Clear Your Browser Cache — Be Charged With Obstructing Justice, Even If You Never Knew FBI Was Seeking A Warrant Regarding Your Computer

Juliana DeVries at The Nation provides details of one case and a sketch of the history of the use and abuse of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002). Yes, you could be prosecuted for clearing your browser history if you were under investigation by the FBI, even if you had no knowledge of the existence of the investigation, and yes, it has happened to one or more people in real life. In the case in question, the cab driver was charged with four counts of obstruction of justice, three for lying to the FBI (always a bad idea) regarding the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston Marathon bombing infamy, and one for removing some material from his personal computer that might have associated him with the Tsarnaevs.

It beggars belief that the simple act of clearing your browser cache, something many people do routinely, something about which your intent or state of mind in doing is almost impossible to prove absent independent evidence, could get you sent to jail for decades.

What an era we live in! I doubt our nation's founders would recognize what has become of federal law enforcement as being in any way related to, let alone descended from, the system they created.

Once again, I wonder whether Mr. Godwin's long-valuable wisdom still reflects reality... I keep having a deep-seated inclination to violate Godwin's Law regarding cases like these.

Big Brother Hoover Is Watching You

This should surprise approximately 0 people who are paying attention:

FBI Runs Secret Air Force Posing As Fake Companies
To Spy On U.S. Cities

By JACK GILLUM, EILEEN SULLIVAN and ERIC TUCKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned.

The planes' surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge's approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found.

...

During the past few weeks, the AP tracked planes from the FBI's fleet on more than 100 flights over at least 11 states plus the District of Columbia, most with Cessna 182T Skylane aircraft. These included parts of Houston, Phoenix, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis and Southern California.

...

Cessna 182T Skylane
Photo credit: Wikimedia
(aircraft ID photoshopped out)
(actually, GIMPed out!)

Houstonians: just remember: when you raise your middle finger at the FBI, be sure to point it high enough...

‘I Never Metadata I Didn't Spike’: FBI Finds Ways To Broaden Internet Dragnet

emptywheel has such details as are available in her post "How Internet Dragnettery Got Way More Permissive Under PRISM". "Metadata" is being significantly redefined for surveillance purposes, and now includes some content. Welcome to our shiny new engine of internet freedom, folks...

Welcome To Hoover's FBI Reborn

AP via TPM: "FBI: We Faked AP Story To Catch Bomb Suspect But Didn't Spoof Newspaper." How virtuous... your government lies to you only when absolutely necessary. Somewhere in Hell, the shade of John Edgar is surely grinning...

DoD's Minerva Program: Why Do Pentagon/University Research Programs Conflate Nonviolent Activists With ‘Supporters Of Political Violence’?

This damned good question is posed by The Guardian's Nafeez Ahmed (H/T bobswern at Kos), along with related questions about why nonviolent activists are pigeonholed as "social contagions" and other questions aiming at Pentagon preparedness to beat the shit out of you, me and other nonviolent protesters in the coming conflict they see as both inevitable and violent. To me, it appears that's exactly what the DoD is seeking to justify in the coming decades, and it's paying universities large chunks of your tax money to study and crank out such justifications. Mr. Ahmed posed a version of my subject question to Minerva staffers and received essentially no response:

I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.

Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.

If you think I am unduly personalizing these programs and their targets, please read carefully:

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

That's hitting pretty close to home, isn't it? (Bolds mine.)

This reminds me a great deal of another era in American history... you got it... that of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Oh, and COINTELPRO. Somewhere, Hoover's shade is grinning at us all.

DNI Clapper Issues Directive: All Intelligence Community Employees Forbidden To Speak To Press

Kevin Gosztola at FDL:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has issued a directive that prohibits all employees of the intelligence community from speaking to the press.

Signed on March 20, it establishes a policy on “contact with the media,” which leadership in intelligence agencies believe will “ensure a consistent approach for addressing media engagement across the intelligence community and mitigate risks of unauthorized disclosures of intelligence-related matters that may result from such contacts.”

It does not differentiate between classified and unclassified information. Any detail pertaining to an “intelligence-related” matter, if disclosed to a member of the media, is “covered” by the policy. However, the policy apparently does not “apply to contact with the media in connection with civil, criminal or administrative proceedings.”

...

Emphasis mine.

