#Oakland ordinance could set strict rules on government surveillance ~ #FTW? U tell me! ~ “Oakland, California may become one of the first US cities to impose strict rules on how officials can acquire and deploy surveillance technology. The city’s transparency commission recently approved an ordinance that aims to increase transparency and accountability while protecting citizens’ civil liberties.”
#pwnzd
The documents of the US government that were expected to remain out of reach in the coming years have been got hold of by Jason Leopold of FOIA staffers. The CIA would have definitely thought that one of the documents would remain its little secret for the coming years.
On July 28, 2014, the CIA director wrote a letter to senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss — the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) and the panel’s ranking Republican, respectively. In it, he admitted that the CIA’s penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency’s torture program — a breach for which Feinstein and Chambliss had long demanded accountability — was improper and violated agreements the Intelligence Committee had made with the CIA.
However, the letter was never sent. The CIA threw out its Inspector General’s report on the breach and instead charged the Senate of immodesty and carried out an in-house “investigation” clearing the CIA of illegal behavior.
The letter was never sent or signed by Brennan. In the hope that the letter would never been seen again, it was filed somewhere away in the CIA’s archives. However, it was accidentally handed over to Jason Leopold much to the CIA’s embarrassment resulting in additional humiliation.
After VICE News received the documents, the CIA contacted us and said Brennan’s draft letter had been released by mistake. The agency asked that we refrain from posting it.
We declined the CIA’s request.
No official confirmation has come yet from CIA regarding any wrongdoing (such as the document it did not want to be released but entered into the public record), and still, there’s an acknowledgement of guilt in the hands of the public. Senator Feinstein asserted that everything that could be violated in a single act was violated making it a little difficult to defend actions.
Feinstein wrote to Brennan on January 23, 2014 and told him she consulted with the Senate’s legal counsel, who informed her that the CIA’s search of the Senate’s computer network “may have been inconsistent with the separation of powers principles embodied in the Constitution and essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities.”
“Second,” her letter continued, “the search may have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution, various statutes (including federal criminal statutes, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Executive Order 12333,” which says it’s unlawful for the CIA to conduct domestic spying.
It looks like someone in the CIA already knew that what it did was clearly wrong and also probably illegal; however, the top management was persistent on not accepting it, as a result, that it even did not send an apology letter. It would have remained a complete secret had not someone mistakenly goofed up and handed over the unsigned letter in a FOIA response deposit.
Source: Techdirt
We are pleased to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is signing the Necessary and Proportionate Principles on the application of human rights to surveillance.
Privacy on the Internet is closely connected to our mission to disseminate free knowledge.[1] We strive to provide a platform for users from all over the world to exercise their free expression right to share and study educational content. There are circumstances when contributors need to remain anonymous when working on the Wikimedia projects. To that end, the projects allow people to edit under a pseudonym, without providing any personal information, and without even creating an account. We want community members to feel comfortable when working on the projects. And we strongly oppose mass surveillance by any government or entity.
Although the recent conversation about internet surveillance was spurred by the revelation of a US government program, PRISM, a report issued by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Freedom of Opinion and Expression makes it clear that surveillance by governments is global, ubiquitous, and generally unchecked. The Necessary and Proportionate Principles are intended to provide a framework for human rights laws to address modern surveillance technologies.[2] They demand that governments respect international law and human rights by complying with basic principles such as:
The Necessary and Proportionate Principles project was led by several groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Access, and Privacy International. The principles were developed through a consultation with civil society groups and international experts in communications surveillance law, policy, and technology. So far, the Principles have been advocated by over 400 organizations and many individuals. The signatories include Wikimedia Mexico and several Wikimedians. Today, we are proud to join their efforts.
Yana Welinder Legal Counsel, Wikimedia Foundation[3]
Celebrities against NSA spying. ~ "Stop Watching Us: The Video" #StopTheNSA #F11 #DataLove (by EFForg) ~ StopWatching.us is a coalition of more than 100 public advocacy organizations and companies from across the political spectrum. Join the movement at https://rally.stopwatching.us. This video harnesses the voices of celebrities, activists, legal experts, and other prominent figures in speaking out against mass surveillance by the NSA. Please share widely to help us spread the message that we will not stand for the dragnet surveillance of our communications. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a nonprofit civil liberties law and advocacy center that has been fighting the NSA's unconstitutional spying for years. Learn more at https://eff.org.
