Activists: Chicago Police Likely Using Stingray Tapping Protesters' Cell Phones

Walter Einenkel at Kos has the story. Protesting in Chicago? Take note; adapt your phone use (or your phone) accordingly. (If you use a smartphone, google
   "cell phone wiretap detector app"
and you'll get plenty of responses; I don't know if they work or not.)

Watch Lists In Post-Constitutional AmericaHow Ray McGovern Ended Up On A ‘BOLO’ List, Though He Engaged In No Criminal Activity, And What It Took To Remove Him From The List

Peter van Buren at FDL has the story; here's an excerpt from the middle to familiarize you with the basic concepts and the specifics of McGovern's case, how he ended up on a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) list, and how he got himself removed from it:

...

Watch Lists in Post-Constitutional America

McGovern’s case has many touch points to the general state of affairs of post-9/11 government watchlists, such as No-Fly.

Ray McGovern
(NOTE: hair, beard vary
greatly across photos)

The first is that it is anonymous interests, within a vast array of government agencies, that put you on some list. You may not know what you did to be “nominated,” and you may not even know you are on a list until you are denied boarding or stopped and frisked at a public event. Placement on some watchlist is done without regard to– and often in overt conflict with– your Constitutional rights. Placement on a list rarely has anything to do with having committed any actual crime; it is based on the government’s supposition that you are a potential threat, that you may commit a crime despite there being no evidence that you are planning one.

Once you are on one watchlist, your name proliferates onto other lists. Getting access to the information you need to fight back is not easy, and typically requires legal help and a Freedom of Information Act struggle just to get the information you need to go forward. The government will fight your efforts, and require you to go through a lengthy and potentially expensive court battle.

We’ll address the irony that the government uses taxpaying citizens’ money to defend itself when it violates the Constitutional rights of taxpaying citizens another time.

...

The concept alone is enough to curl your hair: anonymous lists, compiled in secret, involving Americans who are not accused of any crime except that of offending someone in a powerful position, but subjected to surveillance as if they were the most heinous criminal... indeed, traitor.

How much worse can it get? How many of us are on such lists for what many of us consider ordinary political activity and/or speech? The short answer: we may never know.

Greenwald: NSA Targets Five American Muslim Leaders For Surveillance, Apparently Because They Are Muslim

Via Kevin Gosztola at FDL's The Dissenter, we have Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept revealing yet more NSA activity in violation of the First Amendment's freedom of religion guarantee. Here's Gosztola's summary:

...

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of The Intercept have published a much-anticipated story revealing five prominent Muslim-Americans the National Security Agency and FBI spied upon. The surveillance, which primarily appears to have involved monitoring their emails, was conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The five individuals are: Faisal Gill, a former member of President George W. Bush’s administration and a Republican Party operative; Asim Ghafoor, a public relations consultant, lobbyist, lawyer and advocate for the rights of American Muslims; Agha Saeed, a professor who has mobilized American Muslims to become involved in the American political process; Hooshang Amirahmadi, founder and president of the American Iranian Council, who has done considerable work on American policy toward Iran; and Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which is the largest Muslim civil rights organization in America.

The national legal advocacy organization, Muslim Advocates, reacted, “This report confirms the worst fears of American Muslims: the federal government has targeted Americans, even those who have served their country in the military and government, simply because of their faith or religious heritage.  The report clearly documents how biased training by the FBI leads to biased surveillance.”

...

Oh, and Gosztola notes this bit of raw, offensive incivility:

On a visceral level, The Intercept included a section from July 2005 instructions on how to format internal memos “justifying surveillance.” The NSA did not use “John Doe” in the place where the name is supposed to be. They used “Mohammed Raghead” instead.

And this from Greenwald and Hussain:

“I just don’t know why,” says Gill, whose AOL and Yahoo! email accounts were monitored while he was a Republican candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. “I’ve done everything in my life to be patriotic. I served in the Navy, served in the government, was active in my community—I’ve done everything that a good citizen, in my opinion, should do.”

