The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

Oh the hits just keep coming. . . It seems there is an ObamaPhone after all  :D
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"In the digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?" - Al Jazera Gore

(CNN) -- The U.S. government has obtained a top secret court order that requires Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency on an "ongoing daily basis."

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The program does not target foreigners or known terrorists. It is specifically directed toward American Citizens.  Probably just the dirty Tea Partiers.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/05/nsas-verizon-spying-order-specifically-targeted-americans-not-foreigners/

And more today. . .

The government has now given itself the authority to search your property without any probable cause. . ."Based on hunches"
The 23-page report, obtained by The Associated Press and the American Civil Liberties Union under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, provides a rare glimpse of the Obama administration’s thinking on the long-standing but controversial practice of border agents and immigration officers searching and in some cases holding for weeks or months the digital devices of anyone trying to enter the U.S.

Since his election, President Barack Obama has taken an expansive view of legal authorities in the name of national security, asserting that he can order the deaths of U.S. citizens abroad who are suspected of terrorism without involvement by courts, investigate reporters as criminals and — in this case — read and copy the contents of computers carried by U.S. travelers without a good reason to suspect wrongdoing.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/06/05/dept-of-homeland-security-laptops-phones-can-be-searched-based-on-hunches/

I sure am glad that Bush never did anything like this.  Oh wait, I seem to remember a bit of a hubbub about something?

"There can be no question about the legality or infamy of this action. Contact your Congresscritters and Senators- immediate impeachment is the only option." -Daily Kos. . .Jan 13th 2006

As a Democrat friend of mine said a couple of weeks ago: "I'm just upset because the President is openly doing all of the things we suspected Bush of doing but couldn't prove."

I guess we don't need this old ditty any more:
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.

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Jamie Dupree is live tweeting from a press conference with Senate leaders about the Verizon phone records scandal. Where Sen Diane Feinstein just said "It's called protecting America."

Can we send her back to Hogwarts?  Please?

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It's across-the-board wholesale spying on American citizens, and you want to squander any attempt at reform by imagining it to be partisan politics?
Clearly you are not an equal opportunity outrager.

You mean they were spying on Liberals too? 

I'm sure this will upset many on this board, just as it did when the previous admin chose to spy on folks talking to terrorists.

Perhaps this will represent an opportunity to unite in common outrage over constitutional overreach.

Go ahead and express your outrage. Just take your time and speak clearly into the stapler.

No administration has the monopoly on enabling the Security State:

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861.  "There is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows."
"Mmost Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted" the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited "metadata" is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens' communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication.

Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual's network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The NSA, as part of a program secretly authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, implemented a bulk collection program of domestic telephone, internet and email records. A furore erupted in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had "been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" and was "using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity." Until now, there has been no indication that the Obama administration implemented a similar program.

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http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/welcome-to-the-bush-obama-white-house-they-re-spying-on-us-20130606
Welcome to the era of Bush-Obama, a 16-year span of U.S. history that will be remembered for an unprecedented erosion of civil liberties and a disregard for transparency. On the war against a tactic—terrorism—and its insidious fallout, the United States could have skipped the 2008 election.

It made little difference.

Despite his clear and popular promises to the contrary, President Obama has not shifted the balance between security and freedom to a more natural state—one not blinded by worst fears and tarred by power grabs. If anything, things have gotten worse.


Killing civilians and U.S. citizens via drone
Seizing telephone records at the Associated Press in violation of Justice Department guidelines.
Accusing a respected Fox News reporter of engaging in a conspiracy to commit treason for doing his job
Detaining terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, despite promises to end the ill-considered Bush policy
Even the IRS scandal, while not a matter of foreign policy, strikes at the heart of growing concerns among Americans that their privacy is government's playpen

Now being slammed by the author of the Patriot Act.  Not a good year for Holder.
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It turns out this will lead to an even broader scandal. Apparently, the NSA was collecting metadata from all carriers and on all citizens.  This would include members of congress, the suprime court, and other political leaders.  The NSA falls under the Executive branch.

From a separation of powers standpoint, for the Executive branch to be monitoring the activities of a co-equal branch of government represents a serious constitutional breech.

I'm tired of Uncle Sam doing whatever he wants and telling me I this form my safety.

Eliminating the 4th amendment would make use safer.  Kill freedom of the press.  Habeous Corpus. Jury trials. More secret warrants. More spying on citizens.  No sarcasm - all those things will help protect us from outsiders.

Then all we need is protection from our government.

Don't forget the second amendment.  Those guns might fall into the hands of terrorists.

I'm just trying to figure out if they are going through the amendments alphabetically or numerically. :P

My solution is to have all conversations in code.

The shoe is on the window.

Doesn't the "F" in FISA stand for foreign?  :D
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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALN7LTeLxtI[/youtube]

Don't you know Mrs. Holder is getting tired of saying: "Another rough day at the office, honey?"

I wonder if the president has heard about this scandal yet, or if he will learn about it from the news tonight?

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The U.S. National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have access to servers at Google, Facebook and other major Internet services, collecting audio, video, email and other content for surveillance, the Washington Post and the Guardian reported on Thursday.
The surveillance is taking place in real time under a classified program called PRISM, which was begun in 2007 to investigate foreign threats to the U.S., the reports said. Most of the major Internet services, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Apple and AOL as well as Google and Facebook, knowingly participate in PRISM, according to the Post and the Guardian.

"The secrecy surrounding the government's extraordinary surveillance powers has stymied our system of checks and balances," wrote Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress must initiate an investigation to fully uncover the scope of these powers and their constraints, and it must enact reforms that protect Americans' right to privacy and that enable effective public oversight of our government."

Oh thank God, Congress will get right on it.




...but it's not like they didnt already know:

The FBI and telecom companies collaborated to routinely violate federal wiretapping laws for years, as agents got access to reporters’ and citizens’ phone records using fake emergency declarations or simply asking for them.

The Justice Department Inspector General’s internal audit, released Wednesday, harshly criticized how the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Communications Analysis Unit relied on so-called “exigent” letters to get carriers to turn over phone records immediately. The letters were a hangover from the investigation into the 9/11 attacks and promised telecoms, falsely, that subpoenas would follow shortly.

It all started after 9/11 as FBI agents hunting terrorists began relying heavily on call toll records — essentially a person’s phone bills — in a frantic effort to find terror plots before they were carried out. The agency even gave AT&T, Verizon and MCI multimillion dollar contracts to keep phone records longer and to answer FBI requests faster.
The companies then set up remote terminals inside the FBI’s offices, staffing them with telecom employees who quickly became friendly with the agents requesting phone records. The telecom employees had FBI e-mail addresses, access to shared drives and invitations to happy hours, according to the report.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/fbi-att-verizon-violated-wiretapping-laws/
 

Our credibility as a free country has been seriously compromised.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

BREAKING (not really) ;): Carney Explains
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When this originally crossed his desk, the president simply thought this was part of Verizon's Share Everything Plan, and was very excited about the prospect of "unlimited data."  As you can imagine, he was shocked when he read the article in the Guardian last night, and learned that the government was collecting information on innocent Americans without probable cause.  This is wrong, and the president has ordered the Justice Department to launch an immediate investigation into the allegations.

As a result of this gross abuse of FISA law, the president will be unveiling his new plan titled "Protecting America's Privacy" tomorrow.

Ok, so that's not what Carney said, but I bet it will be just as entertaining.

It's hard to believe this is a huge surprise to anyone.

People are grabbing it and feigning OUTRAGE.

Shock me, shock me, shock me.

Stick your finger in a light socket.
 
 ;D

There will always be those who don't find this the least bit concerning.

. . .the frogs in the pot.

I don't believe that there are many Americans, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative or otherwise who are willing to support the notion of violating the 4th amendment for the sake of security.

Those who trade liberty for security have neither. - Benjamin Franklin

I always assumed that any phone conversation I ever had could be tapped. I always assumed that any e-mail I sent could be read by others. I always assumed that any website I went to could track me.

I have just watched too many movies about spying or crime-solving by pesky kids who had some nerdy tech-savvy friend with a headset who could do anything on a computer.

Am I sad that my government is doing it? Yes. Am I shocked? No.

Then why was it allowed to be done with the Patriot Act?  I didn't hear many screaming about that.

You were listening to something else.

It's concerning, yes.  Will we ever be able to do anything about it?  No.

Even if someone says "We've done something about it.", they've not done anything of consequence.  It'll still happen.

Our government isn't some benevolent organization with kind thoughts at its center.  It's a group of power hungry individuals who wish to remain in power.

If you think something can be done to change this, get on out there and do it.

Well under Bush, I could say: "I'm not engaged in terrorist or illegal activities so it doesn't bother me."

Now under Obama I can say: "This is a vicious over-reach by the Obama Administration."

On a serious note, I sense there is the same amount of outrage as there was about the Patriot Act when more details became known about it.  This does not bode well for the Obama Administration with IRSgate, APgate, Benghazigate, etc. all blowing up at once.  Secondly, for a Constitutional law professor, one would think he would respect the Constitution and would have surrounded himself with a staff which respects the Constitution and the individual liberties protected by it which it now appears they are crapping all over.

For one thing the hypocrisy is stifling:

From 2008 on the campaign trail at Dartmouth College, Presidential Candidate Obama said:


Senator Obama voted "NO" in 2005 to extend the wiretapping provisions of the Patriot Act.


Regardless of source, his vote is a matter of Senate record.  Just like his promise to close Gitmo, his admin is shaping up more and more like 8 additional years of Bush/Cheney.

That is why I am supporting Hillary in 2016.

I'd love to know how people who supported Hillary in the '08 primaries feel about their eventual support for Obama in the '08 general election and his re-election bid in 2012.

Does anyone think he could have won re-election if all this had been swirling around in June of last year? 

I'll refer you back to the "a group of power hungry individuals who wish to remain in power."

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Ldj8pzd0RAs#t=27s[/youtube]

Check out the new 1.5 million square foot $2,000,000,000 NSA data mining facility in Utah. Expected to be finished in September of 2013, the facility is designed to hold yottabytes of your personal information, and provide processing power to mine all of that information in seconds.

http://galleries.realclearpolitics.com/gallery/Secret_NSA_Data_Center_in_Utah/slideshow/A_military_no_trespassing_sign_is_seen_in_front_of_Utah%27s_NSA_Data_Center_in_Bluffdale%2C_Utah%2C/0cK46u71Pta6x

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Binney is talking:
http://libertasutah.org/interview/nsa-whistleblower-speaks-out-on-verizon-prism-and-the-utah-data-center/

Looking at the cooling towers, I could have retired on the sale of the HVAC system alone.

You need those when you play a lot of Call of Duty 4 at high resolutions.

I guess they have finally had enough of being lied to. . .
MSNBC is starting to report the news again.
Contrary to the president's comments today, most of congress has not been briefed that the NSA is gathering data on citizens.

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/06/07/internet-spying-kept-secret-from-most-of-congress-sen-merkley-says/

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," President Barack Obama said Friday as he tried to reassure Americans who have had to digest a dizzying array of revelations in the past few days.

Thats a half-truth.
Machines have been doing that job for the better part of a decade, first with international calls, now with domestic calls.

From 2005:

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/12/5808-2/
 

Oh, THAT'S the reason why....

Apparently the NSA complained to the Justice Department that it's privacy was violated, and is asking the Obama administration to investigate the recent leaks.
 

Well, the leaker has been identified. Not looking good for this guy.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2531439

The kicker is that he, an American citizen, had to seek sanctuary from the U.S. in China.
Have we really sunk that far in the free world?

I wonder if this will cause people to re-evaluate the case of former Tulsan Bradley Manning.  
They both exposed high-level abuses that embarrassed the government, but in Mannings case, the State Department spun it into treason, even after they conceded that his whistleblowing did not actually place any American troops in danger.

The guy who leaked the information is named Snowden. 

Yossarian was a collector of good questions and had used them to disrupt the educational sessions Clevinger had once conducted two nights a week in Captain Black's intelligence tent with the corporal in eyeglasses who everybody knew was probably a subversive. Captain Black knew he was a subversive because he wore eyeglasses and used words like panacea and utopia, and because he disapproved of Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating unAmerican activities in Germany.

Yossarian attended the education sessions because he wanted to find out why so many people were working so hard to kill him. A handful of other men were also interested, and the questions were many and good when Clevinger and the subversive corporal finished and made the mistake of asking if there were any.

