By Carey Wedler
Privacy advocates are urging the House of Representatives and Senate to vote against bills that further increase the government’s widespread surveillance of citizens. The bills, called the “Protecting Cyber Networks Act” (H.R. 1560) and the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” (S. 754) are the latest move by lawmakers to bolster the strength of the domestic spying apparatus.
One of the main objectives of the new laws is to eliminate consequences for companies that share their users’ private information with the government. The bills refer to this as “liability protection.”
Letters written to members of the House and Senate from a coalition of privacy advocates caution lawmakers that the bills
…would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cyber security.
Cassius Methyl and Nick Bernabe
Despite the ongoing debate to roll back the Department of Homeland Security’s current civil liberties overreaches, the DHS is soliciting bids from corporations for access to license plate data collected by private surveillance systems. In a public statement, the Department said it’s “not seeking to build a national database or contribute data to an existing system,” rather, the DHS claims to be tapping into existing networks.
According to the Washington Post, the DHS “is seeking bids from companies that already gather the data to say how much they would charge to grant access to law enforcement officers at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency.”
Aaron Dykes
Despite appearances, the “smart” society was never based on saving energy, saving money or saving the environment.
The real aim has been to control the population and conduct absolute surveillance on the larger herd and even every individual.
Thanks to smart phones, smart meters, smart grids, smart TVs, smart cars and smart appliances, the places you go, the people you contact and all the things you interact with are logged, tracked and analyzed by advanced computer algorithms. Thanks to search engines, the technocrats even believe they know what you’re thinking and what you’ll do next.
Now, the “smart” street lights that record conversations and broadcast government propaganda are actually being rolled out on city streets across the America.
Derrick Broze
A former member of President Obama’s National Security Agency review committee said there is no significant value in mass surveillance programs.
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone spoke at the Constitutional Law University Law School on the failures of the surveillance programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Jake Anderson
Before the events of 9/11, surveillance practices were fairly limited in scope for local police departments. Warrants would be obtained for phone logs, wiretaps and searches; while some departments abused those privileges, most complied with federal and state laws.
Now, however, a new type of surveillance has arisen and police departments today are loath to let the public in on their practices. Funded by grants from the Department of Homeland Security, local law enforcement agencies are using equipment that the average citizens not only does not know about, but is actually prevented from knowing about by nondisclosure agreements and federal intervention.
Ted Baumann
Yesterday I fell for an April Fools’ joke for the first time (that I can remember, at least).
A blog post, ostensibly from Georgia Tech, announced a new program to award credit to students who use their smartphones while logged on to the campus Wi-Fi system. “Every website visit, post, tweet, photo, and yes, even yaks are available and tied to a user,” it said. “Grades are assigned using machine learning that has been trained to recognize intellectually valid content. The student receives a monthly report of their progress. The more they use the Internet, the faster they graduate.”
At first I thought, “So much for digital privacy on campus.” When I realized I’d been had, I chuckled, seeing my bamboozlement as a by-product of age.
But I soon realized that my gullibility wasn’t funny at all. Instead, it’s grim proof that nothing about our digital world, no matter how outrageous, seems unusual anymore. Every day reveals a new abuse of digital privacy, each more insane than the last.
In fact, one of the biggest privacy outrages in a long while is about to pass through our supposedly “hopelessly divided” Congress….
Jake Anderson
The next time you take a trip to the mall, make sure you give those mannequins a big smile. The surveillance industry’s latest recruit—joining the ranks of the Statue of Liberty, vending machines, Kinect, and a litany of other seemingly innocuous retail products—is store mannequins. The $245 billion dollar luxury goods industry currently avails itself of five companies in Europe and the U.S. that use the EyeSee polystyrene frame mannequins, whose eyes are equipped with police grade face-recognition cameras.
Italian mannequin maker Almax SpA supplies these bionic oddities, offering companies the holy grail of retail: “personalizing” their sales offerings.
More than just surveillance cameras
Most shoppers think store cameras are just used to detect and deter shoplifters, but now some stores are tracking shoppers to gather information about target markets, and what products shoppers like and don’t like.
Aaron Dykes and Melissa Melton
This video is just a drive through an average, moderately sized American city.