Please read both articles. Apparently, in today's America, being both a Muslim and a civil liberties activist are enough in combination to ensure you will be spied upon by the most invasive arm of your government. If the Hobby Lobby case wasn't enough to signal to you the death of the First Amendment's establishment clause, this revelation should finish the job. If you're not Christian, as I am not, you have a choice: keep a low profile... or expect your government to spy on you. Once again, Thomas Jefferson turns in his grave...

Supremes: In General, Cops Need A Warrant To Search Digital Content Of Suspect's Cell Phone

This decision is big. In it, a unanimous 9-0 Supreme Court (!!) holds that, with a few exceptions already long established in Fourth Amendment law, if you are carrying a cell phone when police apprehend you and search you, if they want to page through your phone directory, photos, emails, recent text messages, etc., they need a warrant. This recognizes the intrinsic difference between your cell phone and, say, the contents of your car's glove box: a glove box can easily contain a weapon that you could use to harm an arresting officer or a bystander; a cell phone, not so much. (There is of course a distinction between what the phone "contains" physically, e.g., a razor blade, and what the phone "contains" as digitally represented information about you.)

This is a most welcome decision. Until now, a cop searching the digital content of your cell phone could easily turn up more private information about you than s/he could in a similar search of, say, all your paper file cabinets in your home. Searches of paper documents are fairly easy to specify in ways that prevent "fishing expeditions"; more to the point, no one denies the Fourth Amendment applies to them. Searches of the digital content of your iPhone are intrinsically unrestricted by the nature of the device; they render the Fourth Amendment useless if no warrant is required for such a search.

I found this article by Dahlia Lithwick interesting; you may want to read it.

(H/T Enfant de la Haute Mer in comments to the preceding post for alerting me to this decision. I've been busy with housework and not doing my homework.)

AFTERTHOUGHT: emptywheel has other ideas altogether about what the decision may mean, and not all her conclusions point to actual benefits to civil liberties.

A Serious Congressional Effort To Reform The Surveillance State And Restore Constitutional Rights... Or Yet Another Cover‑up?

Shahid Buttar at FDL tells us about the proposed USA FREEDOM Act... and examines what more needs to be done to rein in the decade of secret surveillance of our citizens in which our government has engaged.

Can You Hear Me Now? Riley v. California Heard By SCOTUS

Riley v. California, one of two cases involving the question of whether police may arrest a person, search his/her cell phone (i.e., the person's phone directory, photos, text messages, emails and anything else in the phone's increasingly capacious memory) without obtaining a warrant, and use the results of the search as evidence against the individual in court. In the named case, Riley was convicted and sentenced to 15 years based on a photo in his smartphone. The case was heard by SCOTUS yesterday, 4/29/2014.

A lot of the arguments for allowing such searches (including Justice Alito's) assert that the information in a cell phone is not substantially different from what police might find in a wallet, which they are allowed to search without a warrant. Sane people, on the other hand, argue against such searches, recognizing that a modern cell phone can hold much of the data about a person's entire life, unabridged, and that searching it is like searching "houses, papers, and effects" ... your computer, your file cabinets, your personal phone directory, your photo albums, etc., and therefore violates the Fourth Amendment.

A good place to begin... always... is with SCOTUSblog's "In Plain English" series entry for the case, which is here. As few of my readers are lawyers, I'm going to leave you with that for tonight, and await more analysis as it comes out. There's no way I'm going to attempt to guess what the Court, which has no clear majority for either the government's case or the defendant's, will decide in a compromise. I don't envy them their work. Even Scalia... EVEN SCALIA! ... has serious doubts about the government's case.

What I can tell you is this: in one article I ran across today, it was asserted that 90% of Americans (cell phone owners, I believe they meant) have smartphones. I am among the 10% with a junky old dumb phone. I have lately contemplated buying a smartphone, which means one for me and one for Stella. Like most Americans, she is fascinated with the possibilities. I, on the other hand, am horrified at the kinds of police fishing expeditions a smartphone combined with any kind of aggressive ruling in this case could enable. No, thank you; if warrantless searches on a law enforcement officer's mere whim are authorized in law, you can forget about my carrying anything easy to search. And if any of you know how to password-protect older cell phones, I'd appreciate knowing how to password my old Samsung.

