It's TRUE: Your 'Internet Enabled' Devices Will Spy On You — Lights, Garage Doors, Security Cams and Everything Else

"In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials... "We're going to use your toothbrush to snoop on you."
—James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence

The "Internet of Things": Tie all of your home's devices to the web and the U.S. government (and anyone else) can and will watch and catalog everything you do.

By Jon Queally
Sworn testimony delivered to the U.S. Congress by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper raised eyebrows on Tuesday as he acknowledged publicly for the first time that surveillance agencies are almost certain to exploit (if they aren't already) the increasing number of web-connected devices—also known as the "Internet of Things"—as a way to keep tabs on the population in the coming years.

"In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said in his submitted testimony.

In a piece at The Register—titled "We're going to use your toothbrush to snoop on you, says US spy boss"—tech-security journalist Kieran McCarthy reports Clapper's acknowledgement that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a "potential goldmine for surveillance" echoes "a similar conclusion reached by academics last week." The testimony on Tuesday, McCarthy adds, follows "repeated warnings over the poor security standards included in smart-home products, even the most well-resourced and well-known. Recently, the Ring doorbell and the Nest thermostat were discovered to have security vulnerabilities that could provide an attacker with your Wi-Fi password – and so access to your home network.

According to Guardian journalist Spencer Ackerman, Clapper's admission about the surveillance potential of networked home devices—which also include wi-fi enabled smoke detectors, larger appliances, and entertainment systems—"is rare for a US official." Not commonly discussed in public, Ackerman points to a 2012 speech by then CIA director David Petraeus who described the surveillance implications of such devices as "transformational … particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft."

Though Clapper did "not specifically name any intelligence agency as involved in household-device surveillance", reports Ackerman, "security experts examining the internet of things take as a given that the US and other surveillance services will intercept the signals the newly networked devices emit, much as they do with those from cellphones. Amateurs are already interested in easily compromised hardware; computer programmer John Matherly’s search engine Shodan indexes thousands of completely unsecured web-connected devices."

As McCarthy adds:

The data from IoT products can potentially be hugely valuable. Many include microphones and motion sensors, for example, such as new smart TVs, kids' toys and voice-controlled products like Amazon's Echo.

It wasn't just the internet of things that Clapper is worried/excited about. He also references that artificial intelligence is provided a similar risk/opportunity. By meddling with or anticipating the results of algorithms, a huge number of AI systems "are susceptible to a range of disruptive and deceptive tactics that might be difficult to anticipate or quickly understand." On the flipside, however, they also "might create or enable further opportunities to disrupt or damage critical infrastructure or national security networks."

And it's not just the government spies that people worry about. In a post at ZDNet last year, Steve Ranger explores the many pitfalls and concerns presented by IoT, including the way in which private corporations will exploit the connectedness of new technologies.

"The IoT could be one of the purest outgrowths of late capitalism imaginable," explained Ranger, "one that can packages your every waking minute into a product (and the sleeping ones too, of course -- there's many a way of making money out of the data you generate in your slumber).

"There's a real danger that it could form part of the ongoing erosion and corporatisation of private spaces in the quest for profit. In a surveillance economy, privacy represents an opportunity for profit forgone."

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

The NYPD Is As Bad As The NSA: Uses License Plate Reader Database to Monitor Movements of Residents

The "Vigilant" contains over 2.2 billion location data points, and it is growing by almost a million data points per day. The database also isn’t limited to New York City, which means the NYPD can now monitor your car whether you live in New York or Miami or Chicago or Los Angeles. It also has a corrupting influence on its users: A police officer in Washington D.C. pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of cars near a gay bar and blackmailing the car’s owners.

(click to see full-size image)

Documents Uncover NYPD’s Vast License Plate Reader Database

Surveillance is about power. Vigilant gives the NYPD power to monitor our whereabouts.

By Mariko Hirose
Supporters of license plate readers are fond of saying that unless you’re a criminal, you needn’t fear the invasive technology. But those who adhere to that argument should consider just a few examples from around the country:

• A police officer in Washington D.C. pleaded guilty to extortion after looking up the plates of cars near a gay bar and blackmailing the car’s owners.


