Surveillance state vs. freedom of travel / right to privacy

[bernorange 8345]

22 minutes ago, Captainant said:

... He's hand delivered letters to putin from trump for fucks sake. ...

sigh...

Quote

...

"At Senator Paul's request, President Trump provided a letter of introduction. In the letter, the President mentioned topics of interest that Senator Paul wanted to discuss with President Putin," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement.

...

A US official provided to CNN the text of the letter, which read: "I would like to introduce Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a voice for expanding dialogue with the Russian Federation. He will be in Moscow from August 5 to August 8."

The brief letter continued, "Senator Paul would appreciate the opportunity to meet with you to discuss several topics. He is interested in legislative exchanges, parliamentary dialogue and cultural and educational exchange programs, increased counter-terrorism cooperation, building on recent successes like the disruption of the St. Petersburg plot and resolution of the military conflicts in Syria and Ukraine."

The letter ended, "Thank you for considering meeting with Senator Paul during his visit to Russia."

...

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/topic/3571-the-decline-of-rand-paul/&do=findComment&comment=400128

Perfectly fine with me if you do not like Sen. Paul as a POTUS candidate, but you are doing a disservice to reality with that spin.

Edited February 7, 2019 by bernorange

[DanRydell 799]

On 1/15/2019 at 10:25 AM, bernorange said:

Some potentially good news:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/01/14/feds-cant-force-you-to-unlock-your-iphone-with-finger-or-face-judge-rules/#3205933c42b7

I think there are sound policy arguments to not discourage biometric security by treating them differently but the constitutional arguments are flimsy at best. There's simply nothing testimonial about your fingerprint. 

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

...

Generally, submitting biometrics like blood samples, fingerprints and a handwriting sample, while potentially incriminating, is seen as non-testimonial and not protected by the Fifth Amendment’s right against self-incrimination. However, alphanumeric passcodes are protected in many circumstances because they are knowledge that could lead to self-incrimination.

“Testimony is not restricted to verbal or written communications,” Westmore wrote. “Acts that imply assertions of fact can constitute testimonial communication for the purposes of the Fifth Amendment.”

...

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/compelling-biometric-features-to-unlock-phones-is-an-abuse-of-power-rules-u.s.-judge/

Perhaps you could translate Westmore's comment into english (seriously - I'm trying to understand the nuance involved here)? 

[Captainant 27250]

39 minutes ago, bernorange said:

sigh...

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/index.php?/topic/3571-the-decline-of-rand-paul/&do=findComment&comment=400128

Perfectly fine with me if you do not like Sen. Paul as a POTUS candidate, but you are doing a disservice to reality with that spin.

Well it's more a matter of that Rand Paul and the white house have different stories on what the purpose of the letter was and it was only weeks after the Helsinki meeting, making it curious why trump would need an exclusive method of communicating with Putin. And I'm not really encouraged by behavior like blocking a small nation from joining NATO that was being bullied by russia, or second guessing the entire intelligence community to side with Putin instead.

So I wouldn't really call it spin, so much as just paying fucking attention to the details.

Edited February 7, 2019 by Captainant

[bernorange 8345]

Seriously?  Rand's tweet, quoted in your first link, is entirely consistent with the CNN report.  Different stories?  lol.  Both the planning for Paul's trip and the request for the letter occurred long before Trump's Helsinki meeting. 

[suddenly shaggy 929]

Rand Paul has been a reliable toady for Putin since Trump was elected. He's consistently had a pro-Russia spin that would be entirely foreign to the policies he and his father purportedly support. He's not the same guy he used to pretend to be. 

[DanRydell 799]

1 hour ago, bernorange said:

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/compelling-biometric-features-to-unlock-phones-is-an-abuse-of-power-rules-u.s.-judge/

Perhaps you could translate Westmore's comment into english (seriously - I'm trying to understand the nuance involved here)? 

She's basically saying that the fingerprint is as revealing as a passcode in this scenario, which isn't necessarily untrue, but that's not the crux of Fifth Amendment analysis.

The Fifth Amendment protects what's in your head. We've shorthanded it to a right against self-incrimination, but the actual text says that a person cannot "be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The general concept is that a person should be not be forced into a position where he has only three options, 1) Lie, 2) Incriminate himself, or 3) be in contempt.

Being compelled to tell the police your passcode is violative of the Fifth Amendment not because it gives the police access to your phone but because it requires you to reveal the contents of your mind, which, in the case of a phone, can be incriminating because it reveals your ability to access the phone. But if you had the passcode tattooed on your finger, there would be no Fifth Amendment problem with the police typing that passcode into the phone. Choosing to use a fingerprint passcode is effectively tattooing your passcode on your finger.

The textbook example is a wall safe that can be opened by a combination lock or a key. The police cannot compel you to tell them the combination. They also cannot compel you to tell them the location of the key. But if the key is in your pocket, they can take the key and use it to open the safe. The first two reveal the contents of your mind; the last does not.

[bernorange 8345]

On 11/30/2018 at 7:54 AM, Biff Tannen said:

Yeah, because they don't tell you you can opt out.  I flew out of there in September going to Italy and when boarding they just told everyone, "ok, step up and look into the camera.  We are using facial recognition technology today!"  It didn't sound like a choice.

 

On 11/30/2018 at 7:56 AM, bernorange said:

That actually explains a lot.  We need more two percenters (no aggy).

 

[Anastasis 23329]

Well that just fucking great.  I was hoping that the jetblue responses were fake. Wrong. 

[Anastasis 23329]

It's OK guys, nothing to worry about wrt the surveillance apparatus here.  They will set up a secret court to oversee the process and make sure it is all above board. 

https://www.apnews.com/9d43f4b74260411797043ddd391c13d8

 

Edited April 23, 2019 by Anastasis

[Bat Guano 359]

It's a done deal:

US facial recognition will cover 97 percent of departing airline passengers within four years

 

Quote

The Department of Homeland Security says it expects to use facial recognition technology on 97 percent of departing passengers within the next four years. The system, which involves photographing passengers before they board their flight, first started rolling out in 2017, and was operational in 15 US airports as of the end of 2018.

The facial recognition system works by photographing passengers at their departure gate. It then cross-references this photograph against a library populated with facesimages from visa and passport applications, as well as those taken by border agents when foreigners enter the country.

The aim of the system is to offer “Biometric Exit,” which gives authorities as good an idea of who’s leaving the country as who’s entering it, and allows them to identify people who have overstayed their visas. Quartz notes that US authorities have traditionally relied on airline flight manifests to track who’s leaving the country.

Since the introduction of the current system, facial recognition identified 7,000 passengers who overstayed their visas on the 15,000 flights tracked. The US Customers and Border Protection (CBP) estimates that over 600,000 people overstay their visas every year, an offense that carries a maximum penalty of a 10-year ban from entering the US.

Critics argue that building up a database of millions of people’s photographs is a threat to civil liberties. Once you have the database, it would be easy to share it with other agencies, effectively turning it into a search tool for all law enforcement.

The current iteration of the system first entered trials in 2017 on a single flight between Atlanta and Tokyo. It was originally planned to roll out more widely at the beginning of 2018, but its implementation was fast-tracked by the Trump administration and was expanded to more airports in the summer of 2017.

