Big Brother @ Work

[CptSternn]

I have a thread on this here...

https://www.gothic.net/boards/showth...1&page=1&pp=25

But it had a different title, so I am moving the topic here. Anyone wishing to comment on the above thread contents should feel free to do so here.

To start off..

Judge Orders Release of Reports on ’04 Surveillance

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/ny...syahoo&emc=rss

A federal judge yesterday rejected New York City’s efforts to prevent the release of nearly 2,000 pages of raw intelligence reports and other documents detailing the Police Department’s covert surveillance of protest groups and individual activists before the Republican National Convention in 2004.

In a 20-page ruling, Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV ordered the disclosure of hundreds of field intelligence reports by undercover investigators who infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups in a huge operation that the police said was needed to head off violence and disruptions at the convention.


Another good article and worth the full read. The story is this - anti-republican groups protested the RNC convention. Not news, BUT the fact a dozen police groups and federal agents when undercover to find out who was in these groups, get detailed dossiers, and then when they went to protest arrested them to get their fingerprints, mug shots, and then let them go is whats the issue here.

These are Americans exercising their right to assemble and protest. Various US government agencies took time and resources to track these Americans, not because they are a terrorist threat nor are they thought to be involved in any crimes, but because they protest the republican party.

They were put under surveillance, like terrorists, multiple agents were paid to 'infiltrate' these groups of protesters. This is American tax dollars at work. Not hunting down Al-Queda, but going after democrats, libertarians, and other political groups who protest the rnc.

Like many other protests in DC of late, the protesters were arrested, their personal info taken, put into the national crime computer, and then they were released.

Americans, put into the system merely because they don't vote for bush and don't support his parties policies.

Americans, pulled off the street and thrown in jail for protesting government policies they don't agree with.

Free speech?

[BLEED REBELION!!!]

Well thats what Amerikkka's all about... control, assholery, lies ect

[KontanKarite]

Sadly, I didn't bat an eye.

[CptSternn]

US doles out millions for street cameras

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/wa...treet_cameras/

WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security is funneling millions of dollars to local governments nationwide for purchasing high-tech video camera networks, accelerating the rise of a "surveillance society" in which the sense of freedom that stems from being anonymous in public will be lost, privacy rights advocates warn.

Since 2003, the department has handed out some $23 billion in federal grants to local governments for equipment and training to help combat terrorism. Most of the money paid for emergency drills and upgrades to basic items, from radios to fences. But the department also has doled out millions on surveillance cameras, transforming city streets and parks into places under constant observation.

The department will not say how much of its taxpayer-funded grants have gone to cameras. But a Globe search of local newspapers and congressional press releases shows that a large number of new surveillance systems, costing at least tens and probably hundreds of millions of dollars, are being simultaneously installed around the country as part of homeland security grants.

In the last month, cities that have moved forward on plans for surveillance networks financed by the Homeland Security Department include St. Paul, which got a $1.2 million grant for 60 cameras for downtown; Madison, Wis., which is buying a 32-camera network with a $388,000 grant; and Pittsburgh, which is adding 83 cameras to its downtown with a $2.58 million grant.

Small towns are also getting their share of the federal money for surveillance to thwart crime and terrorism.

Recent examples include Liberty, Kan. (population 95), which accepted a federal grant to install a $5,000 G2 Sentinel camera in its park, and Scottsbluff, Neb. (population 14,000), where police used a $180,000 Homeland Security Department grant to purchase four closed-circuit digital cameras and two monitors, a system originally designed for Times Square in New York City.

"We certainly wouldn't have been able to purchase this system without those funds," police Captain Brian Wasson told the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.

Other large cities and small towns have also joined in since 2003. Federal money is helping New York, Baltimore, and Chicago build massive surveillance systems that may also link thousands of privately owned security cameras. Boston has installed about 500 cameras in the MBTA system, funded in part with homeland security funds.

Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said Homeland Security Department is the primary driver in spreading surveillance cameras, making their adoption more attractive by offering federal money to city and state leaders.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke said that it is difficult to say how much money has been spent on surveillance cameras because many grants awarded to states or cities contained money for cameras and other equipment. Knocke defended the funding of video networks as a valuable tool for protecting the nation. "We will encourage their use in the future," he added.

But privacy rights advocates say that the technology is putting at risk something that is hard to define but is core to personal autonomy. The proliferation of cameras could mean that Americans will feel less free because legal public behavior -- attending a political rally, entering a doctor's office, or even joking with friends in a park -- will leave a permanent record, retrievable by authorities at any time.

