Photo Credit: WNDAmid revelations that the National Security Agency and others have monitored Americans’ cell phone calls, a state court has affirmed the privacy rights of cell phone users.
The decision this week by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the case of Thomas W. Earls applies only to residents of the state, but it is being watched as a possible bellwether in the surging dispute over the government’s surveillance powers.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center said the decision is the first to “establish a constitutional right in location data since the U.S. Supreme Court decided United States v. Jones, a GPS tracking case in which several justices expressed concern about the collection of location data.”
In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled police could not attach a tracking device to a suspect’s vehicle and follow him without probable cause and a warrant.
In the Earls case, the court upheld that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cell phone location data.”
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-20 04:07:322016-04-11 11:18:51Court Says Tracking by Cell Phone Signal Off Limits
Photo Credit: GettyHacker posts email addresses, passwords of House and Senate staffers online
By Alex Pappas. A hacktivist associated with Anonymous claims to have posted online thousands of email addresses and passwords for Capitol Hill staffers.
According to a Twitter account that posted a link to the hacked information, House and Senate staffers were targeted in protest of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying program.
“Dear #Congress: We are paying very, very close attention to how you handle #NSA #FISA & #PRISM Don’t.. F**k.. Up….,” Twitter user OpLastResort wrote before posting a link to the email addresses and passwords.
PRISM is the government’s secret data mining program recently revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act which deals with electronic surveillance. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AFPWhite House stays silent on renewal of NSA data collection order
By Spencer Ackerman. The Obama administration is refusing to say whether it will seek to renew a court order that permits the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records on millions of Verizon customers when it expires at the end of this week.
Officials declined to discuss what action they intend to take about the order at the center of the current surveillance scandal, which formally expires at 5pm Friday.
The looming expiration of the order, issued by the secretive Fisa court, provides an early test of Barack Obama’s claim to welcome debate over “how to strike this balance” between liberty and security. Beyond the question of the phone records collection, the court order authorizing it is a state secret.
On Thursday, the administration would not answer a question first posed by the Guardian six days ago about its intentions to continue, modify or discontinue the Verizon bulk-collection order. The White House referred queries to the Justice Department. “We have no announcement at this time,” said Justice Department spokesman Brian Fallon. The NSA and office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to questions.
A spokesman for the Fisa court, Sheldon Snook, said the court “respectfully declines to comment”. Read more from this story HERE.
NSA chief says leak damage ‘irresponsible and irreversible’
By Catherine Herridge. National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander said Thursday the damage from recently leaked information is “irresponsible and irreversible” because it has given terrorist groups the intelligence community’s “playbook.”
He also described the leaks as “crazy.”
Addressing the Aspen Security Forum, Alexander said the NSA was secretive about its programs out of necessity because the “operatives are among us.”
He added that, based on damage assessments, there is “concrete proof” terrorists now have changed their tactics. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: gaelxCongress: Anonymous Hack Got Only Old Emails and Passwords
By Ginger Gibson. The hacking group Anonymous published the login information for a constituent contact system used by thousands of congressional staffers, posting addresses and passwords on an online message board, according to a memo sent to Hill staffers.
Anonymous presented the information — when it on Thursday posted more than 2,100 email addresses and passwords, as login data for official congressional email accounts. But in a memo to staff from the Office of the Chief Administrator of the House, officials said the information was actually old login data for iConstituent, which is an online system used to contact voters.
“While this incident did not compromise the House email system, out of an abundance of caution, iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter account holders will be required to change their House network login,” said the memo, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The passwords, some of which belonged to individuals who no longer work for Congress, were expired, according to the memo.