• The DEA contemplated using license plate readers to monitor people who were at a gun show. Since the devices can’t distinguish between those who are selling illegal guns and those who aren’t, a person’s presence at the gun show would have landed them in a DEA database.


• A SWAT team in Kansas raided a man’s house where his wife, 7-year-old daughter, and 13-year-old son lived based in part on the mass monitoring of cars parked at a gardening store. The man was held at gunpoint for two hours while cops combed through his home. The police were looking for a marijuana growing operation. They did not find that or any other evidence of criminal activity in the man’s house. With these stories firmly in mind, the New York Civil Liberties Union’s latest license plate reader discovery is all the more chilling.

Last year, we learned that the NYPD was hoping to enter into a multi-year contract that would give it access to the nationwide database of license plate reader data owned by the company Vigilant Solutions. Now, through a Freedom of Information Law request, the NYCLU has obtained the final version of the $442,500 contract and the scope-of-work proposal that gives a peek into the ever-widening world of surveillance made possible by Vigilant.

RELATED STORIES:
U.S. Government Buys Surveillance Technology To Track Drivers in Real Time

Cops Must Swear Silence to Access Vehicle Tracking System: Corporations Insist License Plate Tracking Stay Hidden Media and Public

License Plates Are Being Massed Photographed by Private Companies For Sale To Law Enforcers That Track You — Now They Fight For the 'Right' To Do It

Surveillance is about power. Vigilant gives the NYPD power to monitor our whereabouts and, by extension, our affiliations, interests, activities and beliefs.

The scope-of-work proposal explains how Vigilant vastly expands the NYPD’s surveillance capability beyond what was possible with its own license plate database. Known as the Domain Awareness System, it collects the license plate data scanned by the approximately 500 license plate readers operated by the NYPD and combines it with footage from cameras and other surveillance devices around the city. The NYPD holds on to the license plate data for at least five years regardless of whether a car triggers any suspicion.

The Vigilant database raises similar privacy concerns as the Domain Awareness System, but those concerns are greatly magnified because the Vigilant database is massive: It contains over 2.2 billion location data points, and it is growing by almost a million data points per day. The database also isn’t limited to New York City, which means the NYPD can now monitor your car whether you live in New York or Miami or Chicago or Los Angeles.

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Who Spies The Most On Americans — NSA, CIA?: No the DEA — Judge Orders Release of Info on Two Decades of Phone Surveillance

Illustration by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

By Mark Rumold
A federal judge in Los Angeles has given our clients, Human Rights Watch, the go-ahead to take discovery from the government in our ongoing lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the DEA’s bulk surveillance program. Friday's decision is rare, and it's a decisive victory—both for HRW and for the general public. EFF is not aware of any other case where discovery has been allowed into a government mass surveillance program. And the order forces the government to answer questions, under oath, about the steps it took to ensure that all illegally collected records have been fully purged from all government systems.

The case stems from the DEA’s disclosure in January of this year that it had secretly collected Americans’ international call records in bulk for over two decades. News reports described the program as massive—sweeping in billions of records of Americans’ calls to more than 100 countries around the globe, including Canada, Mexico, India, and Italy. The DEA relied only on an obscure administrative subpoena statute to obtain the records in bulk. That means, unlike the NSA’s bulk surveillance program, there was no judicial involvement whatsoever. Making matters worse, reports confirm that multiple agencies searched the illegally collected records for all kinds of cases—from terrorism, to drug trafficking, to export violations.

In April, immediately following a lengthy report in USA Today, EFF filed suit on behalf of Human Rights Watch against the DEA, DHS, FBI, and various unnamed agencies. The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the program, and seeks to ensure that the program is permanently stopped rather than merely suspended as claimed by DEA. The suit further asks the court to ensure that all illegally collected records are accounted for and destroyed.

The government, instead, asked the judge to dismiss the case. DEA had previously said that it had “suspended” collecting records in bulk in September 2013. Now, it submitted an additional four-paragraph declaration from a DEA agent that said the DEA’s illegally collected records had been “quarantined” and “purged.” That, the government argued, required the court to dismiss the case. The government was trying to sweep two decades worth of unconstitutional activity under the rug with a single, four-paragraph declaration.