Businesses and government buildings have used closed-circuit cameras for decades, so it is nothing new to be videotaped at an ATM machine. But technology specialists say the growing surveillance networks are potentially more powerful than anything the public has experienced.

Until recently, most surveillance cameras produced only grainy analog feeds and had to be stored on bulky videotape cassettes. But the new, cutting-edge cameras produce clearer, more detailed images. Moreover, because these videos are digital, they can be easily transmitted, copied, and stored indefinitely on ever-cheaper hard-drive space.

In addition, police officers cannot be everywhere at once, and in the past someone had to watch a monitor, limiting how large or powerful a surveillance network could be.

But technicians are developing ways to use computers to process real-time and stored digital video, including license-plate readers, face-recognition scanners, and software that detects "anomalous behavior." Although still primitive, these technologies are improving, some with help from research grants by the Homeland Security Department's Science and Technology Directorate.

"Being able to collect this much data on people is going to be very powerful, and it opens people up for abuses of power," said Jennifer King, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies privacy and technology. "The problem with explaining this scenario is that today it's a little futuristic. [A major loss of privacy] is a low risk today, but five years from now it will present a higher risk."

As this technological capacity evolves, it will be far easier for individuals to attract police suspicion simply for acting differently and far easier for police to track that person's movement closely, including retracing their steps backwards in time. It will also create a greater risk that the officials who control the cameras could use them for personal or political gain, specialists said.

The expanded use of surveillance in the name of fighting terrorism has proved controversial in other arenas, as with the recent debate over President Bush's programs for eavesdropping on Americans' international phone calls and e-mails without a warrant.

But public support for installing more surveillance cameras in public places, both as a means of fighting terrorism and other crime, appears to be strong. Last month, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 71 percent of Americans favored increased use of surveillance cameras, while 25 percent opposed it.

Still, some homeland security specialists point to studies showing that cameras are not effective in deterring crime or terrorism. Although video can be useful in apprehending suspects after a crime or attack, the specialists say that the money used to buy and maintain cameras would be better spent on hiring more police.

That view is not universal. David Heyman, the homeland security policy director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, pointed out that cameras can help catch terrorists before they have time to launch a second attack. Several recent failed terrorist attacks in England were followed by quick arrests due in part to surveillance video.

Earlier this month, Senator Joe Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, proposed an amendment that would require the Homeland Security Department to develop a "national strategy" for the use of surveillance cameras, from more effectively using them to thwart terrorism to establishing rules to protect civil liberties.

"A national strategy for [surveillance cameras] use would help officials at the federal, state, and local levels use [surveillance] systems effectively to protect citizens, while at the same time making sure that appropriate civil liberties protections are implemented for the use of cameras and recorded data," Lieberman said.




So, whats in the UK will soon be in the US - CCTV covering all outside areas in all major cities, monitored 24/7 by the government, watching people to make sure they are not doing things the government doesn't approve of.

Anyone think the big brother analogy is still a stretch?

[CptSternn]

Feds face tough questioning in spy case

http://news.**********/s/ap/domestic...veIstOOxKs0NUE

SAN FRANCISCO - Government lawyers faced tough questioning from an appeals court asked to toss out two legal challenges to a Bush administration anti-terror program that allowed government spies to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Greg Garre said the government will be forced to reveal sensitive "state secrets" if the two lawsuits are allowed to proceed and it has to defend itself in court.

But in a case involving AT&T Inc., a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals raised concerns Wednesday about the government's seemingly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on terrorist suspects with little judicial oversight.

Judge Harry Pregerson complained that Garre was asking the court to "rubber stamp" the government's claim that state secrets are at risk.

"Who decides whether something is a state secret or not?" Pregerson asked. "We have to take the word of the members of the executive branch that something is a state secret?"

Garre said the national intelligence director and the head of the National Security Agency each have personally implored judges to toss out the case.

The appeals court did not immediately rule.

The court was hearing the government's request to dismiss two lawsuits. One was filed by AT&T customers against the company, and the other was brought by the now-defunct Oregon charity Al Haramain Islamic Foundation and two of its lawyers who say the NSA illegally listened to their calls.

The appeals court's ruling in the two cases will apply to 50 remaining lawsuits, all of which are before U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco. Walker ruled against the government last year and said he saw no harm in letting the lawsuits continue because the eavesdropping program had been publicized widely.

In December 2005, The New York Times exposed a warrantless wiretapping program. Soon after, other newspapers reported the government's domestic eavesdropping program also included widespread interceptions of e-mail traffic, and that it had been secretly collecting customer data from telecommunications companies without judicial permission.

