PRISM

[BigV]

well, defense against the subversion of the constitution is what checks and balances is all about, but never mind that quibble.

I think the core of this problem is a fattening and softening of American attitudes, BY DESIGN, by those who can profit from it, either by increasing their wealth or their power or both. By having unrealistic attitudes like "protect me from everything at all times" "be afraid of _________" "with us or agin us" repeatedly and relentlessly promoted, it gives ideas like this traction. Someone(s) will say, I can provide that protection, just sign here, or rather, look away while I "protect you" and by "protect you" I mean agglomerate more power and money to myself.

THEY'RE culpable for two reasons, simple greed for money and power, and by mistrusting the toughness (indeed, breeding it out of our attitudes) and resilience of regular, civilian citizens.

[Griff]

Amen, brother V.

[BigV]

I need to try out my voice more.

[Griff]

[Griff]

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been the recipient of multiple tips from the NSA. DEA officials in a highly secret office called the Special Operations Division are assigned to handle these incoming tips, according to Reuters. Tips from the NSA are added to a DEA database that includes “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records.” This is problematic because it appears to break down the barrier between foreign counter-terrorism investigations and ordinary domestic criminal investigations.

On and on...

[Lamplighter]

...along that line, here is a story about bank robbers, the FBI, and "tower dumps"

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...hy-it-matters/
Ars Technica
Nate Anderson
8/29/13

How “cell tower dumps” caught the High Country Bandits—and why it matters
Fishing expeditions can pay dividends—but do they need a warrant?

On February 18, 2010, the FBI field office in Denver issued a "wanted" notice
for two men known as "the High Country Bandits"—a rather grandiose name
for a pair of middle-aged white men who had been knocking down rural banks
in northern Arizona and Colorado, grabbing a few thousand dollars
from a teller's cash drawer and sometimes escaping on a stolen all-terrain vehicle (ATV).
<snip>
If you're the FBI, you ask a judge to approve a full "cell tower dump,"
in which wireless operators will turn over the records of every cell phone
that registered with a particular tower at a particular time.
(Phones "register" with the nearest cell towers so that the network knows how to route calls.)
And then you look for any numbers that stand out.
<snip>
The FBI actually received more than 150,000 registered cell phone numbers
from this particular set of tower dumps, despite picking the most rural locations possible.
What the case agents wanted to do was scan the logs from all four sites on the belief
that no single person was likely to be at all four banks during the robbery—except for the robber.

So the FBI dumped all the numbers into a Microsoft Access database and ran a query.
As expected, only a single number came back: Verizon Wireless phone number 928-205-xxxx
had registered with the tower closest to three of the banks on the day of each robbery.
(Verizon didn't have a cell tower covering the fourth bank.)
Further analysis found a second number, 928-358-xxxx,
that had been in contact with 928-205-xxx and that had registered with two of the towers in question.

The FBI then went back to the judge and obtained more particular
court orders covering these specific phone numbers.
The phone numbers came back with subscriber names attached: Joel Glore and Ronald Capito.
And the location data returned showed that these two phones had
been present at most of the 16 bank robberies under investigation.
Further, the data showed that both phones tended to travel from Show Low, Arizona,
to the location of each bank just before each robbery.
<snip>

BUT... About those 149,998 other numbers...

Bandits? Caught. Justice? Done.
But let's step back from the final result for a moment and ponder
the technique that provided the big lead —the cell tower dumps.
Should we have any concerns with the government getting that sort
of mass tracking information on so many Americans without a warrant?

Some judges say yes. Former Magistrate Judge Brian Owsley dealt routinely
with warrant requests and court orders until becoming a law school professor earlier this year;
he has just written an intriguing paper about the issues surrounding cell tower dumps.
In his view, these are clearly "searches" under the Fourth Amendment,
and they require a full warrant backed by evidence of "probable cause."

That's because the Supreme Court jurisprudence on surveillance has
relied for decades in part on the idea of someone's "reasonable expectation of privacy"
—and people certainly expect that their location won't be easily and routinely accessible
to law enforcement without a warrant, regardless of whether cell phone technology tracks them or not.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

Access ??? I don't want anyone having access to this kind of data who does't have a ƒucking SQL Server guy on staff.

[Lamplighter]

Don't worry about it... that was just a product placement ad.

[Lamplighter]

Here is a new program published today ... a program called "HEMISPHERE"
It's not just cell phones... it's every call that goes through an AT&T "switch"

NY Times
SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN
9/1/13

Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program
have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database
that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls
— parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s
hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.<snip>

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch
— not just those made by AT&T customers —
and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides
bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say;
technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record.
Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.<snip>

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T,
and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program.
It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called
“administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge
but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.<snip>

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates?
No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s.
“Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question:
whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data,
rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s
requirement that searches be “reasonable.”
Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government
in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Here is the article-link to the slides described above...


NY Times
9/1/13

Synopsis of the Hemisphere Project

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country.
Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents
and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

A slide presentation given to The New York Times shows that the Hemisphere Project
was started in 2007 and has been carried out in great secrecy.

[Lamplighter]

It's almost(?) getting boring to see one article after another about the ubiquitous abuses by the NSA.

The last time I remember such a drip, drip, drip of exposés were the Watergate crimes of Richard Nixon.

This 4 page article is based on the documents provided by Edward J. Snowden, and
describes the front-door, back-door, and digital methods that NSA is using to decipher
every coded message and to collect and store any/every message that the NSA, itself, decides.

The NSA apparently asked the news media to NOT PUBLISH
this article because it exposed things they wanted kept secret.
In this article, the Times tells why they have gone ahead with publication.