Thanks, Trump.

[Captainant 27250]

2 hours ago, bernorange said:

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Anastasis said:

Well that just fucking great.  I was hoping that the jetblue responses were fake. Wrong. 

 

1 hour ago, Bat Guano said:

It's a done deal:

US facial recognition will cover 97 percent of departing airline passengers within four years

 

Thanks, Trump.

That story is sadly unsurprising. Cloud computing providers have a number of products for facial recognition that are scarily easy to use. Hell, it's the exact same underlying system and workflow that facebook uses to ask "is this ${friend}?" whenever you upload a picture to FB. And we've been giving that machine learning algo a massive and well-labeled dataset to learn what we look like.

It's not going to stop, it's just as bad as the woman in the twitter thread made it out to be. It really is that fast and easy to take a static image, send it to an external service for ID, and receive a confidence level (0-100%) assessment of who that person is based on their face. I've built out a demo for that in under 10 minutes on AWS, it's fucking nuts. If you think things are bad now, just wait till you find out how the NSA has been prying into all of our private lives thanks to the metadata exemption they got back in the 2000's when metadata (and how to utilize it effectively) didn't really exist in the way it does now.

[Anastasis 23329]

22 minutes ago, Captainant said:

That story is sadly unsurprising. Cloud computing providers have a number of products for facial recognition that are scarily easy to use. Hell, it's the exact same underlying system and workflow that facebook uses to ask "is this ${friend}?" whenever you upload a picture to FB. And we've been giving that machine learning algo a massive and well-labeled dataset to learn what we look like.

It's not going to stop, it's just as bad as the woman in the twitter thread made it out to be. It really is that fast and easy to take a static image, send it to an external service for ID, and receive a confidence level (0-100%) assessment of who that person is based on their face. I've built out a demo for that in under 10 minutes on AWS, it's fucking nuts. If you think things are bad now, just wait till you find out how the NSA has been prying into all of our private lives thanks to the metadata exemption they got back in the 2000's when metadata (and how to utilize it effectively) didn't really exist in the way it does now.

I'm with you. Let's take it next level.  The FDA has built a massive drug registry that is based on the medical information of the vast majority of Americans. It is currently in a decentralized form that has been stripped of key identifiers and is used to do very important and interesting things in terms of safety surveillance; however, with just a few regulatory tweaks, say within the framework of a major healthcare overall and advancement of background checks to include medical information such as mental health or psychotropic medication exposure, that massive distributed database could be integrated with many other dimensions of data and biometrics collected by the surveillance apparatus in this country.  This shit is technically feasible today, the only thing standing in the way is a few regulatory issues and a populace that cares consistently and acts aggressively about abuses by the intelligence community.   

Edited April 23, 2019 by Anastasis

[WBT 20376]

3 hours ago, Anastasis said:

a populace that cares consistently and acts aggressively about abuses by the intelligence community

bwahahahaha

 

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

Lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt plans to begin using facial recognition technology on nearly all departing air passengers within the next four years.

The agency’s plan has reignited the fight over the sensitive technology. Critics say facial recognition technology is not ready for large-scale deployment and that DHS has failed to establish specific rules to prevent abuses and policies for handling the collected data.

“The Department of Homeland Security is plowing ahead with its program to scan travelers’ faces, and it’s doing so in absence of adequate safeguards against privacy invasions, data breaches, and racial bias,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement to The Hill. “Homeland Security should change course and stop its deployment of facial recognition technology until it meets that standard.”

Markey and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) have raised these concerns with DHS over the past year, releasing statements and sending letters to the agency urging it to halt the program until it puts specific safeguards in place. So far, according to Markey’s office, the department has ignored their warnings.

DHS has been implementing its “biometric exit” program, which photographs some visitors when they are departing the U.S., for years, expanding to 15 major airports with plans to reach five more. President Trump in 2017 signed an executive order speeding up the rollout of the face-scanning technology, and Congress in 2016 authorized up to $1 billion over the next 10 years to implement the program.

The stated purpose of the program is to identify non-U.S. citizens who have overstayed their visas, but it captures the faces of U.S. citizens as well. The agency says it has successfully identified 7,000 people at major U.S. airports who have overstayed their visas.

The DHS report published last week, which was provided to the House and Senate judiciary committees, is the latest sign that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) — DHS’s largest federal law enforcement agency — is fast-tracking the implementation of the program at the country’s largest airports.

That has privacy advocates in an uproar. They say DHS is ignoring concerns that facial recognition technology wrongly recognizes certain populations at higher rates and allegations that the agency ignored formal procedures required to implement such a wide-ranging program.

“DHS wants to scan your face before it has issued formal rules to protect your privacy,” Harrison Rudolph, an associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology, told The Hill. “Without rules, there could be little that stands in the way of DHS breaking its privacy promises. That’s deeply alarming.”

According to a tranche of documents released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center last month, CBP skipped parts of the formal rulemaking process that requires federal agencies to solicit public comments before they adopt technology that will be used on U.S. citizens.

Privacy advocates have continued to call for CBP to undertake a rulemaking process, which would allow them to push for safeguards and limits on its data collection.

As it stands, CBP says it keeps the photos of those identified as U.S. citizens for 14 days before disposing of them. The agency keeps photographs of non-U.S. citizens for up to 75 years.

Neema Singh Guliani, a senior legislative council at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Hill that she is concerned by CBP’s refusal to establish rules around how passengers can opt out of face scanning.

“The agency has not undertaken any rulemaking to clarify how it’s going to use this information, what privacy protections will apply, what recourse individuals may have in the event that their privacy is violated,” Guliani said. “They haven’t provided clarity or information as to how U.S. citizens or others can opt out of face recognition.”

The agency says it is working to propose a rule that would require all travelers, including U.S. citizens, to be photographed. But it is unclear what safeguards that would include.

Currently, CBP says passengers are welcome to decline to participate in the program. But according to the airlines partnering with the agency, very few passengers do so.
...

More:  https://thehill.com/policy/technology/440323-dhs-plan-for-face-scanning-at-airports-sparks-alarm

[Nice Guy Eddie 13388]

The facial recognition at boarding doesn’t bother me too much.

At that point of the flight security process the govt is aware you (or someone with your ID and boarding pass) is booked on the flight and that you’ve gone thru security.  And a flaw in the current model is that they depend on TSA agents to compare the ID to the person.  A computer recognizing you is most likely better at identifying a mismatch between the data and the person as opposed to a TSA agent doing the same.

i do question how well this will be executed and the delays or process when the recognition software says it’s not you. 

 

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

Do you know where you were five years ago? Did you have an Android phone at the time? It turns out Google might know—and it might be telling law enforcement.

In a new article, the New York Times details a little-known technique increasingly used by law enforcement to figure out everyone who might have been within certain geographic areas during specific time periods in the past. The technique relies on detailed location data collected by Google from most Android devices as well as iPhones and iPads that have Google Maps and other apps installed. This data resides in a Google-maintained database called “Sensorvault,” and because Google stores this data indefinitely, Sensorvault “includes detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide and dating back nearly a decade.”