Note that all employees... not just agents handling classified material... are forbidden to speak to the press. Note also that the press is broadly defined, and most certainly includes internet publications such as blogs. And finally, note that all communication about any intelligence-related matter, even if it is unclassified, is censored by the policy. It appears to me as if this lessens or perhaps eliminates outright the whole concept of something from an intelligence agency that is unclassified, unless it is administrative or related to legal actions.

In these parlous times of consistent over-classification, often obviously for purposes of CYA rather than security, such a policy is obscene. The American public deserves better. This policy provides critics (and I am emphatically a critic) with a good argument for shutting down the three-letter agencies altogether... not that we would be so fortunate as to live to see that happen.

Marcy Wheeler Offers More Analysis Of The PCLOB Report

Here. emptywheel's assessment begins thus:

PCLOB tells us that the FISA Court approved a new automated query system (versions appear to have been in development for years, and it replaced the automated alert system from 2009) in late 2012 that permitted all the 3-degree contact chains off all RAS-approved identifiers to be dumped into the corporate store at once where they can be combined with data collected under other authorities (presumably including both EO 12333 and FAA) for further analysis.

[extended quote from the PCLOB report; please read at emptywheel's site at the link above]

...

On December 27, 2012, Jeff Merkley gave a speech in support of his amendment to the FISA Amendments Act that would push to make FISC decisions public. It referenced both the backdoor loophole (which John Bates extended to NSA and CIA in 2011, was implemented in 2012, and affirmed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in June 2012) and the language underlying the phone dragnet. Merkley suggested the government might use these secret interpretations to conduct wide open spying on Americans.

[another extended quote from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR).]

...

The point, in brief, is that we are being forced to live under a secret law, and that secret law may be in direct conflict with our constitutional rights in the powers it secretly grants to the intelligence agencies. Please note how Sen. Merkley is compelled to tiptoe around the whole issue by stating things as conditionals because he is probably prohibited from stating them outright in a public forum.

Sen. Jeff Merkley

This is not the America I grew up in. That America at least once rejected firmly the secret spying on American citizens undertaken by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI for purposes that were never freely debated by Congress and authorized by the President, purposes whose constitutionality was highly questionable at best. Nearly five decades later, here we are again: different intelligence agency; vastly advanced technology... but the same old bullshit subverting the same rights and liberties of the American people. What is it going to take to put a stop to the American surveillance state? Will I... will any of us... live to see the day it is shut down for good?

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: To the best of my knowledge, I am no relation to Judge John Deacon Bates, or indeed to any other George W. Bush appointee.

PCLOB Report: NSA Actions Not In Compliance With US Law, May Be Unconstitutional

I didn't know President Obama had created a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) as an alleged watchdog over the intrinsic conflicts between the surveillance state (once primarily the FBI; now mainly the NSA) and our constitutionally protected civil liberties (including, at least implicitly, privacy) embodied, among other places, in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, until today, when PCLOB released a report (.pdf, 238pp). I say "alleged" because the Board voted 3-2 to release today's report along what can only reasonably be called partisan lines: the two NO votes were by former members of the Bush 43 Justice Department, which never met a civil liberty it didn't dislike.

Fortunately for my tired eyes, Bryan of Why Now? has collected, in one post, links to a number of important sources analyzing the report, and I am going to send you to him forthwith. Oh, maybe I'll suggest an order to read the posts and articles Bryan links: BBC, Lambert, Charlie Pierce, and last of all, emptywheel. It is rare indeed that I place emptywheel's material last, but it is a detailed indexed annotation of the report, and unless you read the report itself, you will have more context for EW's annotations if you read the other posts and articles first.

---

CORRECTION: the PCLOB was created by statute, 42 U.S.C. § 2000ee(c)(1).

Long Before Manning And Snowden, COINTELPRO Burglars Now Coming Forward In Public

I never expected to live to see this, but statutes of limitations can be valuable things at times: the burglars who stole the COINTELPRO papers from the FBI in 1971... that's the year I graduated from college (and I'm now officially a senior citizen), the year of America's greatest domestic conflict over Vietnam, the year the NYT also published the Pentagon Papers acquired by Daniel Ellsberg... have come forward with a book about their story. Mark Mazzetti at NYT tells the outline of the story.

The story is accompanied by an NYT Retro Report summary video which is both fascinating and a good introduction if you know nothing about the burglary (and really, who among us knew any of the details). If you are unfamiliar with COINTELPRO, Wikipedia has a decent overview. And I presume if you want the whole story, there's the new book by former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger, who received the stolen documents and reported on them at the time: The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI. I am hoping the local library has a lot of copies.

