Give what you can, share where you may. Hopeline.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Police launched the future of law enforcement into the smoggy Los Angeles sky in the form of a drone aircraft, bringing technology most commonly associated with combat zones to urban policing.

The unmanned aerial vehicle, which looks like a child’s remote control toy and weighs about five pounds (2.3 kilograms), is a prototype being tested by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Police say the drone, called the SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions.

“This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone,” said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

I’m sure that the realization the the drone can also be used to silently observe private individuals on non-public land (and public) never occurred to anybody. Nev-er. Because it’s about the children!

The existence and use of the drones is effectively no different than having a bunch of helicopters flying around – and cheaper too! – so you’ve got nothing to worry about. I mean what’s to worry about when you’ve got a mini-Predator roaming your skies? What? It’s not like UAV’s have been used to assassinate people before, like, ever, or that pushbutton video game violence dehumanizes the event and lowers the barriers to pushing the trigger or anything.

Yes, I realize it’s too small to carry a weapon… but it’s not too small to carry a laser designator. And if you’ve got spotters, why not have a full Predator around? You know, just in case. Just in case you spot the terrirrrists en flagrante terrrristo! In case Jack Bauer needs an assist. In case you see a Sikh running from a building and into a panel van?

FSM, I love technology! Woohoo! When I thought of the future, I thought of living in a police state under constant surveillance where the government pays no heed the laws as written in the books. Didn’t everyone?

via Apostropher

In 2003 AT&T built “secret rooms” hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company’s popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

Seriously, people. Encryption + obfuscation == you maintain your privacy

Philip R. Zimmermann created a program to encrypt e-mail. His Zfone will do the same for Internet calls.

He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

Now he is again inviting government scrutiny. On Sunday, he released a free Windows software program, Zfone, that encrypts a computer-to-computer voice conversation so both parties can be confident that no one is listening in. It became available earlier this year to Macintosh and Linux users of the system known as voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP.

Ordinarily, a company that conceals their transactions and activities from the public would violate securities law. But an presidential memorandum signed by the President on May 5 allows the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, to authorize a company to conceal activities related to national security. (See 15 U.S.C. 78m(b)(3)(A))

Though it’s not considered one of the signs of fascism, an obsession with secrecy is certainly a hallmark of a despotic government.

If the Executive issues an ad hoc presidential memorandum that authorizes corporations to violate laws passed by the Legislative, how are we not in the middle of Constitutional crisis right now?

Possibly. But it’s also certainly our own NSA.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA’s explanation did little to satisfy Qwest’s lawyers. “They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to do that because FISA might not agree with them,” one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest’s suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general’s office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

So, kudos to Qwest, for being the only telecomm to refuse to comply with the NSA’s illegal requests absent a court order. If you can switch, by all means do so. Or better still, Working Assets, the only telecommunications company to sign on with the ACLU to stop the illegal wiretapping of US Citizens.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what the NSA is doing is collecting an immense database of the behaviors and activities of American citizens. Without a warrant. Without probable cause. Outside of the law. This is a shadowy group that even the CIA lifers think are right wing. A group completely amoral, devoted to black ops, and in favor of authoritarianism at every step of the way.

If anyone imagines for even one second that the data the NSA is collecting here is not going to be used or already used for such things as domestic spying, intimidation of protest groups, disruption of reporters who may be investigating actions embarassing to the administration, exposing whistleblowers and the like, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Remember, at first they said they didn’t spy. Then they said they spied only with court approval. Then they said they spied only on international calls, not your calls to your girlfriend or your parents or your fellow little league coaches. And now, they’re spying on we domestic citizens. Outside of the Rule of Law, with no legal authority outside of an authoritarian state.

At each new revelation, the 101st Fighting Keyboarders said if you didn’t like what was happening, you loved the terrorists. At each step, they gave tortured justifications or credulously believed the administrations patently absurd legal justifications. At each step, these cowardly bedwetters begged for the paternalistic administration to come tuck them in and save them from the bad people. Well, now they’ve met the bad people, and the bad people wear US Government ID cards.

