Things That Make You Look Over Your Shoulder

Two articles well worth your time to read:

• It turns out Donald Trump's father was the racist landlord Woody Guthrie hated
  

  

  I admit I am a fan of Woody Guthrie (I wish I could truthfully say "This Keyboard Kills Fascists," as Guthrie often labeled his "machine" [guitar]), and not so much a fan of Donald Trump or landlords in general, but based on this article, Fred Trump was worse than the lot regarding racial discrimination. Like father, like son? I wouldn't go that far, but things one learns in youth about interaction with other people tend to last a lifetime, and a racist parent makes me nervous about the child.

• U.S. will use facial recognition at airports
  

  

  I no longer fly because I do not like undergoing invasive searches without a warrant, but these machines, however well they appear to work, make me very uncomfortable. What happens if you're a close match (as the device reckons) with a terrorist? Are your happy urban life, your career, your relationships personal and business, etc. immediately over? I wouldn't bet against it. It's the no-fly list writ large. ("No-live list"?)
  
  And then there's the fact that these machines work, um, badly. Here's the ACLU on the subject:
  

  A study by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, found false-negative rates for face-recognition verification of 43 percent using photos of subjects taken just 18 months earlier, for example. And those photos were taken in perfect conditions, significant because facial recognition software is terrible at handling changes in lighting or camera angle or images with busy backgrounds. The NIST study also found that a change of 45 degrees in the camera angle rendered the software useless. The technology works best under tightly controlled conditions, when the subject is starting directly into the camera under bright lights - although another study by the Department of Defense found high error rates even in those ideal conditions. Grainy, dated video surveillance photographs of the type likely to be on file for suspected terrorists would be of very little use.

  Does that give you a lot of confidence?

(I'm afraid I didn't log the sources of these links. If you published one or both, and you are on my blogroll, please accept my thanks.)

Since 2010, NSA Has Collected Social Data On US Citizens

James Risen of NYT:

WASHINGTON — Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.

The spy agency began allowing the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs in November 2010 to examine Americans’ networks of associations for foreign intelligence purposes after N.S.A. officials lifted restrictions on the practice, according to documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

The policy shift was intended to help the agency “discover and track” connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the United States, according to an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011. The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said. Because of concerns about infringing on the privacy of American citizens, the computer analysis of such data had previously been permitted only for foreigners.

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Oh, and let's not forget what other sources they can use:

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The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.

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By now, certainly, no one in government worries about "infringing" on a nonexistent attribute like the privacy of American citizens. And besides, the relevancy to mission is abundantly clear: NSA agents now have more to gossip about with each other in the snack room and with their s.o.'s when they at long last get home in the evening after a long day of PTA (Peeping Tom activity). You do see the direct relevance to national security, don't you? you don't? Hang on a moment while every Tammy, Dick and Harriet in the NSA annotates the big database to reflect your lack of understanding...

Face it: most of this has
happened on Obama's watch

'Privacy Down The Drain'

Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch, at FDL, posting about "Privacy Down the Drain":

In the U.S. these days, privacy is so been-there-done-that. Just this week, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret outfit that hears only the government side of any argument and has generally been a rubberstamp for surveillance requests, declassified an opinion backing the full-scale collection and retention of the phone records (“metadata”) of American citizens. That staggering act was, the judge claimed, in no way in violation of the Fourth Amendment or of American privacy. ...

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Engelhardt goes on to discuss the recent ACLU report by Calabrese and Harwood on the FBI, "Unleashed and Unaccountable," and how the FBI has been transformed into an internal surveillance agency gratuitously and unconstitutionally gathering formerly private information on American citizens at home.

Privacy does not entail secrecy. You have a right to privacy. "If you're not doin' anything wrong," as the nut-jobs begin, your right to privacy should be even more firmly established, but you have the right of privacy in any endeavor you undertake that is not manifestly criminal, and even then, according to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, the government must convince a court of "probable cause" to issue a warrant before it may legally breach your right to security in your "persons, houses, papers, and effects." Privacy is a right, not a privilege to be revoked whenever a government agency feels like spying on you. When a secret court issues a secret opinion infringing explicitly and significantly on that right, the substance of America has been compromised at its core.

When will we have a Congress and a president willing to stand up for this fundamental human right for Americans?

