Category Archives: Surveillance State

Encryption: The only cure for warrantless eavesdropping?

Governments around the world are beginning to recognize how the internet shifts the balance of power away from government toward the citizenry and they are taking the threat very seriously.  Not a week goes by without a news story of government attempts to expand their power to monitor and control the internet.  These power grabs usually take the form of legislation disguised as measures to control child porn, copyright infringement, or terrorism, but they have been less than successful because of the public outrage they sometimes inspire.  So, when it comes to monitoring internet communications, the government has taken to cloaking its operations in secrecy, thereby thwarting any opportunity for anyone to know whether they are being spied on.  If you have no way of finding out whether the government is monitoring your communications, you are powerless to challenge them on it.  And it is exactly that tactic that permits the government to sidestep any Fourth Amendment limitations.  Basically, when it comes to the internet, the requirement for a search warrant is dead.

So, while the government will presumably always have the power to pull the plug on the internet, you can fight back against their monitoring by using encryption.  According to reason.com, encryption schemes have not integrated well into email clients and other communications software…

But Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload fame has stepped in to fill the gap. Facing prosecution for his old cloud storage service, Dotcom has not only battled extradition to the United States from New Zealand, he has started Mega, a new encrypted cloud storage service. And what better to go with your encrypted cloud storage than an encrypted means of discussing what you keep in there? Says Dotcom of his new email service, “we’re going to extend this to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won’t have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email.”

Unfortunately, Kim Dotcom has not been very successful in fighting extradition to the U.S. where he faces charges of piracy, racketeering, copyright infringement, and money laundering.

Nevertheless, better encryption software is being pursued and is already available from some vendors.  The real question is whether those vendors will be able to adequately convince the public that they aren’t in cahoots with the government, providing them a way to decrypt the traffic without ever telling the public.  With the powers the government has acquired since 9/11, it seems very likely that a software company could be compelled to provide backdoor mechanisms for the NSA and be forced to keep it a secret under threat of prosecution.

Such is life in “the land of the free”.

NSA: Our spying on you is Constitutional. Trust us.

Glenn Greenwald comments on governmental use of secrecy to avoid Constitutional challenge to its warrantless wire-taping.

Both the Bush and Obama DOJ’s have relied on one tactic in particular to insulate its eavesdropping behavior from judicial review: by draping what it does in total secrecy, it prevents anyone from knowing with certainty who the targets of its surveillance are. The DOJ then exploits this secrecy to block any constitutional or other legal challenges to its surveillance actions on the ground that since nobody can prove with certainty that they have been subjected to this eavesdropping by the government, nobody has “standing” to sue in court and obtain a ruling on the constitutionality of this eavesdropping.

Amnesty International sued the government over this very strategy and…

The Obama justice department succeeded in convincing the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which vastly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. In the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion, released today, which adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ, while the Court’s four less conservative justices (Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) all dissented. This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government’s new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights.

So, the bottom line is this:

When the new 2008 FISA eavesdropping law was passed, all sorts of legal scholars debated its constitutionality, but it turns out that debate was – like the Constitution itself – completely academic. As both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly proven, they are free to violate the Constitution at will just so long as they do so with enough secrecy to convince subservient federal courts to bar everyone from challenging their conduct.

Now, what’s all this crap I keep hearing, often from libertarians, that the government’s job is to protect our rights?  Naively putting the government in charge of limiting its own powers is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.  The government couldn’t care less about your rights and when some politician suggests otherwise, he should be laughed off the stage.

P.S.  As you may have noticed, I tend to post about almost everything Greenwald says in his column at The Guardian.   Readers would do themselves a favor by skipping my posts and going directly to Greenwald’s column.  Nonetheless, I will continue to highlight his writings because he is a rarity in his prolific even-handed criticism of the rapid expansion of the police state under both political parties.  I am grateful that The Guardian gives him the means to reach a really broad audience.

Poking a sick (or pipe, hammer, etc) in the eye of Big Brother.