“Earlier today, hackers disclosed expired login information (email addresses and passwords) of numerous iConstituent Gateway eNewsletter accounts outside of the House network,” the memo stated. “These passwords have expired and can no longer be used to access the external iConstituent service.” Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-19 04:47:222016-04-11 11:18:55Anonymous Hacked into Official Congressional Email, Threatens to Compromise Accounts if Congress Doesn’t Act to End Surveillance State
Photo Credit: Daily CallerBy Katie McHugh. Former president Jimmy Carter condemned the effect U.S. intelligence programs had on U.S. moral authority in the wake of NSA revelations brought to light by leaker Edward Snowden, Der Spiegel reports.
“America has no functioning democracy,” Carter said at a meeting of The Atlantic Bridge in Atlanta, Georgia on Tuesday.
Carter also claimed there was currently no reason for him to be “optimistic” about Egypt’s internal conflicts and mused whether the standards The Carter Center applies to foreign elections could be fulfilled by U.S. elections, which he believes are plagued by confusing campaign rules and a lack of restrictions on free speech in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The former president continued that democratic developments — fueled by sites such as Facebook and Twitter — might be damaged by the NSA revelations, essentially strangling emerging democratic revolutions in the cradle by casting doubt on the social media juggernauts’ independent credibility. Read more from this story HERE.
By Hadas Gold. The jury made the “right decision” in the George Zimmerman murder trial, former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday.
“I think the jury made the right decision based on the evidence presented, because the prosecution inadvertently set the standard so high that the jury had to be convinced that it was a deliberate act by Zimmerman that he was not at all defending himself, and so forth,” Carter told Atlanta news channel WXIA. “It’s not a moral question, it’s a legal question and the American law requires that the jury listens to the evidence presented.”
Carter said he agrees with President Barack Obama and accepts the jury’s decision. “So President Obama said he thought – it was — he regretted the decision, but he had to accept the results of the jury decision,” Carter said. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:09:432016-04-11 11:18:58Jimmy Carter: ‘America No Longer Has a Functioning Democracy’ (+video)
Photo Credit: APNSA warned to rein in surveillance as agency reveals even greater scope
By Spencer Ackerman. The National Security Agency revealed to an angry congressional panel on Wednesday that its analysis of phone records and online behavior goes exponentially beyond what it had previously disclosed.
John C Inglis, the deputy director of the surveillance agency, told a member of the House judiciary committee that NSA analysts can perform “a second or third hop query” through its collections of telephone data and internet records in order to find connections to terrorist organizations.
“Hops” refers to a technical term indicating connections between people. A three-hop query means that the NSA can look at data not only from a suspected terrorist, but from everyone that suspect communicated with, and then from everyone those people communicated with, and then from everyone all of those people communicated with.
Inglis did not elaborate, nor did the members of the House panel – many of whom expressed concern and even anger at the NSA – explore the legal and privacy implications of the breadth of “three-hop” analysis.
But Inglis and other intelligence and law enforcement officials testifying before the committee said that the NSA’s ability to query the data follows rules set by the secret Fisa court, although about two dozen NSA officials determine for themselves when those criteria are satisified. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: APObama loses support for renewal of surveillance; NSA phone program will expire next year
By Stephen Dinan. The lawmaker who wrote the USA Patriot Act said Wednesday that, as it stands, the House will never renew the provisions that the Obama administration uses to collect Americans’ phone records, meaning the government’s surveillance program will be cut off some time next year.
Both Democrats and Republicans told top administration officials that they reject President Obama’s claim that the law allows the intelligence community to collect the phone numbers, time, date and duration of calls made by Americans, and they said Mr. Obama needs to change the way he is running the program if he wants to keep it intact.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who was chief author of the Patriot Act in 2001, said Congress specifically tried to limit the law’s uses when it renewed the provisions under Section 215 of the act that allow the government to collect data from businesses without obtaining a warrant.
In that renewal Congress added in the word “relevant” to try to limit what the government was pursuing. But Mr. Sensenbrenner said the intelligence community has expanded, not limited, its data-gathering efforts after Congress tried to reel them in.