The news reports prompted hundreds of lawyers, journalists, telecommunications company customers and civil right groups to claim that privacy rights had been violated. About 50 lawsuits were filed against the government and telecommunication companies for allegedly turning over customer account information.

Although President Bush has stated publicly that no domestic communications had been intercepted without warrants, the panel appeared skeptical of the government's reluctance to file documents confirming the president's statement.

"If the government doesn't do it, the litigation is over," Judge M. Margaret McKeown said, wondering aloud why the government does not simply file a court document denying the program's existence.

Garre disagreed, saying that a filing with such a denial wouldn't stop the lawsuit because the customers' lawyers are demanding much more information that delves into state secrets.

In the Al Haramain case, the government appeared to have a more receptive panel. The now-defunct group is using a top-secret document that it received mistakenly to claim NSA officials intercepted telephone calls from a Saudi Arabia-based director to two American lawyers.

The government argued that it has a "privilege" to dismiss lawsuits that threaten "state secrets," even when sensitive documents are accidentally turned over.

Judge McKeown seemed to agree, comparing the situation to when documents are accidentally turned over dealing with attorney-client discussions.

"If it's accidental, the privilege doesn't go away," McKeown said. "You can't use information derived from it."



The judge tells the bush admin lawyers that if they can say that the bush admin did NOT spy on American to American calls, the suit will be dropped. The bush admin tells them they are not prepared to make any statements.

Makes you feel safe knowing the government is fighting itself in court for the right to listen in on all of your phone calls, and use any information gleened on any sort of crime against you in court.

A system setup as protection from 'terrorists'? Yeah, right.

To date all the FBI wiretaps, new 'sneak-n-peek' searches, and all the other big brotheresque powers they have given themselves has only been used to arrested Americans for unrelated criminal offenses.

They arrested men who were running a book making business in New York City. I don't see how a couple guys taking bets in a bar on sports constitutes the use of anti-terrorism laws to bring them to justice. Removing their constitutional rights, just to prosecute them for a relatively minor offense is the first step in prosecuting everyone the government wishes to go after for whatever they can find out about the persons in question.

Now, the government refuses to talk about it, and claims the public has no right to know what the government is doing, but don't worry, it's for your own good, the president and his people assure you of this.

[CptSternn]

At first glance, this appears as a good thing, a win for the good guys...

Pentagon to shut down controversial domestic threat data base

http://news.**********/s/afp/usmilit...S_qMWZapes0NUE

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Pentagon said Tuesday it is shutting down a counter-intelligence reporting system and database called TALON that came under fire for monitoring the activities of hundreds of anti-war activists.

The system will be shut down September 17 and reporting on threats to US military installations in the United States will be shifted to the FBI, said Colonel Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

"It was terminated because reporting had declined significantly, both quantitatively and qualitatively so," he said. "The analytical value was pretty slim."

Keck was unable to explain the decline but the system has been a source of controversy since media revelations in December 2005 that it was used to gather unverified reports of peace activists and others as alleged threats to US military facilities.

The Pentagon said it will keep a copy of an electronic database of threat reports created as part of the system but new reports will go to an FBI database called Guardian until it devises an alternative reporting system.

James Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, had said in April that he was moving to end the program. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England signed the order shutting it down.

The Pentagon said it "will propose a system to streamline such threat reporting and better meet the Defense Department's needs."

Keck said Pentagon officials will have access to the FBI database and will still evaluate law enforcement and other reports of threats to US military facilities.

"We continue to collect (threat) information from the field from law enforcement, security personnel, like we always have. That will not stop. Obviously we need to do that," Keck said.

The TALON reporting system was run by a little known Pentagon entity called the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which maintained a data base with some 13,000 threat reports, according a inspector general's report in June.

The Defense Department's inspector general concluded that CIFA acted legally in collecting information on US citizens because the reports were gathered for law enforcement rather than intelligence purposes.

However, the inspector general's review of 1,113 reports that were purged from the TALON database after the media disclosures in December 2005 found that 263 reports dealt with anti-war protests.

It also found that 571 US residents were named in the purged reports.

It was unclear what effect ending the TALON reporting system will have on CIFA, which was created in September 2002 by former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

The Washington Post reported that it spent more than one billion dollars through last October, and had a staff of 400 full-time employees and 800-900 contract workers.


Until you realise two things:

First, in the article they state they are 'moving' the records to the FBI 'Gaurdian' program, which means they aren't shutting down the system as much as they are just moving it from once agency to another.

