What's happened to 'probable cause' in America?

                                          Image source: Jon McNaughton 'The Forgotten Man'


Article first appeared in lewrockwell.com:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court has been issuing general warrants to the National Security Agency (NSA) since 1978, but it was not until last June that we learned that these general warrants have been executed upon the telephone calls, text messages, emails, bank records, utility bills and credit card bills of all persons in America since 2009.

The constitutional requirement of probable cause is not political fancy; rather, it saves us from tyranny. Probable cause is a quantum of evidence that is sufficient to lead a neutral judge to conclude that the person about whom the evidence has been presented is more likely than not to possess further evidence of criminal behavior, or has more likely than not engaged in criminal behavior that is worthy of the government’s use of its investigatory tools such that the government may lawfully and morally invade that person’s natural right to privacy.

Robert S. Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which runs the NSA, engaged in a curious colloquy with members of the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Litt complained that presenting probable cause about individuals to judges and then seeking search warrants from those judges to engage in surveillance of each of those individuals is too difficult.

This is a remarkable admission from the chief lawyer for the nation’s spies. He and the 60,000 NSA employees and vendors who have been spying on us have taken oaths to uphold the Constitution. There are no loopholes in their oaths. Each person’s oath is to the entire Constitution — whether compliance is easy or difficult. Yet the “too difficult” admission has far-reaching implications.

This must mean that the NSA itself acknowledges that it is seeking and executing general warrants because the warrants the Constitution requires are too difficult to obtain. Stated differently, the NSA knows it is violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, because that amendment expressly forbids general warrants.

In my career as a lawyer, judge, law professor, author and television commentator, I have heard many excuses for violating the Constitution. I reject all of them when they come from one who has sworn to uphold the Constitution, yet I understand the intellectually honest excuses — like exigent circumstances — when they are based on duty. The NSA’s excuses are not intellectually honest, and they are not based on duty. They are based on laziness.

But there was more than met the eye in Litt’s testimony last week. Two days after Litt admitted to the use of general warrants, and while the president was in Europe, the White House leaked to the press its plans to curtail the massive NSA spying. Those plans, which would change only the appearance of what the NSA does but not its substance, have three parts.

The first change relieves the NSA of the need for general warrants to require delivery of massive amounts of data about innocent Americans as to which the NSA has no probable cause, because the second change requires the computer servers and telecoms to preserve their records — instead of the NSA preserving them — and make them “immediately” available to the NSA when it comes calling. And the third is the requirement of a warrant from a FISA judge before the NSA may access that stored data. But because that warrant is not based on probable cause but rather on NSA whim, it is a foregone conclusion that the general warrants for examination, as opposed to delivery, will be granted. The FISA court has granted well in excess of 99 % of the general warrants the NSA has sought.

Litt must have known what the White House planned to leak when he made his “too difficult” complaint, as it fits nicely with this new scheme. Yet the scheme itself, because it lacks the requirement of probable cause that the Constitution requires, is equally as unconstitutional and morally repugnant as what the NSA has been doing for five years. Moreover, the NSA will not exactly go hat in hand to the computer servers and telecoms once it wishes to hear telephone calls or read emails or credit card bills. Its agents will simply press a few buttons on their computers when they wish, and the data they seek will be made available to them.

These so-called changes should be rejected by Congress, which should overhaul the NSA instead. Hasn’t Congress seen enough? The NSA and the CIA spy on the courts, Congress, the military, the police and everyone in America. This keeps none of us safer. But it does lessen our freedom when those in whose hands we repose the Constitution for safekeeping look the other way. What other freedoms are slipping because Congress, too, thinks upholding the Constitution is too difficult?
http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/03/andrew-p-napolitano/whatever-happened-to-probable-cause/

If anyone has any doubt we're in a battle to keep what little rights we have left, here's more proof:

 

Illinois Supreme Court ruled police can't pull over a man looking for a woman:

 

A police officer who pulls over a car he believes is driven by a wanted woman must end the traffic stop once he realizes the driver is actually a man. The Illinois Supreme Court came to this conclusion last week in deciding 5 to 2 that Derrick A. Cummings had his constitutional rights violated when he was stopped and arrested on January 27, 2011.

Cummings had been driving a van that belonged to Pearlene Chattic through the city of Sterling. Although Cummings violated no traffic laws, Officer Shane Bland pulled behind and decided to run the van's license plate.

"It appeared that the registration on the vehicle had expired," Bland testified.

The registration, in fact, was perfectly valid, but Chattic, the vehicle's owner, had an outstanding warrant for her arrest. Officer Bland tried looking in the van's window while driving, but he could not tell whether a woman or man was behind the wheel. He hit his emergency lights and conducted a stop. As he approached the car on foot, he immediately realized his mistake. He proceeded with the stop anyway, asking Cummings for his license and registration.

Cummings did not have a license, and he was arrested. Prosecutors insisted that asking for a license during every traffic stop is "standard operating procedure" and that briefly continuing the traffic stop to ask Cummings to show identification was reasonable. The high court disagreed, saying just because it is legitimate to ask for ID in most cases does not mean it is acceptable to do so in all cases.

"To pass constitutional muster, a request for identification must be tethered to, and justified by, the reason for the stop," Justice Mary Jane Theis wrote for the court majority. "Here, Officer Bland had reasonable suspicion that the van's registration was expired, but that suspicion disappeared when he conducted a computer check. The check, however, revealed the outstanding arrest warrant for Chattic, the registered owner of the van, whom Bland knew was a woman. Officer Bland could not determine whether the driver of the van was a woman, so he had reasonable suspicion that the driver was subject to seizure. That suspicion, like the first, disappeared when he saw that the defendant was not a woman and, therefore, could not be Chattic. Requesting the defendant's license impermissibly prolonged the stop because it was unrelated to the reason for the stop."

http://thenewspaper.com/news/43/4370.asp

U.S. State dept. is trolling (Spying) Twitter for possible terrorists:

The US State Department's social media arms have been much busier over the past few months trolling terrorist sympathizers and radicalization groups online via Twitter and Facebook. "Trolling" probably isn't the most precise term for the injection of countering views into previously uninterrupted feeds, but it does sort of sum up the State Dept's end game, which is less set on converting would-be terrorists than simply preventing these accounts from running uninterrupted and unchallenged feeds.

Back in December of last year, Alberto Fernandez, who heads the State Dept.'s "Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications," put it his way.

Gauging the effort’s effectiveness will be challenging, but even interrupting Al Qaeda’s unimpeded English-language efforts would amount to a modest success, officials said.

“They were setting the narrative and had a free shot at the audience for radicalizing people,” Mr. Fernandez said in an interview. “Nobody was calling them” on it.

The State Dept. uses analysts familiar with the many terrorist factions currently operating around the world, including some fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Somali and Punjabi, to provide countering arguments to assertions made by Twitter accounts and Facebook pages loosely tied to terrorist organizations.

The recent activities of State Dept.-sponsored Twitter accounts like Think Again Turn Away (whose avatar is the State Dept. insignia) have drawn some press, but the genesis of these efforts dates back much further than that.