I hardly need say that history repeats itself, and no, it isn't mumbling, in Snowden's revelation about NSA activities. I wish I understood the mentality, the paranoia, the utter indifference to privacy and fundamental civil liberties, that allows people like Hoover and Gen. Keith Alexander to do literally every damned thing in pursuit of every scrap of information about everyone they don't like, everyone whose politics they disagree with, hell, literally everyone. It never was national security that motivated Hoover, and it cannot possibly be national security motivating Alexander: they were and are nothing better than obsessive peeping Toms, scandals to the cause of freedom.

(H/T Jesselyn Radack at Kos.)

FBI Raids 2 Upscale Houston Homes, 1 Bryan, TX Apartment Re Purchase Of Chemicals For Making Gas

Ooooh, terra-ism in my very own neighborhood? Well, maybe. I'm trying to reserve judgment, but these incidents, one only perhaps 15-20 blocks from Our House ("next door" by Houston standards), are just too weird for words.

From the Houston Chronicle:

A federal law enforcement search of homes in upscale Houston neighborhoods Friday was prompted by the ordering of chemicals that could be used in the manufacture of some type of gas, according to an official.

Agents wearing Hazmat-type gear raided two homes in Houston and a third home in Bryan at about 9 a.m. [yesterday.]

The law enforcement source, who asked not to be identified, said the chemicals were not the type used in the manufacture of a traditional explosive.

The intent was "to make some sort of gas ... like tear gas or nerve gas," the source said.

The official said it was not known if any gas was ever produced or recovered.

...

The documents in the case were sealed, so there's not a lot of information. Apparently no one was arrested. All the news that the Comical saw fit to print seems to be from neighborhood gossip and the property tax rolls. The two Houston homes are owned by a local artist, and the apartment in Bryan is the residence of her son. I'm trying to figure out, presuming this is a put-up deal, just who benefits politically.

This has been your unofficial "be scared, be very scared" alert for the morning.

'Unleashed And Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority' — ACLU Report On The FBI And Its Domestic Surveillance

Here is the document itself (.pdf, 69pp). Keep your antacid handy as you read.

Related doc's:

• Kevin Gosztola's article: ACLU Releases Report on FBI’s Development Into Abusive Domestic Intelligence Enterprise
• Matthew Harwood: A Call For FBI Reform (ACLU Blog of Rights post)
• EFF: In Response to the NSA, We Need A New Church Committee and We Need It Now (not new but very much to the point)

(I may add other articles here as I find them. The report and these articles should keep us occupied for a few days.)

ASIDE: Please join one or more of the major civil liberties, constitutional rights or related org's... ACLU, EFF, CCR, etc. I'm an ACLU guy out of habit, more than three decades of habit, but we need all of them, and they need our help as they are inundated with actions by a government increasingly inclined to disregard the Constitution when it finds it inconvenient to comply. Please do your part!

When They Say The Three-Letter Agencies ‘Hoover’ Up Information On The 'Net, They Aren't Talking About A Vacuum Cleaner

Please read "FBI Pressuring Internet Providers To Allow Government Surveillance Software" ... The FBI is not even trying to hide its anti-Fourth-Amendment internet activities any more. If you have any serious secrets, don't transmit them, let alone store them, on the 'net, no matter how good your encryption may be.

Somewhere, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover is cackling...

Oh, and... welcome to the United States of Surveillance. Bryan of Why Now suggests a new national anthem...

FBI Director Mueller To Congress: Yes, We Do Use Drones Within The US

It seems to me I remember being told the FBI doesn't do this, wouldn't do this, etc.:

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI Director Robert Mueller told lawmakers that his agency currently uses drones for surveillance.

...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Mueller if the FBI uses drones on "U.S. soil."

"Yes," Mueller said. "Let me just put it in context. [In a] very, very minimal way. And very seldom."

Kind of reminds me of the Captain in Gilbert and Sullivan's HMS Pinafore on his seasickness, his propensity to curse, etc.:

Crew: What, never?
Captain: No, never!
Crew: What, never?
Captain: Well, hardly ever!

Look: our government is systematically lying to us about the nature and degree of actions it is undertaking within our borders, directed at our own citizens, actions which may be in violation of the Bill of Rights. I submit that is unacceptable, even if it happens "[h]ardly ever!" And I strongly suspect it may actually be a bit more frequent than that...