http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...spy-do ents/The Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the government Thursday demanding a judge order the feds to release do ents allegedly showing the National Security Agency unlawfully surveilled Americans’ e-mails and telephone calls.
Specifically the EFF wants the government to make public a secret court ruling that found that the feds had broken a 2008 wiretapping law that was intended to legalize President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.
The public first learned of that ruling thanks to three damning statements U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) obtained national security clearance to make public. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, presumably learned of the lawbreaking in briefings from the intelligence community.
The statements concerned alleged abuses of the FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows the government to conduct widespread e-mail and phone surveillance inside the United States, without probable-cause warrants, targeting people or groups “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information.” In other words, the government can collect all e-mails and phone calls from the United States to Lebanon, so long as the target is a suspected terrorist group in Lebanon. If the government collects e-mails that are sent by people believed to be American, the person’s iden y is supposed to be given a pseudonym or “minimized.”
The government is required to get approval from a secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or FISC for both wide-net and targeted surveillance performed inside the United States.
Here are the statements Wyden was authorized to divulge:
• “A recent unclassified report noted that the [FISC] has repeatedly held that collection carried out pursuant to the FISA Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
• “It is also true that on at least one occasion the [FISC] held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”
• “I believe that the government’s implementation of Section 702 of FISA has sometimes cir vented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the [FISC] has reached this same conclusion.”
In short, Wyden is trying to say that the NSA has found a way to collect a ton of information on Americans and sift through it in a way that he considers to be illegal. And, in at least one secret decision by a secret court, judges agree with him.
If appealed to JINO SCOTUS, NSA wins on "national security/secrecy" grounds. iow, just another JINO SCOTUS "ins utions (private and public) powers trumps citizens' rights".
NSA/FBI/NatSec are untouchable and without limits on what they do, and which party in the Exec and Congress makes no difference.
the suit will proceed anyway. may not succeed, but no one can predict the future. not even you.
The best predictor of the (JINO SCOTUS) future is the (recent) past AND the continued domination of SCOTUS by extreme right-wing JINOs, pro-business and pro-ins ution, and ANTI-citizen.
The VRWC has turned the USA into France, where l'etat, royal or republic, has always trumped les droits de l'homme
How Your Movements Are Being Tracked, Probably Without Your Knowledge
In May, Utah lawmakers were surprised to learn that the US Drug Enforcement Agency had worked out a plan with local sheriffs to pack the state's main interstate highway, I-15, with Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) that could track any vehicle passing through. At a hearing of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee, the ACLU of Utah and committee members aired their concerns, asking such questions as: Why store the travel histories of law-abiding Utah residents in a federal database in Virginia? What about residents who don't want anyone to know they drive to Nevada to gamble? Wouldn't drug traffickers catch on and just start taking a different highway? (That's the case, according to local reports.)
The plan ended up getting shelved, but that did not present a huge problem for the DEA because as it turns out, large stretches of highway in Texas and California [3] already use the readers.
So do towns all over America. Last week Ars Technica reported [4] that the tiny town of Tiburon in Northern California is using tag reader cameras to monitor the comings and goings of everyone that visits. Despite the Utah legislature's stand against the DEA, local law enforcement uses them all over the place anyway, according to the Salt Lake City Tribune. [5] Big cities, like Washington, DC and New York, are riddled with ALPRs. According to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, ALPRs have become so pervasive in America that they cons ute a "covert national surveillance grid." The civil liberties group has mapped the spread of ALPRs, and contends on its Web site that, "Silently, but constantly, the government is now watching, recording your everyday travels and storing years of your activities in massive data warehouses that can be quickly 'mined' to find out when and where you have been, whom you’ve visited, meetings you’ve attended, and activities you’ve taken part in."
http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-...your-knowledge
I love the EFF. Good for them.
http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/s...stigation.htmlThe Los Angeles Police Department says it cannot release information about its automatic license plate reader program because all cars in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are under investigation.
The LAPD made this legal argument in response to a records request from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sought to find out what the license plate readers had captured, as well as the department's policies for retaining and sharing the data.
Automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems like the one employed by the LAPD take photos of any and all license plates, storing the plate number, time and location.
The LAPD's legal argument for denying the records request is novel in that it characterizes data collection not tied to a specific criminal case as investigatory, arguing that it may prove useful in future investigations.
The LAPD's filing reads: "All ALPR data is investigatory—regardless of whether a license plate scan results in an immediate 'hit' because, for instance, the vehicle may be stolen, the subject of an 'Amber Alert,' or operated by an individual with an outstanding arrest warrant."