The data Google is turning over to law enforcement is so precise that one deputy police chief said it “shows the whole pattern of life.” It’s collected even when people aren’t making calls or using apps, which means it can be even more detailed than data generated by cell towers.
...

More:  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/googles-sensorvault-can-tell-police-where-youve-been

[Brisketexan 104228]

Time to get creative with makeup and hairstyiling (seriously, this is a thing, for this actual purpose):

So, in the future, we're all gonna be androgynous Japanese people....so there you have it.

[XYZ 2154]

“Privacy versus safety” has never been an actual issue.

[bernorange 8345]

I know I could have put this in the "China sucks" thread, but I see it as an instructive warning germane to this thread.

Quote

...
This report provides a detailed description and analysis of a mobile app that police and other officials use to communicate with the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, 一体化联合作战平台), one of the main systems Chinese authorities use for mass surveillance in Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch first reported on the IJOP in February 2018, noting the policing program aggregates data about people and flags to officials those it deems potentially threatening; some of those targeted are detained and sent to political education camps and other facilities. But by “reverse engineering” this mobile app, we now know specifically the kinds of behaviors and people this mass surveillance system targets.

The findings have broader significance, providing an unprecedented window into how mass surveillance actually works in Xinjiang, because the IJOP system is central to a larger ecosystem of social monitoring and control in the region. They also shed light on how mass surveillance functions in China. While Xinjiang’s systems are particularly intrusive, their basic designs are similar to those the police are planning and implementing throughout China.

Many—perhaps all—of the mass surveillance practices described in this report appear to be contrary to Chinese law. They violate the internationally guaranteed rights to privacy, to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and to freedom of association and movement. Their impact on other rights, such as freedom of expression and religion, is profound.
...

More:  https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass-surveillance

The fuzzy logic matrix describe above reminded me that the USA has a similar system in place already, albiet without the scope or draconian conditions in the Chinese system (for now?).  It's the NCTC's disposition matrix.

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

San Francisco could become the first city in the nation to ban any city department from using facial recognition under a proposal that says any benefits of the technology outweigh its impact on civil rights, and Oakland may not be far behind.

In San Francisco, a Board of Supervisors committee is scheduled to vote Monday on the Stop Secret Surveillance Ordinance, which would make it illegal for any department to “obtain, retain, access or use” any face-recognition technology or information obtained from such technology.

The proposal, introduced by San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin in January, would also require public input and the supervisors’ approval before agencies buy surveillance technology with public funds. That includes the purchase of license plate readers, toll readers, closed-circuit cameras, body cams, and biometrics technology and software for forecasting criminal activity.

“The propensity for facial recognition technology to endanger civil rights and civil liberties substantially outweighs its purported benefits, and the technology will exacerbate racial injustice and threaten our ability to live free of continuous government monitoring,” the ordinance reads.

Other Bay Area cities and counties, including Berkeley, Palo Alto and Santa Clara County, have similar rules in place about buying surveillance tech, but a San Francisco ban on facial recognition would set a precedent. In Oakland, a proposal to add a ban on facial recognition to city regulations about surveillance tech is set to be considered by Oakland’s Public Safety Committee later this month.
...

More:  https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2019/05/06/san-francisco-oakland-could-be-first-cities-in-nation-to-ban-facial-recognition/

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

Australia is preparing to debut its version of the Chinese regime’s high-tech system for monitoring and controlling its citizens. The launch, to take place in the northern city of Darwin, will include systems to monitor people’s activity via their cell phones.

The new system is based on monitoring programs in Shenzhen, China, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is testing its Social Credit System. Officials on the Darwin council traveled to Shenzhen, according to NT News, to “have a chance to see exactly how their Smart Technology works prior to being fully rolled out.”

In Darwin, they’ve already constructed “poles, fitted with speakers, cameras and Wi-Fi,” according to NT News, to monitor people, their movements around the city, the websites they visit, and what apps they use. The monitoring will be done mainly by artificial intelligence, but will alert authorities based on set triggers.

Just as in China, the surveillance system is being branded as a “smart city” program, and while Australian officials claim its operations are benign, they’ve announced it functions to monitor cell phone activity and “virtual fences” that will trigger alerts if people cross them.
...

More:  https://www.theepochtimes.com/chinas-big-brother-social-control-goes-to-australia_2898104.html

Coming soon to "smart cities" all over the world.  Govco loves mass surveillance.

[Anastasis 23329]

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/449234-house-votes-against-curtailing-warrantless-collection-of-americans-data

House votes against curtailing warrantless collection of Americans' data

BY EMILY BIRNBAUM - 06/18/19 10:43 PM EDT 74

 

 

© Greg Nash

The House on Tuesday rejected an amendment that would have limited the government's ability to collect Americans' personal communications without a warrant.

The House voted 175-253 against the amendment introduced by Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) amid opposition from national security hawks. 

Amash and Lofgren tried to pass the measure as part of an appropriations bill that funds several federal departments, including the Labor Department, Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.

The amendment would have curtailed a controversial law that allows the U.S. government to collect communications from foreigners located outside of the U.S. without a warrant.

Pro-privacy lawmakers like Amash and Lofgren have long argued that one of the law's provisions — Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — allows the government to collect data on Americans who are communicating with non-U.S. citizens outside of the country without a warrant. Their one-page amendment would have barred the government from collecting communications under FISA on Americans without a warrant. 

Digital rights group Fight for the Future in a statement after the vote pointed out that more Democrats had voted against the amendment than Republicans.

"It’s good to know that House Democrats like Adam Schiff are 'resisting' Trump by voting to ensure that he has limitless authority to conduct mass warrantless surveillance,” Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "The Democrats who voted against this common sense amendment just threw immigrants, LGBTQ folks, activists, journalists, and political dissidents under the bus by voting to rubberstamp the Trump administration’s Orwellian domestic spying capabilities." 

Congress last year reauthorized Section 702 of FISA with few alterations after a bitter battle between privacy activists and security hawks in both chambers.

Lofgren and Amash's amendment attracted enormous support from civil liberties activists throughout Tuesday, after Amash announced the House would be voting on the measure. 

"We just got handed a potentially historic opportunity to finally finally close the gaping loopholes in Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act that the NSA [National Security Agency] abuses to conduct warrantless dragnet surveillance of our Internet activity, email, text messages, etc," Fight for the Future wrote in a blog post. 

Forty-two civil society groups signed onto an impromptu letter in support of the Amash-Lofgren amendment, writing it would "significantly advance the privacy rights of people within the Unties States."

"We represent a cross-partisan coalition of civil liberties, transparency and government oversight organizations committed to reining in the warrantless surveillance of people in the United States," wrote the groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Arab American Institute and digital civil rights group Color of Change. 

In April 2019, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said U.S. intelligence agencies conducted 9,637 queries for search terms concerning a U.S. person in 2018. 

Amash on the House floor earlier on Tuesday said Republican and Democrats' resistance to reforming Section 702 exemplifies "what’s wrong with Washington." 

"The government can search and sweep in billions of communications, including communications of Americans, and then query that data," Amash said. "The Amash-Lofgren amendment puts in basic safeguards to allow the government to continue using Section 702 for its stated purpose of gathering foreign intelligence, while limiting the government’s warrantless collection of Americans’ communications under FISA." 

Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-Ind.) in a rebuttal on the floor said the amendment would have made "it more difficult for the NSA to target foreign nationals if the intended target is in communication with someone in the United States." 

"I would point out … that this is an appropriations bill, this is not an authorization bill," Visclosky said. "The amendment is a serious change in policy and deserves more than 10 minutes of debate in this chamber."

[Francisco 2.0 32290]

God Bless the United States of America

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/

Quote

I SHOULD HAVE kept my mouth shut about the guacamole; that made things worse for me. Otherwise, what I’m about to describe could happen to any American who travels internationally. It happened 33,295 times last year.

My work as a journalist has taken me to many foreign countries, including frequent trips to Mexico. On May 13, I was returning to the U.S. from Mexico City when, passing through immigration at the Austin airport, I was pulled out of line for “secondary screening,” a quasi-custodial law enforcement process that takes place in the Homeland Security zone of the airport.

 

Quote

Austin is where I was born and raised, and I usually get waved through immigration after one or two questions. I’m also a white man; more on that later. This time, when my turn came to show my passport, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was more aggressive than usual in his questioning. I told him I’d been in Mexico for seven days for work, that I was a journalist, and that I travel to Mexico often, as he could see from my passport. That wasn’t enough for him, though. He wanted to know the substance of the story I was currently working on, which didn’t sit right with me. I tried to skirt the question, but he came back to it, pointedly.

 

Quote

I was going on three hours of sleep, and I hadn’t had anything to eat in the last 12 hours besides some popcorn and peanuts and a Monster energy drink. Had my blood sugar been higher, I might have cheerfully told him. Instead, I muttered something about not having a legal obligation, under the circumstances, to disclose the contents of my reporting.

The agent, whose name was Moncivias, said we would see about that. He asked me to follow him into the secondary screening area.

“Oh, come on, man,” I said, checking the time on my phone. It was just after noon. “This is going to be a huge waste of time.”

 

Quote

“I’m here all day,” Moncivias said. He might have been 30 years old, clean cut, with dark hair and light skin. He and I were close enough in age that there was definitely some male primate posturing going on between us. At one point, I told him that I had been in the Army. “Thank you for your service,” he retorted.

 

Spoiler

In retrospect, I was naive about the kind of agency CBP has become in the Trump era. Though I’ve reported several magazine stories in Mexico, none have been about immigration. Of course, I knew these were the guys putting kids in cages, separating refugee children from their parents, and that Trump’s whole shtick is vilifying immigrants, leading to many sad and ugly scenes at the border, including the farcical deployment of U.S. troops. But I complacently assumed that wouldn’t affect me directly, least of all in Austin. Later, I did remember reading a report in February about CBP targeting journalists, activists, and lawyers for scrutiny at ports of entry south of California, but I had never had a problem before, not in a lifetime of crossing the Texas-Mexico border scores of times on foot, by car, by plane, in a canoe, even swimming. This was the first time CBP had ever pulled me aside.

When asked to comment on specific details in this story, a CBP spokesperson responded with a canned statement replete with the sort of pseudo-military terminology that betrays the agency’s sense of itself not as a civil customs service but as some kind of counterterrorism strike force. “CBP has adapted and adjusted our actions to align with current threat information, which is based on intelligence,” the statement reads in part. “As the threat landscape changes, so does CBP.” The agency declined to put me in touch with Moncivias and the other officers named in this account or to make an official available for an interview, but a CBP source mentioned that the “port director” had reviewed “the tape” of the encounter. I found that very interesting, because I had specifically asked Moncivias and the other officers if I was being videotaped or recorded, and they had categorically denied it.

WE PASSED THROUGH a detention area harshly illuminated by fluorescent lights where armed CBP officers in dark uniforms outnumbered the few tired-looking travelers. The officers all had Homeland Security patches on their shoulders and pistols on their belts. Moncivias sat me down in a side room with a desk, two chairs, and a microscope on a filing cabinet. He left the door open.

A bespectacled supervisor named Lopez made an appearance. In a polite back-and-forth, I learned that I was not under arrest or suspected of any crime, and my citizenship was not in doubt, but if I didn’t answer the question asked by the “incident officer,” I wouldn’t be allowed into the United States. He handed me some brochures and left the room.

Moncivias was joined by an Anglo officer named Pomeroy, who had a shaved head and looked a little older. They stared at me expectantly.

“Fine,” I said. “For the last six months, I’ve been doing an investigative journalism project to determine which restaurant has the best guacamole in all of Mexico.”

Moncivias didn’t miss a beat. “And what restaurant is that?”

“El Parnita, on Avenida Yucatán in Mexico City,” I told him, truthfully.

The flippancy would cost me. From then on out, the officers made it clear that I was in for a long delay. When I saw how mad they were, I lost interest in the principle of the thing. In reality, I didn’t care if they knew what the story was about. The draft was done, and my editors had a copy. All I cared about was getting home to a cup of coffee, a sandwich, a shower, and my bed. In an effort to smooth things over, I said that if they really had to know, I was finishing up a story for Rolling Stone about some guys from Texas and Arizona who sold helicopter machine guns to a Mexican cartel and that I’d been in Mexico City to interview a government official who, for understandable reasons, didn’t want his name bandied about. I apologized for my grouchiness, blaming it on the stress of travel.

Cooperation didn’t earn me any leniency. Next up was a thorough search of my suitcase, down to unscrewing the tops of my toiletries. That much I expected. But then a third officer, whose name was Villarreal, carefully read every page of my 2019 journal, including copious notes to self on work, relationships, friends, family, and all sorts of private reflections I had happened to write down. I told him, “Sir, I know there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but I want to tell you, as one human being to another, that you’re invading my privacy right now, and I don’t appreciate it.” Villarreal acknowledged the statement and went back to reading.

That was just the beginning. The real abuse of power was a warrantless search of my phone and laptop. This is the part that affects everyone, not just reporters and people who keep journals.

IN GENERAL, LAW enforcement agents have to get a warrant to search your electronic devices. That’s the gist of the 2014 Supreme Court case Riley v. California. But the Riley ruling only applies when the police arrest you. The Supreme Court has not yet decided whether the same protections apply to American citizens reentering the United States from abroad, and federal appeals courts have issued contradictory opinions. In the absence of a controlling legal authority, CBP goes by its own rules, namely CBP Directive No. 3340-049A, pursuant to which CBP can search any person’s device, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. If you refuse to give up your password, CBP’s policy is to seize the device. The agency may use “external equipment” to crack the passcode, “not merely to gain access to the device, but to review, copy, and/or analyze its contents,” according to the directive. CBP can look for any kind of evidence, any kind of information, and can share what it finds with any other federal agency, so long as doing so is “consistent with applicable law and policy.”

I had my doubts as to whether they could actually crack my iPhone and MacBook, but I didn’t doubt that they would be happy to confiscate them. So I decided to take another tack: I told the officers I had nothing to hide, but I felt I had a professional obligation to call an attorney for further advice. Pomeroy said I could not because I wasn’t under arrest; I just wasn’t allowed to enter the United States. I wasn’t allowed to leave the Homeland Security zone, either. I know because I tried to sort of wander out a couple of times and got yelled at. When I actually tried to call a lawyer friend of mine in Austin, Pomeroy stopped me. They held onto my phone from then out.

