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Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 08-10-2013
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Lavabit, the first technology firm to take the decision to shut down rather than disclose information to the federal government. In August, Lavabit owner Ladar Levison shut down his company after refusing to comply with a government effort to tap his customers' information. Levison has now confirmed the FBI was targeting NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who used Lavabit's services. But, he says, instead of just targeting Snowden, the government effectively wanted access to the accounts of 400,000 other Lavabit customers, forcing his decision to close. He now says that since first going public he's been summoned before a grand jury, fined $10,000 for handing over encryption keys on paper instead of digitally, and threatened with arrest for speaking out. The Justice Department began targeting Lavabit the day after Snowden revealed himself as the source of the NSA leaks.
To talk about the case, we are joined by Ladar Levison, founder, owner and operator of the email provider Lavabit. In Washington, D.C., we're joined by his lawyer, Jesse Binnall.
Welcome, both, to Democracy Now! It's great to have you back, Ladar. Explain to us what happened.
LADAR LEVISON: Yeah, well, I think it's important, just so you don't get me in trouble, Amy, I still can't confirm who the subject of the investigation was. That's the one piece of information they've kept redacted. But
AMY GOODMAN: You mean you can't confirm it was Edward Snowden.
LADAR LEVISON: I can't confirm that, no. But what I can say is that what they wanted was the ability to basically listen to every piece of information coming in and out of my network. And, effectively, what they needed were my SSL private keys. For those at home that don't know what SSL is, it's the little lock icon in your web browser. SSL is the technology that effectively secures all communication on the Internet, between websites, between mail servers. It secures instant messages. And it represents the identity of a business online. And they effectively wanted that from me, a very closely guarded secret, something I've compared to the secret formula for Coca-Cola, so that they could masquerade as me or as my business on the Internet and intercept all of the communications coming in.
AMY GOODMAN: How did they come to you?
LADAR LEVISON: They knocked on my door. They left a business card on my door sometime in May, and then we ended up linking up via email and setting up an appointment. And they came by my office, and we sat down, and I spent a couple hours explaining to them the nature of my system and the nature of my business. Now, it's probably important to mention that, at least in May, they still didn't knowat least the agents that approached mewho the target of the investigation was.
But I had pretty much have forgotten about it, until they came back at the end of June with their pen/trap and trace order, which is a law that's been on the books for 40 years that allows federal law enforcement to basically put a listening device on a telephone or a network to collect meta-information. It's just that in this case, the meta-information that they wanted was encrypted. So they wanted to peel back the encryption on everyone's information as they were connecting to my server, just so that they could listen to this one user. But yet, at the same time, they wouldn't provide any kind of transparency back to me to assure me that they were only collecting information on one user. And I had a real problem with that. Given the sensitivity of the information that they were asking for, and given how it would harm my reputation if I letif they ended up violating the court order, I just didn't feel it was appropriate to give them the access that they wanted. So I recruited Jesse, who we'll hear from in a minute, and he's been helping me fight that request ever since.
AMY GOODMAN: When the federal judge unsealed the documents in the case, allowing you to speak more candidlylet me ask Jesse Binnall this questionwhy did the judge do that?
JESSE BINNALL: Well, actually, the order unsealing the case is still at least partially under seal, but what we can say is that we had made a motionactually, two motionsone Ladar made himself before I was even involved in the caseto unseal this case and to get rid of the nondisclosure obligations on Ladar over a month ago. And now that there's an appeal pending in the Fourth Circuit, the court has finally lifted the majority of the privacy and the sealed nature of the case, and so we can finally talk about the record of everything that Ladar did go through now.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is happening right now, Jesse Binnall? Where does this case stand?
JESSE BINNALL: Well, right now we actually still have some legal issues pending at various stages of the process, but the majority of what's going on right now is there's an appeal that has been noted in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and there's a brief that will be filed by Ladar's legal team here within the next few days outlining our position on why the actions taken by the government are both unconstitutional and violate statute.
AMY GOODMAN: What exactly is at stake, Jesse Binnall?