There’s a new game in Germany and it’s called Camover where the object is to destroy as many security cameras as possible.  From RT:

To participate in Camover, players form a team and give it a name – the ‘brigade’ part seems to be a must – and then go around town destroying CCTV cameras. The process has to be taped and posted online. Each team gets point for the number of destroyed cameras, as well as for creativity of execution.

The contest continues until February 19th when the European Police Congress is held in Berlin.  There is an interesting factor at play here.

Germany has strict personal image rights laws – global tech giant Google was forced to censor the faces of anyone whose picture was taken on their street view service, RT’s Peter Oliver reported.

Could this catch on elsewhere?  Maybe.

Once a local trend, Camover has now gone global, with ‘brigades’ reporting successes from all over the world. The newest teams have been formed in US, one of which, the’Barefoot Bandit Brigade,’ claimed to have destroyed 17 CCTV cameras in a move of “concrete sabotage against the system of surveillance and control.”

Afternoon Links

  • According to this New York Times article, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claim 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the U.S. in 2010 were suicides.  It turns out that a bullet to the brain is one of the most effective ways to kill yourself.  My question is, why the hell is the CDC tracking anything related to guns or suicide neither of which is a disease?  Oops.  I forgot.  As a government agency, there are no bounds to its mission.  Oh, and congratulations to the 50 million gun owning households that managed to make it through 2010 without any suicides.
  • There will be no armed drones in the U.S., at least until they change their minds or violate their own rules.  In terms of privacy, the FAA couldn’t care less.
  • Are republicans an endangered species?  We can only hope.  And we can only hope they take the democrats with them.  Personally, I’d much rather we replace the current two party system with a myriad of much more narrowly focused parties.  I can think of a couple.  An anti-war party.  A balanced budget party.  A small government party (I mean a real small government party, not the Tea Party).

 

 

Morning Links

  • President Obama condemned a third nuclear test by North Korea calling it a “highly provocative act” that demands “swift and credible action by the international community” against North Korea. Countries that already have nuclear weapons always strongly condemn other countries getting them.
  • Glenn Greenwald asks whether drones should be used to kill Christopher Dorner, the ex-police  officer who is accused of waging war on the LAPD.  Whether drones are or are not being used is in dispute.
  • The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in the 6,656 death of military personnel.  Of course, U.S. Presidents are always wiling to pay the cost of war with other people’s lives.  But, you rarely hear about the other “sacrifices” Presidents have been  willing to commit American soldiers to: 1700 limb amputations, 50,000 combat wounds, 130,000 cases of PTSD, and 253,330 cases of traumatic brain injury (6500 of which are severe).
  • The identity of Israel’s most secret prisoner has been uncovered,  I know it’s Kind of hard to imagine a democratic country secretly imprisoning a citizen without trial and then forcing the press to keep quiet about it.   Hahaha!   Just kidding about that last part.  Nothing is hard to imagine about democratic countries anymore.

  • Knut, the polar bear that became a sensation in 2007 and then unexpectedly died in 2011 will soon have a new home at the Berlin’s natural history museum.

 

 

 

[Updated below with a couple items from The Agitator]

  • Ohio Attorney General releases a report and animation (below) of a Cleveland incident where 13 cops fired 137 rounds at a suspect vehicle killing the occupants.  Police insist someone shot at them from the car and took off in pursuit of it.  The chase involved “nearly 60 vehicles”, but no gun or shell casings were ever found in the car.  The state attorney general condemned the actions as a systemic failure, but the police chief and city council insist that existing polices and procedures work fine.

Raytheon is watching you

Raytheon has developed software that mines information from social networks to track what  you’re been doing and what you might do in the future.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a “Google for spies” and tapped as a means of monitoring and control.

Ratheon doesn’t have a customer yet, but it has shared the technology with the U.S. government.  Luckily, we don’t need to worry about that because the U.S. government are the good guys.  If you don’t believe me, just ask them.

