Government snooping, backdoors and #necessaryhashtags

[ewmayer]

The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad | Ars Technica

For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target's complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that's required is an agent's signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation.
...
The NSL got a major boost in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, as it became part of the USA Patriot Act. Between 2003 and 2005, the FBI issued 143,074 NSLs according to a Justice Department inspector general report.

Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director, said that "the FBI has imposed effectively permanent gag orders on tens of thousands of NSL recipients... This kind of secrecy prevents the public from learning how the government’s surveillance authorities are used, distorts public debate, shields policymakers from accountability for their decisions, and insulates surveillance powers from judicial review."

[kladner]

I was looking for another Walt Handelsman animation about the NSA, but this turned up first:


Ah! Got it! This one is from mid-2006. This is a slightly glitchy conversion, at least so it seems to me.

[Nick]

Latest on the UK court case involving GCHQ (the British NSA) and Privacy International:
https://privacyinternational.org/node/681

If you don't have the time (or inclination) to sift through all the evidence, I recommend Ross Anderson's submission:
https://privacyinternational.org/sit...2015_Final.pdf

[Xyzzy]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/...0TM20820151203

The appeals court also vacated Valle's conviction for using the database, finding that federal law does not prohibit individuals from accessing a computer they are normally authorized to use, even if they do so for an improper purpose.

[ewmayer]

Oh, look, how conveeeeeeeeeeeeniently timed!

San Bernardino shooting: Terror investigators can't view NSA phone records - San Jose Mercury News

WASHINGTON — The U.S. government’s ability to review and analyze five years’ worth of telephone records for the married couple blamed in the deadly shootings in California lapsed just four days earlier when the National Security Agency’s controversial mass surveillance program was formally shut down.

Under a court order, those historical calling records at the NSA are now off-limits to agents running the FBI terrorism investigation even with a warrant.

Instead, under the new USA Freedom Act, authorities were able to obtain roughly two years’ worth of calling records directly from the phone companies of the married couple blamed in the attack. The period covered the entire time that the wife, Tashfeen Malik, lived in the United States … from July 2014.

Under the new law, passed in June, investigators still can look for links in phone records, but they must obtain a targeted warrant to get them directly from phone companies.

That's right - "we were just about to finally get around to analyzing years' and years' worth of incriminating phone calls involving these two, but y'all made us stop, you terrorism-loving bastards!" Given how many such terror plots the NSA has been shown to have broken up via their precrime initiatives, that is a very credible spin on the story. /sarc

When it comes to getting da peeps to surrender what little is left of their constitutional rights, one must never let a crisis or tragedy go to waste.

Suitably scathing demolition-in-detail of the above article available here.

[ewmayer]

Guess what was sneaked into the just-passed omnibus budget bill in DC?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...-spending-bill

An NC reader answers: "CISA. The zombie bill that would not die. They’ve been trying for close to four years now to get this turd passed."

I'm pretty sure there are several other nasty surprises in this latest bipartisan - echoing Nancy Pelosi - "We have to pass this bill to see what's in it" effort.

[Xyzzy]

A small victory perhaps:

Originally Posted by American Friends Service Committee

Congress just passed a bill funding the government for the coming year. We're excited to report that the bill does not include language that would hinder the resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the U.S.

[S485122]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Guess what was sneaked into the just-passed omnibus budget bill in DC?

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2...-spending-bill

An NC reader answers: "CISA. The zombie bill that would not die. They’ve been trying for close to four years now to get this turd passed."

I'm pretty sure there are several other nasty surprises in this latest bipartisan - echoing Nancy Pelosi - "We have to pass this bill to see what's in it" effort.

CISA includes a nasty provision :

Cisa would create a system for corporate informants willing to share their customers’ data with 
the Department of Homeland Security, which would then pass the information to other federal 
agencies, defined in the final text as the departments of commerce, defense (which oversees the 
CIA), energy, justice (the FBI), the treasury (which oversees the IRS), and the office of the 
director of national intelligence (which oversees the NSA).

In return, companies participating would be shielded from regulatory action related to the 
information they passed along and any Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the public to 
determine exactly what kind of user information was being handed over to the government.

Jacob

[Nick]

The 2015 European Digital Rights awards (both negative and positive):
https://edri.org/edri-awards-2015/

[ewmayer]

o China Just Launched the Most Frightening Game Ever — and Soon It Will Be Mandatory | The AntiMedia

As if further proof were needed Orwell’s dystopia is now upon us, China has now gamified obedience to the State. Though that is every bit as creepily terrifying as it sounds, citizens may still choose whether or not they wish to opt-in — that is, until the program becomes compulsory in 2020. “Going under the innocuous name of ‘Sesame Credit,’ China has created a score for how good a citizen you are,” explains Extra Credits’ video about the program. “The owners of China’s largest social networks have partnered with the government to create something akin to the U.S. credit score — but, instead of measuring how regularly you pay your bills, it measures how obediently you follow the party line.”

Prediction: Western "democratic" governments will very soon - insofar that they are not already doing this sort of thing "informally" - be going down this route, but with an even more subtle twist: Instead of any appearance of mandatoriness, people not allowing their life data to be continually vacuumed up via social media (and thereby dutifully fed to the government domestic-spying hydra) will simply find themselves evermore shut out of the emerging Big Data-run economy. Want to work in the aboveground economy? Gotta have a Facefvck acount, your employer's corporate spying app installed on your smartphone and and be trackably online 24/7. One can already see many aspects of the future wired-totalitarian state apparatus busily establishing itself in the form of things like "social foo" and apps that start out as "convenient and fun thins to do" and quickly become mandatory - employers and HR using social accounts to vet prospective hires and track employees, schools embracing "online learning" which of course needs the kid to sign up for some BigDataCorp's panopticon, and governments relentlessly pushing toward the abolition of physical currency.

[ewmayer]

At the start of what promises to be another year of government encroachment on civil liberties, it is useful to recall the history of the EFF. Note that the precedent set in their first big case has effectively been abrogated by mass warrantless e-mail surveillance by NSA and similar organizations overseas:

The [1990] Steve Jackson Games case turned out to be an extremely important one in the development of a proper legal framework for cyberspace. For the first time, a court held that electronic mail deserves at least as much protection as telephone calls. We take for granted today that law enforcement must have a warrant that particularly describes all electronic mail messages before seizing and reading them.

Also, I had been unaware of crypto guru Dan Bernstein's central role in their second major case, that related to exportation of crypto technologies.

And related:

15 News Stories From 2015 You Should Have Heard About But Probably Didn't | The AntiMedia.org