Sophia Cope, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued CBP over its warrantless device searches, told me that the agency “has for sure said no” as to whether there is a right to counsel during secondary screening. “They’ve been pretty consistent. You don’t get a lawyer. A lot of people have tried to push back, particularly after the Muslim ban. People were like, ‘I have a green card, and you’re putting me back on a plane to Iran. I need a lawyer to come down to the airport.’”

CBP has been doing warrantless device searches since the advent of the modern smartphone, Cope said, but the practice has increased by some 300 percent since Trump took office. In late 2017, EFF teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a case alleging the unconstitutionality of the administration’s blitz of warrantless searches. Anecdotally, CBP appears to be targeting typical Trumpian scapegoats, including Muslims, Latinos, and journalists, but anyone reentering the United States can be subject to these searches. The 11 plaintiffs in the EFF and ACLU case are a computer programmer, a filmmaker, a graduate student, a nursing student, a limousine driver, a businessman, an engineer, a professor, an artist, and two journalists. All are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents who had experiences similar to mine.

“The secondary inspection environment is inherently coercive,” the complaint says. “Travelers are not free to exit those areas until officers permit them to leave.” Travelers are usually exhausted, sometimes ill, and may be under pressure to catch a connecting flight, anxious to get home to kids, or needed at work. Forcing travelers who are not suspected of any wrongdoing to cough up their passwords, on pain of having their devices seized, violates the Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures, the plaintiffs argue, and also infringes the First Amendment right to free expression and association by means of government intimidation and surveillance. “Regardless of whether you have embarrassing information on your device,” Cope said, “it’s about personal autonomy and living in a free society and not a police state.”

I DIDN’T KNOW all of this when I was being held by CBP. When the officers told me they only wanted to check my devices for child pornography, links to terrorism, and so forth, I believed them. I was completely unprepared for the digital ransacking that came next.

After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of photos and videos and emails and calls and texts, including encrypted messages on WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. It was the digital equivalent of tossing someone’s house: opening cabinets, pulling out drawers, and overturning furniture in hopes of finding something — anything — illegal. He read my communications with friends, family, and loved ones. He went through my correspondence with colleagues, editors, and sources. He asked about the identities of people who have worked with me in war zones. He also went through my personal photos, which I resented. Consider everything on your phone right now. Nothing on mine was spared.

Pomeroy, meanwhile, searched my laptop. He browsed my emails and my internet history. He looked through financial spreadsheets and property records and business correspondence. He was able to see all the same photos and videos as Moncivias and then some, including photos I thought I had deleted.

At one point, Pomeroy was standing over my laptop on the desk. I couldn’t see the screen, and he had such a puzzled expression on his face that I stood up to see what he was looking at. “Get back,” he said, clapping a hand on his sidearm. “I don’t know if you’re going for my gun.” At another point, Pomeroy had taken my laptop to the desk in the waiting area, and I thought I heard him call for me to come over, so I did. “Stand back from my gun,” he said, when he saw me approaching; it turns out he had been talking to someone else. Three times during the course of the secondary screening, Pomeroy pronounced words to the effect that he was subjectively forming a reasonable belief that I might grab his service weapon.

It was an implicit death threat and a rhetorical move on part of the police that will be familiar to people of color: I’ve got a gun on you, ergo, you’re a threat to me. Speaking of which, I’m certain this whole experience would have been worse had I been black or brown instead of white. And that is to say nothing of migrants and refugees, whose treatment at the hands of CBP on the U.S.-Mexico border is another matter altogether. But it does go to show that you can’t contain a culture of aggression to one part of an armed agency.

I was being physically submissive, keeping my hands visible at all times, not making any sudden moves, but Pomeroy would not let me see the laptop screen. I told him I at least had the right to know what files he was reviewing. “All of them,” he said, giving me a hard stare. “I’m going to look at all of them.”

“Please don’t look at the one called ‘Secret ISIS Confession,’” I said.

There was a South Asian couple detained along with me, a husband and wife with their luggage. Neither of them would have been able to get away with a crack like that. In my case, Pomeroy just determined to proceed even more painfully slowly.

Both he and Moncivias spent the most time on my photos. Admittedly, I had some crazy ones, including footage of combat taken while reporting in Iraq and Syria. Likewise, my phone contained many chat logs with people in the Middle East, and even more with people in Mexico and Colombia. That could make a border agent justifiably curious, but they had made the decision to detain me and give me a hard time well before they saw the images or messages. That I turned out to be a war correspondent just gave them more ammunition to question me.

“They ask a lot of fishing questions,” said Alexandra Ellerbeck of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which has documented dozens of unwarranted interrogations of reporters by CBP in recent years. “There’s an opportunistic element to it. It seems to be targeted towards general intelligence-gathering. They take a broad view of their mandate to ask these questions, and there can be repercussions if you refuse to answer. They’ll hold you for longer, search your devices, or flag you in the future.” She added, “We don’t think this should be happening at all.”

MONCIVIAS, POMEROY, AND VILLARREAL questioned me for hours on all aspects of my work. They asked about conversations with editors and colleagues. They asked about my political opinions. Moncivias wanted to know how I felt about Trump trying to pull troops from Syria. He asked if I’d had contact with the Taliban there, and I had to explain that the Taliban don’t operate in Syria. It was clear that they weren’t after anything in particular; their questions were completely scattershot. This wasn’t a continuous interrogation, either. They were wandering in and out of the room, leaving me alone for long periods of time. Interestingly, they didn’t ask me anything about CBP itself. I had told them my current story was about gunrunning, but they didn’t think to ask if I’d done any reporting on their employer, which I had. In fact, my laptop contained hard-won documents on CBP, but I didn’t see the officers reading them.

I did see them copy my laptop’s serial number and write down three or four numbers and alphanumeric sequences found deep in my phone’s settings. The only specifier I halfway understood was the phone’s IMEI number, which can be used to track its physical location. Even if I get rid of the phone, I could be on some accursed watchlist, or somehow electronically tagged, for the rest of my life. Even if it’s benign, like those devices scientists stick whales with, I experience it as an indignity, and you probably would too. They didn’t handcuff me, but the officers otherwise acted as if I were under arrest in a police station, though I had done nothing wrong and they had no reason to suspect me of anything. They frequently took my devices out of the room for long periods of time. When I asked if they had backed up the devices or copied files, they denied it, which I found hard to believe. “You didn’t stick a thumb drive in there?” I asked Pomeroy, who was walking around carrying my laptop. He pretended not to hear.

Around the three-hour mark, I became completely passive. Confinement in a blank room is a soft form of torture, especially if you suffer from a crippling caffeine addiction, as I do. They were “fresh out” when I demeaned myself by meekly requesting coffee. For a long time, I sat slumped in the chair with a mounting headache while Moncivias finished typing up his report on me. He would pause, carefully consult something on my phone, and then go back to typing. This went on for another hour.