This is nothing new. Remember this from 2002?

US government database spy site fading away

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement...931,00.htm?r=3

As controversy grows over the Defense Department's shadowy Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, the project's virtual presence is steadily decreasing. If fully implemented, TIA would link databases from sources such as credit card companies, medical insurers, and motor vehicle databases for police convenience in hopes of snaring terrorists.

Yeah, TIA, also met great controversy. They promised to shut it down. They did. They moved all the records from TIA to TALON. Now they are 'shutting down TALON' and moving the records to Guardian. So it's not that they are shuttering such programmes, they merely are playing a high-tech shell game. When the media finds out about secret programmes to monitor citizens, they merely rename it, move it to another agency, and they proudly go on telly and proclaim 'that programme is no more!'...when in reality it just means they renamed it, hid it somewhere else and that it's still in full effect.

Also note, this isn't a database of foreign terror threats, it's the American government tracking American citizens. This isn't to stop 'Al Queda', this is to track Americans that the current administration doesn't like.

[CptSternn]

...and here it is. Again. New name, smae programme, and AGAIN they shut it down. Whats this? The fourth time we have found secret data mining programmes, deemed illegal, which are being shut down? Each time a new one pops up and once the public finds out they merely rename it and then claimed the programme is shut down. It's like a shell game, except more like 3 card monty because the game is rigged and the dealer isn't losing.


DHS ends criticized data-mining program

http://news.**********/s/ap/dhs_data...oPparis1Ws0NUE

WASHINGTON - The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.

The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism."

Since then, Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.

DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday the project was being dropped.

"ADVISE is not expected to be restarted," Knocke said. DHS' Science and Technology directorate "determined that new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE."

Earlier, DHS said testing would resume once appropriate privacy analyses and public notices were completed.

ADVISE was one of the broadest of 12 data-mining projects in the agency.

A DHS research official said in 2004 it would be able to ingest 1 billion pieces per hour of structured information, such as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces per hour from unstructured text, such as government intelligence reports.

The system was supposed to identify links between bits of information that could otherwise go unnoticed. And it would graphically display results in charts of relationships and links.

A DHS workshop report in 2004 said it hoped to answer queries like: "Identify any suspicious group of individuals that passed through customs at JFK (airport in New York) in January 2004."

The GAO said in March that DHS should notify the public about how an individual's personal information would be verified, used and protected before ADVISE was implemented on live data.

Then, in separate reports released without fanfare in July and August, the DHS inspector general and privacy office concluded that between 2004 and 2007, three pilot tests of ADVISE used personally identifiable information without first issuing required privacy impact assessments. The privacy office said this "created unnecessary privacy risks."

The errors were in pilot programs involving weapons of mass effect, immigration enforcement and the DHS intelligence analysis office, the privacy office said.

This is the second such error at DHS.

The Secure Flight program to screen domestic air travelers was blocked by Congress after it acquired live personal data for testing. That program has since issued a privacy impact assessment, dropped use of commercial data such as personal credit card histories, and will begin tests this fall.

"Data analysis programs hold real promise for protecting America, but they need to be tested using dummy data before being used on real data," said James Dempsey, policy director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group. "Why this mistake keeps getting made over and over again, I don't understand."

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said database tools "must be closely supervised to prevent abusing the rights and the privacy of ordinary Americans. All too often, the Bush administration has treated safeguards for databases as a disposable afterthought if at all."

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said DHS "must follow federal privacy laws — in this case the E-Government Act which requires privacy impact assessments before personal information can be used — in order to maintain public support for these new technologies."

Among the data the privacy office found had been plugged into ADVISE pilot projects were:

_The no-fly list of people barred from domestic air travel and the list of people who require special inspections before flying.

_More than 3.6 million shipping records from a commercial data provider with names of cargo shippers and consignees.

_Terrorist Screening Center lists of people who tried to cross the U.S.-Canadian border at a port-of-entry.

_Classified intelligence reports about illicit traffic in weapons of mass effect.

_Lists of foreign exchange students, immigrants under investigation and people from special interest countries.

Although Knocke said ADVISE "was never used in an operational environment" and DHS had assured Congress in 2006 it was not operational, the inspector general found that "on at least one occasion, the data was used to produce classified intelligence information."

At Lawrence Livermore, analysts used the pilot system "to uncover previously unknown connections between organized crime and terrorism," the IG found in a July report quietly made public last month.

The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information. Dempsey argued those were too vague to alert citizens how ADVISE would use their data.