“Section 215 expires at the end of 2015 and unless you realize you’ve got a problem, that is not going to be renewed. There are not the votes in the House to renew Section 215,” he said. “It’s got to be changed and you have to change how you operate Section 215. Otherwise, in a year or a year and a half, you’re not going to have it anymore.” Read more from this story HERE.
By Brian Hughes. Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted on Wednesday that an already frosty relationship between his government and the United States would not be damaged if Russia granted asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.
“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are much more important than the squabbles around the activities of the security services,” Putin told reporters in eastern Siberia.
“We warned Mr. Snowden that any of his activities that cause damage to U.S.-Russian relations are unacceptable to us.”
Snowden, the former government contractor who disclosed details about U.S. phone and Internet surveillance programs, applied for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. A lawyer representing Snowden told Russia’s Interfax news agency on Wednesday that the ex-CIA official could leave Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in the next few days.
The Obama administration has repeatedly warned the Putin regime not to give Snowden refuge since he faces a trio of espionage charges back on U.S. soil. If his application were approved, Snowden could stay in Russia for up to a year. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:06:112016-04-11 11:18:58NSA’s Surveillance Goes “Exponentially Beyond what it had Previously Disclosed”
Photo Credit: CNNBy Michael Martinez. Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the information for years with little privacy protection, the American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday.
The information potentially allows authorities to track the movements of everyone who drives a car.
The ACLU documented the police surveillance after reviewing 26,000 pages of material gathered through public records requests to almost 600 local and state police departments in 38 states and the District of Columbia.
Police are gathering the vehicle information with surveillance technology called automatic license plate readers, and it’s being stored — sometimes indefinitely — with few or no privacy protections, the ACLU said.
“The documents paint a startling picture of a technology deployed with too few rules that is becoming a tool for mass routine location tracking and surveillance,” the ACLU said in a written statement.
Photo Credit: APHow the government is keeping track of EVERYWHERE you’re driving thanks to license plates and police scanners
By James Nye. Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong.
Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of every vehicle with a license plate, according to a study published Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Affixed to police cars, bridges or buildings, the scanners capture images of passing or parked vehicles and note their location, uploading that information into police databases. Departments keep the records for weeks or years, sometimes indefinitely.
As the technology becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and federal grants focus on aiding local terrorist detection, even small police agencies are able to deploy more sophisticated surveillance systems.
While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge’s approval is needed to track a car with GPS, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver’s location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Robert Landau/CorbisAlarming number of databases across US are storing details of Americans’ locations – not just government agencies
By Ed Pilkington. Millions of Americans are having their movements tracked through automated scanning of their car license plates, with the records held often indefinitely in vast government and private databases.
A new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found an alarming proliferation of databases across the US storing details of Americans’ locations. The technology is not confined to government agencies – private companies are also getting in on the act, with one firm National Vehicle Location Service holding more than 800m records of scanned license plates.
“License plate readers are the most pervasive method of location tracking that nobody has heard of,” said Catherine Crump, ACLU lawyer and lead author of the report. “They collect data on millions of Americans, the overwhelming number of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Crump said that the creeping growth of license plate scanners echoed the debate over the National Security Agency. “It raises the same question as the NSA controversy: do we want to live in a world where the government makes a record of everything we do – because that’s what’s being created by the growth of databases linked to license plate readers.”
ACLU based their research on the results of freedom of information requests to 300 police departments and other agencies nationwide that generated 26,000 pages of documents. The mountain of training materials, internal memos and policy statements retrieved by the group has opened a door on a previously little understood world. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Reuters ACLU: We’re Increasingly Living in a Dragnet Society
“There’s just a fundamental question of whether we’re going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine,” said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the ACLU, which wants police departments to immediately delete records of cars not linked to a crime…
The ACLU study, based on 26,000 pages of responses from 293 police departments and state agencies across the country, also found that license plate scanners produced a small fraction of “hits,” or alerts to police that a suspicious vehicle has been found.