#NSA #Whistleblower Russ Tice - Where's the Pushback? ~ http://www.accuracy.org/nsa-veterans-and-whistleblowers-respond-to-obama-speech/&session_token=xGlED4uI7gabllRrP--CCc4fRCV8MTM5MjA4NzMwMEAxMzkyMDAwOTAw http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://LeakSource.wordpress.com https://twitter.com/LeakSourceNews
Identifiable images of bystanders extracted from corneal reflections - @_@
~
http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.po... Animated zoom on the cornea of a high-resolution photographic subject. The zoom begins with a passport photo-style framing of the subject, and ends with a full face close-up of a bystander captured in the subject's corneal reflection. Successive movie frames represent a linear magnification of 6%. Each frame was resized to 720 pixels wide x 540 pixels high using bicubic interpolation to reduce high spatial frequency noise. Contrast was enhanced separately for each frame using the Auto Contrast function in Adobe Photoshop to improve definition. The image sequence was then converted to movie format for viewing.
Billions of dollars annually are being used to fund operations conducted by the United States intelligence community, the likes of which allow the government to eavesdrop on emails, listen to world leaders’ phone calls and about everything in-between.
One thing that budget hasn’t bought, however, is subtlety. The US National Reconnaissance Office launched a top-secret surveillance satellite into space Thursday evening, and the official emblem for the spy agency’s latest mission is, well, certainly accurate, to say the least.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence live-tweeted Thursday’s launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and throughout the course of the ordeal made no effort to ignore the logo for the NROL-39 mission.
The latest spy satellite to be sent into orbit by the NRO can be recognized by its seal: a malevolent octopus with furrowed brows that also happens to be wrapping its tentacles around all corners of the Earth.
“Nothing is beyond our reach,” the NRO boasts on the bottom half of the emblem just below the most sinister-looking cephalopod likely ever to be sent into space.
Along with the National Security Agency and more than a dozen others, the NRO is one of 16 federal offices under the directive of DNI James Clapper and is responsible for building and operating the spy satellites used to collect intelligence around the world. NRO-gathered intelligence was reportedly instrumental in the mission that brought US Navy SEAL’s to the home of former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011, and decades earlier the agency launched a school-bus sized satellite into orbit to spy on Soviets at the height of the Cold War.
In preparation for launch, the NROL-39 payload, encapsulated within a 5-meter diameter payload faring, is transported and mated to its United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V booster at Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex-3. (Photo from www.ulalaunch.com)
This time around the ODNI says the satellite’s payload is mostly classified, but did admit over Twitter that around a dozen mini satellites funded by both the NRO and NASA will be brought along to orbit as well. Another thing they didn’t bother to acknowledge, of course, is how the lack-of-subtlety apparent in the Earth-strangling octopus emblem could quickly be used by critics of the US intelligence community as fodder to further condemn the government for admitting to their sheer and unmatched ability to control the world’s information.
Thursday’s launch of the latest NRO satellite occurred almost exactly six-month-to-the-day after The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers published the first of what has since been revealed to be a trove of leaked national security document showing proof of the NSA’s widespread and extensive ability to monitor people around the world. On June 6 those papers first disclosed evidence in which the NSA was documented to demand telephony metadata from millions of people daily, and a steady stream of leaked files attributed to former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden have since captivated the world while also raising a number of questions.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket carrying a payload for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) lifted off from Space Launch Complex-3 on Dec. 5 at 11:14 p.m. (Photo from www.ulalaunch.com)
For half a year now, leaked NSA documents have let the world learn that the US monitors the phone habits of not just Americans, but also foreigners sitting atop the governments of allied nations.