“Who is Spain?”

“Why is Hitler?”

“When is right?”

“Where was that stooped and mealy-colored old man I used to call poppa when the merry-go-round broke down?”

“How was Trump at Munich?”

“Hi-ho beriberi!”

and “Balls!” all rang out in rapid succession, and then there was Yossarian with the question that had no answer:

“Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?”

And yet...there are people who think the Patriot Act was a good idea.....

Because they had no idea what it actually was.
Some of those people are in Congress.


As for Snowden, someone who can make $200,000 a year with only a GED must have been doing something right.


We managed to survive greater threats in our history ... than a few disorganized terrorist groups and rogue states without resorting to these sorts of programs.  It is not that I do not value intelligence, but that I oppose ... omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance .... That seems to me a greater threat to the institutions of free society than missed intelligence reports, and unworthy of the costs."

I had read Snowden was a former military officer which means he would have had at least a bachelor's degree if that is correct.

^^Read that later on.  Sounds like his credentials might be a little confused.  In fact the whole story on him seems odd and confusing.  Guy gets a $200K job, in Hawaii after working for various NSA contractors and the CIA before that, then goes rogue within three months of his new position in paradise??  They said he accessed information well above his security clearance level.  He sounds more and more like a plant to me.

This has brought to light though how big the "Intelligence Industrial Complex" has become.  Booz Allen's primary customer is the U.S. Government to the tune of $5.7 billion last year and almost $12 billion in long-term contracts.  Of particular interest, is the easy exchange between leadership at the NSA to leadership at Booz Allen.  Seems incestuous enough for government work.

Anyone who hires high level technical people knows that typically a diploma only indicates that the person is somewhat trainable.  It does not have any bearing on skill.  Some of the best programmers I know were never trained in their vocation through any sort of 4 year program, and many that have are lackluster at best.  For an analyst/developer, how you think is more important than what you know.

If the kid had mad skills and the military intelligence community recognized that, they would naturally want to develop those.  Unfortunately developers are a dime a dozen in the private sector, but GOOD developers with analyst skills and the ability to visualize data are very rare.  Most have realized that they can do contract work and make a lot of money without answering to bosses or sitting in an office all day.  For a company to keep one of these skilled individuals, it is necessary to pay them top dollar, otherwise the independence and profitability of contract work is just too strong.  $200K is not an outrageous salary for a someone like this with military security clearance.

So, lets speculate. . .
We know the kid is bright and has some clandestine ops exposure.  We also know that this entire leak and the subsequent interview was planned.  Because of his vocation, he is used to planning, mapping and visualizing very complex scenarios, therefore, I am willing to bet that he was never in Hong Kong.  I am also willing to bet that the interview with the reporter took place prior to the information on civilian surveillance being released to the Guardian.  Otherwise the reporter(s), and any support individuals who have contact with him would be surveilled.  I would also assume that there are additional interviews and perhaps leaks that have already been prepared, and will be released to coincide with reaction/action on the issues.

The libertarian community and other international socially liberal groups will tend to support his actions, so he won't have to look very far for a support network.  I'm sure the powers that be will also attempt to use those groups to trap him.  As for his future, the movie will be fabulous. If he can escape extradition he will be, and is already becoming, an international celebrity.

I could be wrong, but when playing hide-and-go-seek, it is typically not a good idea to telegraph your location, unless you can throw your voice. ;)
If I were him, I would probably be in a European country where I could easily blend in.  I woud choose one with lots of rail travel across borders, support for my cause, and easily bribable officials.  I think I would be in Eastern Europe and/or Russia.

There have been no charges levied against Snoden yet.  I am hopeful that the president will use this opportunity to stand up for what he claimed he believed in back in 2008 when he was working so hard for your vote.

From the Obama-Biden website in 2008:
"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government."

Since the president chose to expand the drastic policies of Bush instead of eliminating them, this is one of those rare instances when opportunity actually knocks twice!
Will he answer?
Will you hold him to his pledge?

the keyword is "yet".
here's the petition to make the office of the president address the issue.  (half way there)
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/pardon-edward-snowden/Dp03vGYD

Don't know about the term "national hero," but he does fall into the exact category that then candidate Obama recognized.  As a military officer, Snowden was trained to defend the constitution of the United States.  It seems that he was doing just that, which does not make him a hero, it simply makes him honest.

Perhaps the president could do the same.

He was not an officer.  He enlisted in 2003, he is 29 today... meaning he would have been 18 or 19 upon enlistement.  And just because you take an oath to defend the constitution of the United States, doesn't mean he was fully trained in how to do that. 

I don't believe it makes him Honest, either.  He had to have an Non disclosure agreement of some variety, which means he signed that he would keep secret what he came across.  He had to have known that being involved with one of these agencies would meant he was going to do things that most people couldn't stomach.

I think that no matter what branch of government you are in, or in what capacity, you should be not only free, but expected to report corruption, violations of the law, human rights, and most certainly constitution you are bound to protect.  A government that fears it's own people is the best government.  As candidate Obama said: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled.

We can't afford to have the people live in fear of government.  When politicians justify intrusion, and the violation of your rights, they acknowledge that your rights are less important then their goals.  If you allow them to subjugate one of your constitutional rights, you make it easier for them to do the same with the others.  The constitution is not immune to rust.

It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest. – William O. Douglas

When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs.
When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent.
When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun.
Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet. – Lyle Myhr

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government – lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. – Patrick Henry

The strength of the Constitution, lies in the will of the people to defend it. – Thomas Edison

"I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

VP Biden has been rather silent on this.  I wonder why?  Oh yeah, this is how he felt when Bush was spying on 2 million Americans making phone calls to known terrorists.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2qgU8kJt-0&feature[/youtube]

Respectfully, he was not a Government employee.  He was a contractor.  He does not know what happens with the information he is paid to retreive.  He is not privvy to the intent or purpose behind information being sought.  If he wants to report fraud, waste and abuse inside his own company and how they are doing something illegal or unethical within the bounds of their contract, then he should be protected by the whistleblower act.  He is not.  He is taking a small portion of the picture and making up the rest of what is going on, and pointing the finger directly at the Government.

I am not saying that I agree with the whole wire tapping thing.  I didn't much like it when Bush did it and I don't much like it now.  However, I understand that if lives can be saved by intercepting information about an upcoming terrorist attack, I would be more ticked off to find out we had the ability to stop it but didn't because they didn't want to tap phones or pull records. 

People are data mined every day, cell phone companies, email providers, websites.  If you want to live in fear, live in fear that, regardless of what the Government does, your information is still being gathered.  As long as you are not doing drug deals over email, trading kiddy porn or plotting a terrorist attack, I am pretty sure they won't care what they heck you are saying.  I am almost willing to say that they are keying in on certain phrases that are common with Terrorism.     

It's one thing for private companies to do it...  
Private companies:
a)  we know they do it... it's in all those terms and conditions you agree to
b)  they're subject to regulation and monitored.. can only use it in certain ways, etc...

Big Brother:
where's the oversight?
what are they doing with it?
we all pretty much knew they were doing it.. but it's all super secret classified stuff
who has access to it (apparently any schmo contractor)

If ever they're a debate/topic that's eligible for the "slippery slope" argument...
This one is it.

I bet we hit all those around here....

Everybody's gotta have a dream....that whole thing disappeared a long time ago....way before my time or anyone else alive today.

Bruce Schneier's post today is quite good:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/prosecuting_sno.html?rss=1

JCnOwasso,
Here we must simply disagree.  The United States Government has no legal right to violate its own charter.  Until the people's representatives in congress vote to repeal the 4th amendment, and the president signs such a repeal, this act is unconstitutional, and their is no logical or emotional rationale that would make it so.

As for Snoden's status as a government contractor, he obviously had more of a picture than the public, and the information he presented was indeed a complete picture and the administration has admitted such.  He points his finger at HIS government because there is no other actor.

Yes, we are indeed data-mined every day, but that is by our own choice. Becoming a member of Google, or Facebook, or signing a contract with a service provider, in many cases gives them the right to use your data, but they must disclose that to you, along with the purpose for that data and wether or not they intend to provide your data to others.  If they violate that contract they are liable and you are eligible for appropriate damages.

When the federal government collects your private information, they are not doing so with your permission.  The intent of the gathering is to identify and build evidence for prosecution, or to build some form of legal leverage against you.  It is no different than if the government were to search your home or your car every day and catalog your possessions.

FISA (and remember the F stands for Foreign) is a law which prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign powers" and "agents of foreign powers" (which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of espionage or terrorism).  There is no prevision within the law to allow for a "blanket warrant" to collect private data on all Americans.

So, wether you are perfectly comfortable with the government keeping an eye on you or not, is irrelevant.  It is not legal, nor does the establishment of the Patriot Act or FISA make it legal.

No matter what happens, aside from all electronic technology ceasing to operate,  this activity will never stop.

Fair enough, sir.  To be clear, I never intended to change your mind on the subject... I respect the fact that you disagree.  I understand exactly what you are saying, and, in fact, I agree, for the most part.

 

 

To just surrender to government is never the answer.  Though many are growing more comfortable with the idea of statism, we are not yet there as a country, and our constitution still remains strong.

There are tens of thousands of people that work for agencies like NSA who must have knowledge of their government committing crimes against its own people.  Snowden may have just gotten the ball rolling.  We will have to see how fearful others have become.  I suspect this is just the beginning.

You are typically fair in your discourse, and I look forward to exploring this topic more as the issue matures.

I think we have much more to learn for Snoden over the next couple of months, unless he is disappeared or accidentally tripps over a hellfire missile.  I also suspect others will emerge.

So you think someone will say "Okay you guys, knock it off." and this will stop?

Not sure what to think of the website or the author, but this is pretty interesting

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100221535/is-edward-snowdens-story-unravelling-why-the-guardians-scoop-is-looking-a-bit-dodgy/

Coburn, R-Okla., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Americans would be proud and amazed by the work being done by the National Security Administration and would have no concerns that their civil liberties were being violated.

I think Coburn's response was delayed a few days, as it took time to travel from whatever planet it was sent from.


(http://saveaccess.org/sites/saveaccess.org/files/images/att_splash.png)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589012-38/nsa-surveillance-retrospective-at-t-verizon-never-denied-it

What a country of Wookies we have become.....


Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

There are always unanticipated complications with new uses for technology, and in this case, the accused just may have a valid use for the data:

...Louis argued in court Wednesday that the government should be forced to turn over phone location records for two cellphones Brown may have used because it could prove he was not present for one of the attempted bank robberies, on July 26 on Federal Highway in Lighthouse Point.

http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/accused-bank-robber-wants-nsa.html (http://boingboing.net/2013/06/13/accused-bank-robber-wants-nsa.html)

OK, there's an obvious flaw because the data would show where the cellphones were, not necessarily where the accused was.

What are his chances of getting the data?

At what point in our life do we look at the things that were said in the 17 and 1800's and realize that they may have been useful and true for that time, but today we have to handle things differently.  When do we realize that our todays self would have invaded our yesteryear self for the forced relocation and in some case, slaughter, of the natural inhabitants of the land, or slavery, or allowing Justin Beiber to enter the states.  Kind of like the ten commandments, probably great in their time, but today it is just kind of "hey, how bout that", it is more a symbol than a guideline.  Like if you don't know it is bad to kill, you have mental issues.  Seeing the ten commandments isn't going to cause you to realize "Holy Smile, I didn't realize I should not kill".     

In all cases it was government policy to engage in genocide and extermination of the native inhabitants....just so we are crystal clear on that point.

And how would you know it is bad to kill - actually, to commit murder as the real definition means - without the training, education, and growing up with the infrastructure the society provides for such things?  Goes to one of the points I have hammered on incessantly here - we have no sense or knowledge of history.  (Perhaps in part because of attitudes as expressed just above - "may have been useful and true for that time....".)  Well, the platitude the really applies is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it...."  (As an aside - here is an interesting little historical tidbit -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke)  The Ten Commandments is an exceptional item as a guide to life, regardless of time or space, or whether attached to a religious doctrine or not.  The only thing I would add to make complete would be the Golden Rule.  That's all ya need....even if your God is Buddha or Shintoism or you feel your Creator is a cosmic gamma ray burst - the first still applies.

Of course, if the Ten Commandments had been considered at all, by any of the "Christian" countries that colonized it, this country would not exist as you experience it today....  (stealing, murder, covet, false witness, adultery - as in rape and pillage, just to name a few.)