In Maryland, for example, the state reported reading about 29 million plates between January and May of last year. Of that amount, about 60,000 — or roughly 1 in every 500 license plates — were suspicious. The No. 1 crime? A suspended or revoked registration, or a violation of the state’s emissions inspection program accounted for 97 percent of all alerts. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 03:05:242016-04-11 11:18:58Moving Closer to Police State: Agencies Tracking Innocent Drivers by License Plate Scanners Everywhere (+video)
Photo Credit: Jw WuOur grandparents’ generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany’s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.
Germans who were born east of the Berlin Wall were careful to give the organs of the Staatssicherheit a wide berth. But it was only after the fall of the Wall in 1989, when the citizens who had brought down their government stormed the secret police’s headquarters and realised the full horror of the web woven by the Stasi: neighbours spying on neighbours; husbands spying on wives. Joachim Gauck, our current president, was the first head of the Stasi Archives, the government agency that, 20 years on, continues to painstakingly piece together a full record of East Germany’s surveillance of its citizens.
Yes, we Germans have better cause than many of our allies to abhor the secret state. It’s why we don’t like closed-circuit television cameras. It’s also why our constitutional court enshrined a fundamental right of data privacy, and declared it illegal for Germany to implement an EU directive on preventive data storage.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-18 02:47:272016-04-11 11:19:02Germany: We Have Good Cause to Abhor the Surveillance State
Photo Credit: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPAPrivacy groups led by EFF sue to stop NSA and FBI electronic surveillance
By Associated Press. Rights activists, church leaders and drug and gun rights advocates found common ground and filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the federal government to halt a vast National Security Agency electronic surveillance program.
The lawsuit was filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represents the unusually broad coalition of plaintiffs, and seeks an injunction against the NSA, Justice Department, FBI and directors of the agencies.
Filed in federal court in San Francisco, it challenges what the plaintiffs describe as an “illegal and unconstitutional program of dragnet electronic surveillance.”
The suit came after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about NSA surveillance programs last month, revealing a broad US intelligence program to monitor Internet and telephone activity to ferret out terror plots.
Snowden, who has been charged with spying and theft of government property, has spent the past three weeks in the Moscow airport transit zone. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AFPSnowden to stay in Moscow airport for now: lawyer
By Maria Antonova. US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden will stay in the transit zone of the Moscow airport where he has been holed up for three weeks while Russian authorities process his asylum request, a lawyer helping him said Tuesday.
Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer who helped Snowden file an application for asylum in Russia earlier Tuesday, told AFP the fugitive former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor was happy with his treatment at the airport.
“While all procedural questions are being decided, he will remain in the transit zone of the airport,” Kucherena told AFP in central Moscow when asked if Snowden would remain at Sheremetyevo airport until the asylum request was approved.
He confirmed that the asylum procedure could take up to three months, although a shorter period is theoretically possible.
Kucherena said he met Snowden at the airport on Tuesday to file the asylum request, with a translator the only other person present. Read more from this story HERE.
Sen. Graham suggests US boycott Winter Olympics in Russia over Snowden
By Jeremy Herb, Julian Pecquet and Justin Sink. President Obama should consider boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia if the Cold War-era foe gives asylum to Edward Snowden, Sen. Lindsey Graham told The Hill on Tuesday.
“I would. I would just send the Russians the most unequivocal signal I could send them,” Graham (R-S.C.) said when asked about the possibility of a boycott.
“It might help, because what they’re doing is outrageous,” he said. “We certainly haven’t reset our relationship with Russia in a positive way. At the end of the day, if they grant this guy asylum it’s a breach of the rule of law as we know it and is a slap in the face to the United States.”
nowden, who has been charged with espionage for leaking details about two National Security Agency programs that collected information about U.S. telephone calls and international Internet usage, officially filed a request for temporary asylum in Russia on Tuesday. He pledged to abide by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands that he stop leaking information that could damage the United States.