[CptSternn]

U.S. collecting personal data on travelers

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...a.37ebf94.html

WASHINGTON – The U.S. government is collecting much more detailed electronic records than previously disclosed on the travel habits of millions of Americans, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The data includes whom the persons travel with or plan to stay with; the personal items they carry during their journeys; and even the books that travelers have carried, according to the documents.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

Officials Friday defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the department raises alarms about the government's ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also worried that such personal data could one day be used impede their right to travel.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society," said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, "may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. ... But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent."

Mr. Gilmore's file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book Drugs and Your Rights. "My first reaction was I kind of expected it," Mr. Gilmore said. "My second reaction was, that's illegal."

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in passengers' reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. "I flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers are reading," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading."

But, Mr. Knocke said, "if there is some indication based upon the behavior or an item in the traveler's possession that leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the front-line officer's duty to further scrutinize the traveler." Once that happens, Mr. Knocke said, "it is not uncommon for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny."

He said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Mr. Gilmore's book about drug rights, but that generally "front-line officers have a duty to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the counter-narcotics mission." Officers making a decision to admit someone at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if there is some indication of a violation of the law, he said.

Although the screening has been in effect for more than a decade, data for the system in recent years have been collected by the government from more border points, and also provided by airlines – under U.S. government mandates – through direct electronic links that did not previously exist.

The records the Identity Project obtained confirmed that the government is receiving data directly from commercial reservation systems, but also showed that the data, in some cases, are more detailed than the information to which the airlines have access.

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the U.S. or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.

James Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison's brother, obtained government records that contained another sister's phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. "So my sister's phone number ends up being in a government database," he said. "This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth."

Stewart Verdery, former first assistant secretary for policy and planning at DHS, said the data collected for ATS should be considered "an investigative tool, just the way we do with law enforcement, who take records of things for future purposes when they need to figure out where people came from, what they were carrying and who they are associated with. That type of information is extremely valuable when you're trying to thread together a plot or you're trying to clean up after an attack."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last August said that "if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information."

Mr. Knocke, the DHS spokesman, added that the program is not used to determine "guilt by association." He said the DHS has created a program called DHS TRIP (Traveler Redress Inquiry Program) to provide redress for travelers who faced screening problems at ports of entry.

But DHS TRIP does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy underlying the system. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy Act requirements, including the right to "contest the content of the record," a traveler can't correct erroneous information, Mr. Sobel said.


Where you go, who you visit, what you read - things the US government is now monitoring, and recording, to keep tab on it's own citizens. Funny thing is - if you don't live in America, they don't have this data. So how exactly is this making America more safe? It appears more of a weeding out process to stifle political dissent when it happens.

[bleedingheart344]

Sternn, what exactly would be the point of tapping phones in other countries? Would it give any more vital information than what we can already get? This is to monitor the citizens and see if there are any threats in our country.

[CptSternn]

Thats what they claim.

[Rizash]

Not reading all this, skimmed it so if I'm a bit out of touch with topic thats why.... BUT

I concider my image/appearance my intellectual property.... If anyone misuses/abuses this I would fight them by all legal means. Same goes for voice....

BTW: in the day/age of seamless undetectable digital media encoding anything can be made to look like anything so I'm worried about some prankster making it look like people are doing things they arent....

*shrugs* so much for freedom

-Riz

[CptSternn]

Spy Flies All the Buzz at Washington, N.Y. Political Events

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...s&hpid=artslot

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Others think they are, well, dragonflies -- an ancient order of insects that even biologists concede look about as robotic as a living creature can look.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

The technical challenges of creating robotic insects are daunting, and most experts doubt that fully working models exist yet.

"If you find something, let me know," said Gary Anderson of the Defense Department's Rapid Reaction Technology Office.

But the CIA secretly developed a simple dragonfly snooper as long ago as the 1970s. And given recent advances, even skeptics say there is always a chance that some agency has quietly managed to make something operational.

"America can be pretty sneaky," said Tom Ehrhard, a retired Air Force colonel and expert in unmanned aerial vehicles who is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonprofit Washington-based research institute...


The full article is worth the read. Looks like the US government is now using tiny flying cameras to monitor American citizens at anti-war rallies.

This way they can't be called out for doing it.

[CptSternn]

Verizon Says It Turned Over Data Without Court Orders

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

Verizon Communications, the nation's second-largest telecom company, told congressional investigators that it has provided customers' telephone records to federal authorities in emergency cases without court orders hundreds of times since 2005.

