“I Feel Like a Despised Insect”: Coming of Age Under Surveillance in New York

IN THE SPRING of last year, two New York women were arrested on charges of supporting ISIS, following a joint investigation by the New York Police Department along with federal agencies. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Queens residents Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui “plotted to wreak terror by creating explosive devices.” Central to the disruption of this “terror plot,” authorities boasted, was the work of an undercover police detective, although no concrete plan was ever hatched. Indeed, as The Intercept reported, the unsealed criminal complaint reveals the undercover officer’s role in pushing the two women to turn their controversial political sentiments into something more dangerous. In this sense, the arrests were similar to a number of post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions, half of which have involved the use of informants or undercover agents, according to a 2014 report co-authored by Human Rights Watch, which raised concerns over “questionable” and “discriminatory” tactics.

New Technologies Give Government Ample Means to Track Suspects, Study Finds

WASHINGTON — For more than two years the F.B.I. and intelligence agencies have warned that encrypted communications are creating a “going dark” crisis that will keep them from tracking terrorists and kidnappers.

Now, a study in which current and former intelligence officials participated concludes that the warning is wildly overblown, and that a raft of new technologies — like television sets with microphones and web-connected cars — are creating ample opportunities for the government to track suspects, many of them worrying.

Cybersecurity, Encryption and the Golden Age of Surveillance

The Internet, the electronic nervous system of the planet, has changed human society, profoundly altering the way we conduct our lives. It has been a great leveler, allowing people to connect, publish and share on a global scale. You can write, shop and bank online, or organize a demonstration that could overthrow a dictatorship. But the Internet also opens us to intense monitoring, exposing our most personal, private communications to the prying eyes of corporations and government spies, not to mention criminals. One way we can protect ourselves is with encryption, which provides security for our data, allowing us to send and store digital information safely, essentially scrambling the information. In order to unscramble it, you need a key, a password. The ability of regular people to access encryption tools has prompted the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom to propose special access to all communications. They want a master key to everyone’s digital life.

Opinion A Surveillance State Born in Ground Zero's Rubble

This is a portentous day.

Forty years ago on Sept. 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende.

Twenty-eight years later, the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington induced the democratically-elected government of the United States to overthrow itself.

Each attack took about the same number of lives, around 3,000 -- all at once in New York and Washington, over weeks and months in Chile. The Chilean junta also arrested, imprisoned and tortured some 28,000 people in the next few years, including the young Michelle Bachelet, who is currently running to be re-elected as president of Chile.

NSA surveillance program violates the constitution, ACLU says

The National Security Agency's mass tracking and collection of Americans' phone call data violates the constitution, has a chilling effect on first amendment rights and should be halted, accord to a court motion filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday.

In a detailed, legal critique of the NSA programme, the ACLU warned that such long-term surveillance "permits the government to assemble a richly detailed profile of every person living in the United States and to draw a comprehensive map of their associations with one another."

Edward Snowden Covered Electronic Tracks, Government Officials Suspect

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government's efforts to determine which highly classified materials leaker Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency have been frustrated by Snowden's sophisticated efforts to cover his digital trail by deleting or bypassing electronic logs, government officials told The Associated Press. Such logs would have showed what information Snowden viewed or downloaded.

The government's forensic investigation is wrestling with Snowden's apparent ability to defeat safeguards established to monitor and deter people looking at information without proper permission, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the sensitive developments publicly.

NATO Surveillance Cancellations Costs Canadian Firms Millions

OTTAWA - The Harper government's decision to cancel Canadian participation in two NATO surveillance programs will cost contracts in the country's aerospace industry, newly released documents show.

National Defence was hoping to save as much as $90 million per year by withdrawing from the jointly owned and operated Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) and the Alliance Ground Surveillance (AGS), a fairly new program meant to utilize drones to monitor the battlefield.

America's Surveillance Net

A school of fish swims peacefully in the ocean. Out of sight, a net is spread beneath it. At the edges of the net is a circle of fishing boats. Suddenly, the fishermen yank up the edges of the net, and in an instant the calm, open ocean becomes a boiling caldron, an exitless, rapidly shrinking prison in which the fish thrash in vain for freedom and life.

Increasingly, the American people are like this school of fish in the moments before the net is pulled up. The net in question is of course the Internet and associated instruments of data collection, and the fishermen are corporations and the government. That is, to use the more common metaphor, we have come to live alongside the machinery of a turnkey tyranny. As we now know, thanks to the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency has been secretly ordering Verizon to sweep up and hand over all the metadata from the phone calls of millions of its customers: phone numbers, duration of calls, routing information and sometimes the location of the callers. Thanks to Snowden, we also know that unknown volumes of like information are being extracted from Internet and computer companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

Why the Government Surveillance of Fox's James Rosen Is Troubling

On Friday, I wrote a piece for Mother Jones speculating that government spying on press communications may not be "unprecedented," as Associated Press head Gary Pruitt put it, but simply rarely disclosed. The rules requiring disclosure of such surveillance, after all, only appear to apply to "subpoenas" for "telephone toll records"; they do not cover other secret tools deployed by federal law enforcement, such as National Security Letters. Even outside the shadowy world of intelligence, as federal magistrate judge Stephen Smith has observed, court orders granting government access to electronic communication records routinely remain secret indefinitely. I suggested that there could be quite a few other cases like the AP story that we've never learned about, even if the Justice Department has been scrupulously following its own rules, because such cases might not involve grand jury subpoenas for phone logs.

Big Data is watching you, and you, and you

Fact or fiction? Scene from the 1955 British movie of George Orwell's 1984 resonates today, though many sophisticated systems of government snooping are invisible to the ordinary citizen.

There’s an elephant in your room – and it never, never forgets.