Things are way beyond just traffic cameras… The average city intersection is jammed with so much surveillance technology, that it would be difficult to even sort out what is what.
During a couple of intersections we observed, there were not only eye-in-the-sky cameras, but angles of every direction of traffic, plus several antennas relaying data to the authorities, a red light camera photographing license plates and generating revenue, and what else?
Melissa Melton
Is it OK to listen in on private conversations between a lawyer and a defendant on trial for a serious crime? What about sifting through the communications of an entire country, or even continent, in pursuit of a wanted criminal or terrorist?
Ask any spy agency about their practices of collecting millions (and probably even billions) of phone calls, cell phone data, e-mails and other communications data from the population, and you’ll be probably get the same basic answer:
SM Gibson
The citizens of the United Kingdom are possibly the most surveilled group of people in the history of the world. Forget the NSA’s ever-expanding reach over every form of communication imaginable. We’re talking cameras… everywhere. The City of London is equipped with thousands of them, so is Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and, well, like I said before, pretty much everywhere. In a nation of 64 million residents, there is one CCTV camera for every 11 people in the UK.
The British Security Industry Authority (BSIA) estimates there are up to 5.9 million closed-circuit television cameras scattered throughout the UK, including 750,000 in “sensitive locations” such as schools, hospitals and care homes. This statistic was released in 2013 as well. Do you think they decided to halt the expansion of their Orwellian state at any point over the past two years? The safe bet is that these numbers have grown exponentially.
The truly remarkable and almost unfathomable piece of information regarding CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom is that no one really knows how many there are.
Activist Post
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) has announced the launch of the Snowden Archive, a comprehensive database of all of the documents published to date from the Snowden leak.
Created in partnership with the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, the Archive is the world’s first fully indexed and searchable collection of publicly released Snowden documents.
The Archive is a powerful resource for journalists, researchers and concerned citizens to find new stories and to delve deeply into the critically important information about government surveillance practices made public thanks to Edward Snowden.
Mac Slavo
It seems that the NSA, the feds and law enforcement aren’t the only ones monitoring cell phone data and mobile devices.
The Ad companies are in on it, too – and are now using drones to spy, err.. track, err… keep pace with consumers.
Here’s what Venture Beat is reporting about the new drone fleet operating in the L.A. area:
Cassius Methyl
Between 2015 and 2017, the Pentagon will have the ability to decipher human voices in surveillance audio even if background noise makes the covertly recorded conversations inaudible.
This may bring to mind the surveillance audio secretly recorded through our smartphones when they are in our pockets. On or off, we know now that our conversations are being recorded by a wide array of electronic devices, and our conversations we used to consider private are actually being stored in data collection facilities like the one in Utah aptly titled the ‘Utah Data Center’.
With this multimillion dollar technology, our seemingly private conversations can be stored and analyzed by government officials even if the background noise is too much for a normal audio recording.
Newly released documents from DARPA show that they are in the third phase of their ‘RATS’ program (Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech). This information indicates that they are going to great lengths to make sure that secretly recorded conversations can be analyzed by the government.
Vladimir Platov
Stolen encryption keys are just the beginning. US NSA appears to have compromised big telecom, IT manufacturers, online banking, and even passports, starting on the factory floor.
Recent days have been marked by a record number of news stories regarding the US and its allies trying to establish total control over Internet users.
On February 16, researchers at the Moscow-based security group Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of the ultimate virus which has virtually infected all spheres of military and civilian computing in more than 40 countries around the world. They’ve managed to discover a piece of malware that must have been installed on hard disks while they were still being manufactured, and due to its complexity and a certain number of features that it shares with Stuxnet, it’s safe to assume that it was created by US secret services.
Nadia Kayyali
Want to know if GCHQ spied on you? Now you can find out. Privacy International (PI) has just launched a website that lets anyone find out if their communications were intercepted by the NSA and then shared with GCHQ.
The website is the result of a February 6 ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). Similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the US, the IPT is a special court in the UK established by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that deals with issues of surveillance and human rights.