We pushed back. We’ve seen enough government double-speak concerning surveillance programs to know that there was more to the story. We argued that the government’s four-paragraph, summary declaration wasn’t enough to establish that all of the billions of records it collected, over a twenty-year span, had been accounted for and purged. Instead, we asked the court to allow HRW to take discovery—basically, a process by which one party to a lawsuit can compel the other side to provide information—from the government about the surveillance program.

Although the court narrowed the scope of the discovery HRW can take, the decision is still a victory. It will provide some much needed insight into the government’s surveillance program and whether or not the government continues to retain and use those illegally collected records. And we'll keep fighting for more information about the program and to ensure that the program is stopped, once and for all.

Reprinted with permission from  Electronic Frontier Foundation

FBI Using Airplanes To Spy On Americans — Surveillance Aircraft Used on Anti-Police Brutality Protesters

The FBI has been conducting mass surveillance on Americans without a warrant

Photo screen captured from Associated Press video.

By Jack Gillum, Eileen Sullivan and Eric Tucker
Scores of low-flying planes circling American cities are part of a civilian air force operated by the FBI and obscured behind fictitious companies, The Associated Press has learned.

The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April, orbiting both major cities and rural areas. At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.

For decades, the planes have provided support to FBI surveillance operations on the ground. But now the aircraft are equipped with high-tech cameras, and in rare circumstances, technology capable of tracking thousands of cellphones, raising questions about how these surveillance flights affect Americans' privacy.

"It's important that federal law enforcement personnel have the tools they need to find and catch criminals," said Charles Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But whenever an operation may also monitor the activities of Americans who are not the intended target, we must make darn sure that safeguards are in place to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans."

The FBI says the planes are not equipped or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance. The surveillance equipment is used for ongoing investigations, the FBI says, generally without a judge's approval.

The FBI confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services.

"The FBI's aviation program is not secret," spokesman Christopher Allen said in a statement. "Specific aircraft and their capabilities are protected for operational security purposes."

The front companies are used to protect the safety of the pilots, the agency said. That setup also shields the identity of the aircraft so that suspects on the ground don't know they're being followed.

The FBI is not the only federal law enforcement agency to take such measures. The Drug Enforcement Administration has its own planes, also registered to fake companies, according to a 2011 Justice Department inspector general report.

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Video Didn’t Save Eric Garner — Body Cameras Won’t Save You

Obama's Plan Means More Surveillance of You, Not Police

A grand jury’s decision not to indict Eric Garner’s killer sparked nationwide anger and protests. (Flickr)

By Guillermo Jimenez
Daniel Pantaleo choked a man to death on camera. He wrapped his arm around his victim’s neck and squeezed until the life escaped his body. The victim was, of course, Eric Garner, a 43-year-old black father of six, whose final words, “I can’t breathe,” have become a rallying cry for social justice.

If you didn’t know Pantaleo was a New York City police officer, you’d expect him to be sitting in a jail cell right now. The fact that he isn’t, and that knowing he’s a cop somehow instantly admonishes him of any guilt, should give us all great pause to wonder … why?

On Wednesday, December 3, a Staten Island grand jury cleared Pantaleo of any wrongdoing by electing not to indict him for Garner’s murder. The decision immediately sparked protests around New York, and across the country, only nine days after a St. Louis grand jury similarly cleared police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown in early August in Ferguson, Missouri.

Officer Pantaleo denies ever applying a chokehold on Eric Garner.

Public outrage has seemingly forced the Obama administration to react — to do something, anything, that could possibly help solve the problem of police accountability.

In typical Hegelian-dialectic fashion, however, the federal government has seized this opportunity to offer up a “solution” that only furthers their own objectives.

Obama’s Executive Order

On December 1, President Obama issued an executive order authorizing US$263 million in funding for local police departments to “improve training” and purchase 50,000 body-worn cameras, or “body cams.”

Meanwhile, the order also ensures the federal programs responsible for funneling military-grade equipment to local law enforcement agencies are sustained. In standard political double talk, the president said the federal government wants to make sure “we’re not building a militarized culture inside our local law enforcement,” while at the same time suggesting these programs “actually serve a very useful purpose.”

The irony of Obama’s proposal was perhaps best captured by the Onion’s headline: “Obama Calls For Turret-Mounted Video Cameras On All Police Tanks.”

