Big Brother is collecting our baby pictures, medical records, resumes and our children's DNA
After learning that the NSA and FBI have targeted him for exhaustive surveillance, prominent Muslim-American attorney told Glenn Greenwald:
All Americans should be outraged and concerned by the surveillance. “Because if it is Muslim Americans today, it is going to be them next” ….
Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs.
Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance. “No additional information,” writes a civilian analyst. Another makes fun of a suspected kidnapper, newly arrived in Syria before the current civil war, who begs for employment as a janitor and makes wide-eyed observations about the state of undress displayed by women on local beaches.
They're even spying on our credit reports, click here to read more.
By law, the NSA may “target” only foreign nationals located overseas unless it obtains a warrant based on probable cause from a special surveillance court. For collection under PRISM and Upstream rules, analysts must state a reasonable belief that the target has information of value about a foreign government, a terrorist organization or the spread of nonconventional weapons.
Most of the people caught up in those programs are not the targets and would not lawfully qualify as such. “Incidental collection” of third-party communications is inevitable in many forms of surveillance, but in other contexts the U.S. government works harder to limit and discard irrelevant data. In criminal wiretaps, for example, the FBI is supposed to stop listening to a call if a suspect’s wife or child is using the phone.
There are many ways to be swept up incidentally in surveillance aimed at a valid foreign target. Some of those in the Snowden archive were monitored because they interacted directly with a target, but others had more-tenuous links.
If a target entered an online chat room, the NSA collected the words and identities of every person who posted there, regardless of subject, as well as every person who simply “lurked,” reading passively what other people wrote.
In other cases, the NSA designated as its target the Internet protocol, or IP, address of a computer server used by hundreds of people.
The NSA treats all content intercepted incidentally from third parties as permissible to retain, store, search and distribute to its government customers. Raj De, the agency’s general counsel, has testified that the NSA does not generally attempt to remove irrelevant personal content, because it is difficult for one analyst to know what might become relevant to another.
That’s according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post — disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans’ private conversations to be swept into the spy agency’s traps.
Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through 2012, and some were hundreds of pages long.
Nearly 90% of the individuals — or accounts — whose information was obtained were not federal targets, but rather ordinary Internet users, a Post analysis found. Some had visited online forums in which targets chatted, or exchanged e-mails with a target, and “were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else,” the Post reported.
Some were identified by either the government or newspaper as Americans. It said NSA analysts censored 65,000 references to Americans’ names, contact information or other details. The paper found almost 900 “unmasked” e-mail addresses “that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.”
The Post said the agency’s standards for classifying someone as a foreigner could apply to “tens of millions of Americans,” such as those who log into an e-mail account when traveling outside the country or use proxy servers located outside the U.S.
At least one subject was classified as foreign simply because the person communicated in a foreign language.
The Post said it withheld several significant conversations that were within the documents at the request of unnamed government officials.
The United States government is based on a system of checks and balances but, for too long, there has been no substantive check on government surveillance.
With every new surveillance revelation, our government assures us that this was all "legal" – but "legal" does not always mean right or moral, and it is not the role of the executive branch or its law enforcement apparatus to determine what is legal. Slavery was once legal. Forcibly removing and relocating Native Americans was once legal. The indefinite internment of Japanese Americans was once legal. Those will forever be stains on our nation's history and call into question its commitment to the freedoms on which this nation was supposedly founded.
It is time for our government to admit that spying on First Amendment-protected activities is unconstitutional, and that does not keep us safe. We should focus our resources and energy on real terrorists, not Americans who chose career paths to uphold the civil and human rights of all people.
The government has proven, time and again, that it cannot be trusted to make these decisions in a vacuum and without real oversight from the courts and the people. For the sake of our democracy, warrantless surveillance must end.
Police departments are using high tech-devices to spy on citizens, click here to see how the NYPD is spying on innocent Americans.
The Los Angeles Police Department has obtained tons of data over the past several years and that amount of data increases exponentially every year. In addition to its criminal databases, it also collects thousands of license plate time-and-location data points every day and has deployed other forms of surveillance (like Stingray devices), gathering even more data surreptitiously.
Of course, the LAPD feels it can be trusted with all of this data. It claims to have controls in place to prevent unauthorized access to information related to non-criminal Los Angeles citizens. Working with Palantir, the LAPD has instant access to a vast amount of gathered data -- a database so impressive it spent a bit of time bragging about it to a CNN reporter. (via Lowering the Bar)
The CNN video shows LAPD Sergeant Jason O'Brien using Palantir to search for data on a burglary suspect."After searching over a hundred million datapoints, Palantir displayed an impressive web of information," said CNN reporter Rachel Crane. Palantir's interface resembles a web search engine with datasets labeled People, Vehicles, Locations, Crime, Arrests, FIs (Field Interview Reports), Citations, Bulletins, Tips, and Everything (view screenshot). The video also shows Sergeant O'Brien accessing the LAPD's automatic license plate reader database to map the past locations of the burglary suspect, which go back as far as March 2011.
Click here to read about the LAPD's spying on innocent citizens.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a brief in response to an appeal by the Department of Justice in EPIC v. DHS, concerning the government policy (police depts) to disrupt cellular networks.
EPIC won a major FOIA victory when a federal district court ruled that the DHS could not withhold "SOP 303," a government procedure to shut down cellular phone service.