The company said it does not determine the requests' legality or necessity because to do so would slow efforts to save lives in criminal investigations.

In an Oct. 12 letter replying to Democratic lawmakers, Verizon offered a rare glimpse into the way telecommunications companies cooperate with government requests for information on U.S. citizens.

Verizon also disclosed that the FBI, using administrative subpoenas, sought information identifying not just a person making a call, but all the people that customer called, as well as the people those people called. Verizon does not keep data on this "two-generation community of interest" for customers, but the request highlights the broad reach of the government's quest for data.

The disclosures, in a letter from Verizon to three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee investigating the carriers' participation in government surveillance programs, demonstrated the willingness of telecom companies to comply with government requests for data, even, at times, without traditional legal supporting documents. The committee members also got letters from AT&T and Qwest Communications International, but those letters did not provide details on customer data given to the government. None of the three carriers gave details on any classified government surveillance program.

From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities on an emergency basis 720 times, it said in the letter. The records included Internet protocol addresses as well as phone data. In that period, Verizon turned over information a total of 94,000 times to federal authorities armed with a subpoena or court order, the letter said. The information was used for a range of criminal investigations, including kidnapping and child-predator cases and counter-terrorism investigations.

Verizon and AT&T said it was not their role to second-guess the legitimacy of emergency government requests.

The letters were released yesterday by the lawmakers as Congress debates whether to grant telecom carriers immunity in cases in which they are sued for disclosing customers' phone records and other data as part of the government's post-September 11 surveillance program, even if they did not have court authorization. House Democrats have said that they cannot contemplate such immunity without first understanding the nature of the carriers' cooperation with the government.

"The responses from these telecommunications companies highlight the need of Congress to continue pressing the Bush administration for answers. The water is as murky as ever on this issue, and it's past time for the administration to come clean," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who launched the investigation with panel Chairman John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.).

Congressional Democrats have been largely stymied in their efforts to have the Bush administration disclose the scope and nature of its surveillance and data-gathering efforts after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Revelations have come through press reports, advocacy groups' Freedom of Information Act lawsuits and Justice Department inspector general reports.

In May 2006, USA Today reported that the National Security Agency had been secretly collecting the phone-call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecom firms. Qwest, it reported, declined to participate because of fears that the program lacked legal standing.

Last month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group in San Francisco, obtained records through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit showing that the FBI sought data from telecom companies about the calling habits of suspects and their associates, the New York Times reported. Neither Qwest nor AT&T answered the lawmakers' question as to whether they had received such requests for information.

Yesterday's 13-page Verizon letter indicated that the requests went further than previously known. Verizon said it had received FBI administrative subpoenas, called national security letters, requesting data that would "identify a calling circle" for subscribers' telephone numbers, including people contacted by the people contacted by the subscriber. Verizon said it does not keep such information.

"The privacy concerns are exponential each generation you go away from the suspect's number," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney with the EFF. "This shows that further investigation by Congress and the inspector general is critical."

Earlier this year, the Justice Department's inspector general found that the FBI may have improperly obtained phone, bank and other records of thousands of people inside the United States since 2003 by using national security letters and exigent letters, or emergency demands for records.

Michael Kortan, an FBI spokesman, said the bureau has suspended use of community-of-interest data "while an appropriate oversight and approval policy" is developed. He added that the inspector general is reviewing the use of those data.

Both Verizon and AT&T suggested in their letters that they already enjoy legal immunity under existing laws. But AT&T said that when the lawsuits involve allegations of highly classified activity, the company cannot prove its immunity claims.

Carriers are facing a raft of lawsuits from individuals and privacy advocates, such as the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union, for allegedly violating Americans' privacy by aiding the NSA's warrantless surveillance program.

The federal government has intervened, arguing that to continue the case would divulge "state secrets," jeopardizing national security.

The Senate Intelligence Committee could draft a bill this week that includes relief for the carriers. The administration is seeking blanket immunity, which would extend to anyone sued for assisting the government -- not just telecom carriers -- in its post-Sept. 11 surveillance programs.

"It's rare in these situations where there's agreement between the plaintiffs and the defendants -- that there are plenty of protections for telecommunications providers in the existing laws," said the EFF's Opsahl, adding that no new immunity is necessary. "It appears that we both agree that the court should be able to look at the full situation, despite the state-secrets privilege."

In its letter, Verizon said that on occasion, it receives requests without correct authorizations. For instance, it said, it once received a request for stored voice mail without a warrant. The company does not respond until proper authorization is received, it said.

