The NSA, Verizon and Your Privacy

[BraveUlysses]

Yep.

My apathy for the current state of corruption knows no bounds.

Don't forget this gem:

http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/07/08/jon-corzine-will-not-face-criminal-charges-over-mf-global-report/

[5ickride]

If i switch carriers, am i now taking a political stand? Half kidding, but really, im going to leave verizon, would it matter? Or are all carriers in on it?

[nando]

I dont think it matters. I think they are all in on it.

[mrsleeve]

no it would not matter

[5ickride]

Well that sucks! I'm going to wrap my phone in tin foil from now on.

[Fusion]

Funny how people and the media condemn Iran, China, Tunisia etc. for internet restrictions or bans, but when the gov allows DHS to do the same even before anything has happened, noone cares.
DHS by the way is eerily similar to the "National Security" organizations all Euro communist countries had. The only difference is they were "defending the public from the imperialists". When a terrorist attack happened back then, gov't controoled TV stated the US/UK shouldn't be surprised and the communist regime won't get attacked because world piece is the highest goal. Turns out all they did was restrict/ban radio waves, books, news and printed information, the oldschool version of the internet. Citizens were oppressed and sent to prison for releasing info, aka Dissidents, provocatuers and traitors, now called whistleblowers. Any of that sound familiar?

What makes me sick to my stomach is that 25+ years ago, my father packed his pregnant wife, infant kid (me) and decided to risk our lives and the imprisonment of those left behind, just to somehow get to the US, seek asylum, make us proud citizens and pursue the American Dream. Only to see an almost exact copy of the same shit he ran from become the neofreedom 25 years later.

[Dozyproductions]

The US has always been tapping into communications as long as they've had the ability. At least since WWI. As long as there are institutions in this country that exist through a stretch of what is constitutional, those very same institutions will always try to expand their authority beyond it.

[5ickride]

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSL6N0FH24A20130711?irpc=43

[quote]
Top News
French legal complaint targets NSA, FBI, tech firms over Prism
Thu, Jul 11 11:07 AM EDT
* French prosecutor to decide whether to investigate
* Complaint denounces spy methods revealed by Snowden
By Natalie Huet
PARIS, July 11 (Reuters) - Two French human rights groups filed a legal complaint on Thursday that targets the U.S. National Security Agency, the FBI and seven technology companies they say may have helped the United States to snoop on French citizens' emails and phone calls.
The complaint, which denounces U.S. spying methods revealed by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, is filed against "persons unknown" but names Microsoft, Yahoo , Google, Paltalk, Facebook, AOL and Apple as "potential accomplices" of the NSA and FBI.
Media reports that the United States has eavesdropped on European Internet users and embassies under a surveillance programme named Prism have soured EU-U.S. relations, just as talks are starting on a transatlantic free trade pact.
"This blatant intrusion into individuals' lives represents a serious threat to individual liberties and, if not stopped, may lead to the end of the rule of law," the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the French Human Rights League (LDH) said in a statement.
The complaint was filed with a Paris civil court, and a prosecutor will now decide whether to open an investigation. If the prosecutor declines to do so, the plaintiffs can still ask an investigating magistrate to look into the case.
The complaint cites "fraudulent access to an automated data processing system, collection of personal data by fraudulent means, wilful violation of the intimacy of private life and the use and conservation of recordings and documents obtained through such means".
While the complaint alleges that the NSA and FBI bear the bulk of responsibility in setting up Prism, it suggests the U.S. companies may have provided them with the technical means to access their servers and collect personal data and content.
The rights groups said French laws had been violated and called for a judicial investigation into the reports on U.S. surveillance that appeared in Britain's Guardian newspaper, the Washington Post and German news magazine Der Spiegel.
There was no immediate response from the NSA, the FBI or the Justice Department.
Representatives for both Facebook and Google said the companies did not give government agencies any direct access to their servers and provided user information only in accordance with the law. Reuters was seeking comment from the other firms.

[quote]

[nando]

The US has always been tapping into communications as long as they've had the ability. At least since WWI. As long as there are institutions in this country that exist through a stretch of what is constitutional, those very same institutions will always try to expand their authority beyond it.

do you honestly believe the technology in the 1940s was anywhere near the level it is now, that it allowed spy agencies to capture and record every phone conversation, every email, every message sent by anyone using telecommunications in the USA, or even messages routed through it?

and this information can be stored indefinitely, thanks to dirt cheap storage technology.