It was around 4 p.m. when Moncivias finally finished up and informed me, anticlimactically, that I was free to go. I couldn’t wait to get outside because the detention area was freezing. No wonder Spanish-speaking migrants call CBP detention la hielera — the icebox. I took my phone and laptop and silently packed up my luggage, which still lay disemboweled on the desk, underwear and all. Pomeroy was gone by this time. As I was walking out, I said to Moncivias and Villarreal, “It’s funny, of all the countries I’ve been to, the border guards have never treated me worse than here, in the one country I’m a citizen of, in the town where I was born.”

“Welcome back to the USA,” Moncivias said.

 

[The People’s Elbow 707]

On 4/24/2019 at 6:47 AM, Nice Guy Eddie said:

The facial recognition at boarding doesn’t bother me too much.

At that point of the flight security process the govt is aware you (or someone with your ID and boarding pass) is booked on the flight and that you’ve gone thru security.  And a flaw in the current model is that they depend on TSA agents to compare the ID to the person.  A computer recognizing you is most likely better at identifying a mismatch between the data and the person as opposed to a TSA agent doing the same.

i do question how well this will be executed and the delays or process when the recognition software says it’s not you. 

 

Perhaps I’m not connecting the dots here but facial recognition seems like an answer looking for a problem. When booking and checking into an international flight, you already have to give airlines the various bits of information they then cross-reference with various government lists in order to identify and authorize you to purchase a ticket and check-in. When doing the latter digitally, you also have to input your passport information and a photo of the passport, if I’m not mistaken.

Then your name and presumably some or all of that information is available (either directly or indirectly via the passenger manifest, to which it sounds the government also has access.

There seems to be one or two existing places where this information is available to the government, and yet there’s a need for a biometric entry/exit system through which almost everyone (citizen and not) needs to traverse? Torbush. 

Even if we actually need biometrics exits, why not do something similar to the EU? When I was leaving Italy a couple months ago, I had to go through a slightly different customs line as non-EU passport holder. Part of that included a biometric exit. 

[bernorange 8345]

14 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

God Bless the United States of America

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/22/cbp-border-searches-journalists/

...

This is just another facet of the suspicionless search checkpoints border control has established all over the country.  While they purportedly serve an immigration control purpose, they are really instruments for domestic surveillance.  Land of the free - as long as you submit.

[Anastasis 23329]

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/new-documents-reveal-nsa-improperly-spied-on-americans-without-authorization-again/amp/

[Anastasis 23329]

borkage

Edited July 8, 2019 by Anastasis

[Anastasis 23329]

https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/07/nsa-still-grappling-controls-guard-against-surveillance-abuse/158250/

 

NSA Still Grappling With Controls to Guard Against Surveillance Abuse

By Charles S. Clark

2:55 PM ET

The National Security Agency is behind on implementing internal data system controls aimed at assuring compliance with the domestic privacy protections in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a watchdog found.

The NSA inspector general's office, in an unclassified version of its semiannual report released on Monday, summarized its study of the agency's system controls related to the law’s controversial Section 702, which allows counterterrorism programs to target certain non-U.S. individuals overseas under regulated conditions.

The IG “found that NSA did not have a necessary system control,” said the July 8 report covering October 2018 through March 2019. “The agency had previously identified this as a concern and has been working to implement a new system control. Until this system control is implemented, the agency will be at risk for performing queries that do not comply with” its authority under Section 702, which was the since-amended area of the law that former contractor Edward Snowden criticized in 2013 when he leaked highly classified information on NSA surveillance.

Though the original goal for implementing the new controls was December 2017, the NSA now plans to have a prototype ready by December 2020, the IG said.

The watchdog also criticized NSA’s data system security plans, which “are often inaccurate and/or incomplete,” the report said, citing data centers and equipment rooms not properly protected with two-person access controls and removable media that “are not properly scanned for viruses.” An eight-year-old effort to better monitor the authorization of software and hardware purchases by contractors still needs finalization, auditors found.

The inspector general “also found that some aspects of NSA programs it examined were working well, and it recognized a number of best practices that could be replicated across the agency,” the report said. The agency closed 69 out of 198 new recommendations to management during the six-month period, and closed out a total of 438 past outstanding recommendations.

The agency’s investigations division received 457 contacts on its hotline, resulting in 27 investigations and 64 inquiries, as well as 14 cases referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution. Disciplinary actions were taken against eight employees during the reporting period, resulting in one employee’s termination and four employees resigning or retiring in lieu of removal. The NSA recouped approximately $53,000 for contractor misconduct and $11,400 for employee timecard fraud.

Examples of uncovered employee misconduct included a GS-15 civilian found to have committed reprisal against a subordinate by threatening to fire the subordinate, who had made three protected disclosures. The investigative findings were forwarded to Defense Department IG, the NSA Employee Relations office, the Office of Personnel Security and the subject’s supervisor.

In another case, a former Senior Executive, “who at the time of the investigation was a reemployed annuitant and employee of a private company, recommended that a Senior Agency Technical Director meet with his private employer,” the report said. “The former Senior Executive recommended his current private employer to the agency as capable of meeting an agency procurement requirement. The OIG substantiated that the employee had used his public office for private gain, a violation of 5 CFR § 2635.702.”

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

An Arizona company developing a new type of high-altitude, long-range surveillance platform just completed a 16-day mission during which massive balloons floated over four western U.S. states, all part of an effort to someday keep them aloft for months at a time.

World View Enterprises Inc. builds what it calls Stratollites, a system designed to offer the type of coverage satellites afford but without the need to launch incredibly expensive rockets into space. Effectively unmanned balloons, the untethered platforms operate with surveillance equipment payloads of as much as 220 pounds at altitudes of 50,000 to 75,000 feet, far above commercial air traffic.

They will be able to monitor mines, pipelines, transit infrastructure — and perhaps the contents of your fenced-off backyard — in hyper-accurate detail.

The company plans to start selling its commercial product early next year and has spoken with several potential commercial and military customers, Chief Executive Officer Ryan Hartman said in an interview. World View sees its customer base as companies that operate crucial industrial and commercial infrastructure.

The platform, navigated remotely using a unique altitude control system, can provide imagery that’s superior to orbiting vehicles, Hartman contends, because “we’re five times closer to the Earth than the nearest satellite.” He said “our imagination is sort of our limit with regards to where and how these systems can be used. Certainly there is a market in target surveillance and reconnaissance on a global scale.

“There’s a very real potential here that these kinds of systems will lead to a pervasive aerial surveillance.”
...

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-surveillance-balloons-stratollites-20190607-story.html

[Captainant 27250]

16 minutes ago, bernorange said:

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-surveillance-balloons-stratollites-20190607-story.html

You think that's concerning, there's an entire industry of private companies putting imaging satellites into space to sell the data to other private entities. Its not really all that expensive (relative to how much it used to cost) to get a bird in orbit either now. If its outside and not covered, you can bet there's at least one or two images of it from high altitude

Edited July 10, 2019 by Captainant

[bernorange 8345]

What I'm wondering is the potential for imaging systems that go beyond the visible light spectrum.  Does having the equipment at 50-70K feet make it viable to build systems that can see through buildings better than satellites in orbit?

[SquishMitten 10381]

On 2/7/2019 at 9:46 AM, DanRydell said:

I think there are sound policy arguments to not discourage biometric security by treating them differently but the constitutional arguments are flimsy at best. There's simply nothing testimonial about your fingerprint. 

