Surveillance

FBI, Multiple Cities Preparing For Riots If No Ferguson Indictment

October 10, 2014 Tim Reid, www.reuters.com Educate! Ferguson, police brutality, Surveillance, Wars and Militarism

Missouri authorities are drawing up contingency plans and seeking intelligence from U.S. police departments on out-of-state agitators, fearing that fresh riots could erupt if a grand jury does not indict a white officer for killing a black teen. The plans are being thrashed out in meetings being held two to three times a week, according to people who have attended them. The FBI said it was also involved in the discussions. Details of the meetings and intelligence sharing by Missouri police agencies and their counterparts around the country have not been reported before. The grand jury is expected to decide next month whether to bring criminal charges against police officer Darren Wilson, who shot dead Michael Brown, 18, on Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri.

Students Sue Google For Monitoring Their Emails

October 6, 2014 Todd Wasserman, www.mashable.com Resist! Google, Privacy, Student Activism, Surveillance

In a challenge to one of Google's more controversial practices, a group of students in California are suing Google, claiming that the company's monitoring of Gmail violates federal and state privacy laws. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California is currently hearing the complaint from nine students whose emails were subject to Google surveillance because Gmail is a component of Apps for Education. Apps for Education is a suite of free, web-based education tools that has some 30 million users worldwide, most of whom are students under 18 exposed to the software via their schools. A Google rep told Education Week that the company scans and indexes emails from all Apps for Education users. The company uses the data for potential advertising, among other purposes.

Canada’s Intelligence Services Intensive Spying On Environmentalists

October 2, 2014 Jim Bronskill, www.facebook.com Organize! Activism, Canada, Energy, Environment, Surveillance

Canadian spies are trying to narrow the scope of an inquiry into whether they overstepped the law while eyeing environmental activists. A lawyer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says the terms spelled out in a civil liberties group’s complaint are “overly broad” and must be “better defined.” At issue is how far the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the watchdog over CSIS, can delve into the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association’s complaint about alleged spying on groups concerned about Canadian energy policy. CSIS is trying to hide the reasons it monitored environmental groups, said Paul Champ, lawyer for the civil liberties association.

The Security State’s Plans To Crush Activism

October 2, 2014 Michael D. Micklow, www.mediaroots.org Educate! Ferguson, NSA, Police, Racism, Surveillance

Enforcing security based on racist ideology has long been field tested by Israel, which uses Palestinians as lab rats before outsourcing its defense and intelligence capabilities to other world powers. Whether it be Israeli forces training ICE officers in Tacoma, outsourcing a Behavior Pattern Recognition security system for US airports, or intelligence contractor Elbit Systems winning multimillion dollar contracts to patrol the US-Mexico border, Israel’s idea of security has now become America’s. As a result, Big Brother’s gaze is discriminatory, and racial minorities are unfairly targeted by the system. When the state engenders unjust policies like those epitomized in places like Ferguson, the press has a duty to engage, raise awareness and advocate the reinstatement of justice. Standing in solidarity with the oppressed and amplifying the plight of the voiceless is the primary function of the Fourth Estate.

Julian Assange Calls Out Google As Corporate NSA

October 1, 2014 Ryan Grim and Sarah Harvard, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Ecuador, Edward Snowden, Google, Julian Assange, NSA, Surveillance

Julian Assange: "It's a duplicitous statement. It's a lawyerly statement. Eric Schmidt did not say that Google encrypts everything so that the US government can’t get at them. He said quite deliberately that Google has started to encrypt exchanges of information -- and that’s hardly true, but it has increased amount of encrypted exchanges. But Google has not been encrypting their storage information. Google’s whole business model is predicated on Google being able to access the vast reservoir of private information collected from billions of people each day. And if Google can access it, then of course the U.S. government has the legal right to access it, and that's what's been going on." As a result of the Snowden revelation, Google was caught out. It tried to pretend that those revelations were not valid, and when that failed, it started to engage in a public relations campaign to try and say that it wasn’t happy with what the National Security Agency was doing, and was fighting against it.

