No Warrant, No Problem: How The Government Can Still Get Your Digital Data

04/12/2013

The U.S. government isn’t allowed to wiretap American citizens without a warrant from a judge. But there are plenty of legal ways for law enforcement, from the local sheriff to the FBI to the Internal Revenue Service, to snoop on the digital trails you create every day. Authorities can often obtain your emails and texts by going to Google or AT&T with a simple subpoena. Usually you won’t even be notified.

Two senators introduced legislation last month to update privacy protection for emails, but the bill remains in committee. Meantime, here’s how law enforcement can track you without a warrant now:

PHONE RECORDS: Who You Called, When You Called

Listening to your phone calls without a judge’s warrant is illegal if you’re a U.S. citizen. But police don’t need a warrant — which requires showing “probable cause” of a crime — to get just the numbers you called and when you called them, as well as incoming calls, from phone carriers. Instead, police can get courts to sign off on a subpoena, which only requires that the data they’re after is relevant to an investigation — a lesser standard of evidence.

Police can get phone records without a warrant thanks toSmith v. Maryland, a Supreme Court ruling in 1979, which found that the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure doesn’t apply to a list of phone numbers. The New York Times reported last week that the New York’s police department “has quietly amassed a trove” of call records by routinely issuing subpoenas for them from phones that had been reported stolen. According to The Times, the records “could conceivably be used for any investigative purpose.”

LOCATION DATA: Your Phone Is a Tracker

Many cell phone carriers provide authorities with a phone’s location and may charge a fee for doing so. Cell towers track where your phone is at any moment; so can the GPS features in some smartphones. The major cell carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, responded to at least 1.3 million law enforcement requests for cell phone locations, text messages and other data in 2011. Internet service providers can also provide location data that tracks users via their computer’s IP address — a unique number assigned to each computer.

Many courts have ruled that police don’t need a warrant from a judge to get cell phone location data. They only have to show that, under the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act (EPCA), the data contains “specific and articulable facts” related to an investigation — again, a lesser standard than probable cause.Delaware, Maryland and Oklahoma have proposed laws that would require police to obtain a warrant for location data; Gov. Jerry Brown of California, a Democrat, vetoed a similar bill last September. Last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill championed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, which would have updated the ECPA but wouldn’t have changed how location data was treated. Leahy and Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, introduced a similar bill last month, which remains in committee. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, introduced a separate bill in the House of Representatives last month that would require a warrant for location data as well as emails.

IP ADDRESSES: What Computers You Used

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other webmail providers accumulate massive amounts of data about our digital wanderings. A warrant is needed for access to some emails (see below), but not for the IP addresses of the computers used to log into your mail account or surf the Web. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, those records are kept for at least a year.

Police can thank U.S. v. Forrester, a case involving two men trying to set up a drug lab in California, for the ease of access. In the 2007 case, the government successfully argued that tracking IP addresses was no different than installing a device to track every telephone number dialed by a given phone (which is legal). Police only need a court to sign off on a subpoena certifying that the data they’re after is relevant to an investigation — the same standard as for cell phone records.

EMAILS: Messages You Sent Months Ago

There’s a double standard when it comes to email, one of the most requested types of data. A warrant is needed to get recent emails, but law enforcement can obtain older ones with only a subpoena. Google says it received16,407 requests for data — including emails sent through its Gmail service — from U.S. law enforcement in 2012. And Microsoft, with its Outlook email service, disclosed last month that it had received 11,073 requests for data last year. Other email providers, such as Yahoo, have not made similar statistics available. In January, Googlesaid that it would lobby in favor of greater protections for email.

This is another area where the ECPA comes into play. The law gives greater protection to recent messages than older ones, using a 180-day cutoff. Only a subpoena is required for emails older than that; otherwise, a warrant is necessary. This extends to authorities beyond the FBI and the police. I.R.S. documents released this week by the American Civil Liberties Union suggest that the I.R.S.’ Criminal Tax Division reads emails without obtaining a warrant. The bills introduced by Leahy and Lee in the Senate and Lofgren in the House would require a warrant for the authorities to get all emails regardless of age. The Justice Department, which had objected to such a change, said last month that it doesn’t any longer.

EMAIL DRAFTS: Drafts Are Different

Communicating through draft emails, à la David Petreaus and Paula Broadwell, seems sneaky. But drafts are actually easier for investigators to get than recently sent emails because the law treats them differently.

The ECPA distinguishes between communications — emails, texts, etc. — and stored electronic data. Draft emails fall into the latter, which get less protection under the law. Authorities need only a subpoena for them. The bills introduced by Leahy and Lee in the Senate and Lofgren in the House would change that by requiring a warrant to obtain email drafts.