This kind of thing isn't unusual for the State Department. The Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications was established in 2010 to coordinate messaging to target violent extremism on the internet, especially that of Al Qaeda and affiliates. CSCC (an interagency center that is housed at State) initially focused on non-English online forums where the State Department saw jihadists attempting to recruit and raise money (message boards, comments on Al Jazeera Talk, etc.) Late last year, CSCC made a move into English-language websites, with the small team of analysts and microbloggers expanding their fight on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and elsewhere, under the banner of the US State Department.

What the State Dept. is doing now leaves no doubt that this is a government-controlled operation. No effort is being made to hide the department's involvement, which makes the counterpoints almost too easily dismissed and/or attacked to be considered truly effective. (A go-to counterargument to the State Dept.'s accusations of terrorist-related killings of women and children has been to point to the US's drone program, something that has killed a number of women and children as well.)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140322/10393226658/state-dept-now-trolling-twitter-terrorists.shtml

Los Angeles police are spying on every car, truck & motorcycle without a warrant:

CA - Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that “All [license plate] data is investigatory.” The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter.

This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future. If the court accepts their arguments, the agencies would then be able to hide all this data from the public.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/03/los-angeles-cops-argue-all-cars-la-are-under-investigation
http://storify.com/AJAMStream/lapd-all-cars-are-under-investigation/embed?header=none&border=false

The militarization of U.S. police forces

                              Source: http://blog.arrestrecords.com/infographic-the-militarization-of-our-police-forces/

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Four disturbing examples of militarization of America's small town police forces:

For nearly half a century, the general trend within America’s police precincts has been toward greater militarization, a transformation initiated by the culture wars of the 1960s and facilitated by the war on drugs, fear of inner-city crime, and anxieties over the threat of terrorism.

 

Fear of drugs, crime and terrorism have been used to justify the expansion of SWAT programs and the acquisition of military grade weaponry and vehicles in America’s smaller towns. Citing previous work, investigative journalist Radley Balko writes that the number of SWAT teams in municipalities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 “increased by more than 300 percent between 1984 and 1995,” and that 75% of all of these towns had their own SWAT teams by the year 2000. Small precincts acquired wartime weaponry and a warrior culture was engendered among community police. 

DHS's 'Law Enforcement Support Program Agency' website discusses in greater detail, how they're militarizing police across the country.

 

The ACLU is currently working on a major investigation to illuminate the extent of militarization across America. Here are four shocking examples of militarized police in America's small towns.

 

Keene, NH - A town with a murder count of two since 2009, Keene’s city officials surreptitiously accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Defense in 2012 to purchase a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response Counter Attack Truck, or BearCat.

 

The grant was offered through the 1033 program, which was signed into law in 1997 and created a pipeline for the DOD to pass surplus military gear to local police precincts. It may seem preposterous that a sleepy New England town would need to commandeer a tank intended to withstand IED attacks, but in the post-9/11 era, nearly any degree of militarization can be justified with the threat of terrorism.

 

“We don't know what the terrorists are thinking,” warned Jim Massery, sales manager for the creator of the Bearcat, Lencor Armored Vehicles, to investigative journalist Radley Balko, before questioning whether residents who took issue with the BearCat “just don’t think police officers’ lives are worth saving.”  (We know what you're thinking Jim Massery, it's all about profits at the expense of our RIGHTS!)

A series of town meetings led by city councilor Terry Clark revealed a sizable number of city residents opposed the local SWAT’s acquisition of a BearCat. “This is an agreement between the government and arms dealers, essentially,” noted Clark after a representative for Lencor revealed that the transfers of military equipment allow them to tap into the DOD’s $34 billion terrorism budget.

Despite resistance, the Keene police department put the BearCat to use, starting in the fall of 2012, and it was used 21 times as of summer 2013: 19 times for training exercises, once in response to a barricaded person and once in response to a person threatening suicide.

 

Surrounding cities have signed pacts with Keene to borrow the BearCat when needed, and support throughout the state for similar vehicles remains strong: A state bill to halt the purchase of military equipment by New Hampshire police departments was shot down in late March, making it likely that more departments will seek BearCats from the DOD, in addition to the 11 that already have them.

 

Paragould, AK - The Paragould police chief attempted to turn a rising crime rate into a carte blanche for sending fully outfitted SWAT teams into communities to ask every single person in public for identification. The population of the town is 27,000. 

 

"To ask you for your ID, I have to have a reason,” said police chief Todd Stovall at a town hall meeting in December 2012. "Well, I've got statistical reasons that say I've got a lot of crime right now, which gives me probable cause to ask what you're doing out.”

 

The mayor stood by his police chief. "They may not be doing anything but walking their dog, but they're going to have to prove it,” he added to Stovall’s remarks.

 

The policy of de-facto martial law captured national attention and inspired an immediate response from the Arkansas ACLU. Stovall  issued a statement justifying police-state tactics as features of “proactive police philosophy dedicated to managing problems before they become unmanageable,” and gave limited lip service to the Constitution and rule of law in general.

The public outrage forced city officials to back away from the Orwellian initiative.

 

Ogden, UT - Ogden, a medium-sized Utah town flanked by the Wasatch mountain range and the Great Salt Lake, was for a long time little more than a junction point for railroads crisscrossing the country. These days, it’s ground zero for the debate over the use of SWAT in Utah, which has pitted fervent proponents of aggressive paramilitarism against those who want alternatives to the hyper-violent police confrontations that have roiled the state in recent years.

 

The flashpoint for the debate came in January 2011, when members of Ogden SWAT battered down the front door of Matthew David Stewart’s home. When the army veteran awoke to the sound of shouting voices and shuffling boots, he grabbed his bathrobe and Beretta and began exchanging fire with the officers, killing one and wounding seven while sustaining multiple gunshot wounds himself.

This disastrous account of law enforcement excess was bookended by death, starting with the raid fatality and ending with Stewart’s own suicide in his prison cell shortly after a judge threw out his self-defense claim. However, the questions raised about the use of military tactics have endured, imbued with urgency by a steady drip of fatal statewide SWAT encounters in the last two years.

 

Although some in the state advocate more diplomatic means of apprehending drug and other types of offenders, the zeal for Ogden SWAT remains stronger than ever as the institution burrows itself deep into the community’s cultural DNA and swells into nearby jurisdictions. Three separate bills in the Utah legislature would limit the ability of SWAT to serve “no-knock” raids (the deadly kind in which officers barge in the door while bellowing “Search warrant!”) and increase the standard of transparency that SWAT-equipped precincts must meet.

 

Columbia, SC - Richland County, where Columbia is located, caught the attention of some activists in 2008 when its sheriff purchased an armored personnel carrier from the DOD. Police in the area continued buying military-grade vehicles unchallenged. Most recently, the Columbia Police Department purchased a mine-resistant war truck from the DOD in the fall of 2013.