JESSE BINNALL: What's at stake is the privacy issues of all Americans when they deal with communications by methods like email, when there's a third party involved, like Ladar's is a third party that facilitates people's communications, and whether the Fourth Amendment protects those communications.
LADAR LEVISON: Amy
JESSE BINNALL: The Fourth Amendment was
LADAR LEVISON: I was just going to say, Jesse, I think what's important to highlight here is that what's at stake is trust, trust on the Internet.
JESSE BINNALL: Absolutely, yes.
LADAR LEVISON: Can you trustwhen you're connected to PayPal, can you trust your browser to actually be communicating with PayPal or your bank, or is somebody in the middle? And these private keys that they were demanding are the technological mechanism for guaranteeing that trust. And by removing our ability to protect them, they're effectively violating thatforcing us to violate that trust.
AMY GOODMAN: I asked you when you came on the show before, Ladar, if you had received a national security letter, and you said you couldn't say. National security letter, thousands of Americans have received, and they face up to five years in prison if they even reveal that information to someone close to them, that demands they give out information. Can you say now? An NSL?
LADAR LEVISON: There's more than one issue at play here. I think that it's important to highlight that there are still things that I can't talk about, but that the most important thing, at least in my opinion, that I really wanted to talk about was this demand for the SSL key, and that has been unsealed. I decided very early on in this battle that I could live with turning over the keys if I could also tell people what was going on. How do you fight a law you can't tell anybody that it exists? How do you go to Congress without being able to relate what your story is and how their laws affected you? That's effectively how a democracy works, and they were handicapping it by restraining my speech.
AMY GOODMAN: What has your company done differently, what have you done differentlyyou own the companythan other companies to protect the security of your users?
LADAR LEVISON: Well, just because of my background in information security, I took a very serious approach when I designed and architected the system to effectively minimize its number of vulnerabilities. You know, I've spent a lot of time working with information technology in the financial services sector, so I was using the same types of protocols and procedures that a lot of banks use to protect information. And as a result, the information that they wanted to collect was not being passed around in unencrypted form. So there was no place for them to intercept it. And that was one of the big differentiators between, for example, my service and a lot of other services that they may or may not have approached. My system was effectively too secure to be tapped any other way.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about another issue. The National Security Agency, the NSA, has made repeated attempts to develop a tax against people using Tor, athat's T-O-Ra popular tool designed to protect online anonymity despite the fact the software is primarily funded and promoted by the U.S. government itself. That, I'm reading, from a recent Guardian piece. Ladar?
LADAR LEVISON: Mm-hmm, no, that's absolutely correct. Tor was sponsored originally by the U.S. government to allow people in countries like China, that were firewalled off from the rest of the world, to access the Internet freely. And it's actually designed to resist attempts by governments to uncover the identity of whoever is using the network. And to my knowledge, the network itself has actually been able to resist any attempts by the U.S. government to, you know, uncover the identity of users. But what theywhat the government has been doing is basically following a practice of taking over websites on the Tor network and then using them, the hijacked websites, to install malware on visitors' computers, and then using that malware to submit the actual IP or location of a person back to a server in Virginia, where the FBI is located. I don't necessarily have a real philosophical problem with them taking down websites that, you know, for example, promote child pornography, or otherwise facilitate the trade of illegal goods and services, but I do still have a philosophical problem with their practice of remotely loading malware onto people's computers without any kind of restriction, restraint or oversight.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you face imprisonment?
LADAR LEVISON: If I say little bit too much, I think I still could. I think one of the big reasons I'm not in prison now is all of the media attention.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your plans now? Are you going to restart Lavabit? Do you feel you have to go overseas to do this?
LADAR LEVISON: I feel if I did go overseas, I could run the service. But I'm not ready to give up on America yet. I think I have effectively come to the decision that I'm going to wait and see how the court case plays out. If Jesse and myself end up winning, I'll be able to reopen Lavabit here in the U.S. If I lose, I will probably end up turning over the service to somebody abroad and let them run it, so that I can stay here in America, and I'll move onto something else.
AMY GOODMAN: You were willing to hand over if it was just one person. Let's say it was Edward Snowden.