Other worthwhile references:

• Constitutional Accountability Center, here, here and (if they ever get it working) here.
• epic.org on Riley. Contains EPIC's amicus brief.
• Business Insider's very, very short summary.
• Orin Kerr on Volokh's WaPo blog.

Conversnitch

Lamp or listening device?
How would you know?

Via Bruce Schneier, from Wired, we learn about "[a]n eavesdropping lamp that livetweets private conversations":

...

Two artists have revealed Conversnitch, a device they built for less than $100 that resembles a lightbulb or lamp and surreptitiously listens in on nearby conversations and posts snippets of transcribed audio to Twitter. Kyle McDonald and Brian House say they hope to raise questions about the nature of public and private spaces in an era when anything can be broadcast by ubiquitous, Internet-connected listening devices.

...

The surveillance gadget they unveiled Wednesday is constructed from little more than a Raspberry Pi miniature computer, a microphone, an LED and a plastic flower pot. It screws into and draws power from any standard bulb socket. Then it uploads captured audio via the nearest open Wi-Fi network to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, which McDonald and House pay small fees to transcribe the audio and post lines of conversation to Conversnitch’s Twitter account. “This is stuff you can buy and have running in a few hours,” says McDonald, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the Tisch School of the Arts.

...

It's not just the NSA anymore. We have table lamps in most rooms of the house; so, I'm sure, do you... lamps in your bedroom, lamps in your den, lamps in your office at home. There's probably nothing unique about them; someone could quite possibly replace one without your notice by swapping out a lampshade.

Does anybody have a grudge against you? Prepare to be boarded...

Afterthought: maybe it's time to pay attention to your wireless router's security.

Afterthought: this is probably more amenable to use by people who suspect their spouses of cheating. The installation obstacles would be minimized if you installed it in your own home.

NSA Has Known About, Used Heartbleed Bug For Years

Via the same Steven D post linked below, we learn from Bloomberg, which has two unnamed sources, that the NSA has been using the Heartbleed bug for a couple of years to gather "critical intelligence."

The NSA of course denies doing any such damned thing. Of course, loyal Muricans should always believe what they say. Yeah, right.

So the NSA's notion of patriotism when it finds a major vulnerability affecting many of the large internet services and their customers is to a) keep a lid on it, and b) exploit it.

I can't tell you what I think should be done with the NSA, but it may involve a corkscrew...

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.

---

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.

Lots Of Links On The CIA-Senate Story — UPDATED

... and some other important issues. REALLY important issues.

---

UPDATE: now we get word from Time Magazine via Kevin Gosztola at FDL that the CIA has asked the DoJ to investigate Senate staffers for alleged removal of documents on a CIA-SSCI-shared computer, and for that purpose DoJ is using the FBI:

The Justice Department has been asked to investigate whether Senate staffers improperly obtained and removed documents from a CIA computer system at a joint facility created by the CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), TIME has learned.

Well, at this rate, as one agency spies on and leaks about another that spies and leaks in turn on another, we don't need to worry that something is being hidden from the public, do we? I'm rather enjoying this!

CIA Caught Allegedly Hacking Senate Staffers

Hey, the gummint is all just one big happy family, right? DSWright at FDL:

...according to a report by McClatchy.

The CIA Inspector General has reportedly made a referral to the Justice Department related to CIA misconduct for monitoring staff at the US Senate who were working on a report on the CIA’s torture program. The spies were spying on Congress.

Remember, the national security state just wants to keep you safe and is not on a power trip.

...

The McClatchy piece by Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor is cautiously guarded about whether wrongdoing did or did not occur. Presumption of innocence, ya know. (He... hehehe... HAHAHAHAHA!) Even so, there is this assertion:

...

The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

...

Damn, I'll bet they have!

Your tax dollars at work...

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: I suppose I should be clear about precisely what I'm objecting to here, though I suspect you know. The CIA has no business spying on Americans in America, and especially no business spying on Congress; such acts are wildly outside the mission. I understand that every nation today has to have a spy agency, but I hope that ours can spy ON BEHALF OF America, not ON America.

