Former FBI Agent Confirms the Surveillance State Is Real
Greenwald wants to make sure we understand the full meaning of Clemente’s comments. “ ‘[N]o digital communication is secure,’ ” Greenwald repeats, “by which [Clemente] means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications—meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like—are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact.
“To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is,” Greenwald adds.
Department of Justice Tapped Congressional Rooms as Well as Reporters’ Offices
- [Congressman Nunes]: I don’t think people are focusing on the right thing when they talk about going after the AP reporters. The big problem that I see is that they actually tapped right where I’m sitting right now, the Cloak Room.
- [Interviewer]: Wait a minute, this is news to me.
- [Congressman Nunes]: The Cloak Room in the House of Representatives.
- [Interviewer]: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
- [Congressman Nunes]: So when they went after the AP reporters, right? Went after all of their phone records, they went after the phone records, including right up here in the House Gallery, right up from where I’m sitting right now. So you have a real separation of powers issue that did this really rise to the level that you would have to get phone records that would, that would most likely include members of Congress ….
Congressman: Department of Justice Tapped Congressional Rooms as Well as Reporters' Offices
Has the Obama Department of Justice Violated the Separation of Powers?
Liberals rightfully lambasted the Bush administration for considering doing something similar. As Mother Jones reported in 2009:
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau report in the New York Times today that the NSA may have exceeded the wiretapping authority it was given by Congress in 2008.
***
But then there’s this buried in the middle of the story, which isn’t vague at all:
New details are also emerging about earlier domestic surveillance activities, including the agency’s attempt to wiretap a congressman without court approval on an overseas trip, according to interviews with current and former intelligence officials.
….The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact as part of a congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations to gather more intelligence, the official said.
The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some officials in the intelligence community about the idea of using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.
Jesus. If a member of Congress isn’t a “United States person” protected from warrantless surveillance by every version of FISA that’s ever been on the books, who is? Shouldn’t this have set off alarm bells at every possible level at NSA, rather than merely being “ultimately blocked” because “some” officials had “concerns” about it?
But – even though top expert say that Obama is trampling on separation of powers and Constitutional liberties more than Bush or Nixon – many Democrats are still hypnotized by what liberal writer Glenn Greenwald calls the “cult of personality“.
Update: Nunes’ director of communications – Jack Lagner – has issued a clarification:
What Rep. Nunes meant by “tapped” was that the DOJ seized the phone records, as has been widely reported. There was a little confusion between him and the host during the conversation: He did not mean to refer to phone records of the cloakroom itself, but of the Capitol. This refers to the phone records for the AP from the House press gallery, which the DOJ admitted to looking at. He was explaining that if those phone records were seized, they would reveal a lot of conversations between the press and members of Congress, since reporters often speak to Members from the press gallery phones. The notion of the DOJ looking at phone records from the Capitol of conversations between Members of Congress and reporters is something that concerns Rep. Nunes, bringing up issues related to the separation of powers.
Nunes’ point still stands, though. The Department of Justice collection of phone records of conversations between Congress members and reporters violates the principal of separation of powers.
U.S. Secretly Obtains Two Months of A.P. Phone Records
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, for general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and for the main number for the AP in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of the calls.
In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown, but more than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were targeted, on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.
» via The New York Times (Subscription may be required for some content)
News to Me: Bloomberg Posted Private Terminal Messages Online
May 13th, 2013
Via: Quartz:
Bloomberg says it accidentally posted on the internet more than 10,000 private messages that traders sent each other on their Bloomberg terminals. The new revelation, reported by the Financial Times, will undoubtedly escalate the furor over Bloomberg’s handling of data that its customers consider to be confidential.
The messages were related to the Bloomberg Valuation Service, known as BVAL, which sets prices on financial products likes bonds and credit default swaps that are often traded among a small number of investors over the messaging system on their Bloomberg terminals. Customers allow Bloomberg to scan those messages for data about trades, so a market price can be established.