LADAR LEVISON: Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the distinction you make?
LADAR LEVISON: The distinction is access. What they wanted was unrestricted, unaudited access to everyone's communications. And that was something I was uncomfortable with. And if the summer of Snowden has taught us anything, it's that we can't trust our own government with access to information they shouldn't have access to.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you doing now to protect yourself? We just have 20 seconds.
LADAR LEVISON: Talking to you, trying to raise money through Lavabit.com and rally.org to help fight the case, and speaking out and hoping that somebody who has the ability to make a difference hears me.
AMY GOODMAN: Have other email providers come to you toare others going to be speaking out?
LADAR LEVISON: I don't know. I hope so. I think the big ones are doing everything they can, but they face a number of restrictions on their speech that really prevent them from saying what's really going on, just like I faced up until recently.
Panopticon of global surveillance - Peter Lemkin - 08-10-2013
The latest step in the evolution of America's Police State
"If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear."
So say many Americans. And many Germans as well.
But one German, Ilija Trojanow, would disagree. He has lent his name to published documents denouncing the National Security Agency (NSA), and was one of several prominent German authors who signed a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to take a firm stance against the mass online surveillance conducted by the NSA. Trojanow and the other authors had nothing to hide, which is why the letter was published for the public to read. What happened after that, however, was that Trojanow was refused permission to board a flight from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, to Miami on Monday, September 30. Without any explanation.
Trojanow, who was on his way to speak at a literary conference in Denver, told the Spiegel magazine online website that the denial of entry might be linked to his criticism of the NSA. Germany's Foreign Ministry says it has contacted US authorities "to resolve this issue". 10
In an article published in a German newspaper, Trojanow voiced his frustration with the incident: "It is more than ironic if an author who raises his voice against the dangers of surveillance and the secret state within a state for years, will be denied entry into the land of the brave and the free'." 11
Further irony can be found in the title of a book by Trojanow: "Attack on freedom. Obsession with security, the surveillance state and the dismantling of civil rights."
Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who oversees the NSA and other intelligence agencies, said recently that the intelligence community "is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes." 12
It's difficult in the extreme to see how this criterion would apply in any way to Ilija Trojanow.
The story is a poignant caveat on how fragile is Americans' freedom to criticize their Security State. If a foreigner can be barred from boarding a flight merely for peaceful, intellectual criticism of America's Big Brother (nay, Giant Brother), who amongst us does not need to pay careful attention to anything they say or write.
Very few Americans, however, will even be aware of this story. A thorough search of the Lexis-Nexis media database revealed a single mention in an American daily newspaper (The St. Louis Post-Dispatch), out of 1400 daily papers in the US. No mention on any broadcast media. A single one-time mention in a news agency (Associated Press), and one mention in a foreign English-language newspaper (New Zealand Herald).
Panopticon of global surveillance - David Guyatt - 09-10-2013
This is a courageous man. And he's nailed the principal concern too:
Quote:LADAR LEVISON: There's more than one issue at play here. I think that it's important to highlight that there are still things that I can't talk about, but that the most important thing, at least in my opinion, that I really wanted to talk about was this demand for the SSL key, and that has been unsealed. I decided very early on in this battle that I could live with turning over the keys if I could also tell people what was going on. How do you fight a law you can't tell anybody that it exists? How do you go to Congress without being able to relate what your story is and how their laws affected you? That's effectively how a democracy works, and they were handicapping it by restraining my speech.
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 16-10-2013
Purely coincidental I'm sure...
Quote:Former Labour minister accuses spies of ignoring MPs over surveillance
Nick Brown says there is 'uncanny' similarity between GCHQ programmes exposed by Edward Snowden and bill's proposals
Former minister Nick Brown says mass surveillance appears to be happening 'with or without parliament's consent'. Photograph: Chris Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images
- Rowena Mason, political correspondent
- The Guardian, Wednesday 16 October 2013
A former Labour cabinet minister has warned that GCHQ and Britain's other intelligence agencies appear to be undertaking mass surveillancewithout parliament's consent because the coalition failed to get the so-called "snoopers' charter" passed into law after Liberal Democrat opposition.