I can tell you with no reservation or doubt that human nature has not changed substantially in 200 years.  Nor in 2,000 or even 3,000.  What has changed is the available technology to allow one group to dominate and make submissive another group.  That is all.

I notice you've been taking your smart pills lately.  Or more likely, I have failed to recognize your intelligence, and for that I am sorry.  ::)

We have the right to amend that wich no longer applies, but the establishment of what we consider as rights changes little.  You can't simply say that people no longer have a right to their own privacy, or speech, or any of the other things that we accept as part of our liberty, simply because technology makes those rights easier to violate.

The limits we place on government are very important. The Constitution does not grant rights to people.  The constitution restricts Government.   

The Constitution is a "barbed-wire entanglement" designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power. – Jacob Hornberger

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add "within the law," because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual. – Thomas Jefferson

The main point of a constitution is to put limits on what aspects of life are subject to majority rule. – Ronald Bailey

I am fairly positive it is the Constitution that empowers the Government, not restricts.  Now it could be said that the Constitution was the list of guidelines for our republic and how it should function overall.  But I am sure that we mean the same thing.

Now, the part I have changed to red... so does this mean that the right believes that marriage is subject to majority rule?

Heir, I completely agree, I am just saying that just because we did something back then does not make it right... and in many/most cases, what we did was horribly wrong.  I can't really agree that human nature has changed significantly over 200 or even 2000 years.  Somethings are the same or have slightly varied, but there is so much that has drastically changed.  But I think it has been technology that has caused human nature to change.  I really think we have to approach things different these days.  When the enemy is living among you and utilizing everything that you utilize I believe that at some point you have to change your approach.  I know that not everyone feels this way, but I am pretty sure the Government could give two craps less about my daily life and what I have to say. 

Now as for how did I know I shouldn't kill someone?  It is just one of those things you know, but I understand what you mean.  Had I grown up differently, I wouldn't have understood that.  Honestly, the only thing that I think should be needed is the golden rule.  Regardless of race, creed, religion, sex or sexual preference; you should treat others as you wish to be treated.   

Murder...not kill.  There is a time to every purpose - including killing someone if they are trying to do severe bodily harm to you or yours.  Huge difference!

I put the Golden Rule as the top criteria for evaluating how I should act.  Reaction is a slightly different case due to the initiation of the interaction by the other party...generally try to approach it from GR direction anyway....

I haven't changed...you are maturing and becoming a more well rounded individual and personality....

Keep it up!!  I'll try to help any way I can.

It must signal the end times... also finding myself being in agreement with Gaspar of late.
I feel a disturbance in the Force.

Can't argue with that in the slightest.    I must have been angsty last week.  I just felt like arguing to argue.   

That's fantastic!!  I am always up for that....so let 'er rip anytime!!

I have a very old, long time friend who has extensive discussions with me from time to time...we usually start by picking a topic, if it hasn't naturally arisen, then will say, "Pick a side...I'll take the other"...

We will turn him to the light side!  Endeavor to persevere!

Where your drivers license photo and fingerprint actually goes:




http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-photo-id-databases-become-troves-for-police/2013/06/16/6f014bd4-ced5-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html

I want to know where all this so-called data consolidation is that was supposed to occur.  I have various background investigations (repeating) from organizations ranging from the Salvation Army to HazMat license to TSA flight risk evaluations and more.  When are they gonna get their act together so all of these groups can see one set of fingerprints, one drug test results set, and one passport picture so I don't have to wait sometimes several days a year on all this carp!!  Just let me on the dam plane already without all the scanner crap!!  Why should I have to give fingerprints yet AGAIN just to get a machine gun...??  What kind of nonsense is this!!?

The Senate hearings into the wholesale surveillance are going well.   ::)

Q:  Does the NSA have the ability to listen to Americans phone calls or read their emails?
A:  No. We do not have that authority.

Are you sensing a little misdirection and evasion there?  (I am....)

(https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/s403x403/1016659_618524708165808_211056329_n.jpg)

(https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/p480x480/430149_142494575947066_2022503117_n.jpg)

National Intelligence Director James Clapper apologised on Tuesday for telling Congress in March that the NSA did not have a policy of gathering data on millions of Americans.
He said in a letter to the Senate intelligence committee that his answer had been "clearly erroneous".


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23158242

...this, after the Bolivian Presidents plane was forced to land in Vienna to be searched for Snowden.


http://rt.com/usa/kiriakou-snowden-letter-leak-618

...but in this age of electronic mail, good old snail mail isnt being left behind:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?_r=0

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.
“In the past, mail covers were used when you had a reason to suspect someone of a crime,” said Mark D. Rasch, who started a computer crimes unit in the fraud section of the criminal division of the Justice Department and worked on several fraud cases using mail covers. “Now it seems to be, ‘Let’s record everyone’s mail so in the future we might go back and see who you were communicating with.’ Essentially you’ve added mail covers on millions of Americans.” 

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57595529-38/feds-tell-web-firms-to-turn-over-user-account-passwords/

And the tea-baggers just keep on spewing stupid.....it's like they don't understand that their "champions" - the RWRE....aren't.

We have lost our way.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

Malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.

“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsyrklevich.   According to Domaintools, the malware’s command-and-control IP address in Virginia is allocated to Science Applications International Corporation. SAIC is a major technology contractor for defense and intelligence agencies, including the FBI.

If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.

Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gather information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002.

The heart of the malicious Javascript is a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box.

It looks up the victim’s MAC address — a unique hardware identifier for the computer’s network or Wi-Fi card — and the victim’s Windows hostname. Then it sends it to the Virginia server.

In short, Magneto reads like the x86 machine code embodiment of a carefully crafted court order authorizing an agency to blindly trespass into the personal computers of a large number of people, but for the limited purpose of identifying them.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

That lucky traffic stop for improper use of turn signal that netted a bale of marijuana?  ...not luck, but information gathered from illegal wiretaps:



How these look in the local media:

Published: 8/14/2010 10:19 pm
The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics finds nearly 1,500 pounds of marijuana inside a trailer in East Tulsa. Agents made the bust Saturday afternoon near Admiral & 122nd East Avenue. OBN says the drugs are worth $1.2 million on the streets. Agents made the bust after getting a tip from a concerned citizen. The agency says the drugs are most likely from Mexico. Three people have been arrested but their names have not been released.

Published: 4/17/2010 3:20 pm
Tulsa police find 1,500 pounds of marijuana inside a trailer in East Tulsa. TPD says two officers saw a Ford F350 with Mississippi tags and a 20 ft. enclosed trailer sitting in a parking lot at 27th and Memorial, just after midnight Saturday. Officers then searched the vehicle and found the illegal drugs. TPD says it is still unclear whether the marijuana was intended for Tulsa.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/08/07/uk-dea-irs-idUKBRE9761B620130807

(Reuters) - Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

Did Faux News suddenly have an epiphany?

Domestic spying is dangerous to freedom

By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
How is it that the government can charge Edward Snowden with espionage for telling a journalist that the feds have been spying on all Americans and many of our allies, but the NSA itself, in a public relations campaign intended to win support for its lawlessness, can reveal secrets and do so with impunity? That question goes to the heart of the rule of law in a free society.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/08/domestic-spying-is-dangerous-to-freedom/


It's hard to imagine they would turn on one of Bush's pet programs, unless...

Since Snowden’s June 6th revelations about massive NSA spying, we have learned that all Americans who communicate via telephone or the Internet (who doesn’t?) have had all of their communications swept up by the federal government for two-plus years.  


Oh, yeah, right.

Nap is a Libertarian.  He was long before he was a sitting judge back in the 80s and 90s.  He has always been extremely critical of both Republicans and Democrats, and generally anyone who serves but is unwilling to live the word of the constitution.

He has written several great books:
What Happens When the Government Breaks its Own Laws
Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America
The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land
A Nation of Sheep
It is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom
Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History

He was far more critical of Bush.  He thought that Bush and Cheney should be jailed.
http://thinkprogress.org/media/2008/02/20/19701/napolitano-wiretapping/

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TosF6Ope53E[/youtube]

Internet Provider Lavabit shuts down amid Snoden investigation.

This was Snoden's email provider.

http://lavabit.com/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/08/snowdens-e-mail-provider-is-closing-cannot-legally-say-why/

Other secure private services now following suit.

http://gizmodo.com/another-secure-email-service-silent-circle-is-shuttin-1075763867

We know these arent chance "traffic stops" but the lying doesnt miss a beat:

http://newsok.com/downtown-oklahoma-city-traffic-stop-ends-in-pot-bust/article/3871396

So, we bugged the UN last year.
Obama Administration Buggs the UN (http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/25/us-usa-security-nsa-un-idUSBRE97O0DD20130825)

(http://lastbesthope.sayanythingblog.com/files/2013/03/Obama-facepalm.jpg)

Absolute power = absolute corruption. 
NSA Workers Spy on Love Interests (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10263880/NSA-employees-spied-on-their-lovers-using-eavesdropping-programme.html)
(http://standwitharizona.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/obama_facepalm.png)

So you admit that Nixon, Reagan, and Bush were absolutely corrupt...!!

Since they all did that and more.

It's that faux outrage that permeates that side of the aisle.  It's ok to do it.  Only when our guy is in the seat.

It really should NEVER be ok to do it.

Had the occasion to listen to Fox News surrogate - KRMG for about an hour last Friday after 5 until 6.  Time after time after time they reported on the Hasan plea deal and how it was just so far beyond the pale that he would get off without the event being labeled "act of terror" for murdering 13 people.  And not one time did they mention Robert Bales and his life without parole easy street sentence....for murdering 16 people.  Wouldn't that, too, be an "act of terror"??  But they did manage to talk a lot about the important stuff of the day....the massive controversy swirling around Ben Affleck as Batman!!  Oh, the horror of it all....

I'm not terribly excited about that either.

Bingo!  It was, and is never ok!

But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies. – Alan Watts

The bigger debate there is that by not labeling an obvious act of terror as such, the government gets out of paying the survivors and their families any combat benefits.  It was also an obvious  political move so that the administration could claim "no act of terror" on their watch.  It was a rather despicable political act in a long chain of despicable political acts by our attorney general.

Hassan himself said that he wanted to kill American military men and women so that they would not go to Afghanistan and kill his fellow Muslims.  It is an admitted act of terror, no matter how you wish to parse it. 

So then what was Robert Bales??  Chopped liver...?   (Yeah, to be totally gruesome, I bet there was some of that...)

If we are gonna call one thing what it is, then all things should be called what they are.

I wonder if Hassan himself had Robert Bales in mind??

Don't really care what you call Bales.  He was a murderer who killed innocent people.  The difference is that the classification of Bales crimes (terror, murder, whatever) has no impact on his victims or their surviving families. Actually. . .that's not entirely true. . .the families of Bales victims were treated far better than the families of our own US service men gunned down by Hassan.  The US paid $860,000 to the victims' families in Bales case, allocated as $50,000 for each person killed and $10,000 for each person injured.  AE Holder blocked any additional pay to our own servicemen and their families by tinkering with the semantics.

It's "We're so sorry for your tragic loss at the hands of our rogue soldier, here's $50,000." V.S. "Maim, your son was a great soldier, too bad he died in an act of workplace violence.  Please accept this photocopied letter from the president."

I want outrage over the Aflek/Batman casting, damn it!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28S-aOWtFdo[/youtube]

'I'd Tap That' And Other NSA Pick-Up Lines Are All The Rage

http://kwgs.com/post/id-tap-and-other-nsa-pick-lines-are-all-rage (http://kwgs.com/post/id-tap-and-other-nsa-pick-lines-are-all-rage)

Mass surveillance; so easy a caveman can do it.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

"Hemisphere" covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Some four billion call records are added to the database every day.

The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-phone-trove-eclipsing-nsas.html?_r=0

(https://sphotos-b-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1231481_641401145925961_1442095045_n.jpg)

The Motorola Atrix Android phone had this first.

Apple.  Not quite the innovator people think they are.

Better at announcing things though.

True.  Still not impressed.

iPhone.  It's like 'smart phones for dummies'.   ;D

That's obviously why I'm an iPhone fanboi ;)

Well, so far iOS7 sucks on iPad.  Looks pretty, but much slower.  I figured there would be something new or groundbreaking, but lately it seems Apple is only focusing on aesthetics.  Glad I went with the HTC 1 for my pocket data appliance.

