Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags

[Fusion_power]

maybe we should take up a snowden collection. Send him money to live on since he is currently jobless.

[ewmayer]

Mish has a quartet of NSA-spying-related articles in a news roundup today - brief source/snip for each follows.

From The Guardian XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet':

XKeyscore, the [leaked NSA training materials] boast, is the NSA's "widest reaching" system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet", including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

The purpose of XKeyscore is to allow analysts to search the metadata as well as the content of emails and other internet activity, such as browser history, even when there is no known email account (a "selector" in NSA parlance) associated with the individual being targeted...

From Pater Tenebrarum of the Acting Man blog writes about the Targeting of Investigative Journalists and those opposed to the War in Afghanistan:

There are seemingly constantly new revelations about extremely questionable practices employed by the security apparatus. The latest comes from 'five eyes' partner New Zealand, which not too long ago had to admit that its spooks illegally spied on Kim Dotcom to help the FBI make an example of the man in the context of copyright enforcement (we have previously discussed the case of Dotcom, who is accused of breaking laws that apparently don't even exist).

New Zealand's reaction to this embarrassment was, as you may have guessed, to introduce new legislation that will henceforth legalize domestic spying. In the meantime, its security apparatus seems not really deterred by the embarrassment caused to it by the Dotcom case and continues to engage in highly dubious surveillance activities, actively aided and abetted by US intelligence services...

Courtesy of ZeroHedge, please consider pressure cookers, backpacks and quinoa, oh my!

It was a confluence of magnificent proportions that led six agents from the joint terrorism task force to knock on my door Wednesday morning. Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history.

Most of it was innocent enough. I had researched pressure cookers. My husband was looking for a backpack. And maybe in another time those two things together would have seemed innocuous, but we are in “these times” now...

The New York Times reports Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld:

In a significant victory for law enforcement, a federal appeals court on Tuesday said that government authorities could extract historical location data directly from telecommunications carriers without a search warrant.

The closely watched case, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers. Ruling 2 to 1, the court said a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

Viewed that way, everything anyone does online could be construed as a "business record". Which is likely the legal rationale which will be used to justify programs like XKeyscore.

Technophile [and erstwhile ISP owner/operator] Denninger commented thusly on the above decision:

You do know that your phone is always communicating with the towers when it's turned on, right? That's how it works -- it has to occasionally ping back and forth between the tower and device in order for a call to route to you, a text message to be delivered, etc.

Guess what? There now is a court ruling that since you voluntarily "gave" that information to the cell company even though it would be impossible for you to have such a device and have it work without giving that data to them because your giving that data (your location) was "voluntary" it is not protected under the 4th Amendment and thus does not require a warrant.

The root of the problem here is not that it might lead to you "right now." It's that the data, once acquired is never erased and thus becomes a record that can be used at any time in the future if it becomes politically (or otherwise) expedient to use in order to implicate you in something.

KD also had a note about the marvelous surveillance capabilities "featured" by Motorola's just-announced Moto X next-gen smartphone, titled So Now Your Phone Will "Hear" You All The Time?.

[ewmayer]

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

[ewmayer]

Exclusive: IRS manual detailed DEA's use of hidden intel evidence: WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

[chalsall]

In my opinion, Laurie Anderson was before her time. (With apologies to a certain David et al.)

[kladner]

Laurie Anderson is a great artist. I regret I never saw her perform, but we love her records around here. They certainly have a scary edge to them.

O Superman is a wonderful album, and Mister Heartbreak is outstanding. I love that she collaborated with William Burroughs and Peter Gabriel.

[xilman]

Lavabit.com has shut down for reasons the site admin has been forbidden to explain. Lavabit.com was used by Edward Snowden as an email provider. The admin is attempting to fight for his right to speak freely.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

Lavabit.com has shut down for reasons the site admin has been forbidden to explain. Lavabit.com was used by Edward Snowden as an email provider. The admin is attempting to fight for his right to speak freely.

What is a little sad is America (read: The United States of America) used to be considered the "Land of the Free".

Empirically, no longer....

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by xilman

Lavabit.com has shut down for reasons the site admin has been forbidden to explain. Lavabit.com was used by Edward Snowden as an email provider. The admin is attempting to fight for his right to speak freely.

My first thought was that NSA had found non-randomnesses in every public random bit provider's bits except for Lavabit's lava-lamp-generated random bits, so they had to shut down Lavabit to keep truly random, unpredictable bits from being freely available.

And it would've been sorta romantic to find that lava lamps provided the only truly random bits.

But I was confusing Lavabit with a former actual random-bits-from-lava-lamps provider named Lavarand.

I hadn't known that Lavabit was an e-mail provider (apparently not using lava lamps).

From http://shortformblog.com/post/577337...edward-snowden

... It’s rumored Lavabit was Snowden’s email provider, and that the company lost a recent federal case regarding Snowden.

From the latter link (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...bit-snowden/):
"Edward Snowden’s Email Provider Shuts Down Amid Secret Court Battle"

A pro-privacy email service long used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden abruptly shut down today, blaming a secret U.S. court battle it has been fighting for six weeks — one that it seems to be losing so far.

“I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly 10 years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” owner Ladar Levison wrote in a statement. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”

Based in Texas, Lavabit attracted attention last month when NSA leaker Edward Snowden used an email account with the service to invite human rights workers and lawyers to a press conference in the Moscow airport where he was then confined. A PGP crypto key apparently registered by Snowden with a Lavabit address suggests he’s favored the service since January 2010 — well before he became the most important whistleblower in a generation.

Levison posted this message today announcing the shutdown.

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on–the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here.

Reading between the lines, it’s reasonable to assume Levison has been fighting either a National Security Letter seeking customer information — which comes by default with a gag order — or a full-blown search or eavesdropping warrant.

Court records show that, in June, Lavabit complied with a routine search warrant targeting a child pornography suspect in a federal case in Maryland. That suggests that Levison isn’t a privacy absolutist. Whatever compelled him to shut down now must have been exceptional.

A voicemail to Lavabit went unreturned today.

[Nick]

American technology businesses fear they could lose between $21.5bn and $35bn in cloud computing contracts worldwide over the next three years, as part of the fallout from the NSA revelations.
Some US companies said they have already lost business, while UK rivals said that UK and European businesses are increasingly wary of trusting their data to American organisations, which might have to turn it over secretly to the National Security Agency, its government surveillance organisation

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...loud-computing

[xilman]

Originally Posted by xilman

Lavabit.com has shut down for reasons the site admin has been forbidden to explain. Lavabit.com was used by Edward Snowden as an email provider. The admin is attempting to fight for his right to speak freely.

Further fallout --- Phil Zimmerman's new company has shut down email operations.

Silent Circle, another provider of secure online services, announced on Thursday night that it would scrap its own encrypted email offering, Silent Mail. In a blogpost the company said that although it had not received any government orders to hand over information, "the writing is on the wall".