Nick Brown, a former chief whip who sat on the parliamentary committee scrutinising the draft communications data bill, said there was an "uncanny" similarity between the GCHQ surveillance programmes exposed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden and proposals in the first part of the bill.
The communications data bill dubbed the "snoopers' charter" by critics would have given GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 much greater powers to gather and save information about people's internet activities but it was shelved in the spring amid Lib Dem fears that it intruded too much into privacy.
Brown, a Labour MP, said that it "looks very much like this is what is happening anyway, with or without parliament's consent" under GCHQ's secret Tempora programme, which was revealed by the Guardian in July in reports based on files leaked by Snowden. Tempora allows GCHQ to harvest, store and analyse millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries by tapping the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic.
Brown's remarks closely echo those of Lord Blencathra, the Conservative chairman of the committee and a former Home Office minister, who on Monday said GCHQ may be operating "outside the law or on the very edge of the law" because of Tempora.
But in parliament, Theresa May, the home secretary, told the home affairs select committee there was nothing in the Snowden files that changed the case for new laws giving the security services more powers to monitor the internet. She also described the Guardian's publication of the material as "damaging to the public interest" and repeatedly rejected the need for a debate on oversight of the intelligence agencies.
Afterwards, it emerged that Julian Smith, a Conservative MP, had written to the Metropolitan police asking the force to investigate whether the Guardian has broken the law by communicating intelligence information obtained from Snowden. The MP wrote to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to ask if offences had been committed under Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000 or the Official Secrets Act.
A Guardian spokesman said: "The high public interest in the stories we have responsibly published is evidenced by the debates, presidential review and proposed legislative reforms in the US Congress, throughout Europe and in Westminster. We're surprised that, once again, it is being proposed that terror legislation should be used against journalists."
Brown, an ally of the former prime minister Gordon Brown, also called for "grown-up cross-party discussions" to look at how to protect the privacy of individual citizens as the security services seek to expand their ability to monitor the internet.
"The similarity between part 1 of the proposed data communications bill and the events Mr Snowden is describing as already taking place is uncanny," Brown said. "It covers the same set of circumstances. The bill was trying to be permissive in that all material could be saved for a year. It now looks very much like this is what is happening anyway, with or without parliament's consent.
"I agree with Lord Blencathra's account of the evidence. I was sufficiently concerned not to accept part 1 of the [draft communications data] bill."
On Tuesday night, two other Liberal Democrat members of the joint committee also questioned why the Home Office did not reveal the extent of GCHQ's spying capabilities during the committee's inquiry, which concluded the bill carried a risk of "trampling on the privacy of citizens".
Lord Strasburger, a businessman, said nothing was mentioned aboutTempora during two private "no holds barred sessions with the Home Office". "You have to wonder why, even in the secret sessions, none of the witnesses mentioned Project Tempora … It was highly relevant to our work and I believe that deliberate failure to reveal it amounts to misleading parliament," he said.
Last night, Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times, mounted a defence of the ability of journalists at her own paper and at the Guardian to publish public interest stories based on the files leaked by Snowden.
"I think … that those articles are very much in the public interest and inform the public," she said on BBC's Newsnight.
On claims by MI5 director general Andrew Parker that newspaper reports were causing "enormous damage" to the fight against terrorism, Abramson said that there had been no proof of actual harm to security.
"Those of us on the committee were never told by any Home Office officials about the fact the data was already available," Huppert said. "In our report, we accused them of being misleading. It seems they were far more misleading than we could have realised at the time. Presumably, the home secretary knew that this was information they already had available, in which case she was not fully open with the committee. If she didn't know, that raises real questions about her role."
He said the government must reveal which ministers knew about Tempora after Chris Huhne, the former Lib Dem energy secretary, said he was not aware of the programme during his time in government.
"We know the cabinet was not briefed," Huppert said. "We have no idea who was. Was it just the prime minister? Was it a handful of others? Who made the decision not to tell other people? This is incredibly alarming. I hope we will be able to see proper debate and parliamentary scrutiny of this issue. We know that the security services play a very important role but they should operate with public consent."