EPIC sought the policy after authorities shut down cell phone service at a peaceful protest in San Francisco. The government argued it did not need to release the document to EPIC because it was a "law enforcement technique" and because it would endanger the physical safety of an individual.
The federal court rejected those arguments and ordered that the document be disclosed to EPIC, pending a decision on the appeal.
For more details, see EPIC v. DHS—SOP 303.
http://kdvr.com/2014/07/06/report-nsa-compiling-baby-photos-medical-records-and-resumes-of-citizens/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/us-spied-american-muslims-email
Rhode Island wants your kids DNA so big brother can track them:
Providence, R.I. – A bill to reauthorize federal funding for newborn DNA collection passed the U.S. House of Representatives by voice vote—meaning without a vote record—on June 26.
Currently, the Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 mandates collecting blood samples from every newborn by heel prick. Labs then screen the samples for diseases. While many states allow for discarding the samples at that point, this bill would collect each newborn’s DNA in federal databases for subsequent medical research and, in one state, tracking its owners’ education progress.
Neither existing law nor the reauthorization bill, which extends the legislation until 2018, requires informed consent from parents.
“It’s not appropriate for the government to know that much about any human being, much less a young innocent citizen whose parents don’t know it’s being collected,” said Jane Robbins, a senior fellow of the American Principles Project.
In most states, parents may request a screening exemption, but only for religious reasons. In Nebraska and West Virginia, parents may not refuse screening.
Indiana is storing the blood & DNA of 2 million children without parental consent!
So far, Rhode Island appears to be the only state connecting a child’s DNA to his state education record, Robbins said. But in return for federal funds, a number of states plan to link children’s health data with their student records, she noted.
In 2011, Rhode Island received a $50 million Race To The Top Early Learning grant from the U.S. departments of Education and Health and Human Services.
In their grant application, the Rhode Island Department of Education said it would link the state’s newborn DNA database, KIDSNET, to the state’s K-12 database.
“Another key asset is that Rhode Island provides universal newborn screening to all infants and enters the data into KIDSNET, a public health data system that is used by primary care providers to identify the need for follow-up on areas of concern,” the 2011 grant application reads. “This database will be linked to Rhode Island’s PK-20 database as we develop the Rhode Island Early Learning Data System using a unique child identifier so that there is the ability to track progress and child outcomes over time.”
Despite its contract with the federal government, RDOE says it will not use newborn screening data.
“We will link our data with some screening data from the R.I. Department of Health; it is our understanding, however, that the Department of Health does not collect DNA samples,” said Elliott Krieger, a department spokesman, in an email. “In any event, no such data will be linked to data from this agency, nor would we use any such data.”
Robbins said promises would be more assuring if they were backed up with state privacy laws positively forbidding such data collection.
“There is no reason for them to have DNA information, certainly when parents are not required to consent,” she said.
http://eagnews.org/rhode-island-may-use-dna-to-track-students-federal-bill-passes-house/
First they tortured a U.S. citizen and gang member …
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a criminal
Then they tortured a U.S. citizen, whistleblower and navy veteran …
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a whistleblower
Then they locked up an attorney for representing accused criminals …
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a defense attorney
Then they arrested a young father walking with his son simply because he told Dick Cheney that he disagreed with his policies …
I remained silent;
I’ve never talked to an important politician
Then they said an entertainer should be killed because she questioned the government’s version of an important historical event …
I remained silent;
I wasn’t an entertainer
Then they arrested people for demanding that Congress hold the President to the Constitution …
I did not speak out;
I’ve never protested in Washington
Then they arrested a man for holding a sign …
I held my tongue;
I’ve never held that kind of sign
Then they broke a minister’s leg because he wanted to speak at a public event …
I said nothing;
I wasn’t a religious leader
Then they shot a student with a taser gun and arrested him for asking a question of a politician at a public event …
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a student
Then they started labeling virtually every innocent and normal behavior as marking Americans as “potential terrorists” …
I remained silent;
I didn’t want to be called a terrorist
Then they threw political dissenters in psychiatric wards …
I remained silent;
I didn’t want to be seen as crazy
Then they declared that they could label U.S. citizens living on U.S. soil as “unlawful enemy combatants” and imprison them indefinitely without access to any attorney …
I remained silent;
I didn’t want to be labeled an enemy
Then they assassinated an American citizen without any court trial
And they killed his son because he should have had a “far more responsible father” …
I remained silent;
I live on American soil
Then they declared that they could assassinate U.S. citizens living on U.S. soil without any due process of law (update) …
I remained silent;
I didn’t want to be on the list
Then they forced down the airplane carrying the president of a sovereign nation, because they were looking for a whistleblower
I remained silent;
I’m not a foreign leader
Then they called for the founder of an independent publisher to be killed by drone
I remained silent;
I don’t want to worry about drone strikes against me
Then they started spying on all Americans, even though top experts say that doesn’t protect us from terrorism
I remained silent;
I didn’t want to call even more attention to myself from the spies
Then they charged the partner of an investigative journalist with terrorism for transporting whistleblowing documents to the journalist regarding illegal NSA spying
I remained silent;
My wife isn’t a journalist
Then they targeted prominent, peaceful American Muslim lawyers for total surveillance by the NSA and FBI
I remained silent;
I’m not a Muslim
When they came for me,
Everyone was silent;
there was no one left to speak out.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/care-government-harasses.html