 

Unlike Keene’s BearCat, Columbia’s “U.N. blue” has a turret that can be armed with a 50-caliber machine gun. It’s also built to withstand any mine blasts it may trigger in the streets of the "Capital of Southern Hospitality.”

The Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle (MRAP) is valued at $658,000, but was handed off virtually free to the Columbia Police Department under the 1033 program. The Nerve found that the only costs incurred by the Columbia police for obtaining the vehicle in September 2013 came to about $2,800: a $2,000 annual fee for participating in the 1033 program, and $800 to actually transport the vehicle from a military base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

 

Under the conditions of DHS's 1033 program, the DOD technically retains ownership of the military equipment it loans out, and recipients must use the equipment for at least one year before it is returned. However, the national ACLU confirmed with AlterNet that they’ve never heard of a department returning equipment to the DOD.

 

Unsurprisingly, drugs and terrorism were used to justify the presence of the vehicle. The Columbia Police Department’s application for the MRAP explained that the armored vehicle was needed to “protect our officers and the public during high risk counter drug and counter terrorism operations within the city of Columbia and the state of South Carolina.”

 

Victoria Middleton, executive director of the ACLU-South Carolina, noted that local news outlets failed to commit significant time to covering militarization in Columbia. “There has been a huge distraction,” she wrote to AlterNet in an email, “[with the] search for a new police chief, turf issues with Richland County Sheriff department, [and] city administration problems.”

 

Documents reviewed by AlterNet reveal that the ACLU-South Carolina sent a FOIA request to the Richland County Sheriff’s office in March 2013, demanding the disclosure of “all 1033 programs inventories created and maintained” by county police departments. The sheriff’s office responded with a warning that fulfilling the ACLU’s request “may result in a charge of several thousand dollars,” which the ACLU immediately countered with another letter.  

http://www.alternet.org/4-shocking-examples-police-militarization-americas-small-towns

 

Police use numerous methods to access your locked smartphone

The single most valuable new police tool is your smartphone.

Rolf Norton, a homicide detective in Seattle, says when he's talking to a suspect, he keeps his eye open for the person's smartphone.

"I'm thinking there's probably a wealth of information that just got tucked into your pocket," Norton says. "Something that we'd like to get our hands on."

Your calls, your emails, your calendar, your photos — not to mention the GPS data embedded in those photos — could make a whole case, in one convenient package.

That wealth of information is also why more people now keep their phones locked with a PIN. Once he's seized a phone, Norton says, he often has to return to the owner to ask for help.

"Maybe you've established a rapport and you're getting along with this person," Norton says. "We'll reach out to that person and say, 'Hey, your phone's locked. We'd like to inspect it. We'll probably be getting a warrant. Would you give us your password?' "

Under the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination, you might have the right to refuse. But Jeffrey Fisher, a Stanford Law School professor, says the courts haven't settled that issue, so withholding your phone's password could prove risky.

"You can have anything from contempt of court to obstruction of justice," Fisher says. "All kinds of other problems."

Plus, there's a practical consideration: The police may be able to get around your password, anyway.

Companies such as Guidance Software and Cellebrite sell products to law enforcement that "image" smartphones. The products can pull data off in bulk for use as evidence. BrickHouse Security in New York sells products like this for iPhone and Android. CEO Todd Morris says the handset manufacturers don't support this, so it's a constant effort to keep the forensic software up to date.

"It's a collaboration. There's no way any one company can keep up with Apple or Google," Morris says. "You use programmers from all around the world and they share what they find."

These phone-copying systems rely heavily on what hackers call "exploits," or vulnerabilities in the phones' operating systems that can be used to get around the password or encryption.

Phones locked with a four-digit PIN are usually cracked with what's called a "brute force" attack: The software throws number combinations at the phone until one works, in a way that you couldn't do manually. That can take less than an hour, according to David Dunn.

According to a blog post by Nick Berry, a former rocket scientist and current president of Data Genetics, there are 10,000 possible combinations for a 4-digit PIN using the numbers 0-9. And out of that myriad of possibilities, nearly 11% of all PINs being used are "1234".

The newest iPhones seem to be impervious to cracking and even when police send them to Apple (with a warrant), the extent of the encryption means the company can't always get everything.

"If you use the alphanumeric passcode, even Apple can't get in," says Will Strafach, a hacker who works with companies that make forensic tools for police. He's referring to the longer passwords that are optional on iPhones but also more cumbersome to use.

It's also a slow process. When the newest iPhones are sent to Apple, police may have to wait months for whatever data are recovered, Strafach says.

With Google's Android phones, things are looser. Encryption is optional and the basic screen passcode (or "pattern lock") operates more as a deterrent for the nosy. You can choose longer passwords, but any of them can be circumvented with the user's Google username and password.

With a warrant, the police should be able to get those login credentials from Google.

Sophisticated users are locking things down more effectively. Take the example of Ashkan Soltani, a researcher and computer security consultant.

He uses the basic Android "pattern lock" to open the screen while his phone is in use, but he has modified his phone so that when he shuts it off, it requires a longer pass phrase to boot up again.
"If I'm traveling through customs or being pulled over, I would power off my phone," Soltani says.

"And that PIN would be much longer to access on first boot."

The companies behind the phones have an interest in making them harder to crack, especially when they're marketing to corporate customers. It also reflects the tech world's growing distrust of government.

"At this point, I think it's very difficult to trust any policy-based solution," Moxie Marlinspike says.

That's the pseudonym for a hacker well-known in Silicon Valley for his work on third-party encryption systems for smartphones. He says he cares about legal privacy protections. He says he doesn't want to rely on them.

The oft-abused Third Party Doctrine, it would seem that a warrantless search of a smartphone would be a Fourth Amendment violation. There's just too much information stored on the average smartphone to be compared to anything found on a person during a normal search. And, as a New York law student recently asked Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, isn't searching someone's computer roughly equivalent to their "effects," Fourth Amendment-wise? For all intents and purposes, a smartphone is a portable computer, loaded with a person's "effects" and creating a time/date/location "event" every time it pings a cell tower.

Considering how much info can be gathered from a single smartphone, It's little wonder law enforcement wants to peek at arrestees' smartphones, but the courts need to do a bit of catching up to today's cellphone realities. And there needs to be more attention paid to the fact that law enforcement agencies are partnering with private companies to crack phones, apparently without asking for a warrant first.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/03/25/291925559/your-smartphone-is-a-crucial-police-tool-if-they-can-crack-it
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20140326/08390126689/police-utilizing-private-companies-exploits-to-access-data-suspects-smartphones.shtml

Don't let personal data escape your smartphone:

Two EPFL researchers have developed an application that automatically secures shared information on a mobile phone. The Android app should be available in late summer 2014.

An EPFL release reports that two EPFL researchers have developed an intelligent application which, once past the beginning machine learning stage, decides for the user what information to transmit or not, and at what level of detail.
http://actu.epfl.ch/news/don-t-let-personal-data-escape-your-smartphone/

The twenty most common PIN password combinations:

                                                Source: http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html

 

Police departments hiding their use of fake cell tower devices used to spy on everyone

At least 25 police departments own a Stingray, a suitcase-size device that costs as much as $400,000 and acts as a fake cell tower. The system, typically installed in a vehicle so it can be moved into any neighborhood, tricks all nearby phones into connecting to it and feeding data to police. In some states, the devices are available to any local police department via state surveillance units. The federal government funds most of the purchases, via anti-terror grants.