"We know the cabinet was not briefed," Huppert said. "We have no idea who was. Was it just the prime minister? Was it a handful of others? Who made the decision not to tell other people? This is incredibly alarming. I hope we will be able to see proper debate and parliamentary scrutiny of this issue. We know that the security services play a very important role but they should operate with public consent."
Panopticon of global surveillance - Carsten Wiethoff - 17-10-2013
An interesting article about the change in methods the NSA employs:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/15/the_nsa_s_new_codebreakers?page=full
Quote:Interviews with current and former intelligence officials conducted over the past two months have revealed that since 9/11, the NSA's computer scientists, electronic engineers, software programmers, and collection specialists have been remarkably inventive in finding new and innovative ways to circumvent the protections supposedly offered by encryption systems by compromising them through clandestine means. Among these clandestine means are CIA and FBI "black-bag jobs," as well as secret efforts by the U.S. intelligence community to interdict the shipment of advanced encryption technology to America's enemies around the world and insert "back doors" into commercially available computer, communications, and encryption technologies that allow the NSA to covertly access these systems without the users knowing it.
But the most sensitive of these clandestine techniques, and by far the most productive to date, is to covertly hack into targeted computers and copy the documents and message traffic stored on these machines before they are encrypted, a process known within the NSA as "Endpoint" operations. Responsibility for conducting these Endpoint operations rests with the computer hackers of the NSA's cyberespionage unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO).
According to sources familiar with the organization's operations, TAO has been enormously successful over the past 12 years in covertly inserting highly sophisticated spyware into the hard drives of over 80,000 computer systems around the world, although this number could be much higher. And according to the sources, these implants are designed in such a way that they cannot be detected by currently available commercial computer security software. It has been suggested to me by a reliable source that "this is not an accident," with the insinuation being that many of the biggest commercially available computer security software systems made in the United States and overseas have been compromised by the NSA, either covertly or with the knowledge and consent of the companies that manufacture these systems.
Panopticon of global surveillance - David Guyatt - 17-10-2013
Carsten Wiethoff Wrote:An interesting article about the change in methods the NSA employs:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/10/15/the_nsa_s_new_codebreakers?page=full
Quote:Interviews with current and former intelligence officials conducted over the past two months have revealed that since 9/11, the NSA's computer scientists, electronic engineers, software programmers, and collection specialists have been remarkably inventive in finding new and innovative ways to circumvent the protections supposedly offered by encryption systems by compromising them through clandestine means. Among these clandestine means are CIA and FBI "black-bag jobs," as well as secret efforts by the U.S. intelligence community to interdict the shipment of advanced encryption technology to America's enemies around the world and insert "back doors" into commercially available computer, communications, and encryption technologies that allow the NSA to covertly access these systems without the users knowing it.
But the most sensitive of these clandestine techniques, and by far the most productive to date, is to covertly hack into targeted computers and copy the documents and message traffic stored on these machines before they are encrypted, a process known within the NSA as "Endpoint" operations. Responsibility for conducting these Endpoint operations rests with the computer hackers of the NSA's cyberespionage unit, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO).
According to sources familiar with the organization's operations, TAO has been enormously successful over the past 12 years in covertly inserting highly sophisticated spyware into the hard drives of over 80,000 computer systems around the world, although this number could be much higher. And according to the sources, these implants are designed in such a way that they cannot be detected by currently available commercial computer security software. It has been suggested to me by a reliable source that "this is not an accident," with the insinuation being that many of the biggest commercially available computer security software systems made in the United States and overseas have been compromised by the NSA, either covertly or with the knowledge and consent of the companies that manufacture these systems.
The continuation of PROMIS - albeit more advanced and using "insertions" more often than placement...
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 19-10-2013
Dutch Telcos Used Customer Metadata, Retained To Fight Terrorism, For Everyday Marketing Purposes
from the I'm-shocked,-shocked dept
One of the ironies of European outrage over the global surveillance conducted by the NSA and GCHQ is that in the EU, communications metadata must be kept by law anyway, although not many people there realize it. That's a consequence of the Data Retention Directive, passed in 2006, which:requires operators to retain certain categories of data (for identifying users and details of phone calls made and emails sent, excluding the content of those communications) for a period between six months and two years and to make them available, on request, to law enforcement authorities for the purposes of investigating, detecting and prosecuting serious crime and terrorism.