…
According to Bloomberg’s account, the messages that ended up online (and have since been removed) were voluntarily forwarded to Bloomberg by a customer “so that we could conduct internal testing to improve our technology for the client.” A Bloomberg employee uploaded the messages to what he thought was a private website. In fact, it could be accessed by anyone.
Bigger than Benghazi and #IRSGATE: Obama's possibly illegal wiretapping of AP journalists
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.Holy moley. If you are a scumbag politician who is cheating on his wife, now is the best time to come forward with your juicy gossip.
everyone’s getting wiretapped!
CNN Calls for Real-time Police State Surveillance
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
May 13, 2013The establishment media is calling for the implementation of Big Brother technology following the Boston bombing last month.
In order to prevent terrorist attacks, CNN argues, there must be real-time surveillance cameras planted everywhere. Panopticon technology is required if we are to expect government to protect us from terrorists and other miscreants, the corporate media network says.
In April, CNN dismissed privacy and civil liberty concerns and argued that “facial-recognition software and other technologies are making security-camera images more valuable to law enforcement. Now, software can automatically mine surveillance footage for information, such as a specific person’s face, and create a giant searchable database.”
CNN says video surveillance is “less intrusive” and “much more pleasant” than pat-downs and other in-your-face Gestapo tactics. “When combined with competent law enforcement, surveillance cameras are more effective, less intrusive, less psychologically draining, and much more pleasant than these alternatives,” writes Heather Kelly.
CNN insists the Tsarnaev brothers became suspects after they were identified on surveillance camera footage.
The government, however, has yet to convulsively prove that the brothers were anything but average spectators at a sporting event. Not one image of the brothers placing a backpack supposedly containing a pressure cooker bomb has been produced by the government. We are simply expected to believe the brothers placed the bomb despite a complete lack of evidence.
Before demanding we surrender what remains of our privacy to the state and its intrusive surveillance technology, CNN – itself a tool of military intelligence – should insist the FBI and the government provide conclusive evidence that the Tsarnaev brothers actually placed the bombs in Boston.
The government has not released video evidence because none actually exists. Teenager Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an obvious patsy who will be used like Timothy McVeigh for government propaganda designed to further diminish the Bill of Rights and provide an excuse to build the sort of pervasive Big Brother panopticon CNN eagerly argues for.
Federal judge denies motion to throw out evidence gathered via fake cell tower
In a criminal case on Wednesday, a federal judge denied a motion to suppress evidence gathered with the help of a stingray—a device that can create a false cellphone tower signal.
The use of a stingray allows authorities to determine a specific mobile phone’s precise location. The technology isn’t new and many believe law enforcement agencies nationwide have used them for many years.
» via ars technica
FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam
A federal magistrate judge has denied a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.”
Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “Rule 41 search and seizure warrant” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.”
In an unusually-public order published this week, Judge Stephen Smith slapped down the FBI on the grounds that the warrant request was overbroad and too invasive. In it, he gives a unique insight as to the government’s capabilities for sophisticated digital surveillance on potential targets. According to the judge’s description of the spyware, it sounds very similar to the RAT software that many miscreants use to spy on other Internet users without their knowledge.
» via ars technica
(via beatyourselfup)
Megaupload Launches Frontal Attack on White House Corruption
Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom has been announcing it for months on his website and a white paper released today is the first big step towards that goal.
Titled “The United States vs You (and Kim Dotcom)” and written by Megaupload lawyers Ira Rothken and Robert Amsterdam, the paper accuses the Obama administration of being a pawn of big corporations. It further describes in detail how the authorities obliterated Megaupload on flaky legal grounds.
“The message is clear. The White House is for sale. Due process and the rule of law have little value to the current administration. More and more of our rights are eroding away to protect the interests of large corporations and their billionaire shareholders,” Dotcom tells TorrentFreak.