'The NSA Doesn't Care About You Or Your Customers' - Bruce Schneier To ISPs

Well-known security consultant Bruce Schneier has advice to ISPs faced with the choice of simply acceding to the demands of the NSA for their customer data, or fighting and (inevitably) losing battles for their customers' data security. Schneier's advice: fight them. But what of your company's relationship with the NSA? You have no such relationship, Schneier reminds you; the NSA will burn you... or any of your customers... as soon as it is convenient, and your history of cooperation with the NSA will not change that fact. Here's a short segment of the beginning of Schneier's article linked above:

The NSA is Commandeering the Internet

It turns out that the NSA's domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we've learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it's easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.

Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy's life? It's going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they're going to protect you, but they won't. The NSA doesn't care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it's convenient to do so.

We're already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They've lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do -- and don't do -- is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don't care.

It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they'll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they're sloppy. They'll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn't have a copy, the next whistleblower will.

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They say a word to the wise is sufficient. I haven't found that to be true. Remember how you (well, many of you, including me) really thought Obama the candidate was the best thing since sliced bread, and really wanted to believe him? How's that working out for you? And the NSA has even less reason... like, ZERO accountability... not to put a sharp stick in your eye when it's convenient.

ISPs: for your own sake and for ours, please fight them. If nothing else, you will at least establish a trail of actions in court against the process of wanton, needless privacy violation AGAINST EVERYONE by the various security agencies. Perhaps that trail can be used in saner times, say, 20 or 30 years from now. Corporations live that long, and therefore have even more good reason to fight the agencies' most drastic actions than individuals. Yes, you'll lose... but the battle lines will at least be drawn.

Where You Go Plus Who You Phone Equals Who You Are: Secret Court Order Hands Verizon Records To NSA — UPDATED

It is "only" the metadata, i.e., packet data: the number and location of the phone making the calls. But that data, collected over a period of time, can tell the NSA practically everything it wants to know about you. Here's James Ball in The Guardian:

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Discussing the use of GPS data collected from mobile phones, an appellate court noted that even location information on its own could reveal a person's secrets: "A person who knows all of another's travels can deduce whether he is a weekly churchgoer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups," it read, "and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts."

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(Glenn Greenwald has more thoughts on what it all means.)

"[A]ll such facts." The NSA can now collect them. (I think it is reasonable to assume it's not just Verizon but at least all mobile phone companies and probably all phone companies in America.) You are where you go; you are who you phone: privacy is dead in America, and you have two presidential administrations to thank for that. The sound you hear is the nation's founders spinning in their graves.

UPDATE: The White House still thinks spying on us all without a warrant is a great idea. Maybe you should flood their mailboxes with letters telling them it isn't.

UPDATE: the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has accumulated a number of informative links together in one of their online periodical newsletters. They have also introduced me to a parody NSA logo, which they may have created...

Yep. That about says it... plugged in, tuned in, turned on and dropped out of public visibility.

House May Vote On CISPA Today

Zombie Bill
(far right)

It's the Return of the Undead: CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, passed in one version by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives about a year ago, is up for a vote in another version (at least no better than the original).

The House Rules Committee, chaired by Republican Rep. Pete Sessions (Asshole-TX), voted along party lines to remove an amendment with bipartisan support (but not in the committee) that would have allowed companies to make, and to be obligated to keep, privacy promises, including terms-of-use agreements and privacy agreements.

Even President Obama is sufficiently exercised about this bill to threaten to veto it. According to Declan McCullagh of CNET (see above link), the House will nonetheless debate the bill today, but thanks to Sessions and other Republicans on the Rules Committee, the aforementioned amendment will not even get a vote by the full House. Now that's freedum-'n'-duhmocracy for you, Republican style.

All of this Republican fearmongering is in the Holy Name of National Security. Here is a good summary of last year's bill; here's an excerpt from that summary:

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CISPA would "waive every single privacy law ever enacted in the name of cybersecurity," Rep. Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat and onetime Web entrepreneur, said during the debate. "Allowing the military and NSA to spy on Americans on American soil goes against every principle this country was founded on."

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and author of CISPA, responded by telling his colleagues to ignore "all the things they're saying about the bill that are not true." He pleaded: "Stand for America! Support this bill!"

