New spying tech allows anyone to track your movements
Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent.
The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer, according to company marketing documents and experts in surveillance technology.
The world’s most powerful intelligence services, such as the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ, long have used cellphone data to track targets around the globe. But experts say these new systems allow less technically advanced governments to track people in any nation — including the United States — with relative ease and precision.
It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive trade information, said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide.
Security experts say hackers, sophisticated criminal gangs and nations under sanctions also could use this tracking technology, which operates in a legal gray area. It is illegal in many countries to track people without their consent or a court order, but there is no clear international legal standard for secretly tracking people in other countries, nor is there a global entity with the authority to police potential abuses.
Location tracking is an increasingly common part of modern life. Apps that help you navigate through a city or find the nearest coffee shop need to know your location. Many people keep tabs on their teenage children — or their spouses — through tracking apps on smartphones. But these forms of tracking require consent; mobile devices typically allow these location features to be blocked if users desire.
Tracking systems built for intelligence services or police, however, are inherently stealthy and difficult — if not impossible — to block. Private surveillance vendors offer government agencies several such technologies, including systems that collect cellular signals from nearby phones and others that use malicious software to trick phones into revealing their locations.
Governments also have long had the ability to compel carriers to provide tracking data on their customers, especially within their own countries. The National Security Agency, meanwhile, taps into telecommunication-system cables to collect cellphone location data on a mass, global scale.
But tracking systems that access carrier location databases are unusual in their ability to allow virtually any government to track people across borders, with any type of cellular phone, across a wide range of carriers — without the carriers even knowing. These systems also can be used in tandem with other technologies that, when the general location of a person is already known, can intercept calls and Internet traffic, activate microphones, and access contact lists, photos and other documents.
Another way you're being tracked is by using apps that claim you can share your confessions online anonymously or share your pics. like Snapchat, don't believe it!
The chief executive of Secret, the anonymous sharing app that has attracted many users to share their confessions anonymously, just confirmed the app's vulnerability and that anonymity is not guaranteed.
“The thing we try to help people acknowledge is that anonymous doesn’t mean untraceable,” David Byttow, chief executive and co-founder of the Secret, told Wired in an interview this week. “We do not say that you will be completely safe at all times and be completely anonymous.”
As previously explained by Mariana Marcaletti in this post, here is how Secret works: Set up your account with your phone number, e-mail address or Facebook account, and Secret will connect you to your friends already using Secret. You will be able to see and comment on secrets posted by your friends, and friends of friends, thanks to Secret's algorithm that tracks your contacts; you can also share your secrets -- "all anonymously," promised by Secret.
But "white-hat hackers" (those who consider themselves ethical hackers) Benjamin Caudill and Bryan Seely were able to identify the names of people behind the supposedly anonymous posts on Secret by using personal e-mail addresses. They were also able to see what Byttow posted on Secret: "Is Lucy the cutest dog?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/for-sale-systems-that-can-secretly-track-where-cellphone-users-go-around-the-globe/2014/08/24/f0700e8a-f003-11e3-bf76-447a5df6411f_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/08/22/anonymous-sharing-app-secret-isnt-so-anonymous-after-all/
The executive branch can now collect Americans' communications by going outside our borders:
John Napier Tye wrote a Washington Post Op-Ed warning about Executive Order 12333 — the order the executive branch uses to self-authorize spying overseas. “The order as used today,” Tye wrote, “threatens our democracy.” Since that time, his concerns have generated enough attention — in part because of his testimony to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and a New York Times article on the order — that the Director of National Intelligence Civil Liberties Officer Alexander Joel has seen fit to try to rebut Tye’s claims.
In a column at Politico, Director of National Intelligence Civil Liberties Officer Alexander Joel engages in some of the same old misleading jargon the intelligence community has used for 14 months, emphasizing that the NSA won’t “target” an American without the assertion he has some tie to a foreign power. To his credit, Joel – unlike some others who have adopted this argument – admits that U.S. communications get picked up in the process of targeting others (though he implies those are communications about Americans, not by them).
Then Joel makes a boast that President Obama has implemented reforms to rein in EO 12333, which actually reveals the real problem with this claim. He points to Presidential Policy Directive 28, which Obama issued in January in response to Edward Snowden’s leaks. Joel applauds the limits Obama placed on bulk collection in the PPD.
