DHS & police are spying on social media & illegally collecting our cellphone data
DHS is monitoring (spying) on the Drudge Report and social media, click here, here & here to read about how DHS is spying on social media. Click here to find out how DHS is spying on your Tweets.
DHS issued a B/S answer heard all across the U.S. about why they need to spy on every citizen... have you guessed their answer yet? Every law enforcement agency mimics the same response its to... PROTECT CITIZENS FROM ACTS OF TERRORISM!
Take this story for example: Under the pretext of protecting citizens against terrorism, numerous law enforcement agencies in California are secretly employing high-tech methods to collect the personal data of cellphone users.
Not only can they access the cellphone data, they can also pinpoint the exact locations of cellphone consumers. These covert surveillance tactics involve a wide search net rather than the specific targeting of a suspect and would seem to be in direct conflict with the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches without a warrant or probable cause.
Thanks to funding grants from DHS law enforcement agencies have the resources to purchase high-tech equipment like the “StingRay” which is a device that covertly mimics a cellphone tower and captures cell signals within a specific radius. The technology is usually located inside police surveillance vehicles and can “trick” cellphones into communicating with it. Because every cellphone is programmed to seek the nearest cell tower, all wireless devices within a certain range can be tricked into that communication without the user’s knowledge.
Under the auspices of the Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) local law enforcement may be using the device to prevent acts of terrorism but they are also using it to target, apprehend and prosecute everyday citizens who may or may not at the time of surveillance be suspects in a crime.
Local law enforcement in Minnesota, Arizona, Miami and Durham, N.C., also either possess the devices or have considered buying them, according to interviews and published requests for funding.
Florida police are secretly spying on everyone's cellphone calls, click here & here to find out more.
In Oakland, California alone, the city’s Targeted Task Force II used the Stingray technology to arrest 23 criminals in 2007, 19 in 2008 and another 19 in 2009. Although the apprehension of criminals, from thieves to murderers is the practical goal of law enforcement, not one of those arrests were terrorism related. The secret surveillance that led to these arrests may have infringed on the constitutional rights of those criminals who were caught in a wide StingRay net.
Law enforcement in several other California cities are already using secret cellphone data collection or have requested feedback about it for future use. In San Jose, a grant application by law enforcement to receive funding for the StingRay technology includes requests for feedback on its applications from the cities of San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. To avoid publicly disclosing whether or not the technology is in use, law enforcement purports that there is an exacting “non-disclosure requirement” that makes it “inappropriate” to comment on whether or not an agency is currently using or intends to use the spy technology.
The Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect citizens against unreasonable searches and yet, the StingRay can locate users inside their personal dwellings where they have the expectation of privacy. This allows law enforcement to determine who is inside a home at any given time provided the person has a cellphone. The technology can also detect the unique identification number of the phone, the numbers called out from the phone and the personal information stored in the cellphone’s database. The StingRay also collects text messages but in most cases, is not equipped to record voice calls.
The very same police that are spying on innocent Americans are encrypting their radio transmissions to hide them from the public! Click here to read more.
Patriot Act author: CIA spying is 'almost Nixonian'
The author of the post-9/11 law that granted the government much of its modern surveillance authority is again demanding the government explain how and to what extent it spies on members of Congress and their staffers. "Tapping into computers used by members of Congress and attempts to use the Justice Department to intimidate congressional staff is a gross violation of the constitutional principles of separation of powers," Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner wrote in a Thursday letter to Deputy Attorney General James Cole. "It paints an almost-Nixonian picture of an administration that believes it can act with impunity behind a veil of secrecy." Senator Diane Feinstein's speech is blatantly accusing the CIA of breaking the law. "I have asked for an apology, and a recognition that this CIA search of computers used by this oversight committee was inappropriate. I have received neither," Feinstein said. "Besides the constitutional implications, the CIA search may have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as [an executive order], which bars the CIA from conducting domestic surveillance." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had previously said that he was "glad" that the National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting his private phone data, because "the NSA is trying to find out what the terrorists are up to overseas and in our country." Now, he believes, "This is Richard Nixon stuff. This is dangerous to the democracy. Heads should roll, people should go to jail if it’s true. If it is, the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA." Feinstein herself had said that NSA's spying scheme was justifiable because, "It's called protecting America." But both she and Graham are now less receptive to surveillance when they are on the receiving end.