AT&T and Verizon both argued that the onus should not be on the companies to determine whether the government has lawfully requested customer records. To do so in emergency cases would "slow lawful efforts to protect the public," wrote Randal S. Milch, senior vice president of legal and external affairs for Verizon Business, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.

"Public officials, not private businessmen, must ultimately be responsible for whether the legal judgments underlying authorized surveillance activities turn out to be right or wrong -- legally or politically," wrote Wayne Watts, AT&T's senior executive vice president and general counsel. "Telecommunications carriers have a part to play in guarding against official abuses, but it is necessarily a modest one."


If you live in America, you no longer have a right to privacy. Forget about your Fourth Amendment right, the bush administration in conjunction with all the US telecoms have decided you don't have that right anymore.

Not only do you not have that right anymore, people who contact the people you contact don't have that right either.

[CptSternn]

Scanning students' fingers hits a nerve

http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps...NEWS/710240447

With the federal government lagging behind on its plans to implement the use of electronic passports, identification cards and driver's licenses, biometric vendors are targeting a new market: schools.

But the use of biometric technology in schools, such as a system being used by Stayton Middle School's cafeteria, has some parents and privacy advocates condemning the move as outright Orwellian.

"This is biometric data collecting," said Jann Carson, the associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Portland. "It's the 'Big Brother' theory. The last thing we should do is teach parents and their young children to be casual about turning over personal data, like a fingerprint, just for the sake of speeding up a lunch line."

Feeling the lunchtime crunch, Stayton Middle School administrators last month installed a finger-scanning system to help expedite the cafeteria meal line.

To implement the new lunch account system, students' prints were scanned into a scanner to help identify them.

Jack Adams, the superintendent of the North Santiam School District, said the system does not take a student's actual fingerprint.

"It's a string, not a fingerprint," Adams said. "It's three mathematical pieces of information taken from a student's finger. It's stored on the school computer and can't be used in any other way."

But some parents are opposed to the finger-scanning of minors in schools. They say they're concerned that the prints their children register with the school could be stolen, misplaced or used for a form of fraud that hasn't even been invented.

Britta Hamshar of Stayton is one of those parents.

When Hamshar's 10-year-old daughter came home from school Sept. 24 and said she had been fingerprinted for the cafeteria's new account system, the mother was angry.

"They say it's not a fingerprint, but it is," Hamshar said. "I don't know that hackers won't be able to steal my daughter's fingerprints in the future."

Keith Butler, the district's director of technology, has heard the complaints.

"Some of the parents are worried the government will be able to access their kids' prints," Butler said. "But what they don't realize is that the actual image of the fingerprint is discarded and all that's used is a number."

The middle school's new scanner plots points on a fingerprint and then converts those points to an encrypted number, he explained.

That number is used to verify a student's account, he added.

Rather than using an ID card, entering a pin number or paying cash, students simply press their finger or thumb on an infrared scanner to be matched to their lunch account.

School officials say the new system saves time for the cashiers because they don't have to write everything down and can just push a button if a child forgets his or her lunch money for the day.

They also say the system allows parents to pre-pay for student lunches and gives privacy to students who receive free or reduced meals.

But critics say that while the scanners may help improve the efficiency of a school cafeteria, it still is an ink-less way of collecting fingerprints.

Steve Moon, the marketing director of MealTime, a Portland firm that sold the finger-scanning system to the school, rejects that argument.

"All those fears and concerns are based on misinformation," Moon said. "The data can't be used to re-create a fingerprint or by police to identify a student."

It's not known how many schools in Oregon use the finger-scanning system because the federal government does not require school districts to report their use, an official with the Oregon School Board Association said.

But Moon estimates that MealTime has sold the system to at least 60 to 70 schools in Oregon.

Lillie Coney, meanwhile, says she's concerned that biometric vendors are using semantics to convince schools that a person's fingerprint image is stored as mathematical points only.

"All biometrics are mathematical points," said Coney, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a research group in Washington, D.C., that focuses public attention on emerging civil liberties and privacy issues.

"Now we're seeing schools use the language of marketers who sell this type of technology to convince parents there's nothing to worry about," she said. "Schools should be skeptical of an industry that creates this technology and which then says the data can't be used in other ways."

Stayton Middle School's data is kept on a self-contained database at the district office, Butler said.

However, Coney worries that with technological advances, someone could use the information in five or 10 years to recreate a child's fingerprints.

"In the final analysis, the print information collected from these students is only as secure as the database in which that information is stored," Coney said. "And no database is immune from attackers."