The move toward issuing body cams to local police follows a predictable trend, considering the technology’s increased popularity within law enforcement and among well-meaning civil libertarians. They have foolishly bought into the government’s line that “more surveillance will keep you safe.”

Last March, I wrote about the proliferation of body cameras and the dangers of relying on them as a way of keeping law enforcement accountable. At the time, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced he was considering a proposal to supply Border Patrol agents with the technology.

The footage gained from body cams is entirely police-run, securely networked within each local department, not unlike dash cam video or any other form of police surveillance. Make no mistake, this is still the police filming you, not the other way around.

The effectiveness of body-worn cameras is premised almost exclusively on a single study conducted by Police Chief Tony Ferrar and Barak Ariel in Rialto, California. While the study’s basic findings are sound — people will, generally speaking, adjust their behavior when they know they’re being watched — the larger implications drawn from the experiment are deeply flawed.

To suggest police-worn cameras will provide footage that is beneficial to the public, leading to potential indictments or even convictions of offending officers, is incredibly disingenuous. Not even the Rialto study or the police-reform advocates who initially championed this technology make this claim. Furthermore, the Eric Garner case and the grand jury’s refusal to indict officer Pantaleo, despite video evidence of the killing, demonstrates camera footage alone is no guarantee of justice.

Instead, what the Rialto study proposes is that the mere presence of a body-worn camera, and the foreknowledge that their actions are being recorded, will cause police officers to check their behavior and become more likely to “follow the rules.”

The study opens its introduction with a question, referencing one of the most famous examples of police brutality in our modern history: “The Rodney King story is a potent reminder about the enormous power that police officers have and how it can sometimes be abused … would the Rodney King incident [have been] avoided had the officers known that they [were] being videotaped?”

The answer, of course, is yes, but only if the officers believed there would be consequences to their actions. Ironically, it was the verdict in the Rodney King case — the jury acquitting the four officers shown on video beating King senseless while he lay on the ground — that set the precedent for police to effectively act with impunity, video evidence be damned.

The message from the judicial system over the years has been clear: if you wear a badge and kill someone, the odds of being punished are slim to none.

In fact, a New York Daily News investigation has revealed that in New York City alone, on-duty police officers have killed at least 179 people over the last 15 years. Of those cases, only three led to criminal charges against the officer, and just one was convicted. The lone officer who was convicted, however, received no jail time.

In other words, the message from the judicial system over the years has been clear: if you wear a badge and kill someone, the odds of being punished are slim to none.

We’ve now reached the point in 2014 when a police officer can choke a man to death on camera, in broad daylight, and before witnesses, and the court decides it’s not even worth the effort of a trial.

Furthermore, the results of these body-camera studies have shown that the most significant effect their implementation has had is in enabling police to more quickly resolve complaints lodged against their own department, and to gather evidence that benefits the state.

In short, body camera technology is yet another tool in the state’s surveillance apparatus, and absent any reasonable expectation of accountability, any measurable “civilizing effect” on the police will surely wear off over time.

Obama’s Hypocrisy

President Obama’s executive order that aims to “improve policing” comes amid claims of a personal commitment to alleviate the “simmering mistrust” between local law enforcement and minority communities most affected by police violence. “This time will be different,” he said during a meeting at the White House with activists from Ferguson.

“Part of the reason this time will be different is because the president of the United States is deeply invested in making sure this time is different,” he added, implying he has a personal stake in the matter based on his own ethnicity.

He further clarified this position in an interview with BET on Monday, stating “This is not only personal for me, because of who I am and who Michelle is and who our family members are and what our experiences are, but as president, I consider this to be one of the most important issues we face.”

If we allowed the state to kill the innocent without consequence, what would that say about us?

This comes from a man who does not bat an eye at ordering the deaths of people of color in the Middle East and North Africa. In 2012, amid the controversy surrounding the George Zimmerman trial, he said that if he had a son “he’d look like Trayvon [Martin]”; yet he says nothing of the 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Alwaki whose death via drone strike he ordered only four months earlier. Abdulrahman was killed, presumably, for the alleged sins of his father — Anwar al-Alwaki — one of the many names on Obama’s “kill list” of high-value targets marked for assassination.

The Obama administration has been responsible for the deaths of thousands in a campaign of state violence in the name of “national security.” The killing is rationalized away, however, since anyone the state targets is naturally a “terrorist threat” — someone who aims to “do us harm” and threatens our freedom.