According to Dotcom his case is just one example of how corporate interests threaten people’s rights and freedom on the Internet in general.
“Silicon Valley has been turned into Surveillance Valley. Kids with keyboards are the new terrorists. Copyright is now a matter of national security. This is all very un-American. Read the White Paper and wake up.”
The 38-page white paper starts with a bang:
“The criminal prosecution of Megaupload and Kim Dotcom is purportedly the ‘largest copyright case in history,’ involving tens of millions of users around the world, and yet it is founded on highly dubious legal principles and apparently propelled by the White House’s desire to mollify the motion picture industry in exchange for campaign contributions and political support,” the white paper begins.
One of the main complaints against the legal process is that under U.S. law Megaupload and its employees can’t be held criminally responsible for copyright infringements committed by the site’s users.
“The prosecution seeks to hold Megaupload and its executives criminally responsible for alleged infringement by the company’s third-party cloud storage users. The problem with the theory, however, is that secondary copyright infringement is not – nor has it ever been – a crime in the United States.”
“The federal courts lack any power to criminalize secondary copyright infringement; the U.S. Congress alone has such authority, and it has not done so. As such, the Megaupload prosecution is not only baseless, it is unprecedented,” Rothken and Amsterdam write.
The paper continues to give a detailed overview of legal jurisprudence in Megaupload’s favor. Among other things, the lawyers note that Megaupload granted very broad DMCA takedown powers to copyright holders, who could remove any file from the cloud hosting service without oversight.
Most of the legal arguments laid out in the white paper have been highlighted previously. What is new, however, is the legal team’s frontal attack on the Obama administration. The suggestion is, that the White House has been corrupted by corporate money and that the assault on Megaupload was a payoff.
“The degree to which the Copyright Lobby, and the MPAA specifically, have managed to instrumentalize the current Administration to take down a foreign corporation and its executives is, quite literally, un-American,” the lawyers write.
Corrupted by sizable election contributions from corporate interest groups, the United States no longer stands for principled standards and the rule of law, the lawyers argue.
“Those values appear to have fallen by the wayside under this White House, which seems content to violate the due process rights of criminal defendants, mislead the courts, and advance baseless legal theories so long as its fund-raising remains uninterrupted.”
The Truth Will Come Out
Megaupload’s lawyers see the MPAA as the driving force behind the criminal prosecution of the cloud hosting site and its employees. According to them, it is no coincidence that the Hollywood group is headed by former Senator Chris Dodd, one of Vice President Joe Biden’s best friends.
“As the new Chairman and CEO of the MPAA, Chris Dodd improperly leveraged his friendship with Joe Biden to achieve the MPAA’s objectives. Former Senator Dodd’s relationship with the Vice President– who comes off manipulated, a cheerfully credulous facilitator – together with the Obama Administration’s ravenous hunger for campaign contributions, has given the MPAA absolute control over how the U.S. Department of Justice plays the game in enforcing copyright law,” they write.
Continuing on the corruption theme, Rothken and Amsterdam go on to describe MPAA’s influence in Washington as “State Capture.”
“The MPAA’s overt use of campaign contributions to sway the U.S. government into engaging in what amounts to unlawful action against Megaupload reflects a form of State Capture, a term coined by the World Bank to describe a brand of corruption characterized by the ability of a relatively small number of private interests to shape the official rules of the game through direct payments or other forms of financial influence.”
One cited example of how political funding was used to influence decisions was a January 2012 threat from the MPAA’s Chris Dodd. He stated that Hollywood would stop donating to politicians who fail to protect their interests.
“By threatening to revoke vital political and monetary support from the Administration at a crucial moment, the MPAA has exercised de facto control over key levers of executive power in Washington – law enforcement, prosecutors, trade negotiators – and is using those instruments of state power to further the financial interests of its members in Hollywood.”
