US Government Has Spied On Your Phone Calls For Longer Than Anyone Knew

Every time we think we've seen it all, reached the limit, learned all the bad stuff there is to learn about US government agencies engaged in illicit surveillance of American citizens, we are disabused of that comfortable notion with a metaphorical slap upside the head. This time it's Peter van Buren at FDL who administers the slap, and we should be grateful to him for doing so:

DEA Secretly Tracked Billions of Americans’ Calls a Decade Before 9/11

While the Snowden-NSA revelations continue to shock Americans on a daily basis, and illustrate how intrusive the government is in our lives, and how casually it violates our Fourth Amendment right against unwarranted searches, it just got worse.

It turns out the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was spying on Americans, gathering metadata on our phone calls, almost a decade before 9/11, and right up to 2013. With help from the U.S. military.

...

In an exclusive report, USA Today learned the U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. The DEA spying only stopped, supposedly, in 2013, no longer needed due to the NSA.

For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the DEA amassed databases of virtually all telephone calls from the U.S. to as many as 116 countries “linked to drug trafficking.” ...

...

(or substitute GeeDubya Bush)

I seldom talk on the phone with my American friends in Europe; international phone calls (apart from emergencies) are not in my budget. But you may be comforted to know that on the rare occasions I've spoken to them in earlier years, the DEA was on the "wire" assuring that we were not talking about drugs. Not that we talked about drugs when we were face-to-face decades ago in the US... you may be comforted, but I sure as fuck am not.

The notion that any government action is justifiable if it leads to the capture and trial of someone engaged in a criminal act is one that our nation's founders were familiar with: when enough acts are criminalized that government must eliminate all citizens' privacy to enforce the laws, the essence of America's Bill of Rights (especially the Fourth Amendment) is destroyed. And that's where we are today. Privacy is gone, and has been gone for at least two decades.

In my youth I was convinced of the superiority of America's form of government. Why do I now think that that "superiority" is a pile of rank, steaming bullshit?

If there is a god, and if that god can damn, then god damn the people who did this and continue to do this... god damn them.

Cell Phone Spy-In-The-Sky Watches Americans For DoJ

Devlin Barrett at MarketWatch (and WSJ at greater length, if you have a subscription, which I don't):

The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of cellphones through fake communications towers deployed on airplanes, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

Planes are equipped with devices--some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. ... unit that produces them--which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.

...

... Justice Department agencies comply with federal law, including by seeking court approval, the official said.   [Q: What do they do if they don't get court approval? Yeah, right; that's what I think, too. - SB]

Just in case tapping your landline wasn't invasive enough of your privacy...

More Details About ‘Interceptor’ Cell Phone Towers

Not this one, I bet

... from weinenkel at Kos. Not that the details are useful to you personally... e.g., there's a cell phone that can identify and inform you if you're connected to such a tower; the phone costs you only $3500.

UPDATE: the "towers" may in reality be mobile devices. (H/T ellroon.)

Mysterious Cell Towers Infiltrate Phone Companies' Systems

Who built them? Who owns them? What might they do to your cell phone, and on whose behalf? Why are many of them near military bases? Peter van Buren at FDL: The Dissenter discusses the matter, in terms that are necessarily speculative given how little is known at present.

I can't help thinking of Sir Terry Pratchett's later Discworld novels and their clacks, a mechanical optical semaphore long-distance communication system that is the focus of many intrigues, plots and assassinations. If you're not reading Pratchett's Discworld novels, you're missing one of the most thoroughly enjoyable series out there. Call it s/f, fantasy or humor; you'd be correct with any of those categorizations. The first novel in which I remember the clacks appearing is Going Postal, and reading the later novels won't spoil the earlier ones if you choose to read about the clacks out of publication sequence. (Correction: Wikipedia says the first such novel is The Fifth Elephant.)

Obama Calls For End To NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection

... right away. Real soon now... just one more 90-day period, period. Right; yeah, sure.

A lot of proposed versions of this change are floating around, from almost nothing to an outright ban, so I presume the worst, least restrictive version will pass Congress, Obama will cave, and NSA... as they are wont... will ignore it and go back to secret bulk collection.

NYT has become so restrictive of viewing articles that I may have to stop using them as a primary source, but here's a tip: if you get the dialog box insisting that you register, try hitting Reload (in Firefox on a PC that's F5) and as soon as you see most of the text, frantically hit Esc five or six times in a row. I don't know how long or how often this works, but when it no longer does, NYT will have to do without the free advertising of many blogs posting free links to its stories. My patience is almost at an end.

Just to annoy a recalcitrant source, I'll quote one small thing that caught my attention:

...

In recent days, attention in Congress has shifted to legislation developed by leaders of the House Intelligence Committee. That bill, according to people familiar with a draft proposal, would have the court issue an overarching order authorizing the program, but allow the N.S.A. to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without prior judicial approval.

The Obama administration proposal, by contrast, would retain a judicial role in determining whether the standard of suspicion was met for a particular phone number before the N.S.A. could obtain associated records.

...

 NO. For the record, I am NOT down with the idea of anything but a court order authorizing a search. There's this thing I have about the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Nothing less will do.

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PS if you've run out of your daily character count at NYT, you can get at least the basic AP version of the story at TPM.