Thirty-six more police agencies refused to say whether they've used either tactic. Most denied public records requests, arguing that criminals or terrorists could use the information to thwart important crime-fighting and surveillance techniques. Click here to read more.

Article first appeared in the aclu.org/blog:

For some time now, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been on a quest to better understand the use and legality of “stingrays." These devices, which are also known as international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) catchers, or fake cell towers, can be used to track phones or, in some cases, intercept calls and text messages.

The City of Sunrise, Florida, tried to take a page from the CIA’s anti-transparency playbook last week when it responded to an ACLU public records request about its use of powerful cell phone location tracking gear by refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any relevant documents. And the state police are trying to get in on the act as well. We have written about the federal government’s abuse of this tactic—called a “Glomar” response—before, but local law enforcement’s adoption of the ploy reaches a new level of absurdity. In this case, the response is not only a violation of Florida law, but is also fatally undermined by records the Sunrise Police Department has already posted online.

A few weeks ago, the ACLU sent public records requests to 36 state and local Florida law enforcement agencies seeking information about their use of “cell site simulator” surveillance devices known as “Stingrays.” We were partly motivated by the discovery that the Tallahassee Police Department had argued in court to permanently seal court records discussing its Stingray use, apparently in deference to a nondisclosure agreement with the device’s manufacturer. That’s pretty offensive, but at least the new Tallahassee police chief has promised to investigate his department’s practices. The City of Sunrise’s position might be even more galling.

The ACLU sent a reply letter to Sunrise, explaining that it’s bad enough that the Glomar response has no basis under Florida law. Government agencies are required to respond to a public records request by searching for and releasing relevant documents, or explaining why individual documents fall within one of the narrow statutory exemptions to disclosure. Refusing to even confirm whether records exist violates the letter and spirit of the Florida Public Records Act.

But even more embarrassing for the city is that the Sunrise Police Department has already publicly acknowledged that it owns at least one Stingray. A document posted on the city’s public website reveals that in March 2013 the Police Department investigated purchasing a $65,000 upgrade to its existing Stingray device, as well as other related technology and services. (See here for an explanation of the abbreviations found on this form). An agency cannot acknowledge a fact in one context, but then refuse to confirm or deny the same information in response to a public records request. Sunrise’s response might be laughable if it weren’t such a bald violation of government transparency laws.

Sunrise is not the only entity attempting to conceal information about Stingray use. In response to an ACLU request, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (the state police) released heavily redacted records revealing that the agency has spent more than $3 million on Stingrays, that it has signed agreements with a number of local and regional law enforcement agencies allowing them to use the FDLE’s devices, and that it has asked local agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements.

As the ACLU points out in a Tuesday blog post, the city of Sunrise has already published an invoice from Harris on its own website dated March 13, 2013, showing that the city paid over $65,000 for a stingray. That document clearly states, in all-caps on each page, that “disclosure of this document and the information it contains are strictly prohibited by Federal Law.”

Sunrise’s attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment explaining this discrepancy.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Harris profited an average of over $533 million in each of the last five years. That same annual report states that the firm’s primary customer is the US government, but Harris is doing an increasing amount of business with governments overseas, accounting for 24 percent of the company’s revenue in 2012.

More recently, there have also been reports that Harris requires its law enforcement clients to sign similar nondisclosure agreements that forbid those agencies from publicly revealing whether they use the stingray. (This came up in a sexual battery and petty theft case that reached the appellate stage in Florida in November 2013.)

Earlier this month, the East Bay Express, a local alt-weekly newspaper based in Oakland, California reported that it had received documents showing that the Oakland Police Department had signed a similar agreement and was forbidden from responding to public records act requests concerning the use of stingrays.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-liberty/local-police-florida-acting-theyre-cia-theyre-not
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/cities-reluctant-to-reveal-whether-theyre-using-fake-cell-tower-devices/

Police spying on Muslims ‘makes us less safe’

When Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was dropping New York City’s challenge to a law that makes it easier to sue police for racial and religious profiling, it was the second piece of good news for minorities in his tenure so far.

Earlier, de Blasio abandoned the city’s appeal in the stop-and-frisk litigation, effectively conceding that the policies of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) targeted minority men.

It’s now time for the mayor to turn his attention to the NYPD’s mistreatment of another minority community: Muslims who have borne the brunt of the post 9/11 police surveillance.

Details of the surveillance program were revealed in 2011 in a Pulitzer Prize-winning series by the Associated Press, which documented how the NYPD spied on Muslims in restaurants, grocery stores, laundromats, and even in their mosques.

The police didn’t infiltrate these communities because they suspected individuals of criminal or terrorist activity. They targeted entire communities in order to find out whether they were engaging in criminal or terrorist activity.

A federal judge in New Jersey recently held that the NYPD Muslim surveillance program was just fine. Of course the police were going to spy on Muslim communities, the judge said, that’s where the terrorists could be found.

This rationale was rejected in the stop-and-frisk judgment that de Blasio let stand. It’s also the type of program that’s forbidden by the city’s racial profiling law, which the mayor has supported. Indeed, late in his campaign de Blasio became increasingly worried about the NYPD’s focus on Muslims, saying that surveillance should be based on “specific leads.”

Requiring a lead to investigate is the opposite of spying on people because of their religion or race.
It’s also more effective. If there is one thing we are beginning to understand about counterterrorism, it’s that dragnet surveillance doesn’t work. (Beginning to understand? Didn't we learn anything from the Gestapo, KGB and sadly in our own country the NSA & DHS.)

The head of the NYPD’s Muslim mapping programs admitted under oath that the operations yielded no leads. At the federal level, President Barack Obama’s hand-picked review board expressed doubts that the National Security Agency’s massive data collection yielded much actionable intelligence.
Such operations may even make us less safe.

Muslims know firsthand the devastating impact that police spying has on communities. In New York, Muslim leaders report that fewer people go to mosques, and those that do are suspicious of strangers fearing they are informants.

Most Americans may not care whether Muslims are free to worship without worrying about government inference. But religious freedom – for all of us – is one of the principal promises of the Constitution. Notably, empirical research shows that mosque attendance correlates with greater participation in civic life and integration. And those are certainly outcomes that we wish to promote for all communities.
http://www.thecrimereport.org/viewpoints/2014-03-blanket-spying-on-muslims-makes-us-less-safe

TSA/DHS wasted $1 billion on useless ‘behavior detection officers”

Like the rest of us, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.

There’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The TSA has fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.

In scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.

The TSA program was reviewed last year by the federal government’s Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.