The fact your fingerprint exists, in and of itself, is not testimonial. However, I can see the arguement that the act of placing your finger on the sensor is. You are making an overt action telling your phone who you are and that it should unlock itself. How is pushing the button once any different than pushing separate buttons an inch or two higher on the screen? You’re telling your phone the same thing in both cases. 

[Captainant 27250]

14 minutes ago, bernorange said:

What I'm wondering is the potential for imaging systems that go beyond the visible light spectrum.  Does having the equipment at 50-70K feet make it viable to build systems that can see through buildings better than satellites in orbit?

Lol, there's not anything like x-ray specs for satellites, but capturing ultraviolet or infrared images is only as difficult as sending one of those cameras into orbit alongside the visible light spectrum imaging devices.

Also for fun times, it's reallll cheap to buy images from these consumer/private industry folks. There's next to zero rules/regs around the collection and sale of these images, but at least it's not the gubmint doing it right?

[bernorange 8345]

I was thinking more about imaging technologies like Z-Backscatter or radio imaging tech (radio tomographic imaging, etc.).  The Stratollites are flying underneath the ionosphere.

[DanRydell 799]

On 7/10/2019 at 12:09 PM, SquishMitten said:

The fact your fingerprint exists, in and of itself, is not testimonial. However, I can see the arguement that the act of placing your finger on the sensor is. You are making an overt action telling your phone who you are and that it should unlock itself. How is pushing the button once any different than pushing separate buttons an inch or two higher on the screen? You’re telling your phone the same thing in both cases. 

Because punching in a passcode reveals the contents of your mind. Holding your finger on a sensor does not.

[Captainant 27250]

Pentagon testing mass surveillance balloons across the US

Quote

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal.

Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois.

Travelling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to “provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats”, according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defence company.

The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather. The tests, which have not previously been reported, received an FCC license to operate from mid-July until September, following similar flights licensed last year.

Arthur Holland Michel, the co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in New York, said, “What this new technology proposes is to watch everything at once. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘combat TiVo’ because when an event happens somewhere in the surveilled area, you can potentially rewind the tape to see exactly what occurred, and rewind even further to see who was involved and where they came from.”

The tests have been commissioned by the US Southern Command (Southcom), which is responsible for disaster response, intelligence operations and security cooperation in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Southcom is a joint effort by the US army, navy, air force and other forces, and one of its key roles is identifying and intercepting drug shipments headed for the United States.

 

[bernorange 8345]

a persistent surveillance system... land of the free

[Anastasis 23329]

ho hum...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/politics/trump-nsa-call-records-program.html

 

WASHINGTON — Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans’ telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down — but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway.

In a letter to Congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans’ domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act. The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent.

The unclassified letter, signed on Wednesday by Dan Coats in one of his last acts as the director of National Intelligence, also conceded that the N.S.A. has indefinitely shut down that program after recurring technical difficulties repeatedly caused it to collect more records than it had legal authority to gather. That fact has previously been reported, but the administration had refused to officially confirm its status.

“The National Security Agency has suspended the call detail records program that uses this authority and deleted the call detail records acquired under this authority,” Mr. Coats wrote. “This decision was made after balancing the program’s relative intelligence value, associated costs, and compliance and data integrity concerns caused by the unique complexities of using these company-generated business records for intelligence purposes.”

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[Read the letter Dan Coats sent to Congress.]

Complicating matters, three other surveillance authorities primarily used by the F.B.I. are also set to expire in mid-December. They include provisions that let investigators get court orders to collect business records relevant to a national security investigation, wiretap “lone wolf” terrorists without links to a foreign power, and keep wiretapping someone suspected of being a spy or a terrorist who switches phone lines in an effort to evade surveillance.

Mr. Coats’s letter said the administration supported making those three provisions permanent as well, rather than merely subjecting them to another extension of several years, as Congress has previously done.

 

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The executive branch had been internally divided over whether to push for an extension of the part of the Freedom Act that authorizes the phone records program. Months ago, the N.S.A. presented a bleak assessment of the program to the White House, saying it carried high costs and few benefits, but some officials argued that it made sense to keep the legal authority in case technical solutions emerged to make it work better, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.

Mr. Coats’s letter adopted the latter argument, saying the administration supports permanently reauthorizing the provision even though the system was dysfunctional. He noted that “as technology changes, our adversaries’ tradecraft and communications habits will continue to evolve and adapt,” suggesting that such a system might become more useful.

While extending the three other provisions is less disputed, their fate will now be caught up in a broader debate about the phone records law. Privacy advocates, including Patrick Toomey of the American Civil Liberties Union, called for Congress to instead let the phone records program die.

Editors’ Picks

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“It’s long past time that this surveillance program was shuttered once and for all,” Mr. Toomey said. “The NSA has been vacuuming up hundreds of millions of Americans’ call records as part of a program that is hopelessly complex and lacks any discernible evidence of its value. We should not leave such a sweeping, unaccountable power in the hands of our spy agencies.”

The Times reported last month that the House Judiciary Committee has already started drafting a bill to extend the three expiring F.B.I. tools, but without extending the N.S.A. phone records program.

The N.S.A.’s ability to gain access to and analyze Americans’ domestic calling records traces back to the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration set up its then-secret Stellarwind program. It was a basket of surveillance and bulk data collection activities that relied on a raw claim of executive power to bypass legal constraints.

One component of the program collected customer calling records from large telecoms like AT&T and MCI, which later became Verizon. The N.S.A. used the metadata — logs showing who contacted whom, but not what was said — as a social map, scrutinizing indirect links between people as it hunted for hidden associates of known terrorism suspects.

In 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court began issuing secret orders requiring the companies to participate in the program.

The orders were based on a creative and disputed interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which said the F.B.I. may obtain business records “relevant” to a terrorism investigation. The spy court decided that all records could be seen as “relevant” — a theory that a federal appeals court would later rejectas stretching the law too far.

But the bulk phone records program clearly came into public view only in June 2013 when The Guardian published the first revelation from the trove of classified files leaked by Mr. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor. It was a top-secret surveillance court order to Verizon requiring it to give the N.S.A. a copy of all customer calling records.

 

 

In the ensuing debate, intelligence officials could not point to any specific attack the program had thwarted. But they defended it as a useful tool when new terrorism-linked phone numbers were identified, and suggested that had it been in place before Sept. 11, it might have helped uncover Al Qaeda’s plot. Critics rejected the Sept. 11 argument as exaggerated and portrayed the program as ripe for abuse and as a legally dubious invasion of privacy.

Eventually, the Obama administration and Congress agreed on a reform law that would end the N.S.A.’s bulk collection of domestic calling data, but preserve its ability to swiftly gain access to records held by telecoms when a judge agreed that a specific number had terrorism links. The idea was to reduce the risk of abuse while preserving the analytical capability.

That law — the USA Freedom Act of 2015 — permitted the N.S.A. to build a system linking up with the telecoms under which the agency could retrieve logs of phone calls and texts for a specific suspect, as well as the logs of communications by everyone who had ever been in contact with that suspect — even when they were customers of different phone companies.