In a blog post, EFF's Jennifer Lynch criticized the LAPD's argument, saying that it carries significant Fourth Amendment implications:eff.org
This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Cons ution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, su ionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...t-secret.shtmlAs we've noted several times before, law enforcement and investigative agencies tend to roll out expanded surveillance systems without bothering to run it by the citizens they're planning to surveil. The systems and programs are deployed, FOIA battles are waged and, finally, at some point, the information makes its way to the public. It is only then that most agencies start considering the privacy implications of their surveillance systems, and these are usually addressed by begrudging, minimal protections being belatedly applied.
Now, it's obvious why these agencies don't inform the public of their plans. They may uses terms like "security" and "officer safety" and theorize that making any details public would just allow criminals to find ways to avoid the persistent gaze of multiple surveillance options, but underneath it all, they know the public isn't going to just sit there and allow them to deploy intrusive surveillance programs.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is using a new surveillance program utilizing the technology of a private contractor doing business under the not-scary-at-all name of "Persistent Surveillance Systems." This gives the LASD a literal eye in the sky that provides coverage it can't achieve with systems already in place. But it does more than just give the LASD yet another camera. It provides the agency with some impressive tools to manipulate the recordings.
The system, known as wide-area surveillance, is something of a time machine – the entire city is filmed and recorded in real time. Imagine Google Earth with a rewind button and the ability to play back the movement of cars and people as they scurry about the city.As with nearly everything making its way into law enforcement hands these days, this technology was developed and deployed first in battlefields. Persistent Surveillance Systems' first proving grounds were Afghanistan and Iraq, tracking down bombing suspects. All it takes is a cluster of high-powered cameras and a single civilian plane to watch over Compton with warzone-quality surveillance. According to McNutt, the camera system covers "10,000 times" the area a single police helicopter can. McNutt also believes the system can be expanded to cover an area as large as the entire city of San Francisco.
“We literally watched all of Compton during the time that we were flying, so we could zoom in anywhere within the city of Compton and follow cars and see people,” [Ross] McNutt [owner of Persistent Surveillance Systems] said. “Our goal was to basically jump to where reported crimes occurred and see what information we could generate that would help investigators solve the crimes.”
While the cameras aren't quite powerful enough to allow the LASD to make use of another, increasingly popular technological tool -- facial recognition -- this still gives the LASD an unprecedented coverage area. Camera technology continues to improve, so there's no reason to believe a few of McNutt's planes won't someday (possibly very soon) have the power to assist the LASD with adding new mugshots to its databases.
But, as pointed out earlier, where does the public fit into all of this? Were privacy concerns addressed before moving forward with Persistent Surveillance Systems? I'm not even going to try to set up this astounding response from an LASD officer. Just read it:“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,” (LASD Sgt.) Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”
http://reason.com/blog/2014/04/28/ma...ef=mostpopularOne of the downsides of all of the new gee-whiz identification technology law enforcement is adopting (usually with hefty federal subsidies) is that it never works quite as well as advertised. The FBI touts facial recognition software as the bad guy-tagging tool of the future, but you have to dig through do ents to discover that the feds consider a false positive rate of 20 percent to be perfectly acceptable.
We don't really know what the false positive rate for license plate scanners is, but we do know it has one. At least, Mark Molner, a Prairie Village, Kansas, attorney knows it, because a scanner misread his BMW's license plate for that of a stolen Oldsmobile plate, and the next thing he knew, cops with guns in hand had him surrounded and wanted to know his business.
Writes Jay Senter at the Prairie Village Post:
Mark Molner, whose law office is just north of the intersection of 75th Street and State Line Road, was driving back from a sonographer’s appointment with his wife around 5:15 p.m. Monday when a Prairie Village police car pulled up behind him.
"As there were tons of cars around me, I was not certain who they were pulling over, but as I had been at the light some time, I did not think that I had had the opportunity to do anything to interest the officers, so when traffic permitted, I pulled forward with it, slowly," Molner said. "At that time, the cruiser darted in front of me and attempted to pin me by parking diagonally across both lanes of traffic, and the motorcycle took up a place directly behind me."
As one of the officers approached Molner's car, Molner noticed that he had his gun out.
"He did not point it at me, but it was definitely out of the holster," he said. "I am guessing that he saw the shock and horror on my face, and realized that I was unlikely to make (more of) a scene."
After a few moments of conferring with the other officer on the scene, the policeman returned to Molner's window and told him that a license plate scanner mounted on his police unit had thrown off an alert that Molner was in a stolen vehicle. As it turned out, though, the license scanner mounted on the car had misread a "7" on Molner's license plate as a "2." The alert the officer received was related to a stolen Oldsmobile. Molner was driving a black BMW. Molner's wife, who is four months pregnant, watched the incident unfolding from her car in the parking lot of Molner's office.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-s...ly-court-orderIn an era of too-big-to-fail banks, we should have known it was coming: An intelligence agency too big to rein in — and brazen enough to say so.