 

In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time, less than chance. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average, 54 percent, only slightly better than chance. Their accuracy was even lower in experiments when they couldn’t hear what was being said, and had to make a judgment based solely on watching the person’s body language.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/25/science/in-airport-screening-body-language-is-faulted-as-behavior-sleuth.html?hpw&rref=science&_r=1

DHS wasted $1.3 billion on new St. Elizabeth’s headquarters will need an additional $3.2 billion:

When the Department of Homeland Security submitted its master plan for its headquarters on the west campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital in 2006, officials projected they would move into the new facility by 2015.

But today, construction is a decade behind schedule and at least $1 billion over budget. And Homeland Security, which as of September had received $1.3 billion, will need at least an additional $3.2 billion to complete the renovation of the 159-year-old mental hospital by 2026, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

“Frankly, I just fail to see how this is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars — to spend this kind of money for a headquarters — and I’m just really disappointed in the way it’s played out,” Rep. Richard Hudson, North Carolina Republican, said during a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing last month.

It’s “a boondoggle of epic proportions,” an exasperated Rep. Richard Hudson told DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson at a recent congressional hearing, “if you’re in the middle of a huge mess, you stop digging.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/23/dhs-under-fire-with-st-elizabeths-plan-over-budget/?page=all#pagebreak

FirstNet America's national 'First Responder' surveillance & spying network

Article first appeared in privacysos.org:

FirstNet is a public/private cooperative surveillance and information exchange enterprise—a vast network to share Americans' personal information—conceived by and written into law with the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. By law, FirstNet's purpose is to "create a nationwide, wireless, interoperable, public safety broadband network," a euphemism that means, "increase the ease with which government agencies share private and public information about people." By consolidating the placement of points of reference and interoperability for each potential node of state, local, commercial, and other communications networks, FirstNet is a blueprint for making surveillance data-sharing national, lightning-fast, and independent from the insecure, heavily monitored public internet.

The  $7 billion network is an effort to centralize the myriad platforms the government uses to collect and access Americans' information. This means that sharing of biometrics, license plate tracking data, video surveillance, and intelligence will get substantially easier for law enforcement, and that our grasp on privacy will become even more tenuous. That said, not everything about FirstNet is bad. The network will probably do things like make sure fire trucks do not lose contact with fire stations as they travel from one cell tower to another. But there are lots of nefarious and troubling ways the network will be used, too, like to enable law enforcement to mine personal information from multiple jurisdictions at once, with hardly any external oversight.

Officials as high up as the Department of Justice are going out of their way to hide critical information about FirstNet development from public scrutiny. The managers of the program have staged a series of PR sessions around the country for groups of local officials, first responders, and industry figures, but have done little to inform the people against whom the technology will be used. In a telling omission, a FirstNet slide describing its points of outreach fails to dignify with a bullet point "the public" —yet it makes sure to do so for vendors, applications developers, congress, and media, most of whom stand to benefit from and shape the future impact of the surveillance apparatus.

The body initially responsible for determining a minimum set of technical capabilities for FirstNet's operation—separate from its Board—was comprised of telecom executives, officers of multiple defense companies, and public officials, and its recommended philosophy for the ostensibly public project is chilling: "FirstNet must fully embrace the technologies, standards and best practices used by commercial service providers." Even if we operate under the assumption that the program's public safety purpose would be limited to things like enabling the remote prioritization of medical care at the scenes of public emergencies, there’s great danger that, as this influential Public Intelligence report on the program notes, the significant corporate influence over its development has perverted any legitimate purpose the program might have had.

The FirstNet Board features high-profile members of the American surveillance establishment, including former Secretary of Homeland Security (and current embattled University of California President) Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Assistant NYPD Chief Chuck Dowd. Private industry is also well represented on the Board, a disheartening prospect given what we know about telecom's shaky commitment to privacy.

Overall, emphasis in FirstNet appears to be on breaking down information sharing barriers among law enforcement agencies and private corporations. An early set of guidelines for the program anticipates, for example, that, the networks will service secondary users—corporate and non-local clients—and should be arranged so that, "devices outside of their normal jurisdiction to connect to a local packet data network and to the device's home packet data network to carry out incident objectives." This means that in cases of unspecified emergency, FirstNet clients will be able to skirt normal blocks to info-sharing and pluck data from others' networks.

By integrating solutions to resource-based obstacles for the increased use of invasive monitoring technologies like fingerprint readers and license plate scanning, FirstNet subverts privacy in favor of surveillance, with near endless possibilities for overreach. A recent article reporting successful negotiations between FirstNet and municipalities over the use of the 700MHz wireless spectrum, for example, notes FirstNet's enthusiasm about a partnership with a Denver-area 911 network due to its proximity to an airport and thus the prospect for manipulating wireless traffic there.

The public-private surveillance partnership FirstNet provides incentives to local agencies to upgrade and use mobile biometric and real time surveillance technologies. It also increases the number of persons who can access—and thus abuse—the personal information law enforcement agencies send across it. The carelessness that often characterizes United States government treatment of personal data—a recent report including descriptions of shocking flaws in DHS data hygiene  stands out—becomes a much higher stakes problem when departments nationwide are hooked into the same base of data.

We need to know more about how FirstNet is being developed and about what kinds of corporations will be allowed to tap into the private network. We need to know if under FirstNet, information held by a county or police department is fair game for others hooked into the program. The government is building a top-tier, secure internet for itself, through which it can communicate and quickly transmit surveillance data about us. We should be arguing for fewer police departments with their hands on our data, not more.
http://privacysos.org/node/1360

NY to install audio, video recorders in trains under the guise of safety:

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced its plan to install several thousand audio and video recorders on its commuter trains Wednesday, reportedly in response to federal safety recommendations.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, several derailments last year have prompted the need for vast surveillance on a majority of the city’s trains.

“We will be systematically implementing recommendations put forward by the NTSB and other regulators to ensure the best practices are adhered to throughout the MTA family,” MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast said.

Transportation officials claim the surveillance technology will be focused on conductors and their staff to ensure proper safety guidelines are followed.

“Safety must come first at Metro-North,” Metro-North President Joseph Giulietti said. “Safety was not the top priority. It must be and it will be.”

Officials say the technology will also be used to control undesirable behavior while giving detailed conversations and video to accident investigators following any derailment or incident.

Along with surveillance capabilities, “positive train control technology” will be installed as well, giving a computer program the ability to override a conductor’s decisions.

Although the vast majority of cameras will be placed around passengers, no mention was made of how long their conversations would be stored.

DHS is responsible for our ever expanding spy state.

In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security began funding an effort in San Francisco to install real-time cameras on more than 350 buses.

In 2012, city buses in Baltimore began recording the conversations of bus drivers and passengers in order to “investigate crimes.”

While surveillance technology remains at the forefront, more direct intrusions such as TSA style security checkpoints have been rolled out at train stations, bus terminals and semi-truck weigh stations.

Even E-ZPass is being used to track (spy) on motorists outside of toll booths, click here to read more.
http://www.storyleak.com/new-york-trains-install-audio-video-recorders/

Medical monitoring or “telemedicine” is being used to spy on you at home:

Ernestine Marshall can't even go to the bathroom without someone knowing.

