluorocarbon’s vapor can then be tracked with sensors, such as a gas chromatograph. The smell lingers for hours. Think locking yourself in a room with the windows closed or removing the tag will help? Too bad, you still reek. According to a research report submitted to the Justice Department (.pdf), the perfluorocarbon tracers can “permeate closed doors and windows, containers and luggage,” and even give you away for a while after a tagged item is removed.

If you thought working metadata into Fourth Amendment protected space was hard, imagine trying to get a warrant requirement for electromagnetic tracking, or any of these other almost alien technologies. 

We have a lot of work to do if we want to avoid living in a dystopian nightmare powered by miniature, bug-sized drones and invisible tracking ink. The nanotech revolution will require a privacy evolution alongside it, but our related laws are still stuck in the big hair era. Putting our heads in the sand while the military and the FBI develop yet more invasive and powerful surveillance and tracking tools is a good way to ensure that the power inequities and extreme state secrecy we are experiencing today only metastasize. Tinkering around the edges is not going to cut it -- and waiting around for the Supreme Court to bestow us with rights we deserve is not advisable.

So how do we reform the law? Europe’s privacy model is an interesting place to start. Ultimately, we need overarching, broad privacy reform that takes into account these technological advancements and the ones coming down the pike -- and something with teeth. 

But in order to achieve any kind of systemic reform, we need to first overcome an ideological hurdle. Enough with the technological utopianism. Technology can help us do really cool stuff, but it can also hurt us -- badly. Before we can reshape our privacy law for the 21st century and beyond, we have to come to terms with this basic fact. 

http://privacysos.org/node/1092