Secret Court Document Finds Spy Techniques Unconstitutional

Justice Department Fights To Keep It Hidden

By Ryan W. Neal

The Justice Department may soon be forced to reveal a classified document that details unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. The Justice Department has fought to keep the document secret for about a year, but a recent court order demands that they respond to a formal request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation by next week, June 7, 2013.

This document was first revealed last July by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to call attention to an expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 -- which then-Sen. Barack Obama voted for . According to Wyden, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the government violated the Fourth Amendment. The FISC mostly operates in secret, so the actual court decision remained classified. Wyden was only able to say the FISC decision existed; he was unable to disclose any details about the actual surveillance techniques that were deemed unconstitutional or how many Americans they affected.

The EFF took legal action to learn more about the FISC decision. An initial victory in a district court established in the public record that the Justice Department does possess an 86-page FISC decision on unconstitutional surveillance methods that was published Oct. 3, 2011. The decision found that some techniques were “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment,” and that the court concluded that “on at least one occasion,” the Justice Department “circumvented the spirit of the law.”

The EFF’s next goal is to make the actual FISC decision public. The EFF had submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the document to be declassified, but the Justice Department objected to the FOIA request on the grounds that making the FISC decision public would damage national security. It also argued that it didn’t even have the proper legal authority to release the FISC decision. A district court ruled in favor of the Justice Department and upheld the decision to keep the FISC document a secret.

The EFF decided to take its case directly to the FISC last week, and filed a motion to disclose the court records. On Friday, FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton ordered the Justice Department to submit any argument against the motion no later than 5 p.m. on June 7.

Of course, the Justice Department is likely to return with many of the same arguments as before. The difference, as Slate points out, is that this time the FISC, which has been under fire for its lack of transparency, will be deciding on the arguments. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is working on a law that requires declassified versions of FISC decisions be made available to the public.

This could be an opportunity for the FISC to show that it is willing to be transparent. After all, it’s a decision it made nearly 20 months ago that was designed to protect the American people from unconstitutional intrusion by their government.

New technologies have made it easier for the Justice Department to spy on Americans, but others have fought back recently. Google has publicly fought against National Security Letters requesting user data, and more recently, a judge rejected and exposed an FBI proposal to use malware to turn a personal computer into a surveillance device. 

Would You Ever Know If The Government Is Tracking You?

By Patrick C. Toomey

Court rulings unsealed last week in Washington show for the first time a behind-the-scenes legal battle over when the government should have to tell you that it's tracking your location and reading your email. These documents—which came to light only as the public learned more about the government's controversial investigation of Fox News journalist James Rosen—reveal significant new details about the government's obligation to provide notice, after the fact, when it obtains geolocation data or obtains stored email messages. Indeed, the court orders bring to light a striking contrast: federal prosecutors in Washington routinely provide notice to individuals they track using cell-phone geolocation data, even if that notice is delayed, yet the government strenuously resists giving any notice to individuals when searching and reading their emails.

The government is required to tell you when it listens in on your phone calls or searches your home. Now, it appears that at least some prosecutors provide delayed notice when they use cell-phone data to track your location in real-time. If prosecutors in Washington can provide such notice, then prosecutors elsewhere should be doing it too. Last year, the public learned that the phone companies receive a staggering 1.3 million surveillance requests per year, many of which are likely for geolocation data. Although notification is apparently the norm in Washington we're not aware of similar practices anywhere else in the country.

As for government searches of your personal email account, you will likely never know—unless you are ultimately charged with a crime or your email service provider voluntarily tells you about the search (something few do, often because the government obtains a gag order). The lack of notice for email searches appears to be a central question in court documents unsealed last week, which show the government trying to convince at least three judges that it has no duty to provide notice to email subscribers.

The new details emerged in a series of court opinions debating whether the government was ever required to tell Rosen that it had obtained a warrant to search his Gmail account. Relying on the convoluted and outdated federal statute governing email searches—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA)—the government argued that it was excused from providing notice. U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola of the D.C. District Court rejected the government's argument and highlighted the perverse consequences of its position. Pointing out that federal prosecutors in Washington typically provide notice when tracking a person's movements using cell-phone data, Judge Facciola wrote:

[T]he user of a cell phone whose telecommunications data has been intercepted and captured pursuant to a warrant would ultimately learn that the government has been surveilling her, even though a portion of that surveillance may have occurred when she was in a public place. The e-mail account holder, on the other hand, would never learn of the search of the entire contents of her email account. Thus, as the government would have it, while it would have to tell a person that it followed his movements one day as he walked from K Street to Connecticut Avenue, it would never have to tell him that it has read and copied the entire contents of the e-mail account that he opened when he arrived at his office on K Street.