I have one iDevice..iPhone 4S that work provides me.  I updated to 7 last night and was pleasantly surprised.  Some changes were made to the mail client (the ability to mass mark messages read without using some stupid workaround).

But my Galaxy Nexus is still far better.  And when Google/LG puts out the Nexus 5 next month or November, I'm buying it.  I love unlocked phones, and they make the price point easy to buy.  I haven't owned a contract phone in three years now.

So far, I like IOS 7 on my 4S and it didn't do the predictable slow down of the apps in the phone like I experienced when they updated the IOS on the iPhone 3 about the time the iP 4 came out.  Our office manager said she was third in line at 3am at the AT & T store in Tulsa Hills and the line was wrapped around the building by the time she left shortly after 8am.  I'm in no real hurry to get my 5S other than MC wants my current phone so she can get out of the stone ages with communication and her four year old stone age phone is doing the death spiral.

She's the notoriously cheap one in our house. Not a bad thing!

Christmas isn't too far away.

Just got an iPad Friday (typing on it now).  Upgraded to iOS7, so can't tell the difference.  Seems "smoother" than Windows, but is slow.  Not much impressed with any of the so called smart phoneage...gonna just stick with the old Nokia 6010 dinosaurus phone.

At least these are professionals who would never abuse the power the wield...


The NSA inspector general, in the letter dated September 11, detailed 12 investigations that found the NSA's civilian and military employees used the agency's spying tools to search for email addresses or try to snoop on phone calls of current or former lovers, spouses and relatives, both foreign and American.
In one instance, a military member queried six email addresses of a former girlfriend, an American, on the first day of having access to the data collection system in 2005.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/27/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog-idUSBRE98Q0PW20130927

It's natural for government to abuse power.  That is the purpose of our constitution, to bind power.

After all, these guys aren't priests.  Oh, wait! Bad example.  :D

What ever you do, don't eat the apple!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/meet-the-machines-that-steal-your-phones-data
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/08/cellphone-data-spying-nsa-police/3902809/

Its natural for people to abuse power. Animals too. People in government, with guns, in cars, on bikes, in boats, flying airplanes, using field binoculars, listening on party lines, overhearing conversations at parties ALL are abusing power and privilege and have since forever.

Why do you think the nature of the situation or who rules and how they rule would make any difference? Privacy and security are illusions we create to allow us some sanity.

BTW, I also have the HTC1. Took some getting used to but I like it now.

Bah.  Got the LG Nexus 5 last month.  Once I started buying unlocked Google phones, I don't think I'll ever have another 'contract' phone.  This makes it easy for me to fire my carrier and go with a different one if they should make me angry.   ;D

I don't have the tech savvy yet to do that. Might want to buy you lunch some day. Besides, not only are my needs for technology relatively minor and definitely secondary to all my other needs, I have this host of family that tags on to my contract.

If you have a family plan, you can still contract one-by-one.  Makes it more difficult to leave the carrier outright however.  Have my mother on my plan, but her old Nokia bar phone is so old (I got it for her during the ice storm of 2007) that we could both leave.  I might get her a SnapFon as they make good, easy to use phones for seniors with big buttons.  She'd never use text anyway.  She barely uses her mobile phone since we still have a landline (reasons I've explained in the past) but it's peace of mind for me in case I'm gone and power goes out or something.

Plus, the unlocked phone really doesn't take 'tech savvy'.  You just don't get all the carrier bloatware, and, as I've said, if you get upset and are out of your contract, you can switch.  You can even switch to an unlocked phone before your contract is up if you want, but you're still obligated to complete the terms of the contract, or pay the ETF (which in most cases is really not that much).

What exactly is an "unlocked" Google phone? Does it lack a sim card? Do you buy packages of data and minutes from various providers? Like a month to month renter?

Unlocked means a phone you don't buy from the carrier and lock yourself into a contract for the discounted price of the phone.  It means you can choose what carrier to use via sim card.  Many carrier locked phones don't allow this.  Once your contract expires, you can ask them to unlock the phone, but it's almost like pulling teeth.

Sure, you'll pay a little of a premium to get the Google unlocked phone at $349.  But try and buy a brand new unlocked Samsung G4..that will run you about 700.

And you STILL won't have an iPhone!

Thank the maker.  Apple can bite me!

I saw an unlocked Moto for about $179 which looked a lot like my HTC1. I don't use much data so I could probably save using it and a cheap carrier.

Are you saying that Iphones cannot be unlocked? My wife wants the Iphone.

Sorry I'm so dense. I still consider it a phone rather than a pocket tech device.

Most don't use sim cards anymore.  AT&T, FamilyMobile (T-Mobile), and I think Verizon have sim options.  Goes to GSM versus CDMA.  I have been going through smartphone systems with a Samsung Note I borrowed.  Getting ready to buy a CDMA (non-sim) phone so can try US Cellular, Sprint (Virgin mobile) and maybe Cricket.  So far, I am not impressed.  I have been irked with AT&T for a while, but even with all the problems I have with them in my traffic pattern, the alternatives have been worse, so far.  Blech!!     (StraightTalk sucks about as bad as FamilyMobile)

I hear good things about Sprint, but when I use their phones, still seem to get dropped calls.  Anyone have input on Sprint?  Or US Cellular?

And 4G is still kind of silly.  Definitely not ready for prime time...

Unlocked is good.



And while we're waiting for a decent cell phone company, here is something that may actually be something that could be acted on with results....

http://www.upworthy.com/people-should-know-about-this-awful-thing-we-do-and-most-of-us-are-simply-unaware?g=2&c=reccon1

I hadn't thought about it, but rarely ever actually talk on my cell phone anymore.  the vast majority of time, even for communication, it's a text or an email.  90% of my use of my "phone" is for email, calendar reminders, perusing websites and/or apps (it's an iphone) and tethering my laptop when I'm not in a WiFi area.  (It's amazing how much work I can get done in the parking lot of a soccer complex waiting for practice to be finished.)

I fixed your statement to my situation except that I don't have a data plan and don't use my phone for data.  I don't feel the need to be "connected" 24/7  unless that is 24 minutes, 7 times in a decade.
 
 ;D

Rebound, you may be missing a lot of fun watching practices and conversing with the other parents. Recently I drove past LaFortune park where kids and parents used to play. Now I notice the parents, teenagers and a lot of grade school kids sitting at the park texting. Same thing at Riverparks. A few kids swinging by themselves. If we could make the parks a wi-fi hotspot we could save money by letting the swings and slides rust away!

Some sobering graphs from Forbes:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/10/this-is-how-often-your-phone-company-hands-data-over-to-law-enforcement
(http://b-i.forbesimg.com/kashmirhill/files/2013/12/telco-gov-user-requests.jpg)

And the fairgrounds doesnt surprise me, family living nearby mention they go from 5 bars to nothing at times during the fair.

The only way to save America is to make it the Soviet Union:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2013/12/27/judge-rules-nsa-phone-surveillance-legal/WaF4dgUZoZFdsCfYAWZoAO/story.html

“Our investigation found that bulk collection of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-01-13/nsa-phone-data-has-no-discernible-impact-on-terrorism-report

"The Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262098004/review-of-terrorism-cases-finds-nsa-spying-helped-very-little

So....is Snowden a great American hero yet??


The RWRE made one of Oliver North, so Snowden ought to be considered at least ahero even if not great American hero....

Perhaps not necessarily hero, but he served his country (whether or not his country wants to admit it).

Watched the president's speech on changes in the NSA.  It was amazingly tedious and nuanced, and absolutely pointless.  He took a long time, using the infuriating phrase "let me be clear" several times, to say absolutely nothing.  He used China and the Soviet Union's past and current intelligence practices to justify what the NSA is doing. He even said "Don't be mad at us because we do it better." It was a BS speech from start to finish.

Basically what it amounted to is YES we've been spying on citizens and foreigners, YES James Clapper obviously lied to congress, YES we will continue to spy on you, but we're going to "take steps" to store the information in a different way.  He kept using the phrase "I'm calling for this, and I'm calling for that."  pancakes! There is nothing to "call for."

The NSA, like the FBI and the CIA, fall under executive jurisdiction, meaning that if the president wants to change or stop the broad spying practices of the agency, all he needs to do is order such. Why does he continue to treat the American public like idiots?  Some of us are not his followers, and as such, we understand how our government works.

He's asking congress to get involved in some manner, meaning PUNT!  This guy hates to make decisions.  He hates responsibility.  What an unmitigated failure.

If Snowden had done anything, it has been to expose this president as even more of a hypocritical political puppet.

EDIT: Actually forgot to mention my favorite part. . . Obama attempted to justify NSA spying by comparing the NSA to the historical actions of Paul Revere.

Dear Mr. President,
Paul Revere's intelligence committee in Boston was created for citizens to gather intelligence on their own government. Fool!

Sorry, but it was like he was giving a speech to a bunch of ten year olds.

Embarrassing.

The teleprompter that got him elected is very different from the one he reads from today.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAQlsS9diBs[/youtube]

"(Obama's) own White House panel, as well as a federal court judge ... both said there is zero evidence – zero – that this metadata program is actually effective in stopping any terrorist plots"

http://thelead.blogs.cnn.com/2014/01/17/greenwald-obama-nsa-speech-nsa-spying

So when you also consider that many of the programs Snowden exposed were in use BEFORE 9/11 (under various names) as well as the Boston Bombing...

Yes, but it is an excellent tool to gather information necessary to win elections!

For all of those who thought we would never become "that country," now we are!

As Diane Feinstein said on Meet the Press yesterday:

“New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness,” Feinstein said. “We need to be prepared." . . .“Because the whole purpose of this program is to provide instantaneous information, to be able to disrupt any plot that may be taking place,” Feinstein said.

Yet they admit they have not been able to use any of this information for such.  That would lead a logical person to conclude that they are using it for something else. The power to know what everyone is saying, where everyone is going, and how everyone lives their lives is intoxicating, I'm sure!

Our president claims "we are going to store it somewhere else" yet construction on the 1.5 billion dollar NSA storage facility "Bumblehive" continues.
(http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/utah-data-center-entrance.jpg)
(http://nsa.gov1.info/data/collect-citizen-data.jpg)

Such an under-utilization would reek of ineptitude.
You are more likely to find that data as a commodity traded among agencies like ATF, DEA, IRS etc.

When you read about some lucky cop just happening to make a random traffic stop where he just happens to cut open the gas tank and find a bazillion dollars worth of marijuana, well, thanks to Snowden we now have a better idea of how "Parallel Construction" (evidence laundering) works.

We are that country, now.

Hate to burst the bubble, but we have been that for a while...

Oh. You haven't burst my bubble, it's just disappointing that this all had to come to light under the current president.  Had it been Bush or any other Repub, the media would have turned it into a shitstorm and the public would be marching on Washington.  Unfortunately under the current administration the media is content to label it as a fake scandal, and the liberal half of the liberty-minded is content with saying "Oh, well.  It's always been this way. Our government is just looking out for us." 

I really wish Snowden had done his thing when Bush was president.

I seem to recall a past president being impeached, and resigning for recording conversations in a single room.

It did come to light before...under Nixon.  Reagan.  Baby Bush.  None of whom received the kind of non-event BS this current clown is getting.

One little example; we have heard ad nauseum about Benghazi...4 killed, which IS tragic and deserves some attention.  But not calls for impeachment.  UNLESS the same criteria had been applied to Baby Bush - which it was not - when 32 people were killed during his regime at inadequately secured embassies.  Where were the cries for impeachment then?  Or even an investigation?

What happened to the RWRE when atrocities occurred?  Again...perspective.

Were US Military assets ordered to stand-down in the midst of the attacks, to avoid the impression that an attack was taking place on 9/11 in an election year?

Did the president and his staff immediately deny terrorist activity and continue that narrative for two weeks, even though they knew that very night that the group was linked to Al Qaeda?

Was a cover-story created about an internet video so that the president wouldn't' have to miss an important $30K fundraising event the next day?

Did the administration then take participation in a media event to showcase an American "film-maker" being arrested with a bag over his head for producing such a film?

Did the State department continue to hold back information and restrict access to survivors for over a year?

The truth is that our embassies are not safe.  The issue is why would the president and his staff choose to lie about what occurred?
You are right, this was a horrible attack but it was no worse than others we have seen in recent years.  The difference is that in those instances, we know what happened, and we took action, both during and after the attacks to secure our assets. The perpetrators in those attacks are either dead or incarcerated, and there were investigations by the FBI. 

