DHS is targeting activists at the border confiscating smartphones and laptops without probable cause
Washington, D. C. - Newly disclosed U.S. government files provide an inside look at the Homeland Security Department's practice of seizing and searching electronic devices at the border without showing reasonable suspicion of a crime or getting a judge's approval.
The ACLU released new government documents that provide rare insight into how the government uses its powers at the border to search and seize Americans’ electronic devices.
The documents, obtained by our client David House as a result of his lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, demonstrate how the government is abusing its border search authority to evade constitutional restrictions on its surveillance powers. (You can see the documents here.)
The documents describe the case of David House, a young computer programmer in Boston who had befriended Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, the soldier convicted of giving classified documents to WikiLeaks. U.S. agents quietly waited for months for House to leave the country then seized his laptop, thumb drive, digital camera and cellphone when he re-entered the United States.
They held his laptop for weeks before returning it, acknowledging one year later that House had committed no crime and promising to destroy copies the government made of House's personal data.
The government turned over the federal records to House as part of a legal settlement agreement after a two-year court battle with the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government on House's behalf. The ACLU said the records suggest that federal investigators are using border crossings to investigate U.S. citizens in ways that would otherwise violate the Fourth Amendment.
DHS declined to discuss the case.
House volunteered with friends to set up an advocacy group they called the Bradley Manning Support Network, and he went to prison to visit Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning.
It was that summer that House quietly landed on a government watchlist used by immigrations and customs agents at the border. His file noted that the government was on the lookout for a second batch of classified documents Manning had reportedly shared with the group WikiLeaks but hadn't made public yet. Border agents were told that House was "wanted for questioning" regarding the "leak of classified material." They were given explicit instructions: If House attempted to cross the U.S. border, "secure digital media," and "ID all companions."
But if House had been wanted for questioning, why hadn't federal agents gone back to his home in Boston? House said the Army, State Department and FBI had already interviewed him.
Instead, investigators monitored passenger flight records and waited for House to leave the country that November for a Mexico vacation with his girlfriend. When he returned, two agents were waiting for him, including one who specialized in computer forensics. They seized House's laptop and detained his computer for seven weeks, giving the government enough time to try to copy every file and key stroke House had made since declaring himself a Manning supporter.
House and the ACLU are hoping his case will draw attention to the issue, and show how searching a suitcase is different than searching a computer.
"It was pretty clear to me I was being targeted for my visits to Manning (in prison) and my support for him," said House, in an interview last week.
How Americans end up getting their laptops searched at the border still isn't entirely clear.
The Homeland Security Department said it should be able to act on a hunch if someone seems suspicious. But agents also rely on a massive government-wide system called TECS, named after its predecessor the Treasury Enforcement Communications System.
Federal agencies, including the FBI and IRS, as well as Interpol, can feed TECS with information and flag travelers' files.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/homeland-security-chelsea-manning_n_3896941.html
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BORDER_COMPUTER_SEARCHES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-09-09-21-01-16
The border is a back door for U.S. device searches:
The documents show how the government can avert Americans’ constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“Americans crossing the border are being searched and their digital media is being seized in the hopes that the government will find something to have them convicted,” Mr. House said. “I think it’s important for business travelers and people who consider themselves politically inclined to know what dangers they now face in a country where they have no real guarantee of privacy at the border.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/business/the-border-is-a-back-door-for-us-device-searches.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Press targeted by DHS:
Are you of the opinion that the invasive Transportation Security Administration “pat downs” at airports are a violation of your constitutional rights? Wait until they start treating you the way they treat investigative journalists, writers, filmmakers and activists who question the many official conspiracy theories and non-conspiracy theories. The mass media is 99.9% controlled, but the corporatocracy cannot tolerate a few investigative journalists blowing the whistle.
One victim is Laura Poitras, an Oscar-and Emmy-nominated filmmaker and intrepid journalist, who spent years producing a trilogy of documentary films showing the loss of liberties around the world—and particularly in the United States—under the pretense of “the War on Terror.”
Her laptop, camera and cell phone are routinely seized and not returned for weeks. On several occasions, government agents seized her notebooks and copied them—violating her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. Time after time, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents have detained and interrogated her in foreign airports. They threatened her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents have met her plane at Newark Liberty International Airport, detained her and taken her to interrogation rooms. Each time this has happened in the past, Poitras—as a journalist—has taken notes. Her lawyer also advised her to keep notes of her interrogations in order to chronicle what is being done to her, to document the journalistic privileges she asserts and her express lack of consent and to obtain the names of the agents involved. Multiple CBP agents told the American journalist she was prohibited from taking notes on the ground that her “pen could be used as a weapon.”
This chilling treatment escalates, even though Poitras has never been accused of violating any law—and the DHS has been forced to admit that in six years they never found anything to justify their continuing abuse and harassment other than they didn’t like her expressing non-official viewpoints.