It’s Big Data, and, says Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, co-author of a book by the same name, it is “A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think.”

From cradle to grave (and even before birth) we’re tracked, trailed, photographed, videoed, scrutinized, biometrized, analysed and….you can see where this is going.

Preventive Measures

In Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi masterpiece “Minority Report,” set in the year 2054 and released nine months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, homicide-squad detectives no longer spend their time tracking down people who have committed murder. Instead, they go after people who are about to commit murder, swooping down to stop them in the nick of time. Spielberg’s police officers don’t fight crime, they fight “Pre-Crime.” They don’t catch killers, they catch pre-killers.

The enormous anti-terror establishment that the United States has created in the years since 9/11 has a similar purpose. Its vast, sprawling, expensive array of governmental, quasi-governmental, and nominally private institutions and their tools—high tech, like ubiquitous surveillance cameras, satellites, wiretaps, computer algorithms, facial-recognition software, drones, and data collection and analysis on a global scale; lower tech, like networks of agents, bags of cash, and airport security checkpoints—are designed primarily to stop acts of terrorism before they happen. That turns out to be a good deal more difficult than investigating such an act once it occurs.

Nick Clegg takes on the Tories over 'snoopers' charter'

Mr Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, appeared to put a stop to the Tory proposals during his weekly Call Clegg programme on LBC Radio, saying they are “not going to happen”.

Mr Cameron’s official spokesman insisted that discussions about the plans are still “ongoing”, however senior Lib Dems said that Mr Clegg had “killed” the proposals.

FBI Surveillance Of Occupy Wall Street Detailed

WASHINGTON -- Was Tim Franzen stockpiling weapons? What was Tim Franzen's philosophy? What was his political affiliation? Did Tim Franzen ever talk about violent revolution?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to know. In late 2011, an agent or agents -- Franzen still isn't quite sure -- began trying to find out. It was during this time that Franzen became a well-known and central presence in Occupy Atlanta. He helped start the Occupy Wall Street offshoot, and had been arrested when police razed their encampment in a downtown Atlanta park.

The US Government Can Track Your Location at Any Time Without a Warrant

Is law enforcement tracking your cell phone's GPS more like intercepting a phone call or tailing someone on the street? A federal court decision says it's more like following you—which means the authorities don't need to get a warrant to find out where you are at any given time.

The case involves a marijuana courier, Melvin Skinner, whose disposable cell phone was being tracked by the Drug Enforcement Agency as he moved his cargo from Arizona to Tennessee. The DEA got a court order (not a warrant) compelling Skinner's cell phone company to share his GPS information—the release of which led to Skinner's capture and arrest.

Communications Security Establishment Canada: Super-Secretive $400M Eavesdropping Agency Gets A Little Quieter

OTTAWA - The curtains at Canada's most secretive federal agency have been drawn a little tighter.

The government has quietly stopped telling Canadians about the annual priorities of the national electronic eavesdropping agency, meaning scant details of its mission that were once made public are now classified.

Government Leaks: Leon Panetta Orders Pentagon Officials To Monitor Major Media Outlets

WASHINGTON, July 19 (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered senior Pentagon officials on Thursday to begin monitoring major U.S. news media for disclosures of classified information in an effort to stop the release of government secrets after a series of high-profile leaks.

The announcement came hours after Panetta and other senior defense officials appeared before a closed-door hearing of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee to discuss recent disclosures of classified security information.

Vast F.D.A. Effort Tracked E-Mails of Its Scientists

WASHINGTON — A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show. 

What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.

Border Agency Policy Spells Out Surveillance Rules

The Canada Border Service Agency is reluctant to explain the extent to which it monitors passengers across the country, but internal documents obtained by CBC News make it clear that overt audio-video surveillance occurs at "all CBSA offices."

The explanation is contained in a 15-page document, entitled Policy on the Overt Use of Audio-Video Monitoring and Recording Technology, which spells out CBSA’s surveillance policy in detail.

Wiretap ruling may undermine security bill

The Supreme Court of Canada's landmark ruling that emergency wiretapping without a warrant is "unconstitutional" - which could pave the way for a new federal law that better safeguards privacy rights - is being used by critics to revive their attacks on the Harper government's controversial Internet surveillance bill.

"It's a huge blow to the Conservative's Internet snooping bill," NDP justice critic Jack Harris told Postmedia News.

"I think we can expect that their legislation will face similar challenges if they put it in place. We can go after criminals aggressively without treating ordinary citizens like criminals."

Bill C-30 would require telecommunications companies to hand over customers' personal information to police without a court order. A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said the government will be reviewing the court's decision "carefully to determine next steps," but declined to comment further.

In a unanimous ruling, the country's top court said police have an obligation to "give notice to intercepted parties" in the form of a court-issued warrant; that notice can be issued after the investigation.

Canada’s top court strikes down police powers to wiretap without warrants

OTTAWA—The Supreme Court of Canada struck down a law that gives police warrantless wiretap powers to prevent an emergency, saying it provides no accountability or oversight mechanism.

The unanimous judgment issued Friday gave Parliament 12 months to re-write the law. In the meantime, the 1993 Criminal Code (Section 184.4) — the only wiretap provision that does not require after-the-fact notification either to the person wiretapped or some kind of report to Parliament — remains in force.

The decision doesn’t pose a risk to public safety while Parliament rewrites the notice provision, said lawyer Joe Wilkinson, counsel to the Criminal Lawyers Association of Ontario, which intervened in the case.

It is still open to police to intercept private communications to prevent emergency situations but “they would do well to give some kind of notice to whomever it is ended up getting intercepted,” he said.

Wilkinson said there have only been a few superior court rulings on the power, and police were working “very much in the dark” as to its proper use.

Now, he said, “the police still have the bulk of the section and they’ve got it with some really good guidance from the top court in the land.”