While CISPA initially wasn't an especially partisan bill -- it cleared the House Intelligence Committee by a vote of 17 to 1 last December -- it gradually moved in that direction. The final tally was 206 Republicans voting for it, and 28 opposed. Of the Democrats, 42 voted for CISPA and 140 were opposed. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said afterward on Twitter that CISPA "didn't strike the right balance" and Republicans "didn't allow amendments to strengthen privacy protections."

The ACLU, on the other hand, told CNET that the amendments -- even if they had been allowed -- would not have been effective. "They just put the veneer of privacy protections on the bill, and will garner more support for the bill even without making substantial changes," said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU.

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That was last year, and not much has changed. The zombie bill is back. Your
privacy is at risk. CISPA underlines the government's "right" to engage in online surveillance against its own citizens, without a warrant and (IMHO) in defiance of the Fourth Amendment.

Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican sponsor of the bill, alleged that its typical opponent is a "14-year-old tweeter in the basement." In adapting a form letter to my Representative offered by Demand Progress, I added the following paragraph:

Far from being a 14-year-old in my basement, as the bill's sponsor characterizes those of us who oppose it, I recently retired from a successful career as an IT professional; the last 20 years of that career were as an independent contractor. As professionals like me retire, America sorely needs bright young people to enter the field; we need the best if we are to continue to be the best. I can think of nothing more powerful than CISPA to discourage recent college graduates from entering the profession. Please oppose CISPA.

You can either depend on Obama's threatened veto alone... depending on Obama to do any specific thing seems chancy to me... or you can at least try to raise hell with your Representative. I choose the latter.

UPDATE: CISPA passed the House. Stay tuned.

Executive Warrantless Eavesdropping OKed By Supremes

Five Justices of the Supreme Court... I don't even need to mention which five... dismissed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act [of 2008], the law that underpins most warrantless eavesdropping. Glenn Greenwald's assessment:

This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government's new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights. The background of this case is vital to understanding why this is so significant.

The consequences are pretty obvious to me: any vestige of constitutionally protected privacy we may once have had (e.g., under the Fourth Amendment) is rapidly slipping away. I'd say the only privacy Americans have left is the privacy they can manage by technological means. And given the reputedly high level of tradecraft of the NSA, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in that, either.

There is some irony here. The most right-wing Americans are all in favor of this kind of warrantless spying on American citizens, on the basis that it keeps us safe from terrorists... a loss of political privacy from government snooping is essential, in their opinion, to our physical safety. Yet many of those same right-wing nutjobs, especially those obsessed with a religiosity I cannot comprehend, are intent on suppressing the obvious outcome of any personal sexual privacy we may once have had. I suppose there's a sort of foolish consistency there... no privacy of any sort is to be allowed... but I am not happy to see the hobgoblins taking over the little minds again. Damned if I am relinquishing my privacy, personal or political, for the sake of some terrified bastard's notion of physical safety and security.

Fusion... Not Nuclear, Not Musical, But DHS Centers

How far did DHS ultimately go in removing your civil liberties and your privacy, starting (more or less) on 9/11/2001? Gene Howington at Jonathan Turley's blog sketches the sordid picture for us. Few answers will surprise you, but if you grew up in an earlier, freer America, a lot of them will offend you. What can you still keep private from your government? In essence... not a damned thing. Not one. And it's all compiled in databases, crudely indexed and even more crudely cross-referenced, to make sure that what the DHS knows about you that is incorrect, the FBI, CIA, NSA, DoJ and often local law enforcement agencies also know about you... equally incorrectly. Like nuclear fusion, this kind of fusion can so easily get out of hand, become unstable and do more harm than good, that I can't help thinking the term was chosen premeditatedly.

Be sure to read the comments. Most of Turley's readers are attorneys, and many of them have some perspective on the process by which Homeland Security has become personal insecurity. Welcome to our brave new world.

One Nation, Under Surveillance: TrapWire

It's the latest thing in government-sponsored warrantless surveillance of American citizens, 24x7, every aspect of their lives... and it's here today. Here's a sample from FDL's TheCallUp:

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So what is TrapWire, and why has its leak created such a commotion? According to reporting at RT, TrapWire is a detailed surveillance system that “can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw[s] patterns, and do[es] threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Anything suspect gets input into the system to be “analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of pre-attack planning.”