But they've been doing *that* since WWI? come on now..

[Fusion]

That's why all the old regimes needed snitch "agents".

In today's terms:

President Barack Obama has asked that federal agencies launch an unprecedented campaign requiring government workers to monitor the behavior of their colleagues and report potential leakers under the threat of prosecution.

McClatchy reporters Jonathan Landay and Marisa Taylor wrote Tuesday that the “Insider Threat” program mandated by Pres. Obama utilizes methods that, while meant to identify security threats from within, actually provoke co-workers to spy on one another.

The program is unprecedented in scope and hopes to prevent future instances where government secrets are spilled. According to a new report, however, the Insider Threat initiative and the techniques utilized by the agencies involved are not proven to work.

Insider Threat was authorized in October 2011 after Army Private first class Bradley Manning sent classified intelligence to the website WikiLeaks, an action that government prosecutors argued in court this week aided al-Qaeda by indirectly providing them with secret documents.

Through the program, employees are asked to monitor the behavior of their peers, and could face hefty penalties if they fail to alert higher-ups of a potential breach.

[nando]

change government prosecutors to government persecutors and you have a more accurate statement..

[Dozyproductions]

do you honestly believe the technology in the 1940s was anywhere near the level it is now, that it allowed spy agencies to capture and record every phone conversation, every email, every message sent by anyone using telecommunications in the USA, or even messages routed through it?

and this information can be stored indefinitely, thanks to dirt cheap storage technology.

But they've been doing *that* since WWI? come on now..

Reading books do wonders.

[BraveUlysses]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE97409R20130805

(Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

"PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION"

After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said. The training document reviewed by Reuters refers to this process as "parallel construction."

The two senior DEA officials, who spoke on behalf of the agency but only on condition of anonymity, said the process is kept secret to protect sources and investigative methods. "Parallel construction is a law enforcement technique we use every day," one official said. "It's decades old, a bedrock concept."

A dozen current or former federal agents interviewed by Reuters confirmed they had used parallel construction during their careers. Most defended the practice; some said they understood why those outside law enforcement might be concerned.

"It's just like laundering money - you work it backwards to make it clean," said Finn Selander, a DEA agent from 1991 to 2008 and now a member of a group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which advocates legalizing and regulating narcotics.

Some defense lawyers and former prosecutors said that using "parallel construction" may be legal to establish probable cause for an arrest. But they said employing the practice as a means of disguising how an investigation began may violate pretrial discovery rules by burying evidence that could prove useful to criminal defendants.

A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY

"That's outrageous," said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. "It strikes me as indefensible."

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin "would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional."

Lustberg and others said the government's use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant's identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

"You can't game the system," said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "You can't create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?"

Some lawyers say there can be legitimate reasons for not revealing sources. Robert Spelke, a former prosecutor who spent seven years as a senior DEA lawyer, said some sources are classified. But he also said there are few reasons why unclassified evidence should be concealed at trial.

"It's a balancing act, and they've doing it this way for years," Spelke said. "Do I think it's a good way to do it? No, because now that I'm a defense lawyer, I see how difficult it is to challenge."

CONCEALING A TIP

One current federal prosecutor learned how agents were using SOD tips after a drug agent misled him, the prosecutor told Reuters. In a Florida drug case he was handling, the prosecutor said, a DEA agent told him the investigation of a U.S. citizen began with a tip from an informant. When the prosecutor pressed for more information, he said, a DEA supervisor intervened and revealed that the tip had actually come through the SOD and from an NSA intercept.

"I was pissed," the prosecutor said. "Lying about where the information came from is a bad start if you're trying to comply with the law because it can lead to all kinds of problems with discovery and candor to the court." The prosecutor never filed charges in the case because he lost confidence in the investigation, he said.

A senior DEA official said he was not aware of the case but said the agent should not have misled the prosecutor. How often such misdirection occurs is unknown, even to the government; the DEA official said the agency does not track what happens with tips after the SOD sends them to agents in the field.

The SOD's role providing information to agents isn't itself a secret. It is briefly mentioned by the DEA in budget documents, albeit without any reference to how that information is used or represented when cases go to court.

The DEA has long publicly touted the SOD's role in multi-jurisdictional and international investigations, connecting agents in separate cities who may be unwittingly investigating the same target and making sure undercover agents don't accidentally try to arrest each other.

