Mass Surveillance

State Sets Massive Precedent, Passes Law To Effectively Ban The NSA

May 21, 2018 By Rachel Blevins, Activistpost.com Create! Legislation, Mass Surveillance, Michigan, NSA

“It hangs up a sign on Michigan’s door saying, ‘No violation of the Fourth Amendment, look elsewhere,’” Howrylak said. “Democrats, as well as Republicans, would certainly stand very strong in our position on what this law means.” While Howrylak said he thinks the law makes “a strong court case saying this is what the state intends,” he hopes other states will join in by passing similar legislation, in an effort to cripple the NSA’s illegal activities. Next month marks 5 years since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a trove of classified documents revealing that the United States government was routinely collecting metadata from innocent American citizens without warrants, and using “national security” to justify its actions.

Best Buy’s Geek Squad Working With FBI For Over A Decade

March 7, 2018 Aaron Mackey, EFF.org. Educate! FBI, Mass Surveillance

After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squadcomputer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit last year to learn more about how the FBI uses Geek Squad employees to flag illegal material when people pay Best Buy to repair their computers. The relationship potentially circumvents computer owners’ Fourth Amendment rights.

Finding Your Voice

January 22, 2018 Ava Kofman, The Intercept. Educate! Cell Phones, FBI, Mass Surveillance, NSA

At the height of the Cold War, during the winter of 1980, FBI agents recorded a phone call in which a man arranged a secret meeting with the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. On the day of his appointment, however, agents were unable to catch sight of the man entering the embassy. At the time, they had no way to put a name to the caller from just the sound of his voice, so the spy remained anonymous. Over the next five years, he sold details about several secret U.S. programs to the USSR. It wasn’t until 1985 that the FBI, thanks to intelligence provided by a Russian defector, was able to establish the caller as Ronald Pelton, a former analyst at the National Security Agency.

NSA Deleted Data It Promised To Keep For Court Proceedings

January 22, 2018 Terri Webster, The Blaze. Educate! Mass Surveillance, NSA, Whistleblowers

The NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White Thursday that data and “backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016,” Politico reported. On Friday, President Donald Trump extended a law that includes provisions for the NSA to work with U.S. internet providers and tech companies for its surveillance efforts, according to reports. “The NSA sincerely regrets its failure to prevent the deletion of this data,” an NSA official identified publicly as Elizabeth B. wrote in a declaration. “NSA senior management is fully aware of this failure, and the Agency is committed to taking swift action to respond to the loss of this data.”

Lawmakers Demand Tech Corps Censor Journalists And Conduct Surveillance

November 4, 2017 Andre Damon, wsws.org Educate! Congress, Freedom of Speech, Internet, Journalism, Mass Surveillance

By Andre Damon for WSWS - Wednesday’s hearings by the House and Senate Intelligence committees on “extremist” political views served as the occasion for members of Congress to urge technology companies to flagrantly violate the US Constitution by censoring political speech, carrying out mass surveillance, and muzzling journalists in pursuit of the government’s geopolitical aims. The hearings revolved around allegations, promoted ceaselessly in recent months by the intelligence agencies, leading figures within the Democratic Party, and newspapers such as the New York Times, that social opposition to the political establishment results from “fake news” promoted by Russia. As Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff put it, “Russia” promoted “discord in the US by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues” and sought to “mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests.” The basic problem, however, as Schiff put it, is “not just foreign.” The algorithms used by Facebook and Twitter have the “consequence of widening divisions among our society.” Schiff complained: “What ends up percolating to the top of our feeds tends to be things we were looking for,” as opposed to US government propaganda disseminated by the establishment media, which he referred to as “true information.”

DOJ Seeks 1.3M IP Addresses Associated With J20 Protests

August 15, 2017 Staff, www.dreamhost.com Resist! DOJ, Inauguration, Mass Surveillance, Trump Administration

By Staff of Dream Host - You would be shocked to see just how many of these challenges we’re obligatedto mount every year! Chris Ghazarian, our General Counsel, has taken issue with this particular search warrant for being a highly untargeted demand that chills free association and the right of free speech afforded by the Constitution. Demand for Information. The request from the DOJ demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 millionvisitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an effort to determine who simply visitedthe website. (Our customer has also been notified of the pending warrant on the account.) That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.

Newsletter: When Empires Fall

July 23, 2017 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter BDS, Climate Change, Empire, Finance and the Economy, Health Care, Korea, Mass Surveillance, NAFTA, Net Neutrality, Propaganda, Trade, Wars and Militarism

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese. The Pentagon recently released a report, "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World," which details its concerns about losing access to resources and "resistance to authority" both at home and around the world as governments lose legitimacy. Faced with these changes, the United States could embrace them, become a cooperative member of the world, transition to a lower-waste lower-energy sustainable existence and draw back the military to use those resources to meet domestic needs. Sadly, that is not what the Pentagon has in mind. There is a saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The US is the biggest empire in the world; therefore, the Pentagon's solutions are "more surveillance, more propaganda ('strategic manipulation of perceptions') and more military expansionism." The United States' reign as an Empire is coming to an end. It is up to those of us living in the US to take action to prevent more aggression and demand that the US dismantle its empire in a way that causes the least harm at home and abroad.