While the government was unable to convince Magistrate Judge Facciola, it appealed and ultimately persuaded Chief Judge Royce Lamberth that it had no obligation to notify Rosen of the email search. In particular, Chief Judge Lamberth held that the government's duty to provide notice was satisfied when investigators presented the warrant to the email service provider—in this case, Google. Magistrate Judge Facciola had previously rejected the government's interpretation of the notification statute, describing it as a "meaningless act of telling the ISP what it already knows." Facciola also observed that "[i]t is irrational to think that Congress would . . . grant the government a perpetual dispensation from ever notifying a person of the remarkable intrusion that a search of his email account creates."

These court opinions and filings tell us a great deal about how the government interprets its authority to obtain highly personal information, and the extent to which it interprets the law to avoid informing individuals when they have been spied upon. The documents also prompt further questions and significant concerns. For instance, we learned for the first time that federal prosecutors in Washington generally give delayed notice to the targets of cell-phone geolocation tracking—but what about prosecutors in other parts of the country, at the federal, state, and local level? Is this practice the result of a specific court ruling confined to our nation's capital, or does it reflect a national policy adopted nation-wide by the Department of Justice?

Even more, the documents show that the government seeks to access ever-greater quantities of our personal information with even less protection for individuals. Our email accounts contain vast amounts of private information, including personal communications, financial records, and other sensitive material. Yet courts do not even mandate the kind of notice that would be required if the government wanted to rifle through the letters we keep at home. Our laws have not caught up to the reality of today's electronic communications. The government should be required to notify individuals it targets for searches, whether electronic or physical, even if that notice is delayed for a time. Currently, individuals will only learn of these electronic searches if and when they are charged with a crime. The strange result of this policy: innocent people who are never charged will never learn that they were the subject of government surveillance and this type of intrusive search.

The Department of Justice has long kept the public in the dark about the scale of its surveillance activities. Such secrecy over surveillance powers is simply not appropriate in a democracy.

Anti-Surveillance Stealth Wear

Promises To Thwart Cell Tracking and Drones

In a move that demonstrates that drones, facial recognition technology, and cellphone snooping are starting to affect the broader culture, the New York-based artist has designed a line of high-tech garments made with sophisticated fabrics that can block signals and thwart cameras.

Set to launch next week in London as part of a collaborative project with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, Harvey’s line of “Stealth Wear” clothing includes an “anti-drone hoodie” that uses metalized material designed to counter thermal imaging used by drones to spot people on the ground.

He’s also created a cellphone pouch made of a special “signal attenuating fabric.” The pocket blocks your phone signal so that it can’t be tracked or intercepted by devices like the covert “Stingray” tool used by law enforcement agencies like the FBI. And if that’s not enough, Harvey has also made what he calls an “XX-Shirt,” which uses material designed to “protect your heart from X-ray radiation.”

The 31-year-old artist, who studied mechanical engineering as an undergrad at Penn State, says the increased use of military surveillance technologies in civilian environments inspired him to create the clothing line. 

“Military technology is coming home from the war,” he tells me, referring to the growing use of spy drones across the United States. “These pieces are designed to live with it, to cope with it—to live in a world where surveillance is happening all the time.”

The artist’s past endeavours have taken a similar stand against the rise of surveillance technologies. A previous project called “CVDazzle” explored how face-painting and hair-styling could be used to thwart face recognition cameras. He’s not alone in this anti-snooping field, either. Last year, German artist Martin Backes created a counter-surveillance balaclava called “Pixelhead.” Meanwhile, others have tried using DIY methods such as infrared head torches to frustrate the operators of security cameras.

As surveillance becomes more ubiquitous, it seems, we can expect to see increasingly creative and innovative efforts to challenge it coming from all corners of society. Fashion might be most commonly associated with models and catwalks—but it’s a sign of the times that it can now be about drones and data mining, too.

Via: "Stealth"

Precrime Creeps Closer To Reality

Predictive Smartphone Location Tracking

A British research group has developed software that can predict, within 20 meters, where you will be 24 hours from now.

It’s actually surprisingly easy to predict your general, routine movements — home, car, office, lunch, car, home — but it has always been nigh impossible to predictbreaks in routine, such as a trip to the cinema or a holiday abroad.