As of today, even though we have the perpetrators of Benghazi on video and know their names, the FBI has yet to arrest anyone.


It is fairly obvious.  The false narrative was a political move to avoid the immediate inconvenience to Obama, and has now become a cover-up to avoid the repercussions to Hillary.

It has now gotten to the point where even CNN and MSNBC can't deny its importance as an issue.  They may suppress it all they like, and belittle those who pursue it, but there is too much time between now and 2016, and scandals of this magnitude don't lie dormant that long.  Facts have a way of working themselves out over time.

What's up, FOX news guy?

Surely someone didnt just hijack this into another Benghazi witch hunt...

Oh, puuuulllllleeeeaaasssseeee!!!


And even if 100% real... pales in comparison to artificially creating an event that killed over 4,000 of our kids and squandered $2 trillion of our wealth!!  Off budget of course, so it didn't look as bad as it was!  But it did get Cheney and his cronies $90 billion in no-bid "gubmint" work....that's the important thing!!

That statement is offensive to Hillary.

Agencies have traded recipes for grabbing location and planning data when a target uses Google Maps, and for vacuuming up address books, buddy lists, phone logs and the geographic data embedded in photos when someone sends a post to the mobile versions of Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter and other services.

http://www.zdnet.com/u-k-u-s-spy-agencies-scoop-leaky-app-data-new-snowden-leaks-say-7000025628

Despite the multiyear effort and supposed value of smartphone data...the agencies' struggle to make use of it all; apparently crunching one month of NSA cell phone data yielded 8,615,650 people of interest, and required 120 computers...the report found nothing suspicious or noteworthy.

(http://cdn-static.zdnet.com/i/r/story/70/00/025628/screen-shot-2014-01-27-at-1-05-34-pm-620x464.png?hash=MGSyMTIwMG&upscale=1)

Terrorists...Lawyers, what's the difference? 

The list of those caught up in the global surveillance net cast by the National Security Agency and its overseas partners, from social media users to foreign heads of state, now includes another entry: American lawyers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/eavesdropping-ensnared-american-law-firm.html?_r=0

The NSA has been remotely activating your webcam to run "automatic facial recognition experiments" (to monitor existing suspects and to "discover new targets of interest") or watching you masturbate: 

http://www.zdnet.com/big-brother-really-is-watching-you-7000026716/
 
The latest revelations show that ordinary citizens are being targeted, purely because they like the convenience of talking to each other through the Web.
The data was fed into the NSA's XKeyscore program, making it searchable by analysts.

Sounds like Pogo stuff, "We have seen the enemy...and he is us!"

They've been checking your "O" face.

"O" face? Orgasm face? Here it is for free.... :o

Most of us in the IT world recognize the vulnerability of the webcam.  That's why we have duct tape over it.  NSA can't get around duct tape. :D

Edit to add:
Many of Tulsa's larger employers have scripts on company laptops that allow admins to view screen, key-log, and webcam activity. We find this regularly when we have to work on systems or acquire old hardware.

Chances are if you work for a big company with a large IT department, there is a good possibility that they are logging your activity, at least for future CYA, and to avoid corporate espionage. If your company also manages government contracts you can almost guarantee it.

If there is a network security specialist on staff, you can count on the fact that they are reviewing endpoint reports (reports that show daily internet activity, use of proxy, personal webmail, or 3rd party email applications like thunderbird or remote connectivity via RDP, FTP, VNC or other protocol).  I know a few of these guys and am amazed by the data they have available on employees, and the speed at which they can intercept and shut down a tunnel if they find that sensitive corporate data is at risk.

It's a good idea to read whatever section of the handbook covers software/hardware and the use of company computers.


 

Doesn't do smile for the microphone, though. :P


What this has to do with NSA spying, I'm not quite sure. If you are an employee using a computer supplied by your employer, they have every right to watch (and log) what you do. Nobody is, at all but the largest employers, but they certainly can. Anybody that has to be SOX compliant will have monitoring systems installed, the question is whether anybody actually looks at the collected data. You'd be amazed at what can be deduced about your activity just from the stuff your computer sends back to the AD server in a Windows environment, with no need of network sniffing or proxies. Event Viewer alone can tell a person a lot. Throw some third party tools on there and it's like the freakin' Panopticon.

That said, exfiltrating data from most companies is basically trivial if you have a tiny bit of patience and they don't have the end-user machines locked down like..well, nothing is locked down that well in my experience. If an employee wants to steal data they have access to and either has a bit of technical competence or help from an outside source, they are going to be successful no matter what controls you put in place.

I had about 3 months of trying to get the company laptop microphone to work - and enlisted the aid of 3 IT guys over that time.  Could not get it to work.  Finally, one day for no apparent reason, it turned on and has worked fine ever since.  (It came on during boot up that morning.)  I guess the monitors didn't want me to use it at all....

Thanks, new Pope.

Works for me...

If the TSA ruined flying, then the NSA will be remembered for ruining the internet:




The NSA would pretend to be Facebook and trick unsuspecting users' computers into thinking they were connecting to Facebook's servers. Then, the NSA would hack into your hard drive and steal your personal data.

The TURBINE program also used spam emails to infect computers will malware. The malware installed by the NSA could then gain access to the users' microphone to record conversations, webcams to take photos, record browser history, save passwords and logins, corrupt downloaded files, and take data from flash drives that users plugged into their computers.

The NSA allowed an automated bot to act without oversight and target users indiscriminately, whether they were criminals or not. Once the bot had taken over the process, the program quickly escalated to include as many as 85,000 to 100,000 malware implants.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/03/12/nsa-plans-infect-millions-computers-malware

So, how would the NSA duplicate Facebook? They would have to duplicate the interface that the user sees as well as pass the information to your Facebook friends, and duplicate the interface your friends see, as well as the ads, instant communication, and regular feeds for postings. They would have to duplicate it, and integrate it so that the users and Facebook would not know that anything happened.

The traffic monitors Facebook uses would see a decrease in traffic to their site. Unless the NSA can spoof all of the ISP's and all the social media sites, and I don't think the Utah data center has the possibility to spoof the web in north America.

It's past tense.  They started in 2004 and fully automated it in 2010.

http://vimeo.com/video/88822483

They don't. They sit in the middle between you and Facebook. So you send a request to Facebook, they copy it, check the cookies to see if you're a person of interest, and if so, intercept Facebook's response and inject whatever malware they desire before forwarding it on to you. Basically, they have installed what I would term malware and what they would term interception software on a large fraction of the routers that make up the Internet. This gives them the capability to reroute your traffic through their servers on its way to its final destination and vice versa. Or just copy it and save it for later.

It's ancient history now, but there's a chance that if you were surfing porn in 2011 it was passing thru an FBI-operated server.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2406837,00.asp

Not me. I type with both hands.

RM never disappoints.  ;D

Neither does Snowden.  This just keeps getting better...

The U.S. National Security Agency has "swallowed" unnamed country's entire telephone network, recording every call made over a 30-day period for instant replay.
http://www.zdnet.com/nsa-records-foreign-countrys-phone-calls-for-instant-replay-7000027441/
The latest batch of leaked documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, published on Tuesday by The Washington Post, detailed how the program, started in 2009, can record "every single" phone call nationwide.

If Your Smartphone Was Just Hacked By The Government, This Could Be How It Happened

Discovered: a remote-controlled trojan that can capture anything from keystrokes to voice and video content to calendar entries.
Researchers at Kaspersky Lab in the U.S. and Canada's Citizen Lab have just uncovered the global servers of a particularly invasive brand of remote-controlled trojan that governments can use to hack into--and take control of-- smartphones.

The Italian cyber offense firm HackingTeam advertises its product, Galileo, as spyware to use against criminals but its victims include “activists and human rights advocates, as well as journalists and politicians,” Kaspersky said in a press release.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3032330/fast-feed/if-your-smartphone-was-just-hacked-by-the-government-this-could-be-how-it-happened

Eyes on You: Experts Reveal Police Hacking Methods
"This in many ways is the police surveillance of the now and the future," said Morgan Marquis-Boire, a security researcher with Citizen Lab and a lead author on one of the reports. "What we need to actually decide how we're comfortable with it being used and under what circumstances."
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/eyes-experts-reveal-police-hacking-methods-24285294

Its true, the NSA really can see you naked... ;D

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden says the analysts who monitored the texts and e-mails of millions of Americans would sometimes share intercepted nude photos and sex texts with colleagues.

"Many of the people searching through the haystacks (of information) were young, enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old," Snowden told the publication. "In the course of their daily work, they stumble across something that is completely unrelated in any sort of necessary sense – for example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation. But they're extremely attractive. So what do they do?

"They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says, 'Oh, hey, that's great. Send that to Bill down the way,' and then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom, and sooner or later this person's whole life has been seen by all of these other people."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/07/21/snowden-nsa-sexting/12937507/

Thats what we call "National Security."

Even before this, anyone who assumes any conversation or data transfer they do over the air is private is a raving moron.

Somehow, I do feel safer now....!!

So that's how the NSA got the pic of me in the Speedo...

FBI director calls for greater police access to communications

Apple and Google should reconsider their plans to enable encryption by default on their smartphones, and the U.S. Congress should pass a law requiring that all communication tools allow police access to user data, U.S. FBI Director James Comey said.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2835052/fbi-director-calls-for-greater-police-access-to-communications.html

Now this is the guy who not only wants you to believe you couldn't already encrypt a smartphone, but wants you to forget he already has access to all your information in cloud storage or sent over the network.

They have been using computers to sift through every phone call and email, yet they missed the Boston Marathon Bombing, ISIS, etc..
Maybe they have mis-identified their real problems?


OTOH, encryption kept at least one former TPD captain out of prison (with the FBI's blessing).

Freddy Martinez, a 27-year-old systems administrator, was in Chicago’s Daley Plaza last February protesting National Security Agency surveillance programs when a sedan with the green-lettered license plates of an unmarked police vehicle pulled up nearby. He’d noticed trouble with dropped calls at previous demonstrations, including the 2012 NATO summit. He opened an app on his phone that spots nearby cellular transmitters and saw a new signal. He wondered if it might be coming from the car.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-16/cops-use-military-gear-to-track-cell-phones

"You're gonna love the way you look.... I guarantee it!!"


http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjAzNjU0MzU4OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjg3MTI3NA%40%40._V1_SX214_CR0,0,214,317_AL_.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0386056/&h=253&w=171&tbnid=aj-_3gCLKh7-dM:&zoom=1&tbnh=186&tbnw=125&usg=__19AaJ_mZgEdkwgoPOHuZ3XIS2DI=&docid=RPqO2leE0xpPvM&itg=1&client=firefox-a&ved=0CIQBEMo3&ei=o05OVKLYDomxyQTGp4H4CQ

The fisherman's net just keeps getting bigger.


WASHINGTON—The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers.  People with knowledge of the program wouldn’t discuss the frequency or duration of such flights, but said they take place on a regular basis.

It is similar in approach to the National Security Agency’s program to collect millions of Americans phone records, in that it scoops up large volumes of data in order to find a single person or a handful of people.
The program cuts out phone companies as an intermediary in searching for suspects. Rather than asking a company for cell-tower information to help locate a suspect, the government can now get that information itself.

Newer versions of the technology are programmed to do more than suck in data: They can also jam signals and retrieve data from a target phone such as texts or photos.  The scanning is done by the Technical Operations Group of the U.S. Marshals Service.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/americans-cellphones-targeted-in-secret-u-s-spy-program-1415917533?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj

Only been doing it since 2007, where you been?

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8LbhijvYPF8/UpPxKdXP_hI/AAAAAAAABCE/zfrJ9RzMwyk/s1600/DRT-2101.jpg)

In a Baltimore trial courtroom on Monday, a local judge threatened to hold a police detective in contempt of court for refusing to disclose how police located a 16-year-old robbery suspect’s phone.  Once the Baltimore Police were able to locate Shemar Taylor’s phone, they then searched his house and found a gun as well.

But rather than disclose the possible use of a Stingray, also known as a cell site simulator, Detective John L. Haley cited a non-disclosure agreement, likely with a federal law enforcement agency (such as the FBI) and/or the Harris Corporation, since the company is one of the dominant manufacturers of such devices. Stingrays can be used to determine a phone’s location, and they can also intercept calls and text messages.

Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams retorted, "You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court," according to the Baltimore Sun.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/11/prosecutors-drop-key-evidence-at-trial-to-avoid-explaining-stingray-use/

True that, but I dont think we expected it was being done on a scale that would have made the Soviets cringe.



DEA kept records of US phone calls for nearly 15 years
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/17/dea-kept-records-of-us-phone-calls

While the program did help bust crooks, there's a concern about the distinct lack of accountability. Besides the lack of judicial controls, the leaks revealed that the DEA's Special Operations Division went so far as to "recreate" trails of evidence to hide that some info originated from call records. Moreover, it shared that information with agencies ranging from the FBI to the Department of Homeland Security.

The Justice Department says that the database is gone. However, its existence has prompted worries among privacy advocates that the government thinks (or at least, thought) that it's acceptable to extend its already controversial bulk surveillance gathering to everyday criminal cases, not just terrorism.

What I'm still concerned about is that our elected leaders don't even seem to get the debate:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jan/15/boehner-nsa-snooping-helped-stop-capitol-bomb-plot/?page=all

Boehner says that the Ohio mans plot to bomb something in DC was caught because of phone surveillance. 

I don't think anyone is debating the fact that if the government listens to citizens' phone calls, they will catch bad people. Just like if police were free to randomly stop and search cars, or randomly enter homes, they'd certainly catch bad people. That is all beyond a doubt.

The debate is: is listening to 330,000,000 million US citizens' phone calls justified by the possibility of occasionally catching a bad guy?

We are trading freedom for security. We are granting the government more power sow e can feel safer.  There is always a balance in play. And where that balance lies SHOULD be a matter of public debate. Certainly it started off far to the "government stay the hell out of my business and no, you can't search crap without a warrant" end of the spectrum  and has shifted more to the "freedom for security" theme as we've gone along. Particularly in the last couple of decades.

But that debate should be public. We wouldn't even be having the debate if Snowden wouldn't have broken the law and tipped us all off about it.

And why the hell are the conservatives fighting for more government power? The world has gone tipsy-turvey!

Too late.... already a done deal...!!

That same agency using the same surveillance knew beforehand that Sony was about to be hacked, and did nothing.
Then there was the Russian government warning the FBI ahead of time about the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Most of the likely Republican presidential candidates are supportive of the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. But Americans who identify as Republican or lean that way appear to disagree.

That's according to a new survey from Pew Research, released on Monday, gauging post-Snowden attitudes on digital privacy and surveillance. Of respondents who were familiar with the NSA spying revelations, 70 percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican said they were losing confidence that the agency's surveillance programs served the public interest.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/republicans-have-less-faith-in-the-nsa-than-democrats-20150316

(Reuters) - A U.S. spying program that systematically collects millions of Americans' phone records is illegal, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, putting pressure on Congress to quickly decide whether to replace or end the controversial anti-terrorism surveillance.

Ruling on a program revealed by former government security contractor Edward Snowden, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Patriot Act did not authorize the National Security Agency to collect Americans' calling records in bulk.

 “For years, the government secretly spied on millions of innocent Americans based on a shockingly broad interpretation of its authority,” ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo said in a statement.

“The court rightly rejected the government’s theory that it may stockpile information on all of us in case that information proves useful in the future,” he said. “Mass surveillance does not make us any safer, and it is fundamentally incompatible with the privacy necessary in a free society.”




So now Congress has to decide whether or not to keep committing a crime, scale back the crime, or legalize the crime with some constitutional sleight of hand.
No word yet on how this affects the same crime being committed by the DEA, U.S. Marshals, etc.

I'd guess it will continue to be done but not admitted to.

This part of the Patriot Act expires June first. Wanna bet that Congress amends the wording to make NSA snooping okay AND that the prez signs it?

Only if they soften up the public with a rash of "terrorist plots" that are foiled at the last second.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/05/virginia-gop-congressman-claims-isis-has-invaded-texas-you-cant-make-up-what-a-terrible-problem-this-is

(http://images.tvrage.com/shows/4/3997.jpg)

Wondering how long it will be before someone asks who that is and why it's relevant.

And not because I don't know..because as someone who grew up with Saturday morning kids shows, I know exactly who this is.

She's what comes to mind any time someone mentions ISIS.

or an attack by ISIS

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NC6wFUpT72Y/UgmpBcq4OjI/AAAAAAAAPXI/Api8GptZyhU/s1600/cat+attack+2.png)

as the "credible but non-specific" fear machine is spinning up in time for the Patriot Act vote.

Don't worry guys, we fixed this problem now. Under the "USA Freedom Act" the government can still read your emails (have to wait 6 months), review your checkout history from libraries, find out what classes you are taking, and pull all your medical or financial records. But, they have made it so the NSA has to get a FISA Warrant to gather data on all your contacts and where you and said contacts are at all times.

The FISA Court has been in place since ~1980. Since that time they have rejected three (3) warrant requests.

So we are totally safe now. Rejected one request a decade sounds like checks and balances to me. Really a good compromise. It's like handing the mugger your wallet, but making him say "thank you" before he kicks you in the nuts and walks away.

You are young!  I could plop the kids in front of tv and that is one that would keep their attention pretty well.  They also liked the Beverly Hillbillies...deep into re-runs by the 70's....

The FBI is now pressing Congress to mandate front-door access to American's encrypted files and communications, with the promise that they will keep its stockpile of passwords safe and secure.
http://gizmodo.com/fbi-insists-on-access-to-encryption-despite-warnings-it-1716603473

...and they have a swell track record to back up their demands:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Thursday revealed that 21.5 million people were swept up in a colossal breach of government computer systems that was far more damaging than initially thought, resulting in the theft of a vast trove of personal information, including Social Security numbers and some fingerprints.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/us/office-of-personnel-management-hackers-got-data-of-millions.html

It isnt about terrorism.  It never was.

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/drug-war-driving-us-domestic-spying/

(http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/wiretaps31-582x334.jpg)
(http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/wiretaps4-582x373.jpg)

In many ways, drug cases subsidize the surveillance technology used by law enforcement.

There's a new Isis. When not giving Swedish Massages to Travel Gnome, she overhead lifts grown men and works out with economy cars.

(http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics4/20101015/lindsay_hayward_05.jpg)

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ft822rDlu5Q/TLggkLma1hI/AAAAAAAABlQ/AgkRoD3__yU/s1600/Giant-Lindsay-Hayward-22.jpg)

All this over a measly 3,500 wire taps?    Come on guys, you can do better than that.

All your records still belong to the Government.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/dc-circuit-overturns-ruling-against-nsa-bulk-collection-program/2015/08/28/d91c1876-4d92-11e5-84df-923b3ef1a64b_story.html

A D.C. appeals court has lifted an injunction against the NSA phone call records program

A federal appeals court in the District has lifted an injunction against the National Security Agency’s call records program on the grounds that the plaintiff has not proved his own phone records were collected and so lacks standing to sue.

The move lifts a ban on the NSA’s collection that had been imposed — and temporarily stayed — by a U.S. District Court judge in December 2013.

Despite promises, technology will always get away from you.   

(http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/2000*1289/1446067141_APTOPIX+Military+BlimpA.jpg)

A runaway communications surveillance blimp in Pennsylvania.

(of infrared cameras that see thru walls) ...people will complain that a hobby drone with a wide-angle lens on the other side of a football field is violating their privacy.   :-\

A Secret Catalog of Government Gear for Spying on Your Cellphone

https://theintercept.com/2015/12/17/a-secret-catalogue-of-government-gear-for-spying-on-your-cellphone/


THE INTERCEPT HAS OBTAINED a secret, internal U.S. government catalog of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.

The catalog includes details on the Stingray, a well-known brand of surveillance gear, as well as Boeing “dirt boxes” and dozens of more obscure devices that can be mounted on vehicles, drones, and piloted aircraft. Some are designed to be used at static locations, while others can be discreetly carried by an individual. They have names like Cyberhawk, Yellowstone, Blackfin, Maximus, Cyclone, and Spartacus. Within the catalog, the NSA is listed as the vendor of one device, while another was developed for use by the CIA, and another was developed for a special forces requirement. Nearly a third of the entries focus on equipment that seems to have never been described in public before.

The Intercept obtained the catalog from a source within the intelligence community concerned about the militarization of domestic law enforcement. (The original is here. https://theintercept.com/document/2015/12/17/government-cellphone-surveillance-catalogue/ )

A few of the devices can house a “target list” of as many as 10,000 unique phone identifiers. Most can be used to geolocate people, but the documents indicate that some have more advanced capabilities, like eavesdropping on calls and spying on SMS messages. Two systems, apparently designed for use on captured phones, are touted as having the ability to extract media files, address books, and notes, and one can retrieve deleted text messages.

Above all, the catalog represents a trove of details on surveillance devices developed for military and intelligence purposes but increasingly used by law enforcement agencies to spy on people and convict them of crimes. The mass shooting earlier this month in San Bernardino, California, which President Barack Obama has called “an act of terrorism,” prompted calls for state and local police forces to beef up their counterterrorism capabilities, a process that has historically involved adapting military technologies to civilian use. Meanwhile, civil liberties advocates and others are increasingly alarmed about how cellphone surveillance devices are used domestically and have called for a more open and informed debate about the trade-off between security and privacy — despite a virtual blackout by the federal government on any information about the specific capabilities of the gear.

“We’ve seen a trend in the years since 9/11 to bring sophisticated surveillance technologies that were originally designed for military use — like Stingrays or drones or biometrics — back home to the United States,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has waged a legal battle challenging the use of cellphone surveillance devices domestically. “But using these technologies for domestic law enforcement purposes raises a host of issues that are different from a military context.”

MANY OF THE DEVICES in the catalog, including the Stingrays and dirt boxes, are cell-site simulators, which operate by mimicking the towers of major telecom companies like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile. When someone’s phone connects to the spoofed network, it transmits a unique identification code and, through the characteristics of its radio signals when they reach the receiver, information about the phone’s location. There are also indications that cell-site simulators may be able to monitor calls and text messages.

Domestically the devices have been used in a way that violates the constitutional rights of citizens, including the Fourth Amendment prohibition on illegal search and seizure, critics like Lynch say. They have regularly been used without warrants, or with warrants that critics call overly broad. Judges and civil liberties groups alike have complained that the devices are used without full disclosure of how they work, even within court proceedings.

“Every time police drive the streets with a Stingray, these dragnet devices can identify and locate dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders’ phones,” said Nathan Wessler, a staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The controversy around cellphone surveillance illustrates the friction that comes with redeploying military combat gear into civilian life. The U.S. government has been using cell-site simulators for at least 20 years, but their use by local law enforcement is a more recent development.

The archetypical cell-site simulator, the Stingray, was trademarked by Harris Corp. in 2003 and initially used by the military, intelligence agencies, and federal law enforcement. Another company, Digital Receiver Technology, now owned by Boeing, developed dirt boxes — more powerful cell-site simulators — which gained favor among the NSA, CIA, and U.S. military as good tools for hunting down suspected terrorists. The devices can reportedly track more than 200 phones over a wider range than the Stingray.

Amid the war on terror, companies selling cell-site simulators to the federal government thrived. In addition to large corporations like Boeing and Harris, which clocked more than $2.6 billion in federal contracts last year, the catalog obtained by The Intercept includes products from little-known outfits like Nevada-based Ventis, which appears to have been dissolved, and SR Technologies of Davie, Florida, which has a website that warns: “Due to the sensitive nature of this business, we require that all visitors be registered before accessing further information.” (The catalog obtained by The Intercept is not dated, but includes information about an event that occurred in 2012.)

The U.S. government eventually used cell-site simulators to target people for assassination in drone strikes, The Intercept has reported. But the CIA helped use the technology at home, too. For more than a decade, the agency worked with the U.S. Marshals Service to deploy planes with dirt boxes attached to track mobile phones across the U.S., the Wall Street Journal revealed.

After being used by federal agencies for years, cellular surveillance devices began to make their way into the arsenals of a small number of local police agencies. By 2007, Harris sought a license from the Federal Communications Commission to widely sell its devices to local law enforcement, and police flooded the FCC with letters of support. “The text of every letter was the same. The only difference was the law enforcement logo at the top,” said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist at the ACLU, who obtained copies of the letters from the FCC through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The lobbying campaign was a success. Today nearly 60 law enforcement agencies in 23 states are known to possess a Stingray or some form of cell-site simulator, though experts believe that number likely underrepresents the real total. In some jurisdictions, police use cell-site simulators regularly. The Baltimore Police Department, for example, has used Stingrays more than 4,300 times since 2007.