NY Times
NICOLE PERLROTH, JEFF LARSON and SCOTT SHANE
September 5, 2013

N.S.A. Foils Much Internet Encryption

The National Security Agency is winning its long-running secret war on encryption,
using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion
to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age,
according to newly disclosed documents.

The agency has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling,
that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records,
and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls
of Americans and others around the world, the documents show.
<snip>
Beginning in 2000, as encryption tools were gradually blanketing the Web,
the N.S.A. invested billions of dollars in a clandestine campaign to preserve its ability to eavesdrop.
Having lost a public battle in the 1990s to insert its own “back door”
in all encryption, it set out to accomplish the same goal by stealth.
The agency, according to the documents and interviews with industry officials,
deployed custom-built, superfast computers to break codes, and began collaborating
with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.
The documents do not identify which companies have participated.

The N.S.A. hacked into target computers to snare messages before they were encrypted.
And the agency used its influence as the world’s most experienced code maker
to covertly introduce weaknesses into the encryption standards followed by hardware
and software developers around the world.

Etc.,
Etc.,
Etc.,...

<Snip>

[Lamplighter]

This is a link to a "sister" article in The Guardian.
It gives a somewhat different perspective, and different details

The Guardian
James Ball, Julian Borger and Glenn Greenwald
9/5/13
US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

NSA and GCHQ unlock encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records
$250m-a-year US program works covertly with tech companies to insert weaknesses into products

Security experts say programs 'undermine the fabric of the internet

[Lamplighter]

It's not just the NSA that is trying to break codes...

US "drone attacks" may be vunerable to false GPS location signals, video transmissions, flight controls, etc.

Washington Post
Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman
9/3/13

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones

Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways
to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the
technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses
upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.
<snip>
Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign
are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post
by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor.<snip>

In 2011, the DIA concluded that an “al-Qaeda-affiliated research and development cell
currently lacks the technical knowledge to successfully integrate and deploy
a counterdrone strike system.” DIA analysts added, however, that
if al-Qaeda engineers were to “overcome these substantial design challenges,
we believe such a system probably would be highly disruptive for U.S. operations
in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”<snip>

Beyond the threat that al-Qaeda might figure out how to hack or shoot down a drone,
however, U.S. spy agencies worried that their drone campaign was becoming
increasingly vulnerable to public opposition.
Intelligence analysts took careful note of al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray drone strikes
as cowardly or immoral, beginning in January 2011 with a report titled
“Al-Qa’ida Explores Manipulating Public Opinion to Curb CT Pressure.”

[Lamplighter]

Some Dwellars may remember this post....

Ron Wyden is still at it... hinting, but not disclosing.
This weekend new issues may be becoming public.

With NSA revelations, Sen. Ron Wyden’s vague warnings about privacy finally become clear
It was one of the strangest personal crusades on Capitol Hill:
For years, Sen. Ron Wyden said he was worried that intelligence agencies were violating Americans’ privacy.
But he couldn’t say how. That was a secret.

Today another article clarifies more of what Wyden was all about...

Washington Post
Ellen Nakashima
9/8/13

Obama administration had restrictions on NSA reversed in 2011

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011
to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails,
permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases,
according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban
— at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches,
that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.<snip>

But in 2011, to more rapidly and effectively identify relevant foreign intelligence communications,
“we did ask the court” to lift the ban, ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said in an interview.
“We wanted to be able to do it,” he said, referring to the searching
of Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Together the permission to search and to keep data longer
expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate
or any specific authority from Congress.<snip>

The court’s expansion of authority went largely unnoticed when the opinion was released,
but it formed the basis for cryptic warnings last year by a pair of Democratic senators,
Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), that the administration had a “back-door search loophole”
that enabled the NSA to scour intercepted communications for those of Americans.
They introduced legislation to require a warrant, but they were barred by classification rules
from disclosing the court’s authorization or whether the NSA was already conducting such searches.
<snip>

[Griff]

Let's play the reallocation game! What would you do with $52.6 Billion a year that have demonstrably made us less free and likely less safe? Education, science research, space exploration, roads and bridges,...

[Lamplighter]

The beat goes on...monotonously and sadly

This article refers to NSA's collection and use of emails, social media, etc.,
to link people to others, who travels with whom, where they go.

Washington Post
Ellen Nakashima
9/28/13

NSA said to be studying some Americans’ social connections using e-mail, call data

The National Security Agency has been mining for several years
its massive collections of e-mail and phone call data to create extensive graphs
of some Americans’ social connections that can include associates, travel companions
and their locations, according to the New York Times.

The social graphing began in 2010 after the NSA lifted restrictions on the practice,
according to an internal January 2011 memorandum, the Times reported online Saturday.
It based its article on documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward J. Snowden and interviews with officials.

The graphing, or contact chaining, is conducted using details about phone calls and e-mails,
known as “metadata,” but does not involve the communications’ content,
according to the documents cited by the Times.

It is supposed to be done for foreign intelligence purposes only, the documents state,
but that category is extremely broad and may include everything from data
about terrorism and drug smuggling to foreign diplomats and economic talks.
<snip>
According to documents the Times cited, the NSA can augment the data
with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes,
Facebook profiles, airline passenger manifests and GPS location information.
<snip>

“This report confirms what whistleblowers have been saying for years:
The NSA has been monitoring virtually every aspect of Americans’ lives
— their communications, their associations, even their locations,”
said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.<snip>

William Binney, a former NSA technical director turned whistleblower, has
long warned of the NSA’s mining of data to create social graphs.
He alleged that it started in the second week of October 2001,
in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that it took place on a massive scale.
<snip>