Under the old program, the N.S.A. had been vacuuming up billions of logs about Americans’ communications every day. Under the replacement Freedom Act system, that number dropped significantly, although its scale remained large in absolute terms. In 2016, the agency obtained orders to target 42 suspects and collected 151 million records. In 2017, it obtained orders to target 40 suspects and collected 534 million records.

But public signs of trouble with the Freedom Act system began to emerge in June 2018, when the N.S.A. announced that it had discovered “technical irregularities” that caused it to collect more phone records than it had legal authority to gather.

The agency has been coy about the details, saying they are classified, but in broad strokes has said that for various reasons telecoms were returning both accurate and inaccurate numbers in the list of accounts a suspect had been in contact with. When the N.S.A. fed those numbers back into the system to get the “second hop” of calling data from the suspect’s contacts, it compounded the problem.

Unable to separate the good data from the bad, the agency deleted its entire collection of Americans’ phone records — hundreds of millions of communications logs — and started over. But in October 2018, it discovered that the problem was happening again, and, once again, had to purge the data, according to a recently declassified inspector general report.

 

 

The recurring headaches, including the inability of the N.S.A. to verify whether the data returned from the phone companies, was accurate, and the relatively low value of the intelligence that was being gleaned from it, contributed to an intelligence community decision in late 2018 to start winding the program down, officials familiar with the matter have said.

A slightly garbled sign of that move first came to light in March, when a senior Republican congressional aide said in a national security podcast interview, with what was apparently overstatement in terms of the timing, that the N.S.A. had not been using the program “for the past six months.” But for months, the government had refused to say what its status was.

[Anastasis 23329]

There is a FISA hearing taking place in judiciary at the moment. Some douche baggery related to current political events, but also some discussion of the above. 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?464430-1/house-judiciary-committee-hearing-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act&live

 

[Anastasis 23329]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fbis-use-of-foreign-surveillance-tool-violated-americans-privacy-rights-court-found-11570559882

 

FBI’s Use of Foreign-Surveillance Tool Violated Americans’ Privacy Rights, Court Found

U.S. discloses ruling last year by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that FBI’s data queries of U.S. citizens were unconstitutional

 

Article behind the tags...

 

By 

Dustin Volz and 

Byron Tau

Oct. 8, 2019 2:38 pm ET

 

WASHINGTON—Some of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s electronic surveillance activities violated the constitutional privacy rights of Americans swept up in a controversial foreign intelligence program, a secretive surveillance court has ruled.

The ruling deals a rare rebuke to U.S. spying activities that have generally withstood legal challenge or review.

The intelligence community disclosed Tuesday that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year found that the FBI’s pursuit of data about Americans ensnared in a warrantless internet-surveillance program intended to target foreign suspects may have violated the law authorizing the program, as well as the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

The court concluded that the FBI had been improperly searching a database of raw intelligence for information on Americans—raising concerns about oversight of the program, which as a spy program operates in near total secrecy.

 

The court ruling identifies tens of thousands of improper searches of raw intelligence databases by the bureau in 2017 and 2018 that it deemed improper in part because they involved data related to tens of thousands of emails or telephone numbers—in one case, suggesting that the FBI was using the intelligence information to vet its personnel and cooperating sources. Federal law requires that the database only be searched by the FBI as part of seeking evidence of a crime or for foreign intelligence information.

In other cases, the court ruling reveals improper use of the database by individuals. In one case, an FBI contractor ran a query of an intelligence database—searching information on himself, other FBI personnel and his relatives, the court revealed.

The Trump administration failed to make a persuasive argument that modifying the program to better protect the privacy of Americans would hinder the FBI’s ability to address national-security threats, wrote U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who serves on the FISA Court, in the partially redacted 167-page opinion released Tuesday.

“The court accordingly finds that the FBI’s querying procedures and minimization procedures are not consistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment,” Mr. Boasberg concluded.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com and Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com

[Captainant 27250]

It's also fun that trump appears to have violated the 1991 Intelligence Authorization Act, which added rules around use of covert action to influence political processes and public opinion, per Sec 503.f

Quote

‘(f) No covert action may be conducted which is intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media.’.

The same enacted legislation also defines covert activity in a broad enough context that I would argue it encompasses the violation

Quote

‘(e) As used in this title, the term ‘covert action’ means an activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly

Good times, good times.

[bernorange 8345]

Quote

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is pushing hard for mandatory facial recognition scans at airports. The government wants to “remove a loophole” that is currently allowing Americans to opt-out of it right now.
...
Proposed in a recent filing, the DHS requested a change to the current rules in order to “provide that all travelers, including US citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure” from the US, citing the need to identify criminals or “suspected terrorists.” While not yet implemented, the rule change is in the “final stages of clearance,” a DHS official told CNN Business, according to a report by RT.
...

https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/dhs-wants-americans-subjected-to-mandatory-facial-recognition-at-airports_12032019

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

Do you have a Ring? Three part series that outlines some of the data sharing that happens without your consent (if the police can't get it from you, the company shares it with the police w/o your knowledge) as well as the ties to police departments in terms of neighborhood apps, etc. As usual, the tech is advancing ahead without regard to the pitfalls when it comes to citizens and their rights. Articles take a while to read through, but once you get past the headline grabber stuff, there are some issues that make you think, "gee, the police always act in my best interest, right?"

 

[Anastasis 23329]

Click the link if you want the police to come to your house and shoot you and your dog.

[Nice Guy Eddie 13388]

I have a new house across the street from me, and it's not hard to assume that they have some Ring type doorbell device. I don't really care but it's creepy that they will have a history of when I leave and come back to my house. Along with any guest that I have. I don't have an expectation of privacy in my front yard but that doesn't mean that I want my front yard filmed 24/7.

It just feels like you should have some option on whether you want to be constantly filmed or not.

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

2 minutes ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

I have a new house across the street from me, and it's not hard to assume that they have some Ring type doorbell device. I don't really care but it's creepy that they will have a history of when I leave and come back to my house. Along with any guest that I have. I don't have an expectation of privacy in my front yard but that doesn't mean that I want my front yard filmed 24/7.

It just feels like you should have some option on whether you want to be constantly filmed or not.

I'm not sure it is just your front yard, depending upon where you live. If part of the security system network for Ring has multiple cameras per multiple houses for various properties around your neighborhood, they can surveil you from where ever those cameras point. When the facial recognition systems get going, we are going to be hiding in the corner afraid to go outside. Except Alexa and Siri will already know what we're up to there, too.

[Anastasis 23329]

Been watching some excerpts from the Church Committee hearings today, repackaged by CSPAN. Color commentary by some of the committee counsel testifying.  There are a whole series of videos.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?409117-1/church-committee-hearings-fbi-intelligence-activities 

https://www.c-span.org/video/?408557-1/william-colby-testimony-church-committee

Church lays it out: 

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air... Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left: such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology...

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Anastasis

[HenryJames 65849]

 

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

I read the article above yesterday and it was darn scary.

To add on to Anastasis comments, I had some committee meetings on as background while I was working this week, and there was a Senate (I think?! I couldn't stop to check) meeting discussing some of the monitoring facial recognition and per usual, the regs are lagging behind the tech so private firms are running with it.