Inventor Of World Wide Web Warns Of Threat To Internet

September 29, 2014 AFP, www.news.yahoo.com Educate! Human Rights, Internet, Net Neutrality, Surveillance

The British inventor of the World Wide Web warned on Saturday that the freedom of the internet is under threat by governments and corporations interested in controlling the web. Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist who invented the web 25 years ago, called for a bill of rights that would guarantee the independence of the internet and ensure users' privacy. "If a company can control your access to the internet, if they can control which websites they go to, then they have tremendous control over your life," Berners-Lee said at the London "Web We Want" festival on the future of the internet.

Police Sign Gag Order Before Getting FBI Spy Equipment

September 26, 2014 Shawn Musgrave, www.muckrock.com Educate! Capitalism, Surveillance, US

Advanced cell phone tracking devices known as StingRays allow police nationwide to home in on suspects or to log individuals present at a given location. But before acquiring a StingRay, state and local police must sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI, documents released last week reveal. The document released by the Tacoma Police Department is heavily redacted — four of its six pages are completely blacked out — but two unredacted paragraphs confirm the FBI’s intimate involvement with StingRay deployment. The StingRay family of trackers are manufactured by the Harris Corporation, a company with $5 billion in annual revenue and headquarters in Melbourne, Florida. As “cell site simulators,” the trackers trick mobile phones into connecting to a StingRay as if it were a cell tower. This allows police to determine the cell phone’s location, and thus its owner’s.

Alternative Nobel Prizes Recognize Snowden, McKibben And More

September 25, 2014 Staff, www.rightlivelihood.org Educate! Climate Change, Edward Snowden, Environment, Human Rights, Journalism, Surveillance

Ole von Uexkull, Executive Director of the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, said: "This year’s Right Livelihood Laureates are stemming the tide of the most dangerous global trends. With this year’s Awards, we want to send a message of urgent warning that these trends – illegal mass surveillance of ordinary citizens, the violation of human and civil rights, violent manifestations of religious fundamentalism, and the decline of the planet’s life-supporting systems – are very much upon us already. If they are allowed to continue, and reinforce each other, they have the power to undermine the basis of civilised societies."

Lawmakers Want To Limit Police Drones, Activists Seek Ban

September 18, 2014 Charles Davis, www.vice.com Resist! California, Drones, Protest, Surveillance

The police hate a bill just passed by California lawmakers, saying it unjustly limits their ability to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fight crime. The Los Angeles District Attorney hates it too, complaining that requiring police to obtain a warrant before deploying a drone to conduct surveillance goes “beyond what is required by Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution," which the seasoned political observer knows police and politicians are supposed to gut, not exceed. But there’s another, somewhat unexpected source of opposition to AB 1327, passed last month by the California State Senate: anti-drone activists. “We are gathered here today to reject the use of drones by law enforcement under any circumstances,” said Hamid Khan, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, at a September 15 press conference in front of City Hall in downtown LA. Activists here are particularly anxious about drones since the Los Angeles Police Department obtained two small surveillance UAVs from police in Seattle, who had to give them away in the face of overwhelming public opposition to their use. The drones have not yet been deployed, with Mayor Eric Garcetti promising to seek public input before ever letting them fly.

Jeremy Hammond Announced As Second Courage Beneficiary

September 17, 2014 Free Jeremy, www.freejeremy.net Organize! Free Speech, Human Rights, Political Prisoner, Surveillance

Jeremy was sentenced to ten years in prison for being the alleged media source for documents from the private US intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), which included revelations that they had been spying on human rights defenders, for example Bhopal activists and members of PETA, at the behest of corporations and governments. WikiLeaks published these documents in partnership with 29 media organisations worldwide as the Global Intelligence Files, which are still being used for news stories around the world. Despite hundreds of pleas, including a letter submitted by WikiLeaks from itself and its media partners – “newspapers, TV networks, and magazines with a combined audience of 500 million” – asking for leniency for Jeremy, the maximum possible sentence was given.