Police often cite the war on terror in acquiring such systems. Michigan State Police claimed their Stingrays would “allow the State to track the physical location of a suspected terrorist,” although the ACLU later found that in 128 uses of the devices last year, none were related to terrorism. In Tacoma, Washington, police claimed Stingrays could prevent attacks using improvised explosive devices — the roadside bombs that plagued soldiers in Iraq. “I am not aware of any case in which a police agency has used a cell-site simulator to find a terrorist,” said Lynch. Instead, “law enforcement agencies have been using cell-site simulators to solve even the most minor domestic crimes.”

WHILE INTEREST FROM local cops helped fuel the spread of cell-site simulators, funding from the federal government also played a role, incentivizing municipalities to buy more of the technology. In the years since 9/11, the U.S. has expanded its funding to provide military hardware to state and local law enforcement agencies via grants awarded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department. There’s been a similar pattern with Stingray-like devices.

“The same grant programs that paid for local law enforcement agencies across the country to buy armored personnel carriers and drones have paid for Stingrays,” said Soghoian. “Like drones, license plate readers, and biometric scanners, the Stingrays are yet another surveillance technology created by defense contractors for the military, and after years of use in war zones, it eventually trickles down to local and state agencies, paid for with DOJ and DHS money.”

Information on such purchases, like so much about cell-site simulators, has trickled out through freedom of information requests and public records. The capabilities of the devices are kept under lock and key — a secrecy that hearkens back to their military origins. When state or local police purchase the cell-site simulators, they are routinely required to sign non-disclosure agreements with the FBI that they may not reveal the “existence of and the capabilities provided by” the surveillance devices, or share “any information” about the equipment with the public.

Sometimes it’s not even clear how much police are spending on Stingray-like devices because they are bought with proceeds from assets seized under federal civil forfeiture law, in drug busts and other operations. Illinois, Michigan, and Maryland police forces have all used asset forfeiture funds to pay for Stingray-type equipment.

“The full extent of the secrecy surrounding cell-site simulators is completely unjustified and unlawful,” said EFF’s Lynch. “No police officer or detective should be allowed to withhold information from a court or criminal defendant about how the officer conducted an investigation.”

“Because cell-site simulators can collect so much information from innocent people, a simple warrant for their use is not enough,” said Lynch, the EFF attorney. “Police officers should be required to limit their use of the device to a short and defined period of time. Officers also need to be clear in the probable cause affidavit supporting the warrant about the device’s capabilities.”

In November, a federal judge in Illinois published a legal memorandum about the government’s application to use a cell-tower spoofing technology in a drug-trafficking investigation. In his memo, Judge Iain Johnston sharply criticized the secrecy surrounding Stingrays and other surveillance devices, suggesting that it made weighing the constitutional implications of their use extremely difficult. “A cell-site simulator is simply too powerful of a device to be used and the information captured by it too vast to allow its use without specific authorization from a fully informed court,” he wrote.

I'll guess someone is going to loose their security clearance.

https://theintercept.com/surveillance-catalogue/



“Ensnares bystanders, drains batteries, blocks calls”

“Will suck every last byte of data out of a seized cellphone”

“More than enough data to map an entire social network”

“Up to 10,000 targets”



Sounds like the perfect stocking-stuffers for paranoid parents.

Great article by The Woz on the governments attack on personal encryption

http://www.cnet.com/news/woz-says-you-cant-trust-government-denies-apple-case-is-terrorism-related-iphone-san-bernardino/

...and not so much discussion from the federal agencies who insist they can keep back doors from terrorists, but just got hacked last week by a 16-tear-old in England.  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/02/13/cops-arrest-teen-for-hack-and-leak-dhs-fbi-data.html

Seems the FBI is really fighting hard for the tools terrorists desperately need.

So if the FBI hadnt ordered the resetting of that phones password, all the data on it would have essentially just fallen into their laps.
http://gizmodo.com/san-bernardino-county-calls-the-fbi-liars-over-terroris-1760317923

Maybe that phone really isnt the prize, but rather its using this case as a pretext to turning potentially EVERY iPhone into their personal data smorgasbord.

Getting caught lying didnt help the FBI's case, either.



This is what the FBI — and now the court — is demanding Apple do: It wants Apple to rewrite the phone’s software to make it possible to guess possible passwords quickly and automatically.

The FBI’s demands are specific to one phone, which might make its request seem reasonable if you don’t consider the technological implications: Authorities have the phone in their lawful possession, and they only need help seeing what’s on it in case it can tell them something about how the San Bernardino shooters operated. But the hacked software the court and the FBI wants Apple to provide would be general. It would work on any phone of the same model. It has to.

Make no mistake; this is what a backdoor looks like. This is an existing vulnerability in iPhone security that could be exploited by anyone.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/02/18/why-you-should-side-with-apple-not-the-fbi-in-the-san-bernardino-iphone-case/

Funny that Microsoft has no problem with backdoors (Windows10cough,cough)   http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2499844,00.asp

An Israeli arms manufacturer that pedles software to governments around the world (including ours) to rifle thru cell phones wants to make it law that police have the right to seize the phones of drivers involved in traffic accidents...and to use their software to scoop up all the data.

Cellebrite, whose products have been used for years to crack passwords and suck data, wants to re-write motor vehicle laws so that the privilege of driving is dependent on "implied consent" that motorists cell phone data is just as safe from unreasonable search as their vehicles now are.



Cellebrite already has roadside devices to scrape the contents of a phone (Universal Forensic Extraction Device), so this technology would just dial it back a bit.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/04/first-came-the-breathalyzer-now-meet-the-roadside-police-textalyzer/


My cell phone is usually out of reach (or sometimes even locked up) when I drive so im not sure how that would work.  Texting while driving is irresponsible and a growing problem, but I think there might be other solutions beside warrantless searches.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has made an extraordinary concession: that Edward Snowden did us all a favor by leaking classified surveillance documents.

We can certainly argue about the way in which Snowden did what he did, but I think that he actually performed a public service by raising the debate that we engaged in and by the changes that we made,” Holder told David Axelrod on “The Axe Files,” a podcast produced by CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2016/05/30/eric-holder-makes-a-small-crack-in-the-wall-of-official-hostility-towards-edward-snowden/#52d4a4ff59d0

... so we need to be able to search your phone.

Drunk driving is a serious issue... we need to be able to stop and search everyone that drives.

Drug smuggling is a growing problem (and every road is a "known drug corridor")... so we need to be able to search your car.

Weapons are an increasing problem... so we need to be able to search your person.

"Revenge porn" is a new and growing problem... so we need to be able to search your internet records.

Making meth at home is a growing problem... so we need to be able to search your home.

Homemade explosives are a rising concern... so we need to be able to search your credit card records.

Armed robberies are an increasing problem... so we need to be able to track your location.
- - -

Name a crime, name some data that hypothetically could help find the perpetrators of that crime, carve out an exception to the 5th Amendment to make it easier for the police to catch criminals. Sounds great! I mean, who would care about enabling easier searches if it means catching criminals?

Stupid Founding Fathers setting up the 5th Amendment, they just didn't understand the power the government could have if we just chipped away at it a little more. Everyone would be safer.

We are a country that has decided that war crimes shall be standard operating procedure.  The ends justifies the means, even if the ends aren't really accomplished.  So a little bit of phone tampering is no big deal to these same people.

We tracked down, prosecuted, and executed hundreds (if not thousands) of Japanese war criminals after WWII for war crimes - one of the big ones which was waterboarding our POW's.   The truly disturbing thing to me is how casually we fall into that whole frame of mind now.

Trump's logo is to make America Great Again.  Then I heard the question posed, "When was America ever great?"   I immediately bristled at that when I first heard it, then thought about the follow on discussion behind it.  May not be an invalid question, considering our history for everyone who isn't a free, white, male over 21.

For nearly 10 years, local police departments around the country have spied on cell networks using military grade surveillance tools in secret. This week, a coalition of civil rights groups lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking an enforcement action against the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) for using cell-site simulators—also known as IMSI-catchers or Stingrays—thousands of times since 2007 without warrants required by the U.S. Constitution, and without a license to use the electromagnetic spectrum required by the FCC.

https://act.eff.org/action/tell-fcc-to-enforce-its-rules-against-police-using-stingrays

Thanks, Yahoo!   >:(



Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yahoo-nsa-exclusive-idUSKCN1241YT

The spy tool that the US government ordered Yahoo to install on its systems last year at the behest of the NSA or the FBI was a “poorly designed” and “buggy” piece of malware, according to two sources closely familiar with the matter.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

But the government was responsibly reading your mail! They were only looking for bad guys. If you have nothing to hide etc. etc. etc.

It's like you people have never heard of the original draft of the 4th Amendment: "Persons shall be free from unreasonable search and seizure unless it helps the government do something they say they need to do." They shortened it in editing.

Saw "Snowden" last week...and regardless of what you may think of Oliver Stone or Edward Snowden, I found it to be a very sobering film and I know from previous experience, that the military and civilian milieu depicted in this film are very accurate.  The FISA courts tend to rubber stamp whatever surveillance is being requested.

Which one?  The one with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Snowden?  Or the docufilm that documented it in real time.  I found THAT film to be very sobering.  Haven't seen the other one yet.

EDIT:  The name of the docufilm I'm talking about is CitizenFour.  Great movie.

"Snowden" with Joseph Gordon-Levitt is what I saw last week.  I had seen "Citizenfour" a couple of years ago and it was definitely better.  Stone uses his film to flesh out the main character and put his actions into an historical context. 

A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.

The companies provided the data — often including the locations, photos and other information posted publicly by users — to Geofeedia, a Chicago-based company that says it analyzes social media posts to deliver real-time surveillance information to help 500 law enforcement agencies track and respond to crime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/11/facebook-twitter-and-instagram-sent-feeds-that-helped-police-track-minorities-in-ferguson-and-baltimore-aclu-says/



Police may have used facial recognition software and a private company's analysis of social media accounts to identify and arrest people with outstanding warrants during the unrest in Baltimore last year, according to a document released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The document was released by the ACLU in California as it announced that its investigation into the private company, Geofeedia, had resulted in three major social media companies — Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — rescinding Geofeedia's commercial access to their data.

In the document, Geofeedia touted its partnership with Baltimore County Police to pitch its services to police in Glendale, Calif.

Civil liberties advocates have criticized Geofeedia's monitoring, saying it can have a chilling effect on free speech and disproportionately target minorities. Last month, The Baltimore Sun reported that at least five area police departments paid Geofeedia to monitor, map and store citizens' public social media posts.

Geofeedia told officials in Glendale that the Baltimore County Police Department's Criminal Intelligence Unit had used its services "to heighten officers' situational awareness and help them stay one step ahead of the rioters," and that "police officers were even able to run social media photos through facial recognition technology to discover rioters with outstanding warrants and arrest them directly from the crowd."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/crime/bs-md-geofeedia-update-20161011-story.html

Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why.

In 2013, Hemisphere was revealed by The New York Times and described only within a Powerpoint presentation made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Times described it as a “partnership” between AT&T and the U.S. government; the Justice Department said it was an essential, and prudently deployed, counter-narcotics tool.

Hemisphere isn’t a “partnership” but rather a product AT&T developed, marketed, and sold at a cost of millions of dollars per year to taxpayers. No warrant is required to make use of the company’s massive trove of data, according to AT&T documents, only a promise from law enforcement to not disclose Hemisphere if an investigation using it becomes public.

Those charged with a crime are entitled to know the evidence against them come trial. Adam Schwartz, staff attorney for activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that means AT&T may leave investigators no choice but to construct a false investigative narrative to hide how they use Hemisphere if they plan to prosecute anyone.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/10/25/at-t-is-spying-on-americans-for-profit.html





Police surveillance: The US city that beat Big Brother
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37411250

Brian Hofer agrees that security cameras can prevent crime but says there is no evidence that mass surveillance does. And he argues that police departments only turn to "shiny gadgets" when relations with the public they are meant to protect have broken down.

"Instead of trying to repair these relationships we are just throwing more surveillance equipment at the problem."