TEXT MESSAGES: As With Emails, So With Texts

Investigators need only a subpoena, not a warrant, to get text messages more than 180 days old from a cell provider — the same standard as emails. Many carriers charge authorities a fee to provide texts and other information. For texts, Sprint charges $30, for example, while Verizon charges $50.

The ECPA also applies to text messages, according to Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is why the rules are similar to those governing emails. But the ECPA doesn’t apply when it comes to actually reading texts on someone’s phone rather than getting them from a carrier. State courts havesplit on the issue. Ohio’s Supreme Court has ruled thatpolice need a warrant to view the contents of cell phones of people who’ve been arrested, including texts. But the California Supreme Court has said no warrant is needed. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 declined to clear up the matter.

CLOUD DATA: Documents, Photos, and Other Stuff Stored Online

Authorities typically need only a subpoena to get data from Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive, and other services that allow users to store data on their servers, or “in the cloud,” as it’s known.

The law treats cloud data the same as draft emails — authorities don’t need a warrant to get it. But files that you’ve shared with others — say, a collaboration using Google Docs — might require a warrant under the ECPA if it’s considered “communication” rather than stored data. “That’s a very hard rule to apply,” says Greg Nojeim, a senior counsel with the Center for Democracy & Technology. “It actually makes no sense for the way we communicate today.”

SOCIAL MEDIA: The New Privacy Frontier

When it comes to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the social networks’ privacy policies dictate how cooperative they are in handing over users’ data. Facebook says it requires a warrant from a judge to disclose a user’s “messages, photos, videos, wall posts, and location information.” But it will supply basic information, such as a user’s email address or the IP addresses of the computers from which someone recently accessed an account, under a subpoena. Twitter reported in July that it had received 679 requests for user information from U.S. authorities during the first six months of 2012. Twitter says that “non-public information about Twitter users is not released except as lawfully required by appropriate legal process such as a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process.”

Courts haven’t issued a definitive ruling on social media. In September, a Manhattan Criminal Court judge upheld a prosecutor’s subpoena for information from Twitter about an Occupy Wall Street protester arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge in 2011. It was the first time a judge had allowed prosecutors to use a subpoena to get information from Twitter rather than forcing them to get a warrant; the case is ongoing.

Via ProPublica

Related Links:

NSA Whistleblower: Everyone in U.S. Under Virtual Surveillance

Intelligence Officials Evade Questions on Domestic Surveillance

CISPA Infographic

Senate Approves FISA Extension, Warrantless Wiretapping Continues

Google Says the FBI is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers

DOJ Asks Judge to Dismiss Suit Over Secret Surveillance Court Opinions

“Going Dark”: What’s So Wrong With the Government’s Plan to Tap Our Internet?

FBI to Monitor Online Chats in Real-Time by 2014

Microsoft, Too, Says FBI Secretly Surveilling Its Customers

FBI Documents Shine Light on Clandestine Cellphone Tracking Tool “Stringray”

DOJ Emails Show Feds Routinely Using Cell Phone Tracking Tool “Stingray”, Hiding It From Judges

FBI Sued Over Secretive Mass Surveillance Program

Facial Recognition & GPS Tracking: TrapWire Company Conducting Even More Surveillance

FBI OWS Documents: Spying, “Domestic Terrorists” & Assassination Plots

New FOIA Documents Reveal DHS Spying on Peaceful Demonstrations and Activists

DHS Built Domestic Surveillance Tech Into Predator Drones

Fusion Center Director: We Don’t Spy on All Americans, Just Anti-Government Americans

New Documents Show IRS Reads Americans’ Emails Without Warrants

CIA’s Chief Tech Officer on Big Data: We Try to Collect Everything and Hang Onto It Forever

Amazon Reportedly Building $600M Cloud for the CIA

Ron Paul: Neo-Con War Addiction Threatens Our Future

 

03/25/2013

William Kristol knows what is wrong with the United States. As he wrote recently in the flagship magazine of the neo-conservatives, the Weekly Standard, the problem with the US is that we seem to have lost our appetite for war. According to Kristol, the troubles that have befallen us in the 20th century have all been the result of these periodic bouts of war-weariness, a kind of virus that we catch from time to time.

He claims because of the US “drawdown” in Europe after World War II, Stalin subjugated Eastern Europe. Because of war weariness the United States stopped bombing Southeast Asia in the 1970s, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. War weariness through the 1990s led to Rwanda, Milosevic, and the rise of the Taliban. It was our fault for not fighting on! According to Kristol, our failure to act as the policeman of the world is why we were attacked on September 11, 2001. Of the 1990s, he wrote, “[t]hat decade of not policing the world ended with 9/11.”