See also, Greenwald, Glenn. Side note: I can see Glenn’s point that the Constitutional and legal issues aren’t exactly bright lines here (primarily resting on privacy grounds, as in lack thereof in PEN registers), but I think the burden is upon the administration to prove the legality of monitoring citizen activities, using coercion against businesses, and essentialing Taking corporate assets for government use. I should point out that, legally speaking, I think the Constitutional issues are probably non-starters, but that statutory issues are almost ironclad in prohibiting the NSA’s actions here. I’ll try to remember to look up the USC sections later.

Further questions I have:
1) internet – are they tracking our browsing/usage behavior? Are they capturing emails? For those of you not already using encryption such as PGP or GnuPG, ferchrissake, what the hell are you waiting for? For those of you not using Tor, what are you waiting for?

2) VOIP too? If yes to internet, then yes to VOIP.

This may not be the America that I knew, but going forward anyone who contacts me should be under the assumption that the communication is monitored and possibly able to be read if in text format.

… Unless you use encryption. Which is both useful and necessary for our privacy. It’s also super easy to use and install. I’m tired of trying to get people to use encryption. You may be forcing my hand here, but by FSM, I’m going to start encrypting everything I send and if the recipients can’t figure it out… tough. My public key is linked to at the bottom of every page on this site. GnuPG + enigmail (two plugins for Thunderbird). All of this is Open and Free. Learn it, live it, love it.

Tor is the other leg to the encryption side. If your packets aren’t encrypted, they can read them. If they are, they can still do packet analysis to see where you are going. Tor eliminates the packet analysis leg. Use it. If you have spare bandwidth, please donate that as well.

Remember the right wing saying how if guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns? Well, if my government suspects me of being a criminal, then only my government is suspect.

Update: the telcos could be liable for many billions in damages (see also: ACSBlog). Now, who wants to be the first attorney to form a class for a Class Action?

“The evidence that we are filing supports our claim that AT&T is diverting Internet traffic into the hands of the NSA wholesale, in violation of federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment,” said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston.

“More than just threatening individuals’ privacy, AT&T’s apparent choice to give the government secret, direct access to millions of ordinary Americans’ Internet communications is a threat to the Constitution itself. We are asking the Court to put a stop to it now,” said Bankston.

Easy Fourth Amendment violation right there. Well, it was a violation until the busheviks took over and smilin Sammy scAlito was mortared into place using the hooves of the traitorous Dem sellouts, that is.

You know, when my back’s against the wall, I’ll think on all of the quislings and cowards that let us inch into this situation. Then I’ll track them down in whatever afterlife they’ve chosen and kick ‘im in the nether regions.

Also, in case it’s not too late, you can still join the EFF and the ACLU (the ACLU has a companion case going against the NSA). Oh, and if you aren’t using Tor, you should be.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have soared the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq for years, spotting enemy encampments, protecting military bases, and even launching missile attacks against suspected terrorists.

Now UAVs may be landing in the United States.

A House of Representatives panel on Wednesday heard testimony from police agencies that envision using UAVs for everything from border security to domestic surveillance high above American cities. Private companies also hope to use UAVs for tasks such as aerial photography and pipeline monitoring.
Click for photos

“We need additional technology to supplement manned aircraft surveillance and current ground assets to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory,” Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner at Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection Bureau, told the House Transportation subcommittee.

This is Hoover’s America, not mine.

The NYPD is installing 505 surveillance cameras around the city – and pushing to safeguard lower Manhattan with a “ring of steel” that could track hundreds of thousands of people and cars a day, authorities revealed yesterday.

The police cameras will constantly keep watch over neighborhoods plagued by crime and monitor potential terror targets as the city moves to put another 1,200 cops on the street, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

I know practices such as these have been going on in Europe for years, but watching as our country becomes increasingly totalitarian and fascist is depressing. The State always couches new information/tracking mechanisms in the cloth of “safety,” and given the current bedwetting climate seeking a Big Brother to watch over them, I don’t think they’ll meet any resistance. Next will be the RFID trackers with the lights to correllate citizen movement with permitted and proscribed activities. Show us your papers!