"I didn't know how closely they were watching me until I received a phone call, and I was like, whoa! Ok!" she said.

The diabetic and MS patient's home is outfitted by insurer, Humana, with sensors that keep track of when she opens her medicine cabinet, her fridge, sleeps, walks, and uses the bathroom.

A break in routine is an early sign of trouble.

"If it becomes unusual, I will get a phone call," she said. "(They say), 'Ms. Marshall, are you alright? Do we need to call your sister?'"

The sensors are monitored by workers at a Humana building in Carillon in Pinellas County, but she also gets a monthly visit from a field agent. (A field agent? This is the Gestapo (NSA/DHS) on steroids, just imagine how much data they're collecting.)

The sensors allow her to live in her own apartment, instead of at an assisted living facility.

"It makes me feel wonderful, to know I'm being monitored, especially living alone," Marshall said.

A lot of people don’t care one bit that they’re under surveillance in their homes 24/7. It’s a beautiful thing. And then there are a whole lot of other people who wouldn’t opt for the surveillance themselves, but feel wonderful that people like Ernestine Marshall feel wonderful.

“Ms. Marshall, we notice you didn’t sit outside for an hour and half today, like you usually do. You didn’t go out at all. Is everything okay?”

“We notice you didn’t flush the toilet today. Are you all right?”

“We didn’t hear you cooking. Did you order in? We didn’t hear a knock on your door.”

 “Remote doctors” are being touted in conjunction with at-home spying on patients. People won’t need to make a trip to an office or clinic very often. An online doc will handle their case.

Medical insurers, including all the Obamacare carriers, will offer to monitor patients’ activity in their homes and inside their bodies. And when they leave the house, things will be wonderful then as well, because why bother spying on people where they live unless you can do it at the mall, too?

“We want to be able to oversee you all the time, so we can do everything to keep you healthy.”

“Thank you so much.”

As a side bonus, the US national health insurance plan requires a medical ID package for every patient in the system. This becomes a de facto national ID card.

“Please show me your medical ID…excuse me, what? It’s not in your wallet? It’s not under your skin? You aren’t in the health system? Officer needs assistance. We have an outlier. I repeat, we have an outlier.”

Obviously, such a person must be questioned. He’s a hold-out. He could be dangerous. Does he have political literature in his house? Does he own a gun? Are his children up to date on their 55 vaccinations? Has he ever seen a psychiatrist? Does he possess any energy devices that place him off the grid? Does he grow his own food?

Eventually, the medical tracking sensors in a person’s home will be able to answer all those questions without the need for a police stop.

And it’ll be wonderful.

And finally, when the spy sensors show that a patient is having a very serious toxic reaction to a medical drug, that fact will automatically be shunted out of the system, and instead, a diagnosis of a new disease or disorder will be entered, to falsely account for the patient’s reaction—and a new (toxic) drug will be automatically delivered to the patient’s door, to treat the new non-existent disorder.
http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/25022711/2014/03/19/the-debate-over-medical-monitoring
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/03/welcome-to-telemedicine-spying-on-you.html#more

America’s police have become too militarized, are they cops or soldiers?

 

 

Peter Kraska, a professor at Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies, estimates that SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year. Some cities use them for routine patrols in high-crime areas. Baltimore and Dallas have used them to break up poker games. In 2010 New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a license”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organizing cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog. According to Mr Kraska, most SWAT deployments are not in response to violent, life-threatening crimes, but to serve drug-related warrants in private homes.

He estimates that 89% of police departments serving American cities with more than 50,000 people had SWAT teams in the late 1990s—almost double the level in the mid-1980s. By 2007 more than 80% of police departments in cities with between 25,000 and 50,000 people had them, up from 20% in the mid-1980s (there are around 18,000 state and local police agencies in America, compared with fewer than 100 in Britain).

The number of SWAT deployments soared even as violent crime fell. And although in recent years crime rates have risen in smaller American cities, Mr Kraska writes that the rise in small-town SWAT teams was driven not by need, but by fear of being left behind. Fred Leland, a police lieutenant in the small town of Walpole, Massachusetts, says that police departments in towns like his often invest in military-style kit because they “want to keep up” with larger forces.

The courts have smiled on SWAT raids. They often rely on “no-knock” warrants, which authorize police to force their way into a home without announcing themselves. This was once considered constitutionally dubious. But the Supreme Court has ruled that police may enter a house without knocking if they have “a reasonable suspicion” that announcing their presence would be dangerous or allow the suspect to destroy evidence (for example, by flushing drugs down the toilet).

Often these no-knock raids take place at night, accompanied by “flash-bang” grenades designed temporarily to blind, deafen and confuse their targets. They can go horribly wrong: Mr Balko has found more than 50 examples of innocent people who have died as a result of botched SWAT raids. Officers can get jumpy and shoot unnecessarily, or accidentally. In 2011 Eurie Stamps, the stepfather of a suspected drug-dealer but himself suspected of no crimes, was killed while lying face-down on the floor when a SWAT-team officer reportedly tripped, causing his gun to discharge.

Householders, on hearing the door being smashed down, sometimes reach for their own guns. In 2006 Kathryn Johnston, a 92-year-old woman in Atlanta, mistook the police for robbers and fired a shot from an old pistol. Police shot her five times, killing her. After the shooting they planted marijuana in her home. It later emerged that they had falsified the information used to obtain their no-knock warrant.

Federal cash—first to wage war on drugs, then on terror—has paid for much of the heavy weaponry used by SWAT teams. Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion in grants to state and local police. Also, the Pentagon offers surplus military kit to police departments. According to Mr Balko, by 2005 it had provided such gear to more than 17,000 law-enforcement agencies.

These programs provide useful defensive equipment, such as body armor and helmets. But it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota—a city that averages fewer than two murders a year—needs an armored personnel-carrier with a rotating turret. Keene, a small town in New Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly $286,000 on an armored personnel-carrier known as a BearCat. The local police chief said it would be used to patrol Keene’s “Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations”. A Reason-Rupe poll found that 58% of Americans think the use of drones, military weapons and armored vehicles by the police has gone “too far”.

Because of a legal quirk, SWAT raids can be profitable. Rules on civil asset-forfeiture allow the police to seize anything which they can plausibly claim was the proceeds of a crime. Crucially, the property-owner need not be convicted of that crime. If the police find drugs in his house, they can take his cash and possibly the house, too. He must sue to get them back.

Many police departments now depend on forfeiture for a fat chunk of their budgets. In 1986, its first year of operation, the federal Asset Forfeiture Fund held $93.7m. By 2012, that and the related Seized Asset Deposit Fund held nearly $6 billion.

Mr Balko contends that these forfeiture laws are “unfair on a very basic level”. They “disproportionately affect low-income people” and provide a perverse incentive for police to focus on drug-related crimes, which “come with a potential kickback to the police department”, rather than rape and murder investigations, which do not. They also provide an incentive to arrest suspected drug-dealers inside their houses, which can be seized, and to bust stash houses after most of their drugs have been sold, when police can seize the cash.