Notice the standard invocation of terrorism and serious crime as a justification for this kind of intrusive data gathering -- the implication being that such highly-personal information would only ever be used for the most heinous of crimes. In particular, it goes without saying that there is no question of it being accessed for anything more trivial -- like this, say:Some Dutch telecommunications and Internet providers have exploited European Union laws mandating the retention of communications data to fight crime, using the retained data for unauthorised marketing purposes.
Of course, the news will come as no surprise to the many people who warned that exactly this kind of thing would happen if such stores of high-value data were created. But it does at least act as a useful reminder that whatever the protestations that privacy-destroying databases will only ever be used for the most serious crimes, there is always the risk of function creep or -- as in the Netherlands -- outright abuse. The only effective way to stop it is not to retain such personal information in the first place.http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131017/08120824913/dutch-telecoms-companies-used-highly-personal-user-data-retained-to-fight-terrorism-serious-crimes-everyday-marketing-purposes.shtml
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 25-10-2013
Meet the Private Companies Helping Cops Spy on Protesters
Promotional materials for private spy companies show that mass surveillance technology is being sold to police departments as a way to monitor dissent
A number of private spying companies offer services to help police keep tabs on individual protesters' tweets and Facebook posts.
By JOHN KNEFEL
October 24, 2013 3:16 PM ET
The documents leaked to media outlets by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden this year have brought national intelligence gathering and surveillance operations under a level of scrutiny not seen in decades. Often left out of this conversation, though, is the massive private surveillance industry that provides services to law enforcement, defense agencies and corporations in the U.S. and abroad a sprawling constellation of companies and municipalities. "It's a circle where everyone [in these industries] is benefitting," says Eric King, lead researcher of watchdog group Privacy International. "Everyone gets more powerful, and richer."
Promotional materials for numerous private spy companies boast of how law enforcement organizations can use their products to monitor people at protests or other large crowds including by keeping tabs on individual people's social media presence. Kenneth Lipp, a journalist who attended the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia from October 19th to 23rd, tells Rolling Stone that monitoring Twitter and Facebook was a main theme of the week. "Social media was the buzzword," says Lipp. He says much of the discussion seemed to be aimed at designing policies that wouldn't trigger potentially limiting court cases: "They want to avoid a warrant standard."
See What Sen. Ron Wyden Had to Say About NSA Surveillance in Our Q&A
While the specifics of which police departments utilize what surveillance technologies is often unclear, there is evidence to suggest that use of mass surveillance against individuals not under direct investigation is common. "The default is mass surveillance, the same as NSA's 'collect it all' mindset," says King. "There's not a single company that if you installed their product, [it] would comply with what anyone without a security clearance would think is appropriate, lawful use."
The YouTube page for a company called NICE, for instance, features a highly produced video showing how its products can be used in the event of a protest. "The NICE video analytic suite alerts on an unusually high occupancy level in a city center," a narrator says as the camera zooms in on people chanting and holding signs that read "clean air" and "stop it now." The video then shows authorities redirecting traffic to avoid a bottleneck, and promises that all audio and video from the event will be captured and processed almost immediately. "The entire event is then reconstructed on a chronological timeline, based on all multimedia sources," says the narrator. According to an interview with the head of NICE's security division published in Israel Gateway, NICE systems are used by New Jersey Transit and at the Statue of Liberty, though it isn't clear if they are the same products shown in the video.
"Thousands of customers worldwide use NICE Security solutions to keep people safe and protect property," says Sara Preto, a spokesperson for NICE. She declined to confirm any specific clients, but added: "We work with law enforcement and other government agencies within the framework of all relevant and national laws."