The February 6th ruling held that intelligence sharing between GCHQ and NSA done prior to December 2014 was unlawful. The decision, which applied to information collected by the NSA through Prism and Upstream, was based on the secrecy of the rules governing sharing of that information. This followed a December ruling in which the court held that information sharing between the NSA and GCHQ could continue because the oversight of the data-collection program had been made public, bringing it into compliance with European law. Privacy International disagreed with the decision made by the tribunal on this point and is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Ted Baumann
Sometimes I wonder just how bad the news about government spying can get. The answer was in my inbox this morning. I quickly ran out of superlatives: Awful. Terrible. Appalling. Dreadful.
The article in question reported that for most of the last two decades, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been deliberately infecting the “firmware” that runs most common hard drives, including those made by Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Toshiba, Samsung and Maxtor.
There’s a 99% chance that the computer you’re using has one of those in it. Mine has four.
The malware campaign, called “Equation,” has infected tens of thousands of public and private computers in more than 30 countries. And it allows the NSA to read everything on those machines at will.
Unless you’ve done one simple thing to thwart them…
Ted Baumann
In the summer of 1849, Austrian Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky did something no one had done before: He bombed a city from the air.
His target was Venice, then in rebellion against the Habsburg crown. During the siege, he launched a fleet of unmanned linen balloons, carrying bombs made from canister shot and gunpowder, timed to drop over the besieged city.
Radetzky told Emperor Franz Joseph that the effect on the people of Venice was “frightful.” Indeed, Radetzky’s balloons had done little physical damage, but had a substantial effect on the morale of the city’s defenders. As the 19th century wore on, fear of attack by airships became a constant theme in popular literature. By World War I, the mere mention of the word “Zeppelin” was enough to cause panic in the streets of London.
A prevailing theme in the literature of the era and the minds of the people was that these aerial monsters would always be deployed by one’s enemies. So it says a lot about the current atmosphere in the U.S. that the overwhelming public reaction to the deployment of massive Army blimps over Interstate 95 in Maryland has been fear and rejection….
Nadia Kayyali and Katitza Rodriguez
Riseup, a tech collective that provides security-minded communications to activists worldwide, sounded the alarm last month when a judge in Spain stated that the use of their email service is a practice, he believes, associated with terrorism.
Javier Gómez Bermúdez is a judge of Audiencia Nacional, a special high court in Spain that deals with serious crimes such as terrorism and genocide. According to press reports, he ordered arrest warrants that were carried out on December 16th against alleged members of an anarchist group. The arrests were part of Operation Pandora, a coordinated campaign against “anarchist activity” that has been called an attempt “to criminalize anarchist social movements.” The police seized books, cell phones, and computers, and arrested 11 activists. Few details are known about the situation, since the judge has declared the case secret.
At least one lawmaker, David Companyon, has speculated that the raids are a “stunt to garner support for Spain’s recently approved ‘gag law.’” The new law severely restricts demonstrations, setting huge fines for activities such as insulting police officers (€600), burning a national flag (up to €30,000), or demonstrating outside parliament buildings or key installations (up to €600,000). Considering the provisions of the law, it’s no surprise that many see the raid, conducted against a group with political ideas that the government appears to find threatening, as connected.
April Glaser
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Watch for it. This year student protest and resistance to mass surveillance might be bursting at the seams. The Internet, which students across the world have grown up with, is under threat. And now more than ever, student leaders are contacting EFF, wanting to know how to get involved to protect our rights online.
Now is the time to organize. We’re calling on all concerned students, whether new organizers or seasoned campus leaders, to join the growing movement to fight for our right communicate and innovate, unhampered by oppressive government surveillance and creativity-stifling copyright law.
Surveillance chills speech. When we know that researching politically controversial topics might make us targets for increased government scrutiny, we are less likely to research. Digital privacy is an intellectual freedom issue. And that’s why we’re thrilled to bring this movement to college campuses.
Katitza Rodriguez
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Canadian government's surveillance of innocent Canadians is secretive, expensive, and out-of-control—that’s the message of a new video launched this morning by Canadian digital rights organization, OpenMedia.ca. The group is leading a large, non-partisan, Canadian coalition of organizations calling for effective legal measures to safeguard Canadians from government spying.
The video reveals how information collected by government spy agency, CSEC (Communications Security Establishment Canada), can expose intimate details about Canadians’ private lives, including their financial status, medical conditions, political and religious beliefs, and even sexual orientation. CSEC was caught as they spied on thousands of innocent Canadian air travelers earlier this year.