In a remarkable legal filing on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal court that its spying operations are too massive and technically complex to comply with an order to preserve evidence. The NSA, in other words, now says that it cannot comply with the rules that apply to any other party before a court — the very rules that ensure legal accountability — because it is too big.
The filing came in a long-running lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging the NSA's warrantless collection of Americans' private data. Recently, the plaintiffs in that case have fought to ensure that the NSA is preserving relevant evidence — a standard obligation in any lawsuit — and not destroying the very data that would show the agency spied on the plaintiffs' communications. Yet, as in so many other instances, the NSA appears to believe it is exempt from the normal rules.
In its filing on Friday, the NSA told the court:
[A]ttempts to fully comply with the Court's June 5 Order would be a massive and uncertain endeavor because the NSA may have to shut down all databases and systems that contain Section 702 information in an effort to comply.
hope it comes to a vote: http://amendments-rules.house.gov/am...1339143914.pdf
How old is that link? It never made it to a vote. HR4435 was introduced 4/9 and passed 5/22 with a 325-98 vote, and sent to the senate. It was placed on senate calendar 425 on 6/5. Several amendments were considered and passed or failed primarily on party lines, but none were hers. It wasn't even allowed in blocks of amendments by her democrat buddies.
If I'm wrong, where is it?
Why don't you verify a status before posting?
if you have a little more information, please share it. I don't always research in depth like you, profe.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-980372.html
US intelligence, making friends enemies...
more on license plate readers:
https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology...ram-record-ame
a law passed in Texas last year turns cops into debt collectors and turns over driving habits and identifying info of drivers who've done nothing wrong, to private companies:
http://gritsforbreakfast.blogspot.co...t-traffic.htmlThe Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday offered Grits an "I told you so" regarding legislation passed last year allowing Texas cops to become debt collectors, accepting credit cards for traffic ticket debt at traffic stops. I'd much rather have been wrong.
Grits had suggested that Rep. Allen Fletcher's HB 121, combined with automatic license plate reader technology, could allow police to “cherry pick drivers with outstanding warrants instead of looking for current, real-time traffic violations.”
Wrote EFF's Dave Maas (formerly of the San Antonio Current):
As it turns out, contracts between between Vigilant and Guadalupe County and the City of Kyle in Texas reveal that Henson was right to worry.So really, I wasn't cynical enough. Grits certainly didn't anticipate that license plate reader vendors would give away their systems in exchange for a 25 percent surcharge. EFF concluded that:
The “warrant redemption” program works like this. The agency gets no-cost license plate readers as well as free access to LEARN-NVLS, the ALPR data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8-billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70 million scans a month. This also includes a wide variety of analytical and predictive software tools.
The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil’s bargain: go to jail, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant.1 In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant’s payment website.
But Vigilant isn’t just compensated with motorists’ cash. The law enforcement agencies are also using the privacy of everyday drivers as currency.
Buried in the fine print of the contract with Vigilant is a clause that says the company also get to keep a copy of all the license-plate data collected by the agency, even after the contract ends. According the company's usage and privacy policy, Vigilant “retains LPR data as long as it has commercial value.” Vigilant can sell or license that information to other law enforcement bodies, and potentially private companies such as insurance firms and repossession agencies.
From Vigilant Solutions contract with City of Kyle
In early December 2015, Vigilant issued a press release bragging that Guadalupe County had used the systems to collect on more than 4,500 warrants between April and December 2015. In January 2016, the City of Kyle signed an identical deal with Vigilant. Soon after, Guadalupe County upgraded the contract to allow Vigilant to dispatch its own contractors to collect on capias warrants.
the system raises a whole host of problems:RELATED: Bud Kennedy at the Star-Telegram offered up a column criticizing the shift in priorities:
- It turns police into debt collectors, who have to keep swiping credit cards to keep the free equipment.
- It turns police into data miners, who use the privacy of local drivers as currency.
- It not-so-subtly shifts police priorities from responding to calls and traffic violations to responding to a computer’s instructions.
- Policy makers and the public are unable to effectively evaluate the technology since the contract prohibits police from speaking honestly and openly about the program.
- The model relies on debt: there’s no incentive for criminal justice leaders to work with the community to reduce the number of capias warrants, since that could result in losing the equipment.
- People who have committed no crimes whatsoever have their driving patterns uploaded into a private system and no opportunity to control or watchdog how that data is disseminated.