To the extent that we identify with our government, and see a part of ourselves in the state, there will be a tendency to assign blame to the victims of state violence. Just as Michael Brown was “no angel,” and Eric Garner an illegal cigarette trader, anyone the state murders must necessarily be guilty. Otherwise, if we allowed the state to kill the innocent without consequence, what would that say about us?

_____________
Guillermo Jimenez
Jimenez is the English-language deputy editor for the PanAm Post and host of the Traces of Reality radio show and the Demanufacturing Consent podcast on Boiling Frogs Post. He is based in South Texas, deep within the DHS "constitution-free zone." Follow @tracesofreality.

Reprinted with permission from PanAm Post

Protests Grow Against Expansive Canadian Surveillance Bill

Day of action set for 'every province across Canada' against so-called anti-terrorism bill

Anti C-51 Protest, March 14, 2015. (Photo by Jeremy  Board)

By Nadia Prupis
Canadian activists are taking part in a weekend of action against the controversial C-51 surveillance bill currently making its way through Parliament.

Supporters of the bill say it would protect the nation against terrorist attacks, but critics charge that it would give the government ever more expansive and invasive spying powers.

If passed, C-51 would give up to 17 government agencies access to Canadian citizens' private information, including their financial status, medical history, and religious and political beliefs. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service would also be given the power to spy on Canadians and foreign nationals living in the country, while the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would be granted increased powers of preventive arrest.

Protests against C-51 are slated to take place in "every province across Canada," organizers said on Friday. Many of those actions will take place outside the offices of 13 conservative Ministers of Parliament who support the bill.

"This bill disproportionately targets indigenous communities, environmental activists, dissidents, and Muslims, many of whom are already subjected to questionable and overreaching powers by security officials, [and] will make it easier and ostensibly lawful for government to continue infringing upon the rights of peaceful people," reads a statement from the organizers.

Among those raising their voices against the bill are human rights and free speech groups like Amnesty International, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, and OpenMedia.

Steve Anderson, executive director for OpenMedia, told Yahoo! News on Friday, "More and more Canadians from all walks of life are concerned about this bill.

"We’re just hoping to make that more clear to the government and educate more Canadians, because … the real kind of challenge for those of us who understand the dangers of the bill is to educate [other] Canadians," he added.

Canadian Journalists for Free Expression last week hosted a teleconference with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who warned that C-51 was "an emulation of the American Patriot Act" and that Canadian intelligence agencies have the weakest oversight in the Western world.

"No matter what we do, no matter what laws we pass, we cannot throw away all of our rights, all of our liberties, all of our traditional freedoms because we are afraid of rare instances of criminal activity," he said at the time.

On Saturday, the message to Canadian officials was clear. "We think that the government should go back to the drawing board…work in consultation with the privacy commissioner [and] seek the opinions of experts," Anderson continued.

Hearings on C-51 are scheduled to continue when the House reopens on March 23.

On Twitter, the actions are being updated under the hashtag #StopC51. #stopc51 Tweets

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

U.S. Government Buys Surveillance Technology To Track Drivers in Real Time

Screenshot of Vigilant Solutions database.

By By Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch
Local government officials have the ability to track individual drivers in the U.S. in real time and take pictures of the occupants of their vehicles, with new “truly Orwellian” technology purchased from companies like Vigilant Solutions, according to new documents uncovered by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

One of the documents is a ten page U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) memo stating that the technology behind the National License Plate Reading Initiative that was launched in December 2008 allows it to capture “vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle.” Another May 2011 memo notes that this system has the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos.”

These details complement findings by the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. Department of Justice has built a secret national database to track vehicle license plates around the country that now holds “hundreds of millions of records about motorists.”

While the program was originally designed to catch drug traffickers, it has now become a routine way for government agencies to find anyone that they suspect is associated with a crime. “Many state and local law-enforcement agencies are accessing the database for a variety of investigations, putting a wealth of information in the hands of local officials who can track vehicles in real time on major roadways,” writes Devlin Barrett in the Journal.

A December 2013 memo from the Milwaukee police explains how such technology works and the “standard operating procedures” for the use of the data gathered.

