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...

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.

‘CISA Isn't About Cybersecurity, It's About Surveillance’

It seems these days that no bad bill that's been killed (*cough* CISPA *cough*) stays dead, and these undead bills, in this case transparently renamed CISA, stalk the halls of Congress looking to give America's law enforcement entities surveillance powers over its citizens, powers unheard of in the entire history of the Republic. Here's some of what you need to know, from

• security expert Bruce Schneier (latest book, Data and Goliath, on this very subject) (H/T CTuttle at FDL),
• the ACLU, and
• an assortment of "civil society organizations, security experts and academics" writing in a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (.pdf).

This bill as it stands is condemned by every one of these experts, yet is under consideration now by the Senate Select Committee. If CISA should pass and be signed into law, at least... at the very least... your Fourth Amendment rights will lie dead in the street, trampled by the forces who believe every American should be subject to surveillance, everywhere s/he goes, in every activity, at any time.

How little difference one letter makes!

How does that sound to you? Right... me too. Please read the linked articles and then HOWL to Congress, for all the good it will do...

NSA Report Must Have Been (ahem) An Oversight

Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept:

The National Security Agency on Christmas Eve day released twelve years of internal oversight reports documenting abusive and improper practices by agency employees. The heavily redacted reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board found that NSA employees repeatedly engaged in unauthorized surveillance of communications by American citizens, failed to follow legal guidelines regarding the retention of private information, and shared data with unauthorized recipients.

While the NSA has come under public pressure for openness since high-profile revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the release of the heavily redacted internal reports at 1:30PM on Christmas Eve demonstrates limits to the agency’s attempts to demonstrate transparency. Releasing bad news right before a holiday weekend, often called a “Christmas Eve surprise,”  is a common tactic for trying to minimize press coverage.

...

Read it all, if you think the gigantic equivalent of a typical Washington Friday press dump contains anything useful. I have other things to do in the next couple of days.