SOD'S BIG SUCCESSES

The unit also played a major role in a 2008 DEA sting in Thailand against Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout; he was sentenced in 2011 to 25 years in prison on charges of conspiring to sell weapons to the Colombian rebel group FARC. The SOD also recently coordinated Project Synergy, a crackdown against manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers of synthetic designer drugs that spanned 35 states and resulted in 227 arrests.

Since its inception, the SOD's mandate has expanded to include narco-terrorism, organized crime and gangs. A DEA spokesman declined to comment on the unit's annual budget. A recent LinkedIn posting on the personal page of a senior SOD official estimated it to be $125 million.

Today, the SOD offers at least three services to federal, state and local law enforcement agents: coordinating international investigations such as the Bout case; distributing tips from overseas NSA intercepts, informants, foreign law enforcement partners and domestic wiretaps; and circulating tips from a massive database known as DICE.

The DICE database contains about 1 billion records, the senior DEA officials said. The majority of the records consist of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. Records are kept for about a year and then purged, the DEA officials said.

About 10,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agents have access to the DICE database, records show. They can query it to try to link otherwise disparate clues. Recently, one of the DEA officials said, DICE linked a man who tried to smuggle $100,000 over the U.S. southwest border to a major drug case on the East Coast.

"We use it to connect the dots," the official said.

"AN AMAZING TOOL"

Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.

"They do a pretty good job of screening, but it can be a struggle to know for sure whether the person on a wiretap is American," the senior law enforcement official said.

Tips from domestic wiretaps typically occur when agents use information gleaned from a court-ordered wiretap in one case to start a second investigation.

As a practical matter, law enforcement agents said they usually don't worry that SOD's involvement will be exposed in court. That's because most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial and therefore never request to see the evidence against them. If cases did go to trial, current and former agents said, charges were sometimes dropped to avoid the risk of exposing SOD involvement.

Current and former federal agents said SOD tips aren't always helpful - one estimated their accuracy at 60 percent. But current and former agents said tips have enabled them to catch drug smugglers who might have gotten away.

"It was an amazing tool," said one recently retired federal agent. "Our big fear was that it wouldn't stay secret."

DEA officials said that the SOD process has been reviewed internally. They declined to provide Reuters with a copy of their most recent review.

[mrsleeve]

Well it has come to this. Spy Or Die

Have we really come this far and crossed the point of no return...........

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/09/spy_or_die_nsa_lavabit_silent_circle

BY SHANE HARRIS

When the U.S. government orders a communications company to give up its data, the firm has two basic choices: resist, and risk its leaders going to jail, or comply, and break faith with its customers. On Thursday, Aug. 8, however, two privacy-minded businesses chose a third and unprecedented option: They committed corporate suicide rather than bend to the surveillance state's wishes.

It could just be the opening battles in a new front of the surveillance war. In a move that blocks governmental monitoring of private email accounts, two secure email providers closed shop on Thursday rather than divulge information about their users to the authorities. The first Dallas-based Lavabit -- which reportedly counts among its users NSA-leaker Edward Snowden -- stopped operations after apparently fighting a losing battle to resist a federal surveillance order. (Snowden called the decision "inspiring" in a note to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald.) A few hours later, Silent Circle, headquartered outside Washington, D.C., announced it was suspending its encrypted email service as a preemptive measure before ever receiving a command from the government to spy on its users.

The companies' extreme actions put them in an exclusive club. Security and legal experts said they could not recall a company preventing government access to its customers' information by shutting down its business. Some companies have appealed surveillance orders in the courts or attempted to force more public disclosure about the secretive intelligence-gathering process, but they have remained functioning. Refusing to comply with an order also means the government is cut off from potentially valuable information that it may have no other means of obtaining.

Ladar Levison, the owner and operator of Lavabit, said in a cryptic public message to his users that he had "been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit."

Levison didn't say precisely what events had led to his decision, but his letter strongly suggests that he had refused to comply with an official order to hand over Lavabit users' emails and give the government ongoing, prospective access to the company's systems. In the letter, Levison said he was forbidden from discussing "the events that led to my decision." Recipients of secretly issued government surveillance orders are often prohibited from disclosing or discussing them publicly.

Silent Circle, in a letter to its customers, cited Lavabit's decision. "We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail [its encrypted email service] now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now."