“(M)anufacturers and law enforcement agencies have argued that images of license plates cannot be used to identify individuals, and thus do not infringe on our individual privacy,” writes Sonia Roubini of the ACLU in an article that explain the significance of the newly released memos. “This argument is thin already, but it certainly doesn’t fly with regards to photographs of the driver or passengers inside of a vehicle — especially in the era of face recognition analytics.”

The ACLU says that the biggest vendor of automatic license plate recognition technology is Vigilant Solutions, based in Livermore, California. The company has been quite open about the fact that it operates the Law Enforcement Archival and Reporting Network-National Vehicle Location Service that now holds some two billion records, and adds some 100 million records every month.

Indeed a October 2014 Vigilant Solution press release offers details on new facial recognition technology that they are hoping to sell police departments.

“The new Vigilant Mobile Companion app improves the return on investment that agencies are seeing from their investments in license plate recognition and facial recognition technologies by expanding the benefits out to everyone in the agency – patrol, investigative, detention, and other areas,” the company writes. “In addition to the license plate recognition capture and analytic tools, the app also features Vigilant’s powerful FaceSearch facial recognition which analyzes over 350 different vectors of the human face. The FaceSearch element of Mobile Companion allows officers in the field to snap a photo of a willing subject and have their face matched against a gallery of over 13 million pre-populated mugshot and registered sex offender images as well as any other images that the agency uploads into its own gallery.”

But the ACLU points out that if such as system is used to track occupants of all vehicles rather than just willing subjects, it would violate laws on privacy.

“In a democratic society, we should know almost everything about what the government’s doing, and it should know very little to nothing about us, unless it has a good reason to believe we’re up to no good and shows that evidence to a judge. If you aren’t the subject of a criminal investigation, the government shouldn’t be keeping tabs on when you go to the grocery store, your friend’s house, the abortion clinic, the antiwar protest, or the mosque,” adds Kade Crockford, also at the ACLU. “Unfortunately, that basic framework for an open, democracy society has been turned on its head. Now the government routinely collects vast troves of data about hundreds of millions of innocent people, casting everyone as a potential suspect until proven innocent. That’s unacceptable.”

Other companies that operate in this field include MorphoTrust USA, owned by Safran from France which sell facial recognition techology to local governments. Another company namedPalantir, based in Palo Alto, California, sells database analysis technology.

Copyright © Pratap Chatterjee, CorpWatch, 2015

The Most Watched People On Earth — Offered Even More Surveillance: UK Prime Minister Wants To Ban All Encrypted Communications

Britain jumps at the opportunity to use terror attacks in France to justify more spying on everybody

David Cameron wants the UK under "total" surveillance.

By Zach Miners
The U.K. may ban online messaging services that offer encryption such as WhatsApp and Apple's iMessage, under surveillance plans laid out by Prime Minister David Cameron.

Services that allow people to communicate without providing access to their messages pose a serious challenge to law enforcement efforts to combat terrorism and other crimes, Cameron said Monday.

He didn't name specific apps, but suggested those with encryption would not jive with new surveillance legislation he's looking to enact if he gets re-elected this year. Such apps include WhatsApp, iMessage, Google Hangouts, Microsoft's Skype, CryptoCat, and more.

"In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which, even in extremists ... that we cannot read?" Cameron said, adding later, "No, we must not."

"The first duty of any government is to keep our country and our people safe," he said.

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CIA Will Be BIG Winners If Republicans Take Senate: GOP Intel Committee Chair Would Let CIA and NSA Run Rampant

The intel community has spent years being bashed by Senate Democrats. Things will be very different if Richard Burr is in charge.

Senator Richard Burr (R-NC): He supports torture, more surveillance, and secrecy.

By John Hudson
Republicans stand to gain as many as eight seats in the Senate this election. But America's spies stand to gain much, much more.

If the Nov. 4 elections deliver a GOP-controlled Senate, the chairmanship of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee is likely to go to a North Carolinian whose unwavering support for the CIA and NSA could radically transform the committee's oversight agenda.

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), an outspoken defender of enhanced interrogation techniques and broad government surveillance powers, is next in line for the chairmanship. Unlike the current Democratic head of the committee, Dianne Feinstein of California, Burr has been harshly critical of a yet-to-be-released report on the Bush administration's post-9/11 torture practices -- a view shared by many in the agency.

