A very helpful resource for deciphering ‘government-speak’ surrounding national security surveillance practices.
Tag: Surveillance
In the name of efficiency and good long-term planning, DHS is ensuring that its Predator Drones over the USA are able to distinguish persons from animals, evaluate whether such persons are armed, and are also integrating signals intelligence systems into the vehicles. From the article:
Homeland Security’s specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,” meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify “signals interception” technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and “direction finding” technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.
The analysis and interdiction capabilities being integrated into drones may – prospectively – be considered legal. If they are legal then it should be clear that ethical and normative (to say nothing of constitutional) claims should be brought to bear on the basis that such expansions of government surveillance are almost certain to be used inappropriately and to the disadvantage of American citizens and residents alike.
Caspar Bowden has been aggressively lobbying the EU Parliament over the implications of the FISA Amendments Act for some time. In short, the Act authorizes capturing data from ‘Electronic Communications Service Providers’ when the data possesses foreign intelligence value. The result is that business and personal information, in addition to information directly concerning ‘national security’, can be legitimately collected by the Agency. (For more, see pages 33-35 of this report.)
Caspar’s most recent article outlines the unwillingness of key members of the EU Parliament to take seriously the implications of American surveillance … until it ceases to be an issue for policy wonks, and one of politics. Still, the Parliament has yet to retract recent amendments that would detrimentally affect the privacy rights of European citizens: it will be interesting to see whether the politics of the issue reverse the parliamentarians’ decisions or if lobbying by corporate interests win the day.
Greenwald has an excellent piece pointing out just some of the hypocrisy surrounding the Snowden revelations. A taste:
The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 articlewhich exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate– specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs – when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collectany type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our storiesto admit that his statement was, in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.
There has been a considerable amount of ‘flak’ – efforts to discredit organizations or individuals who disagree with or cast doubt on the prevailing assumptions that are favourable to established power – exhibited throughout the Snowden affair. It demonstrates quite powerfully that the Propaganda Model, written about in the 1988 book Manufacturing Consent remains a powerful tool of media analysis.
Categories
2013.6.7
Privacy advocates have long warned that allowing the government to collect and store unlimited “metadata” is a highly invasive form of surveillance of citizens’ communications activities. Those records enable the government to know the identity of every person with whom an individual communicates electronically, how long they spoke, and their location at the time of the communication. Such metadata is what the US government has long attempted to obtain in order to discover an individual’s network of associations and communication patterns. The request for the bulk collection of all Verizon domestic telephone records indicates that the agency is continuing some version of the data-mining program begun by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)
Anyone trying to convince people “it’s only metadata” should be discounted as a fool or a government shill. Or perhaps as being both.
Categories
When the Whole World Has Drones
The proliferation of drone technology has moved well beyond the control of the United States government and its closest allies. The aircraft are too easy to obtain, with barriers to entry on the production side crumbling too quickly to place limits on the spread of a technology that promises to transform warfare on a global scale. Already, more than 75 countries have remote piloted aircraft. More than 50 nations are building a total of nearly a thousand types. At its last display at a trade show in Beijing, China showed off 25 different unmanned aerial vehicles. Not toys or models, but real flying machines.
When the Whole World Has Drones
Hackers who breached Google database appeared to seek identities of Chinese spies in U.S. who might be under watch.
This story is incredibly significant: it clarifies an additional target of the Aurora attacks in 2009 (the database that Google stored FISA warrant information in) and, as an extension, provides a notion of why NSA was involved in the investigation (i.e. any revelation of FISA information constitutes a national security issue).
I suspect we’ll never get the full story of what all occurred, but this article very nicely supplements some of the stuff we learned in Levy’s book In the Plex, as well as popular reporting around the series of attacks on major Western companies that happened in late 2009. It also reveals the significant of meta-data/information: it wasn’t necessarily required for attackers to know what specifically waas being monitored to take action to protect agents; all that was needed was information that the surveillance was occurring for countermeasures to be deployed.
In another case of private information being misused, one RCMP officer left his patrol area to snoop on his ex-wife.
According to the discipline documents, the officer’s ex-wife and her boyfriend saw an RCMP patrol car driving through the parking garage of her Winnipeg condominium building at around 11:30 p.m. on May 8, 2010.
Suspecting the car was being driven by the ex-husband, the incident was reported to the RCMP’s D Division headquarters in Winnipeg, which revealed the ex-husband had queried the boyfriend’s licence plates in the police force’s database.
The officer admitted that he performed the database search in the hopes of identifying his ex-wife’s new boyfriend.
The discipline board considered the officer’s acceptance of “responsibility for his actions and [participation] in the early resolution process” when deciding what actions to take. They also noted that the officer had co-operated with the investigation.
In their decision, members of the board said they hope the officer had “learned from his mistake and trusts he is indeed prepared to abide by a Code of Conduct,” noting that “members of the Force are expected to act in an exemplary manner, and their conduct must be beyond reproach.”
The officer was issued a reprimand and docked three days’ pay.
So, two things here:
- These are some of the dangerous uses that a group of BC residents identified with regards to automatic license plate recognition, namely the use of non-hit data (i.e. information not linked to motor vehicle crimes) in excess of the ALPR program’s stated mandate;
- Holy hell. This is a case of a police officer stalking/inciting fear in a civilian and her current romantic partner, and there was a reprimand and a few days of docked pay? It’s these kinds of actions that teach people ‘the police won’t protect me if their own interests are involved.’
I mean really, with regards to (2), how terrifying would it be that an ex who is legitimately empowered to exercise the law is stalking you and those associated with you, using a ubiquitous surveillance technology. And moreover, imagine that things had been reversed: that the CIVILIAN was tracking the police officer. No way there’d be a reprimand and a few days of lost pay. No, that civilian would be looking at some intense court actions.
Total. Double. Standard.
Excited Pixels 