Whats sad - this is happening in schools across America. Whats even sadder - much like this article, parents are upset and complaining, but not doing anything to stop it.

[Methadrine]

On the other hand, if someone wants a random childs fingerprints they don't need to hack or steal a database. It's as easy as to go to a schools frontdoor at night and dust the doorhandle for prints. Voila, 10 random prints to scan at home instead and use in whatever funny way you'd like.

While the concern is valid, that of storage of information that identifies an individual, and should be dealt with since it's sort of a breach of privacy, there are far worse things to do when it comes to computers and identitythefts...

[CptSternn]

Intel centers losing anti-terror focus

http://news.**********/s/ap/20071129...2hYCSjCAms0NUE

WASHINGTON - Local intelligence-sharing centers set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have had their anti-terrorism mission diluted by a focus on run-of-the-mill street crime and hazards such as hurricanes, a government report concludes.

Of the 43 "fusion centers" already established, only two focus exclusively on preventing terrorism, the Government Accountability Office found in a national survey obtained by The Associated Press. Center directors complain they were hampered by lack of guidance from Washington and were flooded by often redundant information from multiple computer systems.

Administration officials defended the centers and said encompassing all sorts of crimes in the intelligence dragnet is the best way to catch terrorists.


Thats right folks, it's happening now. First off, the bush administration violated the Posee Comitatus Act when they started this programme, and others, but violating the constitution and other laws never stopped them before. For those who don't know what this act entails, find out here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

So, not only are they now violating basic rules established to keep the country from becoming a police state, they now are openly admitting they are lying about the reasons for doing so.

'Stopping terrorist' was the reason they gave that they needed to have the US military 'monitor' American citizens. Now it turns out American citizens are being monitored by the US military not because they are investigating terrorism or terrorists, but the military is being used, along with wire taps, mail reading, etc. to fight common crime.

Thats right - as the article states 41 of 43 of the new 'fusion' (fusion being a reference to the military working with local police) centres are focusing on theft, burglary, etc. Billions being funneled into fighting 'terrorism' is going directly into monitoring average Americans and seeing what they are up to.

The tools they are using against enemies abroad are now being used on American soil, against the American people.

Very Orwellian indeed.

(Check out the picture in the article of US military men in combat fatigues alongside police in large offices)

[CptSternn]

States to Track Drivers Through Licenses

http://thenewspaper.com/news/21/2133.asp

A federal program promotes driving license technology that allows the tracking of motorists even when they are not driving.

Electronic monitoring of motorists will soon expand dramatically as states including Arizona, Michigan, Vermont and Washington begin to use radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in drivers' licenses. These electronic chips broadcast the identity of any card holder to any chip-reading sensor within a minimum of thirty feet. The US Department of Homeland Security is promoting the tracking projects as part of its Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

"Multiple cards can be read at a distance and simultaneously with vicinity RFID technology, allowing an entire car full of people to be processed at once," a DHS fact sheet on the Passport Card technology explained.

So-called enhanced drivers' licenses are designed to meet the DHS travel document requirements. Enhanced card holders will be allowed to travel across the border without a passport when new regulations take effect in January 2009. The enhanced licenses electronically store the motorist's name, date of birth, height, weight and identity number on the card. RFID readers use the identity number to access additional private information from a department of motor vehicles database.

Although the licenses will initially be offered on a voluntary basis, the National Motorists Association suggests that it will not take long for the program to become mandatory.

"The federal government just incentivizes their proposal so that each state, and by extension its citizens, feel like they have no choice but to go along with their program," the NMA stated today.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) warns that the move is another step toward a national identity card.

"DHS, Arizona, Vermont and Washington are creating these new ID cards in order to change the state driver's license in to a federal border security identification document," the EPIC website explained. "The license is pulled away from its original intent -- to ensure driving competence -- and used as a multi-use federal identification document that could easily be transformed into a national identity card."

Not every state is sold on the idea. The California State Senate voted in April to ban RFID drivers' licenses. The bill passed an Assembly committee by a 9-5 vote in July.

[Sir Canvas Corpsey]

I was thrilled today when I passed my interview to work at the Ministry of Truth =D

It's hard to be shocked by this, when you consider that possibly half the "facts" we have come to accept and the history of our world is all just fabricated and we are programmed to believe it by the media. Scarier still is that we could even be brainwashed into different mindsets to purposely create conflict and keep countries in that desirable state of chaos which allows the political parties to rule with ease, liberals and labor, they could be the same thing at base. All just part of the grand manipulation

@_@