What that PPD actually permits, however, is the collection of communications in bulk — that is, the collection of all communications from a cable or switch – “temporarily … to facilitate targeted collection,” and more permanently, in search of espionage, terrorism, weapons proliferation, cybersecurity threats, threats to U.S. or allied armed forces or personnel, and transnational criminal threats, including illicit finance and sanctions violations. In fact, the limits on “bulk” collection are so expansive, PPD 28 would be better understood as an admission that Joel’s reassurances about “targeting” are pretty meaningless, because so much collection happens in bulk.
Moreover, Joel doesn’t address a key point Tye made in his PCLOB testimony. “Because of the structure of the global Internet,” Tye explained, “a very large portion of Americans’ communications are available for collection outside of our borders.” To illustrate this, Tye described how an email sent two blocks from where he was speaking to the White House would be available for foreign collection on servers overseas. “Let’s say hypothetically I was using Gmail, or Yahoo, or another big email provider, and sitting right here I sent an email to the President at that White House just two blocks away,” Tye imagined. “It’s almost certain that that email would be stored on servers around the world.”
Tye’s example is in no way hypothetical. As the Post revealed last year, the NSA was in fact breaking into Google and Yahoo’s cables to access communications stored on servers overseas.
Joel claims, “Congress has the power to oversee, authorize and fund these activities.” Of course, that’s different from Congress actually using that power. Moreover, the record suggests Congress may not currently have the power to do anything but defund such spying, assuming they even know about it. Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein admitted last August that her committee doesn’t receive adequate information on EO 12333 collection. Joel’s boss, James Clapper, refused to answer a question from Sen. Amy Klobuchar on EO 12333 violations in a hearing in October. And when Sen. Mark Udall suggested a “vast trove” of Americans’ communications collected overseas should be provided the protections laid out in FISA, Assistant Attorney General John Carlin explained the National Security Division — the part of DOJ he oversees, which has a central role in oversight under FISA — would not have a role in that case because the collection occurred under EO 12333.
In his column, Joel makes no mention of the third branch of government: the courts. That’s because, as ACLU’s Patrick Toomey laid out last week, the government doesn’t give defendants any notice if their prosecutions arise from data collected under EO 12333. Criminal prosecutions are where some of the most important oversight on executive branch spying takes place. By exempting EO 12333 from any such notice, then, the government is bypassing another critical check on potentially abusive spying.
Back in 1978, our government decided that both Congress and the courts should have a role when the executive branch spied on Americans. That was the entire premise behind the FISA law. But by moving more and more of its spying overseas, the government can and — apparently, at least to a limited extent — is bypassing the oversight accorded through three branches of government.
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/21/checks_and_balances_thrown_in_the_garbage_a_new_out_of_control_spying_loophole/
ACLU joins attorney Larry Klayman in fight over NSA spy programs: A legal challenge to the National Security Agency’s program of spying on Americans has received the support of two privacy-rights heavyweights, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“The call records collected by the government are not just metadata – they are intimate portraits of the lives of millions of Americans,” the brief states.
The data, it says, “reveals political affiliation, religious practices and peoples’ most intimate associations.”
“It reveals who calls a suicide prevention line and who calls their elected official; who calls the local tea-party office and who calls Planned Parenthood.”
The brief says, “the relevant fact for whether an expectation of privacy exists is that the comprehensive telephone records the government collects – not just the records of a few calls over a few days but all of a person’s calls over many years – reveals highly personal information about the person and her life.”
“Metadata isn’t trivial,” EFF Legal Fellow Andrew Crocker said. “Collected on a massive scale over a broad time period, metadata can reveal your political and religious affiliations, your friends and relationships, even whether you have a health condition or own guns. This is exactly the kind of warrantless search the Fourth Amendment was intended to prevent.”
The brief explains that changes in technology and the government’s new emphasis on mass surveillance mean that “the holding of the 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland that the government relies on (often called the ‘third-party doctrine’) does not apply.”
“Dragnet surveillance is and has always has been illegal in the United States,” said ACLU spokesman Alex Abdo. “Our country’s founders rebelled against overbroad searches and seizures, and they would be aghast to see the liberties they fought hard to enshrine into our Constitution sacrificed in the name of security. As even the president himself has recognized, we can keep the nation safe without surrendering our privacy.”
Klayman had asked for a court hearing to “ascertain why the government and individual defendants have made material misrepresentations and material omissions of fact.”
Klayman’s case challenged the constitutionality of the NSA and CIA surveillance programs targeting American citizens who have no connection to terrorism. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder also are defendants in the case.http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/legal-teams-gang-up-on-nsa-over-spy-programs/