Big Brother Is Watching You

Ordinarily I would avoid a post title quite so melodramatic on the grounds that it exaggerates what is really going on. Not this time.

From Jon Queally at Common Dreams, we learn that GCHQ, with the knowledge and/or assistance of the NSA, is hacking into the webcam chats of "millions" of unknowing users... without a warrant, without even reasonable suspicion that those people are involved in crime, let alone terrorism or other national security issues.

From Queally:

...

The latest documents leaked to journalists by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and published Thursday in the Guardian newspaper reveal that the British GCHQ spy agency—with possible assistance from its U.S. counterpart—built and maintained a program that allowed it to tap the live webcam chats of millions of internet users with no connection to criminal or national security investigations.

With a program codenamed "Optic Nerve," the documents reveal how the agency hacked into the camera feeds of those using Yahoo! webchats, capturing both snapshots of conversations and metadata associated with the communication. As its name indicates, at least part of the program was aimed at improving the government's ability to use digital eye-recognition technology to detect and catalog online users that may or may be not be part of a criminal investigation.

...

And yes, of course, many of the images (stills, snapped from webcams used in Yahoo! chats, saved to a GCHQ database) are sexually explicit. You expected otherwise?

Based on what is known, and what the program is called, I'd say they've got a lot of damned Optic Nerve...

'Angry Birds', Insufficiently Angry People

DSWright of FDL tells us how NSA uses the low security of games such as Angry Birds on cell phones to accumulate information about their users... probably mostly children. If you're worried about whether your neighbor's five-year-old is secretly an al Qaeda terrorist, relax... the NSA has the kid covered. If you think worrying about five-year-olds perpetrating terrorist acts is fucking nuts, you may have reservations about the NSA's "gather info, all of it, on everyone, all the time" attitude.

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.)

Senator Sanders To NSA: Are You The New Hoover FBI?

Sen. Bernie Sanders

That's not how Sanders phrased it. But that is the essence of the question: Is the NSA spying on everyone including Congress and maybe even the President, and is it using the resulting information to extend its own power? That was, after all, the core behavior of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI; are we witnessing a resurrection of Hoover and his nefarious practices?

Yes, says DSWright at FDL — Not only is Sanders asking the right question, but all indications are that the answer is in the affirmative. Quoting from the WaPo's blog The Switch,

"Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other elected officials?"

That's the question Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) put to the National Security Agency's chief in a bluntly worded letter Friday. It seems, however, that the agency cannot categorically say no.

...

When asked by The Washington Post, an NSA spokesman said that the agency's privacy safeguards are effective at covering all Americans.

"Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons," the spokesman said. ...

...

In other words... none at all. The NSA is, de facto, Hoover's FBI, writ large; the zombie walks again. And what the NSA does is what Hoover would have done if he had had the technology available to him.

Afterthought: the comment thread on DSWright's post is highly critical of Sanders for asking a stupid question. But the quality of the question was never the point. Of course the question virtually answers itself. But why hasn't Congress used its considerable authority to put a stop to NSA's practices? It's easy to see why the President doesn't halt them; hell, he's likely using the results for his own purposes. But it's more difficult for me to see why Congress is not making a serious attempt to stop NSA's effectively universal warrantless spying. Blanket privacy violations (so to speak) have no legitimate value in the pursuit of good governance. Why not restore the Fourth Amendment to its rightful place protecting Americans, both in and out of Congress?

Not News, Hardly Surprising, But Essential: Post Office Photos All Mail Covers For Law Enforcement

I missed this altogether five months ago when it was reported, but it is so much in keeping with all the stuff going down today that I believe it should be noted. From the NYT:

U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement

By RON NIXON
Published: July 3, 2013

WASHINGTON — Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” — supervisor — “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

“It was a bit of a shock to see it,” said Mr. Pickering, who with his wife owns a small bookstore in Buffalo. More than a decade ago, he was a spokesman for the Earth Liberation Front, a radical environmental group labeled eco-terrorists by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. ...

...

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

...