Senator Rand Paul Slammed the CIA over the recent allegations that the agency hacked into senate staff computers as part of a dispute over a report detailing CIA waterboarding.
“There’s an incredible arrogance to me that the CIA thinks they can spy on a committee that is providing oversight for the CIA, and I think it’s a real, very serious constitutional breach,” said the Kentucky senator. “This cannot happen in a free country.”
These same congress members didn’t raise a peep when the government was spying on the people … and instead defended the government’s mass surveillance at every opportunity.
There are hundreds of thousands of Google hits for the search term “Hypocrisy CIA Senate Feinstein“.
High-level NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, Edward Snowden, a very high-level former CIA officer, a former FBI agent and many others are all slamming Congress for the hypocrisy.
http://guardianlv.com/2014/03/california-law-enforcement-secretly-collecting-cellphone-data/
http://agovernmentofwolves.com/2013/03/29/stingrays-and-other-surveillance-devices-using-your-cell-phone-to-track-your-every-move/
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Law-Enforcement-Agencies-Encrypting-Radio-Transmissions.html
http://www.policymic.com/articles/85189/congress-doesn-t-mind-the-nsa-spying-on-you-but-they-flip-when-the-cia-spies-on-them
http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/patriot-act-author-cia-spying-is-almost-nixonian-20140313
http://eyesopenreport.com/rand-paul-slams-cia-over-alleged-senate-hacking-this-cannot-happen-in-a-free-country/
Privacy groups urge Supreme Court to stop police from searching cellphones without a warrant:
Yesterday, several prominent privacy groups filed briefs telling the court why it should stop cops from making easy, no-warrant phone searches.
One case, United States v. Wurie, involves an old-fashioned flip-phone, while the other, Riley v. California, involves a modern smartphone capable of storing much more personal information both locally and in the cloud.
The issue before the court in Riley is whether an arrest alone allows a police officer to search the vast troves of data available on a person's smartphone. In David Riley's case, his phone held a potentially incriminating photo: Riley was standing next to a red Oldsmobile allegedly involved in a shooting.
Many believe Riley is shaping up to be the most important Fourth Amendment case to reach the high court since the January 2012 opinion in US v. Jones. That case held that tracking a vehicle with a GPS device for 28 days violated privacy rights and constituted a search, which requires a warrant.
In a press release following the filing of their brief, American Library Association President Barbara Stripling said, "Today’s cell phones are much more than simple dialing systems—they are mobile libraries, holding our books, photos, banking information, favorite websites, and private conversations. The Constitution does not give law enforcement free rein to search unlawfully through our private records."
The ALA's brief argues:
If a person were arrested while carrying a key to his personal library of 6,000 books... there is no constitutional basis to search those books incident to arrest. Yet by permitting a police officer to search today's smartphone upon arrest, that is exactly what this court would be permitting. A smartphone is a portal to a person's entire electronic library; in fact, for millions of Americans, it is their primary library.
Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of Internet Archive, extended the library metaphor. "Constitutional checks are placed on the search of, for instance, a personal physical library, and these checks should also apply to the comparably vast and personally sensitive stores of data held on our phones."
David Husband, one of the co-authors of EPIC's brief, adds, "Modern cellphones provide access to vast swathes of our lives, not only data that is on the phone, but data accessible from remote servers. Warrantless searches give police access to users' entire personal lives from their phones."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/can-police-search-your-phone-on-arrest-groups-urge-supreme-court-to-say-no/
Telephone metadata betrays sensitive details about your life:
Warnings that phone call “metadata” can betray detailed information about your life has been confirmed by research at Stanford University. Researchers there successfully identified a cannabis cultivator, multiple sclerosis sufferer and a visitor to an abortion clinic using nothing more than the timing and destination of their phone calls.
Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, the researchers behind the finding, used data gleaned from 546 volunteers to assess the extent to which information about who they had called and when revealed personally sensitive information.
The research aimed to answer questions raised by the NSA wiretapping revelations, where it was revealed that the US intelligence agency collects metadata - but not content - of millions of phone calls on mobile networks.