That revisionism is too much even for fellow neo-conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz to swallow. In a 2003 interview, Wolfowitz admitted that it was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia that led to the growth of al-Qaeda:

“(W)e can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina.”

But for Kristol and his allies there is never enough war. According to a new study by Brown University, the US invasion of Iraq cost some 190,000 lives, most of them non-combatants. It has cost more than $1.7 trillion, and when all is said and done including interest the cost may well be $6 trillion. Some $212 billion was spent on Iraqi reconstruction with nothing to show for it. Total deaths from US war on Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been at least 329, 000. None of this is enough for Kristol.

The neo-con ideology promotes endless war, but neo-cons fight their battles with the blood of others. From the comfortable, subsidized offices of magazines like the Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives urge the United States to engage in endless war – to be fought by the victims of the “poverty draft” from states where there are few jobs. Ironically, these young people cannot find more productive work because the Federal Reserve’s endless money printing to keep the war machine turning has destroyed our economy. The six trillion dollars that will be spent on the Iraq war are merely pieces of printed paper that further erode the dollar’s purchasing power now and well into the future. It is the inflation tax, which is the most regressive and cruel of all.

Yes, Americans are war weary, concedes Kristol. But he does not blame the average American. The real problem is that the president has dropped the ball on terrifying Americans with the lies and imaginary threats that led to the invasion of Iraq. Writes Kristol: “One can’t, for example, be surprised at the ebbing support of the American public for the war in Afghanistan years after the president stopped trying to mobilize their support, stopped heralding the successes of the troops he’d sent there, and stopped explaining the importance of their mission.”

If only we had more war propaganda from the highest levels of government we could be cured of this war-weariness. Ten years ago the US invaded Iraq under the influence of neo-conservative lies. Those lies continued to promote US military action in places like Libya, and next on their agenda is Syria and then on to Iran. It is time for the American people to shout “enough!”

Via Ron Paul @RonPaul

Elite’s “Utopia”: Eugenics & Depopulation

Scene from UK 6-part mini-series “Utopia.” The show is about a virus (Russian Flu), purposely spread by the powers of the world, so that they could then supply the vaccine (GENUS), which would sterilize 19 of every 20 people that got it.

This clip shows one of the elites explaining the eugenics/depopulation program, from their point of view.

Notice also the Freemason symbol in the corner of the ceiling, as if to let you know, this is an official message from the powers that be.

 

Psychos…

MA Prosecutor Lets Rumsfeld Walk, Charges Protester Instead

03/07/2013

A little over a year ago former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came to Boston for a speech and was greeted by crowds demanding his arrest. In these pages and others I reported:

“Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been stripped of legal immunity for acts of torture against US citizens authorized while he was in office. The 7th Circuit made the ruling in the case of two American contractors who were tortured by the US military in Iraq after uncovering a smuggling ring within an Iraqi security company. .. The ruling comes as Rumsfeld begins his book tour with a visit to Boston on Monday, September 26, and as new, uncensored photos of Abu Ghraib spark fresh outrage across Internet.”

It turns out that Rumsfeld not only knew about the worst of the worst abuses of the Bush Torture Era, including what was happening at Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, and at Abu Ghraib. He perhaps even ordered it. Memos with comments in Rumsfeld’s own handwriting in the margins said things like “I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”

This was in response to individual torture reports detailing prisoners made to stand for long periods of time. Since the human body fails after standing for extended periods, and crumples to the floor involuntarily, other measures might have been necessary to make them stand. Like chaining them to the ceiling.

At the time, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Daniel McNeill, said that “we are not chaining people to the ceilings.” Contradicting him in the case of an Afghan named Dilawar, Spc. Willie Brand, told Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes: “he’s lying.”

Dilawar died in custody, his arms dislocated, and, in the words of the National Catholic Reporter, flapping uselessly “like a bird’s broken wings.” According to an investigation, Dilawar had been beaten so savagely about the knees, a form of torture known as “peroneal strikes,” that his knees were “basically pulpified,” in the words of the military coroner. Dean Lawrence Velvel of the Massachusetts School of Law states that peroneal strikes were “acts of torture and abuse that were regularly practiced on order or authorization of this country’s highest officials.”

The Army later affirmed that Dilawar was completely innocent of any wrongdoing. His crime was to be driving his taxi past Bagram AFB on the afternoon after a rocket attack. He was out to make a little gas money before picking up his three sisters, as his mother had told him to, for the local holiday.