FBI Used Patriot Act To Obtain ‘Large Collections’ Of Americans’ Data, DoJ Finds

May 13, 2017 Spencer Ackerman, www.theguardian.com Educate! DOJ, FBI, Mass Surveillance, Patriot Act

By Spencer Ackerman for The Guardian - As lawmakers and security agencies braced for a potential loss of the heart of the Patriot Act, a long-delayed Justice Department report showed that the FBI uses the surveillance authorities it provides for “large collections” of Americans’ internet records. Section 215 of the Patriot Act permits the FBI to collect business records, such as medical, educational and tax information or other “tangible things” relevant to an ongoing counter–terrorism or espionage investigation. Since 2006, the NSA had also secretly used it to collect US phone data in bulk. After Edward Snowden’s leaks allowed the Guardian to reveal the phone-records bulk collection in June 2013, deep political opposition coalesced around the bulk program – eclipsing the FBI’s acquisition of other data, which has long been an issue only for civil libertarians. But a Justice Department inspector general’s report finally released on Thursday covering the FBI’s use of Section 215 from 2007 to 2009 found that the bureau is using the business-records authority “to obtain large collections of metadata”, such as “electronic communication transactional information”.

The Antidote To Authoritarianism

May 10, 2017 Malkia A. Cyril, www.theatlantic.com Resist! Authoritanism, Mass Surveillance

By Malkia A. Cyril for The Atlantic - My first known ancestor in the Americas was an Ashanti woman called “the African.” We don’t know her name, but through records kept by slaveholders, we know she existed. We know she was transported to Jamaica, where my known lineage began. These records of property bought and sold were a form of surveillance at the time. Early technologies, and the policies and practices that undergird them, were forged to separate the citizen from the slave. The slave passes, branding, and lantern laws of then have become the cellphone trackers, facial recognition software, and body-worn police cameras of now. Their mission, however, hasn’t changed much—to catch and control black dissidence—only now they’re doing so in a digital age. These technologies have been incorporated into the law enforcement process at every level, from predictive algorithms for assessing pre-trial risk and criminal activity to widely adopted police technologies that face little to no oversight. These technologies—including cell-site simulators and surveillance cameras—are trained on communities of color, especially blacks, immigrants, Arabs, and Muslims.

FBI Has Already Gathered Millions Of ‘Faceprints’ for Facial Recognition

March 26, 2017 Derrick Broze, www.activistpost.com Educate! Courts, Criminal Justice, Facial Recognition, FBI, Mass Surveillance

By Derrick Broze for Activist Post. A House Committee questioned Kimberly Del Greco, Deputy Assistant Director at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, about why the bureau broke the law by failing to file a privacy impact statement acknowledging the collection of millions of Americans’ faces for the agency’s new biometric identification system. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is made up of fingerprints, iris scans, faceprints, and other facial recognition data. The NGI organizes Americans’ biometric data into a single file that includes personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. The Committee reports that nearly half of all adult Americans’ photographs are in the database. The 2013 U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there are over 242 million adults living in the U.S. If the Committee’s numbers are correct, over 121 million adults are in the FBI’s database. Other revelations include that 18 states have a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the FBI to share photos with the federal government, including from state departments of motor vehicles (DMV).

Snowden’s Advice To Trump On Surveillance

March 19, 2017 Alex Emmons, www.theintercept.com Educate! Edward Snowden, Mass Surveillance, NSA, Trump

By Alex Emmons for The Intercept. Snowden explained that the NSA’s surveillance dragnet currently allows any analyst with an appropriate clearance to search a massive database of communications for phones or IP addresses related to anyone, including the president. He was describing the Upstream program conducted under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in which the NSA collects a vast number of American communications from internet cables entering and exiting the United States, ostensibly only “targeting” foreigners. “If Donald Trump wants to take this seriously, he needs to fix the problem that everyone in America’s communications are being collected right now, without a warrant, and they’re going into the bucket, and they’re protected by very lax internal policy regulations, and this simply is not enough,” said Snowden.

European Court Of Justice Rules Against Mass Surveillance

December 23, 2016 Staff, www.dw.com Resist! Courts, Europe, Mass Surveillance

By Staff of DW - The ECJ has ruled that governments cannot force telecom firms to keep all customer data. The ruling, which says the laws violate basic privacy rights, comes as governments call for greater powers for spy agencies. The Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) ruled on Wednesday that laws allowing for the blanket collection and retention of location and traffic data are in breach of EU law. In their decision, the justices wrote that storing such data, which includes text message senders and recipients and call histories, allows for "very precise conclusions to be drawn concerning the private lives of the persons whose data has been retained."

Snowden: ‘Journalists Are A Threatened Class’ In Era Of Mass Surveillance

October 28, 2016 Nika Knight, www.commondreams.org Organize! Edward Snowden, Journalism, Mass Surveillance

By Nika Knight for Common Dreams - "Journalists are increasingly a threatened class when we think about the right to privacy," Snowden said. "Yes, I can give you tips on how to protect your communications, but you are going to be engaging in an arms race that you simply cannot win. You must fight this on the front pages and you must win, if you want to be able to report in the same way that you've been able to do in the previous centuries."

Private Eyes: Little-Known Company Enabling Worldwide Mass Surveillance

October 26, 2016 Ryan Gallagher and Nicky Hager, www.theintercept.com Educate! Corporations, Mass Surveillance

By Ryan Gallagher and Nicky Hager for The Intercept - IT WAS A POWERFUL piece of technology created for an important customer. The Medusa system, named after the mythical Greek monster with snakes instead of hair, had one main purpose: to vacuum up vast quantities of internet data at an astonishing speed. The technology was designed by Endace, a little-known New Zealand company. And the important customer was the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

CIA ‘Siren Servers’ Can Predict Social Uprisings 3-5 Days In Advance

October 10, 2016 Tim Hinchliffe, www.sociable.co Strategize! CIA, Mass Surveillance, Uprising

By Tim Hinchliffe for The Sociable - The CIA claims to be able to predict social unrest days before it happens thanks to powerful super computers dubbed Siren Servers by the father of Virtual Reality, Jaron Lanier. CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman announced that the agency has beefed-up its “anticipatory intelligence” through the use of deep learning and machine learning servers that can process an incredible amount of data.

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