There was a time where companies like Vigilant marketed ALPR technology as a way to save kidnapped children, recover stolen cars, and catch violent criminals. But as we’ve long warned, ALPRs in fact are being deployed for far more questionable practices.
The Texas public should be outraged at the terrible deals their representatives are signing with this particular surveillance contractor, and the legislature should reexamine the unintended consequences of the law they passed last year.
Lawmakers originally said the system would save officers time — true — but justice reformers were concerned that collections would become the focus over traffic patrol.
EFF warned that “To Protect and Serve” would become “To Stop and Swipe.”
Seems like this is a slam dunk due process issue.
I get pulled over, smacked with a 25% surcharge, hire a mouthpiece and get berry, berry rich.
I bet the ALPR data is being sold to private investigators, companies, ANYBODY with enough $$$ (and corrupt admins of the data)
Not until someone beats it. You can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride.
Oh, it'll get slapped down in court.
“This is Just Evil”: Massive Private License Plate Database Tracks Car Locations Over Years
A must-read article in the Atlantic describes yet another surveillance state advance that it was not hard to see coming: large-scale logging of time and location stamped license plate data, retained over years.
The company behind it, ominously called Vigilant Solutions, sells the information both to private parties and to law enforcement organizations. From the story:
The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images.
They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored….
To install a GPS tracking device on your car, your local police department must present a judge with a rationale that meets a Fourth Amendment test and obtain a warrant. But if it wants to query a database to see years of data on where your car was photographed at specific times, it doesn’t need a warrant––just a willingness to send some of your tax dollars to Vigilant Solutions, which insists that license plate readers are “unlike GPS devices, RFID, or other technologies that may be used to track.” Its website states that “LPR is not ubiquitous, and only captures point in time information. And the point in time information is on a vehicle, not an individual.”
But thanks to Vigilant, its compe ors, and license-plate readers used by police departments themselves, the technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous over time.
The article stresses that this form of surveillance may not be kosher, in that the ability to put together a person’s movements over time is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind, from the idea that you have no presumption of privacy (and therefore protection from being photographed) when you are in public. And Vigilant and their ilk also argue that they are not tracking individuals but vehicles, as if the two are not the same in a high percentage of cases.
But the bigger issue, which the article does not address explicitly, is that even if this sort of snooping is not legal (or at a minimum, not usable as evidence), it’s well on its way to being so well established as to be difficult to stop.
The Federal governments is supporting more license plate spying. Again from the story:
“During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Georgia, population 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems,” the Wall Street Journal reports. As one critic, California state Senator Joe Simitian, asked: “Should a cop who thinks you’re cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be ‘no.’”
Experts point out how the information can and almost certainly will be used to detect and punish behavior deemed transgressive:
Vigilant Solutions is a subsidiary of a company called Digital Recognition Network.
Its website declares:
All roads lead to revenue with DRN’s license plate recognition technology. Fortune 1000 financial ins utions rely on DRN solutions to drive decisions about loan origination, servicing, and collections. Insurance providers turn DRN’s solutions and data into insights to mitigate risk and investigate fraud. And, our vehicle location data transforms automotive recovery processes, substantially increasing portfolio returns.
And its general counsel insists that “everyone has a First Amendment right to take these photographs and disseminate this information.” But as the ACLU points out:
A 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police noted that individuals may become “more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation” due to license plate readers. It continues: “Recording driving habits could implicate First Amendment concerns. Specifically, LPR systems have the ability to record vehicles’ attendance at locations or events that, although lawful and public, may be considered private. For example, mobile LPR units could read and collect the license plate numbers of vehicles parked at addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests.”
Many powerful interests are aligned in wanting to know where the cars of individuals are parked. Unable to legally install tracking devices themselves, they pay for the next best alternative—and it’s gradually becoming a functional equivalent. More laws might be passed to stymie this trend if more Americans knew that private corporations and police agencies conspire to keep records of their whereabouts.
And a contact who knows the private equity world pointed out (emphasis mine):
Morgan Stanley’s PE arm lists this company as an investment, which is a good example of how enmeshed PE has become in the security/intelligence state. The spooks, I am sure, love the secrecy of PE compared to public markets.
And the love goes both ways, as it is my experience that PE people love the spooks because returns are able to be generated by influence peddling behind closed doors, and also because they just find them intellectually interesting.
In other words, proprietary opposition research, which is often hard to distinguish from blackmail.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/...+capitalism%29
=============
An Unprecedented Threat to Privacy
A private company has captured 2.2 billion photos of license plates in cities throughout America. It stores them in a database, tagged with the location where they were taken. And it is selling that data.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...llance/427047/
I hope you're right. If you're wrong, it hardens into custom.
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