Kara Dansky of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is overseeing a study into police militarization, notices a more martial tone in recent years in the materials used to recruit and train new police officers. A recruiting video in Newport Beach, California, for instance, shows officers loading assault rifles, firing weapons, chasing suspects, putting people in headlocks and releasing snarling dogs.

This is no doubt sexier than showing them poring over paperwork or attending a neighborhood-watch meeting. But does it attract the right sort of recruit, or foster the right attitude among serving officers? Mr Balko cites the T-shirts that some off-duty cops wear as evidence of a culture that celebrates violence (“We get up early to beat the crowds”; “You huff and you puff and we’ll blow your door down”).

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the federal gov't. has been granting armored vehicles like BearCats to police departments since the World Trade Center attacks in 2001.

Additionally, about 200 vehicles designed to survive landmines and other explosions have also been distributed across the country, with another 750 requests pending.

While some communities have welcomed such acquisitions amid increased concern over mass shootings, others have balked at the idea. As RT reported last year, residents in Salinas, California, flooded the Facebook page of their local police department after it obtained a heavily armored vehicle capable of withstanding rifle fire and minefield explosions.

“That vehicle is made for war,” mentioned one commenter at the time. “Do not use my safety to justify that vehicle,” another one wrote. “The Salinas Police Department is just a bunch of cowards that want to use that vehicle as intimidation and to terrorize the citizens of this city.”

Speaking with the Journal, Eastern Kentucky University professor Peter Kraska said residents are even more worried about potential police militarization following the recent disclosures of the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance program. When citizens continue to hear about the government’s expanding presence, Kraska said armored vehicles represent “a pretty visual example of overreach.”

Still, even as cities across the country raise concern over the acquisitions, limiting them may prove to be much harder. Just recently, New Hampshire lawmaker J.R. Hoell introduced a bill that would ban local towns from receiving armored vehicles, something he believes is leading to the further militarization of the police force. Already, he said 11 communities possess armored vehicles.

"This seems over the top and unnecessary to have this level of armament," Rep. J.R. Hoell (R) told the Journal.

According to the Concord Monitor, however, Hoell’s bill failed in the state House of Representatives, where lawmakers voted to table the proposal.

Meanwhile, the BearCat’s manufacturer, Lenco Armored Vehicles, said that law enforcement agencies are interested in obtaining the vehicle because they don’t want to be unprepared for an unexpectedly dangerous situation, including natural disasters in which the vehicles could be helpful.

One federal lawmaker, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), on the other hand, has targeted the Department of Homeland Security’s grant program – meant to bolster terror attack prevention – as a potential culprit in the past, questioning the need to spend so much money on armored vehicles. He said $35 billion has been spent on “questionable items” since 2003, including BearCats.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers
http://rt.com/usa/towns-no-nanks-militarized.police-429/

Microsoft is spying on Hotmail users emails, claim they don't need a warrant

Microsoft Corp., which has skewered rival Google Inc. for going through customer emails to deliver ads, acknowledged Thursday it had searched emails in a blogger's Hotmail account to track down who was leaking company secrets. (without a warrant)

Microsoft says comeback with a warrant unless you're Microsoft, click here to read more.

John Frank, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, said in a statement Thursday that the software company "took extraordinary actions in this case." In the future, he said, Microsoft would consult an outside attorney who is a former judge to determine if a court order would have allowed such a search.

The case involves former employee Alex Kibkalo, a Russian native who worked for Microsoft as a software architect in Lebanon.

According to an FBI complaint alleging theft of trade secrets, Microsoft found Kibkalo in September 2012 after examining the Hotmail account of the blogger with whom Kibkalo allegedly shared proprietary Microsoft code. The complaint filed Monday in federal court in Seattle did not identify the blogger.

"After confirmation that the data was Microsoft's proprietary trade secret, on September 7, 2012, Microsoft's Office of Legal Compliance (OLC) approved content pulls of the blogger's Hotmail account," says the complaint by FBI agent Armando Ramirez.

Besides the email search, Microsoft also combed through instant messages the two exchanged that September. Microsoft also examined files in Kibkalo's cloud storage account, which until last month was called SkyDrive. Kibkalo is accused of using SkyDrive to share files with the blogger.

Frank said in his statement that no court order was needed to conduct the searches.

"Courts do not issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves," he said. "Even when we have probable cause, it's not feasible to ask a court to order us to search ourselves."

So it's not feasible to abide by our constitution? If Microsoft can willfully ignore our constitution without any repercussions, DO CITIZENS HAVE ANY RIGHTS OR IS IT ALL A CHARADE?

Hotmail's terms of service includes a section that says, "We may access or disclose information about you, including the content of your communications, in order to ... protect the rights or property of Microsoft or our customers."

Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft has taken a defiant stand against intrusions of customer privacy, in the wake of National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden's revelations of government snooping into online activities.

General counsel Brad Smith said in a blog post in December that Microsoft was "especially alarmed" at news reports of widespread government cyber-spying.

Microsoft also has a long-running negative ad campaign called "Scroogled," in which it slams Google for scanning "every word in every email" to sell ads, saying that "Google crosses the line."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/21/hotmail-spying_n_5003855.html

NSA employee brags about how “cool” & “awesome” it is spying on innocent people:

The latest news from The Intercept involves yet another Snowden leaked document, in which an NSA official uses what certainly looks like LiveJournal (complete with "current mood" lines at the end of posts) to informally and gleefully discuss targeting sys admins in order to get access to the networks they maintain. It's not a secret that the NSA does this. That became clear last fall, when earlier Snowden docs revealed how GCHQ and NSA had targeted a Belgacom sysadmin to get access to important Belgacom clients, including the EU Parliament. What's interesting here is the breezy dismissive discussion by this NSA guy -- and the fact that it looks like LiveJournal really gives you this parallel universe view. The tone and arrogance on display isn't particularly different from various private sector hackers. It's just that this guy has access to more powerful tools and the government behind him. Take, for example, this early post in which he brags about how totally cool it is that the NSA collects way more data than it needs:


That's incredible. He's flat out admitting (unlike all the public statements from NSA defenders) that it's great to have all that excess data way beyond what the NSA needs, because you can find all sorts of extra stuff. That's exactly the concern plenty of people have raised -- and which the NSA and its defenders have dismissed.

As The Intercept report notes, the guy admits that he targets sysadmins merely as a means to an end -- to reach the people who use various systems.

The document consists of several posts – one of them is titled “I hunt sys admins” – that were published in 2012 on an internal discussion board hosted on the agency’s classified servers. They were written by an NSA official involved in the agency’s effort to break into foreign network routers, the devices that connect computer networks and transport data across the Internet. By infiltrating the computers of system administrators who work for foreign phone and Internet companies, the NSA can gain access to the calls and emails that flow over their networks.