Our security is guaranteed by a free press. We have no security if free speech is repressed—especially by the big lie that it is being done in the name of national security. http://americanfreepress.net/?p=3705
Professor told to delete NSA-related blog post:
Matthew Green is a well-known cryptography professor, currently teaching in the computer science department of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Last week, Green authored a long and interesting blog post about the recent revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) has, among much else, subverted crypto standards. In his words, "The TL;DR 'too long; didn't read' version is that the NSA has been doing some very bad things." And Green went on to speculate at some length about what those "bad things" were and what they might mean.
Today, Green's academic dean contacted him to ask that "all copies" of the blog post be removed from university servers. Green said that the move was not "my Dean's fault," but he did not elaborate. Were cryptology professors at Johns Hopkins not allowed to say, as Green had, things like:
I was totally unprepared for today's bombshell revelations describing the NSA's efforts to defeat encryption. Not only does the worst possible hypothetical I discussed appear to be true, but it's true on a scale I couldn't even imagine. I'm no longer the crank. I wasn't even close to cranky enough.
The university received information this morning that Matthew Green’s blog contained a link or links to classified material and also used the NSA logo. For that reason, we asked Professor Green to remove the Johns Hopkins-hosted mirror site for his blog.
Upon further review, we note that the NSA logo has been removed and that he appears to link to material that has been published in the news media. Interim Dean Andrew Douglas will inform Professor Green that the mirror site may be restored.
The statement raised further questions, including: from whom did the school "receive" its information? Why was the school's top administration getting involved in the use of the NSA logo on one professor's individual blog post? What was the point of the request given that Green had also published the post to a mirror hosted at Blogger? Wasn't the whole episode likely to bring far greater traffic to Green's post once word of the takedown request got out?
Late this afternoon, Green shared his side of the story on Twitter (tweets concatenated below for ease of reading):
So listen, I'm trying not to talk about this much because anything I say will make it worse. What I've been told is that someone on the APL [Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory—motto: "Enhancing national security through science and technology"] side of JHU discovered my blog post and determined that it was hosting/linking to classified documents. This requires a human since I don't believe there's any automated scanner for this process. It's not clear to me whether this request originated at APL or if it came from elsewhere. All I know is that I received an e-mail this morning from the Interim Dean of the Engineering school asking me to take down the post and to desist from using the NSA logo. He also suggested I should seek counsel if I continued. In any case I made it clear that I would not shut down my non-JHU blog, but I did shut down a JHU-hosted mirror. I also removed the NSA logo. I did not remove any links or photos of NOW PUBLIC formerly classified material, because that would just be stupid.
I'm baffled by this entire thing. I hope to never receive an e-mail like that again and I certainly believe JHU (APL) is on the wrong side of common sense and academic freedom, regardless of their obligations under the law. That said, I have no desire to cause trouble for any of the very good people at JHU so I'll keep my posts off JHU property. I have no idea if this was serious or a tempest in a teapot.
What I have learned: Twitter is really a terrible way to give this explanation. Ow, my thumbs...
Update: Johns Hopkins has confirmed to Ars that "we did not receive any inquiry from the federal government about the blog or any request from the government to take down the mirror site. (Or of course, the personal site, though that never was taken down and we never asked that it be taken down). As to where the information came from, we are still tracing the path of this event, which all exploded into our notice over the past couple of hours."
Update 2: Thanks to the wonder of Google's cache, here is the original post, NSA logo included.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/crypto-prof-asked-to-remove-nsa-related-blog-post/
http://www.propublica.org/article/johns-hopkins-and-the-case-of-the-missing-nsa-blog-post
Elizabeth Warren: The Supreme Court functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of big business
In a speech at an AFL-CIO convention on Sunday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren criticized the Supreme Court for being too right-wing and serving the interests of Big Business over the needs of Americans.
In voicing her support for the labor movement and promoting an agenda aimed at defending working families, Warren warned of conservative-leaning justices and a "corporate capture of the federal courts."
“You follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of big business,” Warren said.
“The big banks and their army of lobbyists have fought every step of the way to delay, water down, block or strike down regulations,” Warren said. “When a new approach is proposed -– like my bill with John McCain, Angus King and Maria Cantwell to bring back Glass-Steagall -– you know what happens. They throw everything they’ve got against it."
According to a recent study, the five conservative justices currently sitting on the Supreme Court are in the top ten most pro-corporate justices in a half century – and Justices Alito and Roberts are numbers one and two – the most anti-consumer in this entire time. The Chamber of Commerce is now a major player in the Supreme Court, and its win rate has risen to 70% of all cases it supports. Follow this pro-corporate trend to its logical conclusion, and sooner or later you’ll end up with a Supreme Court that functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of big business.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/08/elizabeth-warren-supreme-court_n_3891428.html
http://www.alternet.org/economy/elizabeth-warren-slams-corporate-supreme-court