Graham is the first senator to suggest a link between the Olympics and Snowden, who has been holed up in a Moscow airport for weeks. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-17 02:54:422016-04-11 11:19:07Broad Coalition of Gun, Drug, Privacy Groups Sue NSA, FBI Over Surveillance while Snowden Files for Asylum
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Tuesday afternoon he will put a hold on James Comey’s nomination as FBI director until the agency answers questions about the use of drones for domestic surveillance.
“I’m placing a hold on it, not because I have the intention of ultimately defeating him, but I’m going to slow it down enough to see if the administration will respond to my questions,” Paul said, speaking to Eric Bolling on Fox News.
Earlier this month, Paul said he would block Comey’s nomination until the FBI answered questions he sent to them over the government’s use of drones to monitor Americans on U.S. soil. He said Tuesday afternoon he has yet to receive a response and will move forward with the formal hold.
Paul also alluded to holding another marathon filibuster, a potential replay of his 13-hour talking filibuster in March, though he didn’t confirm if he planned to do so.
“[A hold] is like the beginning of a filibuster. Should they bring [the hold] to the floor, and I choose to speak like I did on the drone subject earlier, then as long as I can speak I can stop the debate,” Paul said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-17 02:49:492016-04-11 11:19:07Rand Paul Putting Hold on FBI Director Until FBI Answers Questions About Domestic Drones (+video)
Photo Credit: ReutersSnowden documents could be ‘worst nightmare’ for U.S. – journalist
By Reuters. Fugitive former U.S. spy contractor Edward Snowden controls dangerous information that could become the United States’ “worst nightmare” if revealed, a journalist familiar with the data said in a newspaper interview.
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the documents Snowden leaked, said in a newspaper interview published on Saturday that the U.S. government should be careful in its pursuit of the former computer analyst.
“Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had,” Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinian daily La Nacion.
“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.”
Snowden, who is sought by Washington on espionage charges after revealing details of secret surveillance programs, has been stranded at a Moscow airport since June 23 and is now seeking refuge in Russia until he can secure safe passage to Latin America, where several counties have offered him asylum. Read more from this story HERE.
The (spy) game’s afoot in hunt for NSA leaker Snowden
By Rowan Scarborough. One twist in the fugitive hunt for asylum-seeking Edward Snowden is that the man who has revealed the most secrets about the National Security Agency in history now is undoubtedly one of its chief targets.
A subplot in this international thriller is a cat-and-mouse game: Will the NSA penetrate his communications or will the master leaker outwit all the agency’s high-tech gadgets — since he, as well as anyone, knows how they work?
“NSA is probably doing what it does best, which is sweeping the ‘electronicshere’ for communications, voice and data, indicating his next chess move,” former CIA officer Bart Bechtel says. “They may also be looking at known and suspected collaborators.”
A second analyst, a former intelligence operative, says that the same methods Mr. Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor, disclosed in documents leaks to the press are now being turned on him. Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AFPMorales says US hacked Bolivian leaders’ emails
By AFP. Bolivia’s leftist president Evo Morales on Saturday accused US intelligence of hacking into the email accounts of top Bolivian officials, saying he had shut his own account down.
Latin American leaders have lashed out at Washington over recent revelations of vast surveillance programs, some of which allegedly targeted regional allies and adversaries alike.
Bolivia has joined Venezuela and Nicaragua in offering asylum to Edward Snowden, the former IT contractor for the US National Security Agency who publicized details of the programs and is now on the run from espionage charges.
Morales said that he learned about the alleged US email snooping at the Mercosur regional summit in Montevideo earlier this week.
“Those US intelligence agents have accessed the emails of our most senior authorities in Bolivia, Morales said in a speech. Read more from this story HERE.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-07-14 01:57:222016-04-11 11:19:18Journalist: US Better Not Do Anything to Snowden or Undisclosed Info Will Be Fed’s “Worst Nightmare”