According to the article, this system has been secretly installed in most major cities and around landmarks across the United States, in Canada, and in the UK. Most local police forces are installing their own monitoring software that works in conjunction with TrapWire. Private properties, including casinos, are now signing up to TrapWire. Essentially, it sounds like Big Brother identifying you, watching you, assessing your every move for abnormalities, then indexing your behavior.

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Please read the whole article. This is effectively the old Total Information Awareness program actually implemented, either in defiance of federal law and the Constitution, or else in compliance with some secret law we have no knowledge of.

Oh, by the way... as WikiLeaks and Anonymous began releasing documents pertaining to the program, they were subjected to the DDoS attack from Hell. It looks like the scariest obstacle to your freedom of speech and your right to know what your government is doing is now... your government.

Your Tax Dollars At Work: DARPA Funds Network-Hacking Power Strip

Just... read about it. Here. I've got to go throw up. (H/T ellroon.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: After a couple minutes, I thought of some possibly benign uses for such a device, e.g., to find obvious holes in the security of a system you are newly responsible for. But you'd still be taking an awful chance, just hooking it up, even with the boss's approval. And... what if there's a manufacturer's back door? or a No-Such-Agency back door? You could find yourself with a lot of visitors!

One Nation Under Surveillance: FDA Spies On Its Own Scientists

Mordor - Total Information Awareness

From the NYT, we learn that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) engaged in a "wide-ranging surveillance operation... against a group of its own scientists", using "an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails" to everyone from Congress to journalists and the president:

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The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.

The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.

A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”

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It seems very likely that the FDA's actions were worthy of reporting. But nothing could so effectively reinforce the mostly false image of scientists as brilliant in their field of study but naive about political matters as those scientists' allowing their external communications to be spied upon.

A few simple rules of thumb would probably have allowed the scientists to continue undetected and unimpeded: use your own personal equipment to send the emails, not something your employer's IT department supplied to you; don't use your employer's network to transmit the emails; obtain and use your own personal privacy keys to encrypt the email; don't make copies of files onto removable media. Yes, all of that makes whistle-blowing considerably more inconvenient, but if you're going to do it at all, you may want to exercise at least that much common sense and good judgment.

(H/T Mustang Bobby.)

Trackers

Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan at Pro Publica provide us with details of how your cell phone can easily be the subject of warrantless location tracking: many of the 1.3 million law enforcement requests for called numbers and location information last year alone were warrantless. To me, that bears the stench of being forced to testify against oneself.

Maass and Rajagopalan conclude by suggesting we drop the term "cellphones" as no longer adequately describing their multiplicity of functions. Call them "trackers," they say. Excuse me, my tracker's ringing...

Online Privacy In America - Quickly Vanishing If It Ever Existed

The FTC, which is the agency charged with ferreting out inappropriate and illegal data mining and tracking operations online, lacks an adequate budget, and has the support of neither major political party, because even businesses who have had a reputation for consumer-friendliness (think of Google's "don't be evil") want to be able to do such mining and tracking free of government regulation. Yes, Google does some of these things, including some questionably legal interceptions of inadequately protected Wi-Fi signals from its Street View cars as they troll the streets ostensibly only for 360° photos.

Illegal Wi-Fi interception notwithstanding, as long as companies engage in mining and tracking, your online habits are followed in minute detail by certain kinds of tracking cookies placed in your browser by web sites you visit, placed there by advertisers who want to watch you shop. (Note: most cookies are innocuous, and for purely practical and technical reasons, web sites you visit may need to save information from one session to the next, mostly for your convenience. There may be circumstances under which you will want to clear your cookies, but in general, doing so only inconveniences you and does not obstruct those tracking you all that much.)

What's next, mosquito-sized drones with cameras, following you as you walk through a physical shopping mall? The effect is not that different, and the drones are said to exist already... just google "mosquito-sized drone". Cell phone tracking by businesses that want to sell you something is already infamous, especially for smartphones. Electronic and visual tracking is the staple of retail business in our age.

Peter Maass at ProPublica.org offers a long but fact-filled story on the practices, the ambiguity of laws, the actions of the FTC, etc. If you spend much time online, and especially if you buy anything online, it's worth your time to read the article.