Another program, made by Bright Planet and called BlueJay, is billed in a brochure to law enforcement as a "Twitter crime scanner." BlueJay allows cops to covertly monitor accounts and hashtags; three that Bright Planet touts in promotional material are #gunfire, #meth, and #protest. In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can "monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals," as well as "track department mentions." Bright Planet did not respond to a request for comment.
A third company, 3i:Mind, lays out a scenario for a potential law enforcement client that begins: "Perhaps you are tracking an upcoming political rally." It continues:
Once you set up the OpenMINDâ„¢ system to profile and monitor the rally, it will search the web for the event on web pages, social networking sites, blogs, forums and so forth, looking for information about the nature of the rally (e.g. peaceful, violent, participant demographics), try to identify both online and physical world activist leaders and collect information about them, monitor the event in real-time and alert you on user-defined critical developments.
The scenario concludes: "Your insight is distributed to the local police force warning them that the political rally may turn violent and potentially thwarting the violence before it occurs." The 3i:Mind website gives no clues at to which governments or corporations use their products, and public information on the company is limited, though they have reportedly shown their product at various trade shows and police conferences. The company didn't respond to a request for comment.Other companies are less upfront about how their products can be used to monitor social unrest. A product that will be familiar to anyone who attended an Occupy Wall Street protest in or around New York's Zuccotti Park is SkyWatch, by FLIR, pointed out to Rolling Stone by Lipp, the journalist who attended the police conference. SkyWatch is a mobile tower in the form of a two-person cab that can be raised two stories high to provide "an array of surveillance options," according to a promotional brochure. Those options include cameras and radar, as well as "customizable" options. The brochure says SkyWatch is perfect for "fluid operations whether on the front lines or at a hometown event." As of this writing, the NYPD still has a SkyWatch deployed in a corner of Zuccotti Park, where Occupy activists were evicted by the police nearly two years ago.
These promotional materials, taken together, paint a picture not only of local police forces becoming increasingly militarized, but also suggest departments are venturing into intelligence-gathering operations that may go well beyond traditional law enforcement mandates. "Two things make today's surveillance particularly dangerous: the flood of 'homeland security' dollars (in the hundreds of millions) to state and local police for the purchase of spying technologies, and the fact that spook technology is outpacing privacy law," says Kade Crockford, director of the Massachusetts ACLU's technology for liberty program and the writer of the PrivacySOS blog, which covers these issues closely. "Flush with fancy new equipment, police turn to communities they have long spied on and infiltrated: low-income and communities of color, and dissident communities."
Many of the legal questions surrounding these kinds of police tactics remain unsettled, according to Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security program at New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice. Information that is publicly available, like tweets and Facebook posts, is generally not protected by the Fourth Amendment, though legal questions may arise if that information is aggregated on a large scale especially if that collection is based on political, religious or ethnic grounds. "This information can be useful, but it can also be used in ways that violate the Constitution," says Patel. "The question is: what are [police departments] using it for?"
Rolling Stone contacted police departments for the cities of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. for comment on this story.
"The Philadelphia Police Department has their own cameras," says that force's spokesperson Jillian Russell. "The department does not have private surveillance companies monitor crime." She directed follow-up questions about software used to process big data to a deputy mayor's office, who didn't return a phone call asking for comment.
When asked if the LAPD uses programs to monitor protesters, a media relations email account sent an unsigned message that simply read: "We are not aware of this."
The other police departments did not respond to requests for comment.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/meet-the-private-companies-helping-cops-spy-on-protesters-20131024#ixzz2ihbeZDW6
Panopticon of global surveillance - David Guyatt - 25-10-2013
Quote:In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can "monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals," as well as "track department mentions."(my bolding)
I wonder how you define a "criminally predicated individual" prior to a crime taking place? Is it based on their criminal record or other more surreal methods?
Panopticon of global surveillance - Magda Hassan - 25-10-2013
David Guyatt Wrote:It really quite simple. It is any one who is awake and not yet brain dead.Quote:In another promotional document, the company says BlueJay can "monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals," as well as "track department mentions."(my bolding)
I wonder how you define a "criminally predicated individual" prior to a crime taking place? Is it based on their criminal record or other more surreal methods?