Wolcott has more.

A story by Minnesota Public Radio reveals a disturbing new way that a political party is secretly grabbing sensitive personal information about voters.

This week the Minnesota Republican Party is distributing a new CD about a proposed state marriage amendment. Along with flashy graphics, the CD asks people their views on controversial issues such as abortion, gun control, illegal immigration, and so on.

The problem – the CD sends your answers back to headquarters, filed by name, address, and political views. No mention of that in the terms of use. No privacy policy at all.

What happened to Sony in the DRM fiasco needs to happen to the Panoptic GOP.

It’s good to dream.

A Cincinnati video surveillance company CityWatcher.com now requires employees to use Verichip human implantable microchips to enter a secure data centre. Until now, the employees entered the data centre with a VeriChip housed in a heart-shaped plastic casing that hangs from their keychain.

The VeriChip is a glass encapsulated RFID tag that is injected into the triceps area of the arm to uniquely identify individuals. The tag can be read by radio waves from a few inches away.

I just want to be clear on this… a company thought it was a good idea to force their employees to be injected with RFID tags for access to their datacenter and at least some of those employees acquiesced? Why not just brand them? Worker 3B116-Z would look great with a CityWatch brand on his forehead. What kind of simpering fool would agree to be tagged by their employer? Idiots. Idiots and authoritarians… they’re like peas and carrots.

And the copout that people will not be fired if they refuse is a fig leaf, that further ignores the coercive effects within a work environment, particularly in a tight labor market. What if the person’s only job is within the data warehouse? At that point they are being faced with a situation of acquiesce or quit. No court in the land would hear this case in favor of the workers of course, but that’s more of a condemnation of our country’s massively pro-management legal and social framework than addressing the merits of the worker’s position.

The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.

Bush doesn’t need FISA, he just needs to pay these evil little fuckers $160 and he’ll have everybody Amanpour has called on her cell. Well, my cell phone usage is already miniscule, but this is yet another disincentive to its use.

How is it legal? You have no privacy right in your pen records and there is no countervailing law overriding that with regards to actions such as those described in the article. Hopefully Schumer will get his legislation passed. Oh yeah, GOP control so nothing except for pork and tax cuts for the top 1%. Nevermind.

With the proliferation of RFID devices and related privacy concerns, it seemed due time to create the RFID Blocking Duct Tape Wallet. There are many ways to prevent Radio Frequency ID tags from being transmitted from devices. I often use my work badge and school ID which both contain RFID tags. With drivers licenses, credit cards, and cash now beginning to contain RFID tags, why not create the wallet.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

Implementing encryption is super easy to do, the encryption integrates with nearly every mail reader, and it will make your mail snoop proof until the advent of quantum computing.

To get you started: GnuPG (recommended), OpenPGP, or finally PGP. You need these bits of software before moving on.

In Windoze, I use WinPT. When I’m using email, I use the enigmail and enigmime extensions to Thunderbird.

My public key to the chrism at cmoore dot com is: 0x825597EF

Use it.

Let us say, and why not, that you’re David Brooks, New York Times conservative columnist and desperate apologist for the Bush administration. Let us say, and, indeed, why not, that President Bush and Vice President Cheney decided that the only way to prevent another terrorist attack was to have you raped. So Bush and Cheney went to Alberto Gonzales, who consulted John Yoo, who said, “If the Commander-in-Chief, in a time of war, having been given authorization by the Congress to do what it takes to win the war on terror, decides he needs have David Brooks raped as a tactic to win that war, then the President has the inherent power to so order the raping.”

Thus, having been approved by his AG, whose initials are, conveniently for the President, “AG,” Bush orders that you be raped by the NSA. Now, you, David Brooks, cannot be informed that such an order has taken place. And while members of Congress have been briefed on the matter, with a couple lodging concerns about the legality of raping David Brooks, the rape has been ordered. So, one day, without warning, some men in black grab you, drag you into a van, gag you, pull down your Armani slacks and boxers, and fuck your asshole raw while driving around New York City until, their duty being done, they dump you in front of the Times building.