Morning LInks

  • No more Saturday mail delivery. which is expected to save about $2 billion annually (equal to about an eighth of its annual losses).  The postal workers union is condemning the move, which is probably the best indicator that it’s a step in the right direction.  Interestingly, this decision is being made by the USPS without Congressional approval (like so much of what happens in the Executive Branch these days).
  • Media outlets are reporting on a secret CIA drone base in Saudi Arabia from which drone attacks in Yemen are launch.  While the American media has known about this base for some time, they withheld reporting on it at the government’s request because “the goddamn American people have no business knowing what their government is doing in their name.”  [That last comment is really more of a paraphrasing of American governmental attitude than a specific quote]
  • 18 y/o girl gets 30 days in the slammer for flipping off the judge.  This is right after the judge doubled her bond because of her lack of contrition.  The girl was charged with possession of the prescription drug Xanax.  Most media hasn’t even batted an eyelash at the harshness of the 30-day penalty. While it might not have been in her best interest to piss off the judge, like her, I have no respect for a justice system that would charge and prosecute someone for possession of Xanax to begin with.
  • A new report says the that the Britain’s MI5  wants to install black boxes on UK networks to enable them to monitor virtually everything their citizens say and do online.  While there is some speculation that encryption would render such a system useless, the part of the report that deals with that issue was redacted because, as is the case in any modern democracy, the government can’t have the population knowing what they plan to do.

The internet: Soon to be part of the military industrial complex

This piece by Glenn Greenwald explores how the government is taking over the internet using the same tactics it used to grow the U.S. military into the largest and most aggressive force on the planet.

What Dwight Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex has been feeding itself on fear campaigns since it was born. A never-ending carousel of Menacing Enemies – Communists, Terrorists, Latin American Tyrants, Saddam’s chemical weapons, Iranian mullahs – has sustained it, and Cyber-Threats are but the latest.

Step 1 is fear mongering. This has been in full swing since 2010 and continuously ramping up.

Step 2 is for the government  to saturate the media with reports about how the U.S. must defend itself from the cyber warfare programs of other states even though the U.S. is easily the biggest cyber warfare aggressor.

Step 3 is to get legislation passed that grants the executive branch the powers it needs to exert command control.

Step 4 is to grow the budget for the divisions within the NSA and Pentagon in charge of cyber warfare.

Step 5 is to make sure the government methods, rules, and involvement are secret so it cannot be challenged.

Step 6 is to bring in private sector partners, who have already proven their willingness to sell out their customers for the promise of a big government contract.

All of these steps are already in full swing, ensuring that the kind of popular uprisings we’re seeing in other police states will never happen in this one.

CISPA back in the news

From RT:

In an attempt to scare the public with a looming cyber attack on US infrastructure, US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is once again pushing Congress to pass legislation allowing the government to have greater control over the Internet.

The use of fear-mongering as a tactic to convince people to allow the government to have more power is so common that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow these days.  Despite the government’s history of cover-ups and intentionally deceptive propaganda, people still listen to them as if they actually still possess a shred of credibility.  But…

Privacy advocates had expressed concern that the US government would be able to read Americans’ personal e-mails, online chat conversations, and other personal information that only private companies and servers might have access to. The head of the National Security Agency promised it wouldn’t abuse its power, but critics have remained skeptical.

Yeah, me too.  In fact, skeptical is too kind a word.  The internet is the biggest threat to government ever conceived because it actually provides a means for an entire population to rise up in rebellion in a matter of hours.  This is more than a little terrifying to everyone with a vested interest in the status quo (which includes everyone with power and almost everyone with a lot of money).  Initially their attempts to gain control over the internet were dressed up in the cause of fighting child pornography, but after that failed to bear fruit, they decided to use anti-piracy and anti-terror crusades to justify the power grab.

And what about this little clip from reuters:

She urged Congress to pass legislation governing cyber security so the government could share information with the private sector to prevent an attack on infrastructure, much of which is privately owned.

Since when does government need Congressional approval to share information with the private sector?    Because they sure as hell don’t need it when they intentionally leak classified information that makes the government look good…