It is hardly surprising that if email, telephone and web-based communications are subject to universal and warrantless government surveillance, so is plain old postal mail.

Warrantless? What about the Fourth Amendment's reference to "papers"? Well, since the name-and-address information outside an envelope is "voluntarily" given to a government entity (actually its agent, USPS), there is no need for a warrant. According to the article, "[t]ens of thousands" of pieces of mail out of the millions sent each year are scrutinized on behalf of law enforcement. Were you an activist when you were young? It could be your mail.

Your tax dollars and your postage at work...

The Cold (Cyber) War

Alexander

According to NSA's Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA sees massive data acquisition, even on American citizens, as analogous to the arms race in the Cold War. Yes, that Cold War. Remember how, if the Commies were reported to have a specific kind of weapon, something dread and terrible, even something capable of wiping out all of humankind, it was absolutely essential that the US have the same weapon, only better? Remember the arms race? Remember how secure it made us feel when our bombs were bigger than Soviet bombs? (Don't worry... I don't remember that last one either. The whole Cold War thing scared me shitless. YMMV.)

Well, that's how Alexander, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, described the massive warrantless data collection on American citizens: other nations' security agencies do it, so America has to do it to compete. And some senators... indeed, some Democratic senators... agreed with him.

As one commenter remarked (more or less), didn't Alexander's mother ever ask little Keithie if he would jump over a cliff just because one of his buddies jumped over a cliff? Are we in this helluva fix because the good General failed to absorb that one tiny bit of maternal wisdom?

Caution: small representation
appears much clearer than
data actually retrieved

This is fucking nuts. It would be nuts even if its implementation didn't cost a fortune. It would be nuts even if it didn't compromise the privacy of every American and most every other human being who has a phone or an internet connection. It would be nuts even if it didn't give even America's allies good reason to mistrust the United States. It would be nuts even if it didn't drive America's adversaries to prepare for an otherwise wholly needless war against the United States.

But it does. And it does. And it does. And it does.

I remember, decades ago, chatting during a rehearsal break with the very conservative husband of one of my musical colleagues. How we got off on the subject of nuclear disarmament I do not remember; I generally avoid such no-win debates. But I remember his stating as a premise... a fact already in evidence, to be assumed, something not necessary to demonstrate... that any weapon the Soviet Union had, the US must develop and deploy in more than equal quantities. That was his starting point. I didn't bother challenging him further: someone who believes that is unlikely to understand why that approach is a terrible idea.

And now we are repeating the whole cycle, this time with online weapons. I won't say it is more dangerous to our physical existence than the nuclear arms race was (and is). But it is every bit as hazardous to our fundamental rights and liberties. It is not an exaggeration to say that we've already lost them and must struggle to regain them. In this "era of Big Data," God help America, because Americans like Alexander sure as hell won't.

Shop Online? NSA Is Probably Watching You

Via teacherken at Daily Kos, we have Washington Post's "The Switch" blog informing us:

NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking

By Ashkan Soltani, Andrea Peterson, and Barton Gellman — December 10 at 8:50 pm

... [image of slide from NSA internal presentation]

The National Security Agency is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance.

The agency's internal presentation slides, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations.

For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.

The revelation that the NSA is piggybacking on these commercial technologies could shift that debate, handing privacy advocates a new argument for reining in commercial surveillance.

...

NSA Co-opted Spokesmonster

I know of no way to beat this surveillance, short of using one computer and 'net connection for shopping, and another computer and 'net connection for anything you want to keep safe from NSA hacking. Maybe two virtual machines would do; I don't know. But NSA is determined to divert and use every scrap of information you share with anyone or any company, for NSA's own purposes of... well, what? Who knows... anything they damned well please. I can't imagine all their intentions are benign.

Warrants for these NSA searches? You must be joking. Presumption of innocence? "Innocence? That's so... 19th century," as a friend says in a recent comment. You think all the invasive practices of the NSA don't affect you because you don't have anything to hide? See if that makes any difference when someone, somewhere in government or law enforcement, decides they have a bone to pick with you. You're damned right it affects you. But... go ahead, enjoy your delusions while you can; I won't try to stop you.