And although Burr's views about NSA data collection largely mirror Feinstein's, his distaste for publicity and devotion to secrecy could fundamentally alter the way the committee operates on a day-to-day basis. "I personally don't believe that anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should ever be discussed publicly," Burr told reporters in March. "If I had my way, with the exception of nominees, there would never be a public intelligence hearing."

For an intel committee that has feuded publicly with CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper with a ferocity not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s, the change would be stark.

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Is Glenn Greenwald's New 'Independent Investigative' News Corp A Myth?: Story 'Delayed' After Complaints From US Government

Glenn Greenwald. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

By Donn Marten
On Monday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitter that his long-awaited NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight. By Tuesday morning, much to the dismay of myself and many others it appeared that the site - which since its rollout has been disappointly devoid of new material - has caved to government pressure tactics and did not post the story.

According to a rather cryptic Tweet by Greenwald later on Monday, "After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing". Might any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the "terrorists" and could a permanent delay be in the works?

RELATED STORY: Glenn Greenwald to Publish Names of Americans NSA Spied On —
Calls it a 'The finale, a Big Missing Piece'

While I have remained a skeptic to the allegations that the new First Look Media venture that lured Greenwald with the siren song of creating a new and uncompromising investigative journalism forum that was an alternative to the entrenched corrupt state-corporate media the pulling of the big story only serves to bolster them. When you throw in with the billionaire wolves you will sooner or later being devoured and EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's agenda has already been found by some, for example journalist Chris Floyd to be suspect with support to both the coup government in Kiev as well as the right-wing regime of the newly elected Narendra Modi of India. The problem is that at the end of the day all of these one-percenter elite pigs stick together and Greenwald should have been far more judicious in his association with one of them.

RELATED STORY: Assange Attacks Glenn Greenwald as a Gatekeeper - Accuses Greenwald of
Removing Key Facts from Story Based On Snowden Document

It would have been a brilliant touch were the story of NSA surveillance of domestic political dissidents and well known figures were to have broken during the week of the orgy of flag-sucking excess that is the Fourth of July and Greenwald may have ill-advisedly tipped his hand during that interview with GQ "The Man Who Knows Too Much" when he alluded to fireworks:

I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

For now at least the fireworks show has been postponed.

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Google Had Close Relationship With the NSA: Emails Show Google Executives and NSA 'Coordinated' On A Variety of Issues

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. (Photo by
Charles Haynes)

By Jason Leopold
Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying.

RELATED STORY: Google Execs Running 'Operations' in Coordination With CIA and State Department Documents Reveal

Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.

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Stingray, the Cell Phone Spying Device: US Government 'Disappears' Stingray Spying Records

(Click to see full-sized image)

By Peter Van Buren

We’ve heard variations on the phrase “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” from the government for quite some time. It appears this may be true, at least if you are the government.

In the case of Stingray, a cell phone spying device used against Americans, the government does have something to hide and they fear the release of more information. Meanwhile, the Fourth Amendment weeps quietly in the corner.

Stingray

Cell phone technology is very useful to the cops to locate you and to track your movements. In addition to whatever as-yet undisclosed things the NSA may be up to on its own, the FBI acknowledges a device called Stingray to create electronic, “fake,” cell phone towers and track people via their phones in the U.S. without their knowledge. The tech does not require a phone’s GPS. This technology was first known to have been deployed against America’s enemies in Iraq, and it has come home to be used against a new enemy– you.

Stingray, also known as an International Mobile Subscriber Identity, or IMSI, catcher, works like this. The cell network is designed around triangulation and whenever possible your phone is in constant contact with at least three towers. As you move, one tower “hands off” your signal to the next one in your line of motion. Stingray electronically inserts itself into this process as if it was a (fake; “spoofed”) cell tower itself to grab location data before passing your legitimate signal back to the real cell network. The handoffs in and out of Stingray are invisible to you. Stingrays also “inadvertently” scoop up the cell phone data of anyone within several kilometers of the designated target person. Though typically used to collect location metadata, Stingray can also capture conversations, texts and mobile web use if needed.

Stingray offers some unique advantages to a national security state: it bypasses the phone company entirely, which is handy if laws change and phone companies no longer must cooperate with the government, or simply if the cops don’t want the phone company or anyone else to know they’re snooping.