A number of computer scientists have expressed concern over the privacy risks posed by metadata. Ed Felten gave a particularly detailed explanation in a declaration for the ACLU: “Telephony metadata can be extremely revealing,” he wrote, “both at the level of individual calls and, especially, in the aggregate.” Holding the NSA’s program likely unconstitutional, Judge Leon credited this view and noted that “metadata from each person’s phone ‘reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’”
We used crowdsourced data to arrive at empirical answers. Since November, we have been conducting a study of phone metadata privacy. Participants run the MetaPhone app on their Android smartphone; it submits device logs and social network information for analysis. In previous posts, we have used the MetaPhone dataset to spot relationships, understand call graph interconnectivity, and estimate the identifiability of phone numbers.
At the outset of this study, we shared the same hypothesis as our computer science colleagues—we thought phone metadata could be very sensitive. We did not anticipate finding much evidence one way or the other, however, since the MetaPhone participant population is small and participants only provide a few months of phone activity on average.
We were wrong. We found that phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solely phone metadata.
http://webpolicy.org/2014/03/12/metaphone-the-sensitivity-of-telephone-metadata/
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/mar/13/phone-call-metadata-does-betray-sensitive-details-about-your-life-study
NSA decides it wants to hold our telephone metadata indefinitely ignoring FISCA court ruling:
A house set against itself cannot stand gets a win no matter who's dealing the cards. As was noted earlier, the NSA's metadata is currently integral to a series of lawsuits against the government. This fact prompted the DOJ to ask the FISA court to bend the minimization rules and extend the holding period from five years to "whenever."
This was shot down by FISC judge Reggie Walton, who pointed out that the government's argument was faulty on multiple levels. First of all, changing the stipulations of the minimization procedures put the entire metadata collection on shaky constitutional ground, seeing as it's almost entirely composed of data on American citizens not currently the subject of NSA investigations. Secondly, the DOJ cited evidence preservation statutes that applied solely to private corporations, something that clearly doesn't transfer directly to a government database composed of US citizens' "business records."
On March 10th, a contradictory decision was handed down by US District Court judge Jeffrey Wright, who declared the NSA was required to hold onto metadata relevant to ongoing lawsuits. This set up an interesting situation for the NSA, which would now have to decide whether it would rather have data with no expiration date or destroyed data that would never possibly appear in court.
In a motion filed Wednesday, the agency asked the FISA court to reverse its decision on destroying the held metadata. The filing refers to the temporary restraining order entered by Judge Jeffrey Wright which stipulates that the agency must hold onto the data until the cases are resolved. The NSA notes that it now is subject to two contradictory notices and is asking the FISA court to honor the other court's decision.
No sooner had the ink dried on this post than FISC judge Reggie Walton delivered an opinion agreeing with the District Court's order and will allow the NSA to retain the metadata associated with the two cases listed in Judge Jeffrey Wright's order. Walton's decision to reverse the FISC's opinion hinges on these two specific cases, Jewel v. NSA and First Unitarian Church v. NSA. As he notes, the DOJ's request to hold the data was based on common law rules normally applied to retention of corporate data in civil cases, something entirely unrelated to bulk surveillance metadata.
Addiitonally, he points out that none of the plaintiffs in the cases the DOJ listed had requested the data be retained.
The Court concluded that any interests the civil plaintiffs might assert in preserving all of the BR metadata was "unsubstantiated" on that record. The Court further observed that no District Court or Circuit Court of Appeals has entered a preservation order applicable to the BR metadata in question in any of the civil matters cited in the motion. Further, there is no indication that any of the plaintiffs have sought discovery of this information or made any effort to have it preserved, despite it being a matter of public record that BR metadata is routinely destroyed after five years.
Beyond the legal issues is the NSA itself, which probably wouldn't doesn't mind being able to hold onto metadata indefinitely. (Of course, the FISC court limits this metadata to these two specific cases where the plaintiffs have requested the data be held. There's a lot of plaintiffs in one of those cases [First Unitarian Church v. NSA], meaning a whole lot of records will be maintained.) There's always the concern that this evidence will need to be presented in court, but if the past is any indicator, the admission of these records will be fought vigorously by the agency. As for the data the DOJ requested to be held? It will simply vanish into the ether upon expiration, keeping it out of the public eye forever.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140312/14111926555/nsa-decides-it-wants-to-hold-metadata-indefinitely-asks-fisa-court-to-reverse-decision-telling-it-to-destroy-records.shtml