The white paper further gives numerous examples of how Megaupload’s lawyers believe the authorities abused their power to further the interests of the copyright lobby. The overall conclusion is that people’s rights and freedoms are trumped to secure political donations, which are clear signs of contract prosecution.
“The U.S. government’s attack against Megaupload bears all the hallmarks of a contract prosecution: a case resting on erroneous theories of criminal law, littered with due process violations and prosecutorial abuses, carried out for the benefit of a select few in exchange for their political and financial support,” the lawyers write.
“In the name of eliminating copyright infringement, Hollywood has exerted a corrupting influence in Washington, leading us all down a slippery slope that not only threatens innovation and Internet freedom, but also has profound implications for constitutional principles of free speech, privacy and due process.”
Finally, the white paper suggests that this is not an isolated incident. It warns the public that these corrupt forces can quash anything that stands in the way of the private interests of those who make significant campaign contributions.
“Megaupload and Kim Dotcom are today’s targets, but the crosshairs can just as easily be trained on anybody who dares challenge or inconvenience a special interest that holds sway in Washington, and the current Administration – with its notoriously insatiable appetite for campaign contributions – seems all too willing to cooperate.”
The above points are just samples from the white paper, which is certainly worth reading in its entirety. There is no doubt that the Megaupload legal team have just planted a virtual bomb under the Megaupload prosecution. It will be interesting to see how this is received, and whether we will hear a response from the accused.
News to Me: Israel Airport Security ‘Allowed To Read Tourists’ Email’
April 25th, 2013
If you think this is good, why not go for the bonus round: Israel Cloned Travelers’ Passports to Carry Out Assassination.
Via: AFP:
Israeli security officials at Ben Gurion airport are legally allowed to demand access to tourists’ email accounts and deny them entry if they refuse, the country’s top legal official said on Wednesday.
Details of the policy were laid out by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in a written response to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the group said in a statement.
In June 2012, ACRI’s Lila Margalit wrote to the attorney general demanding clarification following media reports about security officials demanding access to tourists’ email accounts before allowing them into the country.
“In a response dated April 24, 2013, the attorney general’s office confirmed this practice,” ACRI said, quoting sections of the document which said it was only done in exceptional cases where “relevant suspicious signs” were evident and only done with the tourist’s “consent”.
Secretive Spy Court Approved Nearly 2,000 Surveillance Requests in 2012
A secretive federal court last year approved all of the 1,856 requests to search or electronically surveil people within the United States “for foreign intelligence purposes,” the Justice Department reported this week.
The report, released Tuesday to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, provides a brief glimpse into the caseload of what is known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. None of its decisions are public.
The 2012 figures represent a 5 percent bump from the prior year, when no requests were denied either.
» via Wired
Will New Bitcoin Backdoor Extensions Keep Bitcoin Ahead of Government Snooping?
Writes ActivistPost.com:
The CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel has taken a great interest in Bitcoin and has called some of its developers to give a presentation about Bitcoin this June, which is troublesome for the prospect of freedom and privacy.
But resistance is not futile as Andrew Leonard would like his readers to believe. Other developers are working on Bitcoin extensions to add further privacy for users. Bitcoin transactions are already fairly anonymous even though they can be viewed on a public open-source record.Privacy lacks for Bitcoin users, not in the transaction, but in where the coins are stored. Specific encrypted coins can be traced through a transaction to a certain wallet whose owner is may or may not be anonymous. Even if the wallet is anonymous, everyone knows where their specific coins have been which could potentially expose the wallet owner’s activity and identity.A new Bitcoin privacy extension, Zerocoin, is seeking to solve this privacy concern. Zerocoin, being developed by Johns Hopkins University, will basically pool Bitcoins in escrow and scramble them between buyers and sellers to hide the origin and destination of specific coins.[…]Yet as Bitcoin developers are hard at work finding ways to make it even more anonymous, will they be successful in preventing backdoors for government access, thwarting FinCEN regulations, and involvement by the CIA?