The researchers, Mirco Musolesi, Manlio Domenico, and Antonio Lima of the University of Birmingham, cracked this problem by factoring in the location of your friends and your social interactions with those friends (phone calls, meet-ups, etc.) By simply analyzing how many calls you make to a friend, and by correlating your movement patterns, the researchers can predict your movements over the next 24 hours — even if you deviate dramatically from routine.

The repercussions of such an algorithm are immense, with possible applications that range from awesome to terrifying. On the relatively benign side of things, you can imagine a version of Google Now that knows where you will be tomorrow, and offers up suggestions for which clothes to wear, which other friends will be in the area, and where you should eat (plus a coupon, if the restaurant is one of Google’s partner). This application of the algorithm would be opt-in — if you want to enjoy the services that Google can provide by knowing your predicted location, then that’s your choice.

On the nefarious end of the spectrum, though, this algorithm could be the cornerstone of a Precrime Police Division, a la Minority Report. Precrime would track the location of known criminals via their smartphones, and put a tap on their calls to correlate their movements with their friends/known associates. Very quickly, the Precrime Police could create a map of where every criminal will be in the next 24 hours. It would probably be difficult to predict actual crimes, but at least you’d know where to station your cops.

It’s worth noting that some police departments are already doing something similar, but on a much broader scale: They’re collating all of the reports and arrests in their database, and then plotting them on a map to see where crime is most likely to occur on any given day. In regions where police forces are being downsized, technology will become increasingly important as a force amplifier — and eventually, I wouldn’t be surprised if a real, per-criminal precrime system is deployed.

Research paper: Interdependence and Predictability of Human Mobility and Social Interactions

Via: "Extreme Tech"

5 Creepy New Ways You Are Being Tracked

By Alex Kane,

1. GPS Devices In Candy Bars

Nestle really wants to find you--so much so that they’re placing Global Positioning System devices in their products,CBS News reports. 

The Nestle “We Will Find You” campaign has started in the United Kingdom. CBS reports that “once the winning candy bar wrapper is opened, the tracking device will go off and Nestle officials will be able to find the exact location of the customer.”

Once Nestle literally finds you, the customer can win over $16,000.

2. Forget ATM Cards--Use Your Hand!

In Japan, the Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank wants you to never have to remember to take your debit card to an ATM machine. Instead, customers will be allowed to “withdraw cash, make deposits and check account balances through simple palm scans,” according to The Japan Times.

The paper reports that all customers have to do to use the service is “input their birthday, put their palm on the scanner and input their PIN code.” On Thursday, the palm scanning system will expand to 18 branches.

3. Voice Identification By Law Enforcement

A Russian-owned company called SpeechPro has invented a tool so law enforcement authorities can identify a caller by their voice. U.S. authorities are looking into whether they can bring the practice here after successful trial runs in Mexico. Slate reports that “the company is working with a number of agencies in the United States at a state and federal level.”

The New York Observer notes that privacy activists are bound to be upset by SpeechPro’s products. “The blurb for  VoiceGrid ID  has a particularly dystopic echo, offering a ‘voice data management solution with unlimited database size’ in addition to system architecture that scale all the way up to ‘national system deployments.’”

4. Undercover Agents Using Cell Phones

Pacific Standard magazine picks up on a National Journal report that police in Tampa during the Republican National Convention “tried out a new system that turned ‘off-the-shelf smartphones and tablets into tools for sending real-time video, voice, and data.’”

In other words, as the magazine put it: “The guy next to you taking cellphone snapshots may not be a fellow traveller, but an undercover officer sending real-time video to a distant spy center.”

Furthermore, the National Journal reports, the phones used by Tampa police were linked up with “fixed-surveillance camera feeds… global-positioning system information, and traditional radio traffic.”

5. Followed To The Grave

The square digital barcodes that you can scan with a SmartPhone are now being used on headstones, the markers placed over graves.

NPR reports that these QR Codes are being developed by Lori and Rick Miller so that families can set up a website for deceased loved ones that is triggered by scanning your SmartPhone.

The Millers “are launching a new business called Digital Legacy's to sell the tags. Visitors to a tagged grave can pull out their smartphones, scan the QR symbol, and be sent to a personalized Web page for the deceased,” according to NPR.

Lori Miller tells NPR that “they can just upload the photos to the website and we can build their website for them...They give us a biography of their loved ones, and they can upload videos and backgrounds and music."

Other people besides the Millers have had similar ideas.

“And, as Lori Miller points out, the QR codes offer everyone a chance to get to know a stranger whose name or death date makes a passerby curious,” reports NPR.

Via: "Alter-Net"