The NSA wants more than just passwords. The document includes a list of other data that can be harvested from computers belonging to sys admins, including network maps, customer lists, business correspondence and, the author jokes, “pictures of cats in funny poses with amusing captions.” The posts, boastful and casual in tone, contain hacker jargon  (pwn, skillz, zomg, internetz) and are punctuated with expressions of mischief. “Current mood: devious,” reads one, while another signs off, “Current mood: scheming.”

The rather cavalier attitude towards hacking into sysadmins' accounts should be sending off alarm bells across the country.

Click here to read the six pages & here to read more.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140320/17523326643/nsa-official-uses-livejournal-like-board-to-brag-about-hunting-sysadmins.shtml

(Update) Microsoft subsequently issued a statement regarding how they spy on Hotmail:

Deputy General Counsel & Vice President, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft

We believe that Outlook and Hotmail email are and should be private. Over the past 24 hours there has been coverage about a particular case, so we want to provide additional context and describe how we are strengthening our policies. 

In this case, we took extraordinary actions based on the specific circumstances. We received information that indicated an employee was providing stolen intellectual property, including code relating to our activation process, to a third party who, in turn, had a history of trafficking for profit in this type of material. In order to protect our customers and the security and integrity of our products, we conducted an investigation over many months with law enforcement agencies in multiple countries. This included the issuance of a court order for the search of a home relating to evidence of the criminal acts involved. The investigation repeatedly identified clear evidence that the third party involved intended to sell Microsoft IP and had done so in the past. 

Courts do not, however, issue orders authorizing someone to search themselves, since obviously no such order is needed. So even when we believe we have probable cause, there’s not an applicable court process for an investigation such as this one relating to the information stored on servers located on our own premises. 

As part of the investigation, we undertook a limited review of this third party’s Microsoft operated accounts. While Microsoft’s terms of service make clear our permission for this type of review, this happens only in the most exceptional circumstances. We applied a rigorous process before reviewing such content. In this case, there was a thorough review by a legal team separate from the investigating team and strong evidence of a criminal act that met a standard comparable to that required to obtain a legal order to search other sites. In fact, as noted above, such a court order was issued in other aspects of the investigation. 

While our actions were within our policies and applicable law in this previous case, we understand the concerns that people have. Therefore, we are announcing steps that will add to and continue to strengthen further our policies in any future situations involving our customers. Specifically:

• We will not conduct a search of customer email and other services unless the circumstances would justify a court order, if one were available. (BUT ONE WASN'T AVAILABLE & IT DIDN'T STOP YOU!)

• To ensure we comply with the standards applicable to obtaining a court order, we will rely in the first instance on a legal team separate from the internal investigating team to assess the evidence. We will move forward only if that team concludes there is evidence of a crime that would be sufficient to justify a court order, if one were applicable. As a new and additional step, we will then submit this evidence to an outside attorney who is a former federal judge. We will conduct such a search only if this former judge similarly concludes that there is evidence sufficient for a court order.

• Even when such a search takes place, it is important that it be confined to the matter under investigation and not search for other information. We therefore will continue to ensure that the search itself is conducted in a proper manner, with supervision by counsel for this purpose.

• Finally, we believe it is appropriate to ensure transparency of these types of searches, just as it is for searches that are conducted in response to governmental or court orders. We therefore will publish as part of our bi-annual transparency report the data on the number of these searches that have been conducted and the number of customer accounts that have been affected.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2014/03/20/strengthening-our-policies-for-investigations.aspx 

U.S. Navy database tracks civilians' parking tickets, car accidents & more

A parking ticket, traffic citation or involvement in a minor fender-bender are enough to get a person's name and other personal information logged into a massive, obscure federal database run by the U.S. military.

The Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or LinX, has already amassed 506.3 million law enforcement records ranging from criminal histories and arrest reports to field information cards filled out by cops on the beat even when no crime has occurred.

LinX is a national information-sharing hub for federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. It is run by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, raising concerns among some military law experts that putting such detailed data about ordinary citizens in the hands of military officials crosses the line that generally prohibits the armed forces from conducting civilian law enforcement operations.

Those fears are heightened by recent disclosures of the National Security Agency spying on Americans, and the CIA allegedly spying on Congress, they say.

Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale Law School, called LinX “domestic spying.”

“It gives me the willies,” said Fidell, a member of the Defense Department’s Legal Policy Board and a board member of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War.

Fidell reviewed the Navy's LinX website at the request of the Washington Examiner to assess the propriety of putting such a powerful database under the control of a military police entity.

“Clearly, it cannot be right that any part of the Navy is collecting traffic citation information,” Fidell said. “This sounds like something from a third-world country, where you have powerful military intelligence watching everybody.”

Background checks for gun sales and applications for concealed weapons permits are not included in the system, according to NCIS officials and representatives of major state and local agencies contacted by the Examiner.

NCIS officials could not say how much has been spent on LinX since it was created 2003. They provided figures since the 2008 fiscal year totaling $42.3 million. Older records are not available from NCIS.

Incomplete data from USAspending.gov shows at least $7.2 million more was spent between 2003 and 2008. The actual figure is probably much higher, since the spending listed on the disclosure site only totals $23 million since 2003.

Other law enforcement databases have limited information on things like criminal histories, said Kris Peterson, LinX division chief at NCIS.

The rules governing LinX are almost identical to those controlling other federal databases run by the FBI, he said.

While NCIS is a military police unit, its agents are civilian employees equivalent to those at the FBI and other federal agencies, said NCIS spokesman Ed Buice.

More detailed narratives and things like radio dispatch logs and pawn shop records don’t show up in those databases, but are available in LinX, he said.

Participating agencies must feed their information into the federal data warehouse and electronically update it daily in return for access. (Agencies such as the FBI/DHS)

Why LinX wound up in the NCIS, a military law enforcement agency, is not clear. Current NCIS officials could not explain the reasoning, other than to say it grew out of the department's need for access to law enforcement records relevant to criminal investigations.

Since the passage of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, it has been illegal for the military to engage in domestic law enforcement except in limited circumstances, such as quelling insurrections.

The limits in the law were largely undefined for almost a century. In 1973, the Army provided logistical support for FBI agents trying to break the standoff with American Indian Movement militants at Wounded Knee, S.D.

Several criminal defendants later argued the use of the military was illegal under Posse Comitatus.

Ensuing court decisions decreed that using the military for direct policing, such as making arrests or conducting searches, was illegal and should be left to civilian departments. Providing logistical support, equipment and information are allowed.

Since then, the law has been loosened to allow limited military participation in certain large-scale anti-drug investigations.

Aside from the legal issues is the problem of “mission creep,” said Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute and an Examiner columnist, who has written about the overreach of the militaryin civilian law enforcement.

What begins as a well-meaning and limited effort to assist local police can grow into a powerful threat to constitutional protections, Healy said.

A recent example of mission-creep gone awry is the Threat And Local Observation Notice, or TALON, program created by the Air Force at the same time LinX was launched.

Like LinX, TALON’s purpose was to create a network for information-sharing among federal, state and local police agencies that could be used to help protect military facilities.
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