Reporters with access to the cache of pilfered papers have reportedly released only a sliver of what’s been reported to be 50,000 documents during those six months, but the response has already been widespread. The leaders of countries such as Brazil and Germany have lashed out at the NSA’s behavior, and DNI Clapper and his deputy manning the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, have easily become two of the most embattled public figures in Washington.
That being said, you’d think ODNI would reconsider launching a new spy satellite. Or maybe even not put an octopus strangling the Earth on the outside.
"You may want to downplay the massive dragnet spying thing right now,” Chris Soghoian, the chief technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, tweeted Thursday. “This logo isn't helping."
According to a top-secret budget document released by Snowden and first reported on in August, the NRO is in the midst of modernizing their signals intelligence, geospatial and communications system to replace current capabilities.
Looking at the NROL-39 logo, people could be forgiven for mistaking it for a version of the Lovecraftian elder god Cthulhu, who wants to swallow the Earth whole. But that is not the only National Reconnaissance Office emblem with an interesting spin on the space-spying theme: others include Masonic motifs, superhero ones and a few more that, frankly, defy easy classification.
I have to tell you, though, I’m deeply suspicious some of the NSA’s assertions.
They seem to be claiming that they have cracked nearly everything, and that they have backdoor access to privacy software. But this is practically impossible.
A lot of encryption software used today is actually ‘open source’. This means that the software code is freely available to anyone.
GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is a great example. GPG is an open-source, free alternative version of Phil Zimmerman’s original PGP software. And it’s widely used to encrypt files and emails.
But because GPG is open-source, the software code is available for anyone to view, inspect, and modify. If there were any backdoor access for the NSA, thousands of people would see this.
Not to mention, to penetrate a single 2048-bit encryption key can take anywhere from thousands of years to tens of millions of years, even with the fastest supercomputers.
Consequently, it’s IMPOSSIBLE for the NSA to have cracked everything. And my assessment is that this is an intimidation campaign.
The NSA wants people to think that they have this capability.
And if everyone thinks that the NSA is Big Brother’s Big Brother, all-seeing and all-knowing, then not only will everyone be terrified, but everyone will simply stop using encryption.
After all, why bother going through the hassle of encrypting/decrypting if the NSA can still read the contents of your email?
It’s in the NSA’s interest for people to think that the agency is almighty. I don’t buy it. These people are seriously vile. But they don’t have superpowers.
When done properly, email encryption is still a good option. And there are a number of open-source tools out there to consider using.
*slow clap*
Owner of Snowden’s Email Service on Why He Closed Lavabit Rather Than Comply With Gov’t (via emptyage)
I watched an interview about this last weekend. If you don’t know the details, I strongly suggest you read up and be horrified and write letters and vote because holy crap, this is not how the US should be running. (via monkeyfrog)
Silent Circle's thing has always been the promise of end-to-end secure communications, and that drive is apparently causing it to shut down the Silent Mail email service. Reasons cited in a blog post by CTO Jon Callas include the insecure nature of email protocols and preemptively avoiding the outside (read:FISA) pressures that prompted Lavabit to close its doors. Silent Circle says it hadn't received any "subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else". Still, CEO Michael Janke tells TechCrunch he believed the government would come knocking due to certain high profile users of the service. Its phone, video and text products remain operational and claim to be "secure as ever", if you're wondering.
It would appear as though the tinfoil hat-wearing were vindicated today, as news broke of the true scale of the U.S. government's surveillance of its citizens' online activities, conducted primarily through the NSA and seemingly beyond the realm of the law.
If the reports are to be believed, metadata about virtually every aspect of individuals' lives - phone records and geographic data, emails, web application login times and locations, credit card transactions - are being aggregated and subjected to 'big data' analysis.
The potential for abuse, especially in light of the recent IRS scandal and AP leak investigation, appears unlimited.
Knowing this, what steps can ordinary individuals take to safeguard themselves against the collection, and exposure, of such sensitive personal information?
I would start with greater adoption of PGP for emails, open source alternatives to web applications, and the use of VPNs. Are there any other (or better) steps that can be taken to minimize one's exposure to the surveillance dragnet?
Illustration: National Institutes of Health
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.
“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.
“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said.
David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears.
“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”
For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.
The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday.