The thing that really gets me about the “freedom isn’t free” jingoist flag-waving mouthbreathers, is that they are always the first ones to surrender their freedoms in pursuit of security. They decry those that defend their freedoms as defeatists and abetters of enemies of the state, yet hold themselves out as the Free. What’s worse, they’re either too cynical, lazy, incurious, or stupid to realize how contradictory their actions are.

So wave your Freedom flag high, people. Put those meaningless symbol stickers on your car. Maybe if you clap loudly enough, they won’t come for you.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

In 2002, President Bush toured the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md., with Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was then the agency’s director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

a) this is clearly unconstitutional and would be, in any rational world, grounds for impeachment and imprisonment for all involved

b) People, if you don’t use GnuPG/PGP when you email me, it’s your own damn fault. Our civil liberties are gone, our privacy is gone. With this administration and its executive-power-trumps-all paradigm, we have no rights but those we can secure for ourselves. So at the very least, encrypt your mails to me, even if we’re just talking about the weather.

c) This should be an issue that unites conservatives, liberals, and libertarians alike. That the conservatives are not coming out en masse to rally against this is a fantastic demonstration of the bankruptcy of their ideals and their cause.

A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

Let me repeat: the US military is spying on domestic antiwar groups and keeping a database of these incidents.

And here I thought the fascist police state was just around the corner. Who knew it was already here?

A “24×7 national vehicle movement database” that logs everything on the UK’s roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of ‘Gatso 2′ network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.

Which possibly explains why the sorcerer’s apprentices in ACPO’s tech section don’t seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth.

Key-rist. Well, y’all can’t come over here, and France is looking pretty FUBAR’d. I’m voting for … Italy. Yeah, baby.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it isn’t. The pages coming out of your color printer may contain hidden information that could be used to track you down if you ever cross the U.S. government.

Last year, an article in PC World magazine pointed out that printouts from many color laser printers contained yellow dots scattered across the page, viewable only with a special kind of flashlight. The article quoted a senior researcher at Xerox Corp. as saying the dots contain information useful to law-enforcement authorities, a secret digital “license tag” for tracking down criminals.

The content of the coded information was supposed to be a secret, available only to agencies looking for counterfeiters who use color printers.

Now, the secret is out.

Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco consumer privacy group, said it had cracked the code used in a widely used line of Xerox printers, an invisible bar code of sorts that contains the serial number of the printer as well as the date and time a document was printed.

/me checks to make sure his ACLU and EFF memberships are up to date…

And whomever it was that thought using the goatse.cx image was a good idea really needs to have their head examined. Nothing like seeing the second worst picture in the history of the universe to really make the registration process fun!

As you may have read elsewhere, News.com – our sister publication in the US – recently published a story concerning Google and online personal privacy. In it staff writer Elinor Mills used Google itself to find out public information about Google chief executive Eric E. Schmidt, which she then published. In response, Google has decided not to talk to any reporter from News.com for a year.

A state senator frustrated with what he called “stonewalling” by the California National Guard said Tuesday he would launch contempt hearings against the state’s military unit for failing to turn over documents.

Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove, sought the documents as part of his probe into the Guard’s new controversial intelligence unit. After squaring off with a top Guard official and a lawyer for the unit Tuesday, Dunn also threatened to seek subpoenas against dozens of current and former top Guard officials.

The hearing was the first since the Times Sacramento Bureau reported the existence of the Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion program last month. Internal Guard e-mails show the unit had high-level interest in a small Mother’s Day anti-war rally at the Capitol.
…
Before the hearing, the U.S. Army also dealt the committee a blow saying that a computer hard drive and a hand-held Blackberry used by the retiring California Guard colonel who oversaw the fledgling intelligence unit was federal property, and not subject to the subpoena.

The hard drive was erased the same day Dunn requested the Guard preserve all documents related to the unit.