But when Rumsfeld came to Boston, instead of arresting Rumsfeld, police arrested a protester named Shaun Joseph. In the edifice that is the rule of law and simple humanity, Rumsfeld smashed the furniture, broke all the glassware, and spray-painted the walls. Yet it is Joseph who is charged with being “disorderly.”

Joseph has a court appearance this Thursday and Friday in Boston, March 7 and 8. Supporters will join him and seek support from across the nation.

Unlike with Rumsfeld, there is no evidence that Joseph engaged in the disorderly conduct with which he is charged. In fact there is evidence quite to the contrary. Hence the invitation by his supporters to find the (invisible) “karate chop” at an arresting officer while “resisting arrest” in the video above.

Like a good American, when Shaun Joseph heard Rumsfeld would be in Boston, he joined the crowds demanding his arrest. But he wound up getting arrested himself.

In Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel “Catch 22″ a World War II airman waits in agony as sirens approach his apartment in Rome. He has just killed a prostitute. He is sure he is finished. But when the MPs burst into the apartment, they arrest not him, but another man, for being AWOL. It is just such a gruesome, Kafkaesque inversion of the moral universe we are witnessing with the persecution of Shaun Joseph, while Donald Rumsfeld walks the streets.

Binyam Mohamed was seized by the Pakistani Forces in April 2002 and turned over to the Americans for a $5,000 bounty. In a “black prison” in Morocco he was also hung from the ceiling as he watched an interrogator approach him with a scalpel, and proceed to make cuts in his genitals. He wrote in his diary:

Later, when a US airplane picked me up the following January, a female MP took pictures. She was one of the few Americans who ever showed me any sympathy. When she saw the injuries I had she gasped. They treated me and took more photos when I was in Kabul. Someone told me this was “to show Washington it’s healing”.

US Judge Gladys Kessler later found Binyam’s testimony “exceedingly credible.”

So the obvious question is, who is “Washington,” in the MP’s words? “Washington” usually refers to the highest levels in the civilian command, as opposed to the Pentagon, which is in Virginia. Binyam’s testimony “exceedingly credible.”
So the obvious question is, who is “Washington,” in the MP’s words? “Washington” usually refers to the highest levels in the civilian command, as opposed to the Pentagon, which is in Virginia. Binyam was never charged with a crime, and was later released to his home country, the UK.

It is not too late for the Suffolk County DA to arrest Rumsfeld. Any prosecutor has the authority to issue a warrant for arrest when he has overwhelming evidence that a crime has been committed, and a suspect. Torture was, and is, a violation of both US and international law. The Abu Ghraib photos, both the old and the most recently released, revealed a house of horrors that no one could have ever imagined.

Figures as high as former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, and General Janis Karpinsky, commander of Abu Ghraib’s military police, have declared themselves willing to testify in any trial of Rumsfeld. Of the facts surrounding the murder of the 22-year-old Afghan farmer and taxi driver, Dilawar, Col. Wilkerson stated in an affidavit to the US District Court for the District of Columbia: “I am willing to testify in person.”

Boston protester Shaun Joseph has been offered a deal by the Suffolk County DA, which would allow him probation with no jail time in return for a plea of guilty. Joseph has refused, saying “I refuse to be put on probation for crimes I did not commit.”

In his description of the incident, Joseph says:

While attempting to begin a rational discussion with a police officer who was forcibly pulling a bullhorn from a comrade’s hand, I was seized without warning from behind by a police officer, thrown into the street, handcuffed, and taken to jail. Like most people who are assaulted by the police, I was charged with “assault and battery on a police officer” and “resisting arrest.”

The arresting officer, Sgt. David L. O’Connor, alleges that Joseph used a “karate chop like manaveur [sic]” on him. In the video above, see if you can find a karate chop. Look hard, as the prosecutor undoubtedly has. The question is, why is it so easy for us to not see what we don’t want to see?

To support Shaun Joseph please call:

Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office

DA Daniel F. Conley

Phone (617) 619-4000

DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST SHAUN JOSEPH. ISSUE A WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF DONALD RUMSFELD.

Via Truth-Out

Leaked Document: Military Internment Camps in U.S to be Used for Political Dissidents

 

Internment camps for political dissidents in the U.S. aren’t a conspiracy theory. The Department of Defense document entitled “INTERNMENT AND RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS” or FM 3-39.40 proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt.

View this document on Scribd

Army hiring for these internment camps: http://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/legal-and-law-enforcement/internment-resettlement-specialist.html