This has led the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to warn

“A Stingray— which could potentially be beamed into all the houses in one neighborhood looking for a particular signal— is the digital version of the pre-Revolutionary war practice of British soldiers going door-to-door, searching Americans’ homes without rationale or suspicion, let alone judicial approval… [Stingray is ] the biggest technological threat to cell phone privacy.”

Trying to Learn about Stingray

Learning how Stingray works is difficult.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a FOIA request for more information on Stingrays, but the FBI is sitting on 25,000 pages of documents explaining the device that it won’t release.

The device itself is made by the Harris Corporation. Harris makes electronics for commercial use and is a significant defense contractor. For Stingray, available only to law enforcement agencies, Harris requires a non-disclosure agreement that police departments around the country have been signing for years explicitly prohibiting them from telling anyone, including other government bodies, about their use of the equipment “without the prior written consent of Harris.”

A price list of Harris’ spying technology, along with limited technical details, was leaked online, but that’s about all we know.

Though the non-disclosure agreement includes an exception for “judicially mandated disclosures,” there are no mechanisms for judges even to learn that the equipment was used at all, thus cutting off any possibility they could know enough demand disclosure. In at least one case in Florida, a police department revealed that it had decided not to seek a warrant to use the technology explicitly to avoid telling a judge about the equipment. It subsequently kept the information hidden from the defendant as well. The agreement with Harris goes further to require law enforcement to notify Harris any time journalists or anyone else files a public records request to obtain information about Stingray and also demands the police department assist Harris in deciding what information to release.

Something to Hide

An evolving situation in Florida shows how hard the government is working to keep the details of its Stingray spying on Americans secret.

The ACLU originally sought Stingray records in Sarasota, Florida after they learned a detective there obtained permission to use the device simply by filing an application with a local court, instead of obtaining a probable-cause warrant as once was required by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It became clear that the Sarasota police had additionally used Stingray at least 200 times since 2010 without even the minimal step of even notifying a judge. In line with the non-disclosure agreement, very rarely were arrested persons advised that Stingray data was used to locate and prosecute them.

The ACLU, which earlier in 2014 filed a Florida state-level FOIA-type request with the Sarasota police department for information detailing its use of Stingray, had an appointment with the local cops to review documents. The local police agreed to the review. However, the June 2014 morning of the ACLU’s appointment, U.S. Marshals arrived ahead of them and physically took possession of the files. The Marshals barred the Sarasota police from releasing them. The rationale used by the federal government was that having quickly deputized a Sarasota cop, all Sarasota records became federal property.

“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for Stingray information,” an ACLU spokesperson said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”

The Cops are Lying in Court about Stingray

Yeah, it gets worse. According to emails uncovered by the ACLU, Florida law enforcement had concealed the use of Stingray in court documents. Specifically, one e-mail from Sarasota police to North Port police states, “In reports or depositions we simply refer to the assistance as ‘received information from a confidential source regarding the location of the suspect.’ To date this has not been challenged.” By hiding the fact from the court (and the defendant) that information used in the prosecution came from Stingray, the police effectively blocked any possibility that that information could be challenged in court. This appears in direct confrontation with the Sixth Amendment’s right to confront witnesses.

Russell Covey, a law professor at Georgia State University, stated

“The failure of law enforcement officials to disclose to courts the actual source of their information and to pretend that it came from a ‘confidential source,’ is deceptive and possibly fraudulent. Affirmatively misleading the courts about the source of evidence in sworn warrant applications would clearly constitute a constitutional violation.”

A Court Says the Feds Can Hide the Records

Following the feds’ seizure of the Stingray records, the ACLU filed an emergency motion with a Florida court that would require Sarasota to make its Stingray records available. However, in a decision issued June 17, 2014, a Florida state circuit court judge found that his court lacked jurisdiction over a federal agency, allowing the transfer of the Stingray documents to the feds and de facto blocking their release.

The ACLU plans further appeals. Unless and until they succeed, details of another way of spying on Americans will remain secret. The government does indeed have something to hide.

Peter Van Buren writes about current events at blog. His book,Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is available now from from Amazon.

Reprinted with permission from Center for Research in Globalization.