Police "pinged" the cell phones of anyone who had been in contact with fugitive Michael Vance, resulting in a number of dead-end raids on unsuspecting people:

According to channel 5 KOCO, officers believed that Michael Vance was on the property because of a ping on a phone that made it look like Vance was there. They explained that somehow he was using Bluetooth and wasn't actually there.
http://us.blastingnews.com/news/2016/10/deputy-sheriff-shot-while-looking-for-michael-vance-in-oklahoma-search-continues-00122129

FOX23 Katie Higgins talked to a woman in Shattuck, OK, whose home was stormed by investigators this morning during the search for Vance.
Earlier today I spoke to Linda Kotchey of Shattuck, OK. She says investigators stormed through her home early this morning. She say police told her they traced a cell phone ping to her address and thought Vance might be there. He was not.
https://www.facebook.com/KatieHigginsNews/videos/1429846177043701/?_fb_noscript=1

"Meet the new boss..."

Senate passes controversial spying law that scoops up Americans' phone calls and emails without a warrant

http://www.businessinsider.com/senate-extends-fisa-section-702-warrantless-surveillance-bill-2018-1

OHP sifted through cell phone conversations of turnpike travelers to catch a coin box thief.

https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/secret-cellular-surveillance-orders-by-law-enforcement-are-increasing-in-oklahoma-and-proposed-law-would-expand-their/


Spokespeople for the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office and Tulsa Police Department both said only that agencies did not have a cell site simulator — and both said they did not know what a “StingRay” was.

Agencies that use Stingrays are required to deny its existence as a condition of their license... never mind how absurd it is that they would have never heard of one of the hottest surveillance tools in the ten years they have been around.  (cough...fairgrounds...cough..cough)

(https://www.readfrontier.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/harris-stingray-ft.jpg)

I guess my question is, at what point does your expectation of privacy end?

Should I get offended if a police force asks for cell phones that authenticated to a particular tower?    Note that is merely numbers, not name and address....   Name and address would require a subponea as it is considered CPNI.

I think the synthesis of the Frontier article was that The State casually disregarded the privacy of thousands for a petty endevour that should have been reserved for "fighting terrorism."  ....that, and we only know about it by accident rather than accountability.

I encourage you to read the rest of the story as it might better answer your question.

As long as you are willing to pay the NSA for the privilege of carrying a GPS tracker in your pocket, you have no expectation of privacy.

I get the glib comment, but that's not how it works.  Just because the govt "can" track you, doesn't mean they should.  I've got an Amazon Alexa in my house, and I know that if the feds want to hack that, they can.  But that doesn't mean they have the legal right to.  If they want the data, they need to go through the process. As long as there is a process, and it is open and followed, then it's cool. We can argue the actual rules, as long as they exist and are followed.

That said, I read the article and don't have a real problem with the request that was granted.  They had a set of thefts, and asked for the list of cell numbers that pinged the associated towers during that time.  (As I understand it, they did not get the personal info at that point.)  IF they find that a cell number comes up on a significant number of those towers at the time of the thefts, then that moves past a random search and into a specific, targeted, investigation.  They should then request a warrant to get the personal info of that particular number, as it would seem that this would be sufficient grounds to pursue.  Again, not a cop or a lawyer, but seems logical to me.






 

It does assume the rules are always followed.  They arent.

The difference between a Stingray being just a "pen register" that shows non-personally identifiable information and a Stingray that siphons up every last bit of data in its range is only a mouse click.

There are thousands of documented instances where judges are mislead in order to avoid acknowledging that the technology even exists.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-stingray-case-20150408-story.html
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/fbi-didnt-need-warrant-for-stingray-in-attempted-murder-case-doj-says

Just because you have cell phone records or even all the conversations/text messages recorded, that still doesn't tell you who 918-xxx-xxxx belongs to until you get a court order.   

General eavesdropping should not be allowed.  I don't want a govt that looks at all calls, particularly the actual conversation data, and then uses that data to track everyday citizens.   They need to have a reason, first, and then ask for the call and/or personal data.  This is, to me, philosophically similar to police setting up the random check stations for drunk drivers.  It's a blanket search that indiscriminately targets everyone, and then sweeps up whatever it can find.   I'm all for stopping drunk drivers, but general-public check stations are over the line.  (JMHO)

No court order required to use the Google

It is my understanding that eavesdropping requires a court order.   All call records (to/from/duration) are not considered confidential.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_message_accounting)

You are referencing old landline Caller ID tech from the '80's, not the unwarranted mass mining of digital communications by persons not a party to those conversations.

Are you not allowed to talk about Stingrays?

Are you implying I could throw up a cell-tower and listen in on my neighbors?
(this is considered a man-in-the-middle attack)

Paraphrasing Rebounds point, "could" does not necessarily mean "should."

That technology exists.  It's illegal as hell but agencies seem to think that their nondisclosure agreements somehow bypass the U.S. Constitution.

Strangely, I don't think there are any laws about performing a cellular "man in the middle" attack OTHER than the fact you would be rebroadcasting on a licensed spectrum that is "owned" by a particular cellular provider.

Much like email...   If you choose to send it unencrypted, you shouldn't get too angry that someone may read it.

Its called wiretapping, and yes it is against the law.

Are you not allowed to talk about Stingrays?

Don't know much about Stingrays.   Got to pet one once.

Wiretapping is not the same as a man in the middle.   I am not a lawyer, but I thought wiretapping must involve eavesdropping.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/03/wifi_imsi_catcher/

...or that police equipment doesnt find its way into the hands of organized crime.




For the first time, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages.

The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, but American intelligence and law enforcement agencies — which use such eavesdropping equipment themselves — have been silent on the issue until now.

The agency’s response, obtained by The Associated Press from Wyden’s office, suggests little has been done about such equipment, known popularly as Stingrays after a brand common among U.S. police departments.

http://time.com/5226553/spying-devices-washington/

Why not just build your own?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/03/wifi_imsi_catcher/

https://hackaday.com/2016/04/08/build-your-own-gsm-base-station-for-fun-and-profit/

From time-to-time someone gets the bright idea to sell their departments hardware
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/courts/ex-tulsa-police-officer-who-sold-police-guns-now-indicted/article_59420378-f975-5914-a1fa-aa0274ddcda1.html
and selling a much-desired item that technically doesnt even exist might have crossed their mind.

So now its in the nations best interests for people to track down and neutralize fake cell sites (which violate FCC rules anyway) and use strong encryption on cell phones, now that Homeland Security brought the problem to our attention.

Senators Urge Release of Unclassified Records on Suspected Foreign Use of 'Stingray' Devices in US
https://gizmodo.com/senators-urge-dhs-to-release-unclassified-records-on-su-1825363211


Developed by a team of security researchers based in Germany, the CryptoPhone works by measuring three potential indicators of an IMSI catcher in action. The first notes when a phone shifts from a more-secure 3G network to a less-secure 2G one.
The second detects when a phone connection strips away encryption, making interception easier. And the third reports when a cell tower fails to make available a list of other cell towers in the area; this is called a “neighbor’s list,” and it allows phones to easily switch between nearby towers. IMSI catchers typically don’t offer lists of alternatives because they seek to keep phones captured.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://s3.amazonaws.com/posttv-thumbnails-prod/thumbnails/null/crypto2.jpg&w=800&h=450)

Defending Privacy, Supreme Court Says Warrants Generally Are Necessary to Collect Cell Phone Data
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/us/politics/supreme-court-warrants-cell-phone-privacy.html

Basically just tells departments to do what we do and claim the data siphoned up with Stingrays is actually coming from "confidential informants."

Speed Humps have listening devices..You have been warned....

Breadburner:  are you okay?  In the last few months,most of your posts have not made any sense. Its not that I disagree with them or think they are mean, they are incoherent.  That wasn't a trend until recently.  What gives?

- -

On the ruling:  it makes sense to me.  The government's argument was that you are voluntarily giving up data, so they should be able to scoop it up without justification.  A cell phone is essentially required to operate in the modern world. I cannot imagine the founding fathers being okay with the government tracking every person's movement (and potentially their contacts and/or content) simply as the cost of operating in the modern world.

Getting a warrant is a low hurdle.

The split on issues like this continues to surprise me.   We have seen a shift in the last ~25-30 years.  The conservatives are now more likely to trust the government and want to grant it more powers, the liberals are more likely to be skeptical of the power of the State and to check it.  Ideologically, that seems backwards to me. 

We went over that extensively in the cow methane section.  He is huffing way too much methane and nitrous oxide.



It is backwards.  Conservatives are more likely to "trust" it because they have had such overwhelming control for so long.  The reverse was true previously, and reversed before that, and so forth.   I don't trust either side, ever.

Its possible the conservatives furthest to the right assume they will be on the winning side if we sink into a police state, believing they will somehow be able to control it.   A delusion fueled by opioids and too much National Enquirer?

LOL...Phone records...Hah....

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/us/christy-mirack-slaying-update-trnd/index.html

Khashoggi friend sues Israeli firm over hacking he says contributed to the journalist’s murder

A Canada-based Saudi activist filed suit this week against an Israeli cybersecurity firm, alleging that the Saudi government used the firm’s spyware to hack his cellphone and access sensitive conversations he conducted with slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Attorneys for Omar Abdulaziz, 27, who is based in Montreal, lodged a civil case against the NSO Group in Tel Aviv on Sunday, legal papers show. The opposition activist has said he learned that his phone had been hacked in August, some two months after he clicked on an infected link.

The Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto project that investigates digital espionage aimed at civil society, concluded with “high confidence” that the Saudi government targeted his cellphone using Pegasus spyware created by NSO.

Before being notified that his phone had been hacked, Abdulaziz was in regular contact with Khashoggi, with whom he had struck up a friendship. Khashoggi, a contributor to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section and a critic of the kingdom, was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 by members of a 15-man team from Saudi Arabia.

The legal filing argues that the Israeli software provided the Saudis with knowledge of conversations between Abdulaziz and Khashoggi about projects they were working on. The sophisticated software enables the operator to access all information stored on a target’s phone and to secretly film or record audio.
 
The filing says Abdulaziz will argue that use of Pegasus spyware to expose his communications with Khashoggi contributed to the decision to murder him.

The NSO spyware also has been used to target two Saudi activists in London and an Amnesty International researcher, according to the Citizen Lab.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/khashoggi-friend-sues-israeli-firm-over-hacking-he-says-contributed-to-the-journalists-murder/2018/12/03/ddcb28ee-f708-11e8-8642-c9718a256cbd_story.html

TULSA, Oklahoma - On Wednesday the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Tulsa District Office got information from the Tulsa Office of Homeland Security investigators that a package was seized by the United States Customs and Border Protection which contained a half pound of ecstasy.
http://www.newson6.com/story/39672429/tulsa-food-truck-owner-busted-for-various-drugs

Cough...cough... Stingray...Cough Cough...

Most states ban texting behind the wheel, but a legislative proposal could make Nevada one of the first states to allow police to use a contentious technology to find out if a person was using a cellphone during a car crash.

The measure is igniting privacy concerns and has led lawmakers to question the practicality of the technology, even while acknowledging the threat of distracted driving.

If the Nevada measure passes, it would allow police to use a device known as the “textalyzer,” which connects to a cellphone and looks for user activity, such as opening a Facebook messenger call screen. It is made by Israel-based company Cellebrite, which says the technology does not access or store personal content.

Opponents air concerns that the measure violates the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, also raised questions over how the software will work and if it will be open sourced so the public can ensure it doesn’t access personal content.

John Whetsel, former sheriff of Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, said the practice is not consistent among agencies because distracted driving is still a relatively new issue. Plus, laws vary between states and securing a search warrant for a phone can depend on an agency’s resources, he said.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/03/17/cell-during-car-crash-nevada-may-let-cops-use-tech-find-out/3194082002/

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities.

Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html

    In seven years, no one has named a single American who died as a result of revealing the unlawful program of domestic mass surveillance—because it didn't happen. But exposing that crime did reform American laws—and strengthen our rights. https://t.co/3nLhObCDNv
    — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) December 16, 2020

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/18/politics/gop-divided-edward-snowden-trump-pardon/index.html

Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.

The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.
The targeting of the smartphones would appear to conflict with the stated purpose of NSO’s licensing of the Pegasus spyware, which the company says is intended only for use in surveilling terrorists and major criminals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/


More than 50,000 terrorists? What constitutes terrorists in that part of the world?

Israeli president calls Ben & Jerry’s boycott ‘a new form of terrorism’
https://nypost.com/2021/07/21/israeli-president-calls-ben-jerrys-boycott-a-new-form-of-terrorism/





https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/edward-snowden-calls-spyware-trade-ban-pegasus-revelations