The company also acknowledged that its email service didn't have protections as strong as those for its phone and text services, which can delete communications entirely, as well any corresponding metadata records. Email leaves a digital trail that can be recovered and therefore forcibly disclosed by the authorities.

"Tough decision but we couldn't wait for the inevitable risking member security," Vic Hyder, the company's chief operations officer, wrote on Twitter.

"We huddled this afternoon and saw no other choice," Jon Callas, Silent Circle's chief technology officer and a noted computer security expert, wrote on his Twitter feed.

Companies that receive surveillance demands find themselves in an unenviable position. Some, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google, have either fought surveillance orders in court or petitioned the government to let them disclose more information about what the authorities are asking about the companies' users. But until now, these companies and others, including Internet mainstays such as Facebook that have hundreds of millions of users, have complied with the orders and helped form the backbone of official surveillance.

Companies also know they cooperate at the risk of undermining their reputation and their business. Take the encrypted email service Hushmail, a Canadian company that like Lavabit had marketed itself as a secure system. In 2007, the firm gave over information on three customers as part of a U.S. federal investigation into illegal steroids. Although Hushmail was complying with a court order and a legal assistance treaty between the United States and Canada, its reputation was significantly damaged among its product's core users.

Closing a company is certainly not illegal. But evading an official demand is. What penalties or charges Levison might face depends on what the government is seeking. He could face a contempt proceeding, which could include jail time, if he refused to comply with a court order, said Albert Gidari, a lawyer with the firm Perkins Coie who represents companies on surveillance and communications law.

But the government might also be looking for ongoing or prospective surveillance of Lavabit's customers and access to the company's systems. Given Levison's drastic actions, that is likely the case. Shuttering the company would do little to stop the authorities from gaining access to Snowden's or any other customer's old emails. But going out of business would mean Lavabit couldn't comply with any future surveillance.

"It may be that by shutting down the service, he can't comply, and so it's doubtful he would be held in contempt," Gidari said. But "shutting down the service could be viewed as obstruction of justice, so he isn't necessarily out of the woods yet."

Levison faced two bad options. That helps explain why Silent Circle's executives may have decided to avoid the quandary altogether.

Levison's decision was greeted by some as a heroic act of protest. A fund was set up to help pay for his legal expenses. "We've already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals," he wrote.

But Silent Circle's decision added a new wrinkle. The company appeared to be making a business decision, rather than a legal or ideological one. It had not been served with a government order. Indeed, the company, which was founded by an ex-Navy SEAL and the inventor of the first widely distributed commercial encryption software, says it counts intelligence agency employees and special operations forces as its most loyal customers. Silent Circle has billed its encrypted email service as a way for people with secretive jobs to communicate securely, not as an end run around federal surveillance. (The firm has been known to help privacy-minded journalists stay beneath government radars.) By preemptively shutting down its email service -- and purging all data related to it -- Silent Circle preserves its reputation as a secret-keeper. It will continue to sell its secure phone, text-messaging, and video services.

Companies may also find resisting NSA surveillance a losing battle. Recently disclosed documents show that the agency has the legal authority to collect and store any electronic communication that uses encryption. And if companies are storing email in servers within the government's jurisdiction, they may not be able to make good on promises to users that their communications are absolutely private and secure. In his letter, Levison said, "I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

The government has given no indication that it will back down from using surveillance orders to demand all kinds of customer records, from Internet searches to phone logs to email metadata and content. But what Lavabit and Silent Circle have done may mark the beginning of a resistance.

The truth is that for all the government's extraordinary powers under surveillance law and the NSA's global reach, the U.S. intelligence community is largely at the mercy of companies to help it monitor the world's networks. Indeed, current surveillance law was modified a few years ago to give telecom companies that assisted the NSA with warrantless wiretapping legal immunity from prosecution. Officials feared that without those protections, the companies would do everything in their power not to help the government.

If enough companies were to take the drastic step of shutting down, the government would find itself in the dark on potentially crucial intelligence. The likelihood of this happening is still remote. But the fact that two companies would take such drastic measures to preserve their independence and keep the government out of their business may speak to a dawning awareness: While the government may hold the legal power, it is not all-powerful.

[nando]

I saw an article this morning in the Washington Post, where interviewed an NSA official and they gave them a statement they were supposed to be able to release once it was reviewed by the higher ups.

of course the "revised" and "approved" version is nothing like what the original interview said.

they're still lying to us.