Radical Librarianship: Ensuring Patrons’ Electronic Privacy

September 16, 2014 Alison Macrina and April Glaser, www.boingboing.net Create! Education, Library, Privacy, Surveillance

Librarians in Massachusetts are working to give their patrons a chance to opt-out of pervasive surveillance. Partnering with the ACLU of Massachusetts, area librarians have been teaching and taking workshops on how freedom of speech and the right to privacy are compromised by the surveillance of online and digital communications -- and what new privacy-protecting services they can offer patrons to shield them from unwanted spying of their library activity. It's no secret that libraries are among our most democratic institutions. Libraries provide access to information and protect patrons' right to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive. Libraries are where all should be free to satisfy any information need, be it for tax and legal documents, health information, how-to guides, historical documents, children's books, or poetry.

Can The Senate Oversee The CIA?

September 13, 2014 Ali Watkins, www.mcclatchydc.com Educate! CIA, Law, Surveillance

WASHINGTON — Tensions between the CIA and its congressional overseers erupted anew this week when CIA Director John Brennan refused to tell lawmakers who authorized intrusions into computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a damning report on the spy agency’s interrogation program. The confrontation, which took place during a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, came as the sides continue to spar over the report’s public release, providing further proof of the unprecedented deterioration in relations between the CIA and Capitol Hill. After the meeting, several senators were so incensed at Brennan that they confirmed the row and all but accused the nation’s top spy of defying Congress. “I’m concerned there’s disrespect towards the Congress,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who also serves as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told McClatchy. “I think it’s arrogant, I think it’s unacceptable.”

Bush-Era DOJ Memos Gave President Power Violate 4th Amendment

September 7, 2014 Ellen Nakashima, www.washingtonpost.com Educate! Fourth Amendment, NSA, Privacy, Surveillance

The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration’s legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails — a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The broad outlines of the argument — that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans’ communications without a warrant in a time of war — were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel. “We conclude only that when the nation has been thrust into an armed conflict by a foreign attack on the United States and the president determines in his role as commander in chief . . . that it is essential for defense against a further foreign attack to use the [wiretapping] capabilities of the [National Security Agency] within the United States, he has inherent constitutional authority” to order warrantless wiretapping — “an authority that Congress cannot curtail,” Goldsmith wrote in a redacted 108-page memo dated May 6, 2004.

Challenge To NSA Spying Program In Appeals

September 4, 2014 ACLU, www.aclu.org Resist! Law, NSA, Surveillance

This morning, we're heading back to court to challenge the NSA's phone-records program, this time in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. Several district courts have already ruled on the program, with one calling it "almost Orwellian." And, of course, the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has approved it many times. But one consequence of the excessive secrecy surrounding the program is that it has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court or even by a federal appeals court. Until now. Our lawsuit and the several similar lawsuits that have been filed around the country are significant for many reasons. The phone-records program – under which the NSA collects a record of the calls made by millions of Americans every single day – is perhaps the most sweeping surveillance operation ever directed against the American public by our government. It raises profound questions about the role of government in a democracy and about the future of privacy in the digital era. And it threatens our constitutional rights in ways unimaginable by the founders of our country.

Want To Keep Your Cell Phone Info Private? That’ll Cost $3,500

September 3, 2014 Privacy SOS, www.privacysos.org Educate! Cell Phones, Privacy, Surveillance

Your phone can be easily hacked by government or non-state actors. Probably no one at your cell phone company has warned you about this, but it's true. Popular Science reports that US military bases throughout the country appear to be equipped with IMSI catcher cell phone sniffers. The devices, which are also sold to state, local, and federal law enforcement in the United States, trick mobile phones into thinking they are cell phone towers. It's then relatively easy for the person manipulating such a tool to hack into and steal information from any nearby device. Some models can even manipulate mobiles, sending spoofed text messages and making ghost calls from them from a distance. Security conscious technology users have been aware of this threat for some time, but that awareness hasn't made the threat easy to combat. Like with so many things, money changes that. If you have $3,500 you can pay for an encrypted phone that will alert you that someone nearby is sniffing your data. And rich people should seriously consider it; the spy gear appears to be everywhere. Les Goldsmith, who runs a company selling crypto phones, told Popular Science that the number of cell phone sniffing devices "in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated. One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip. We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas," he said.

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