If you get arrested in California for any reason, the photos, e-mails and other personal data on your cell phone are now a bit safer from prying police eyes. A new law now requires law-enforcement officers in that state to obtain a warrant before searching the cell phone of a person placed under arrest.
The Patriot Act is a civil liberties disaster. It was enacted to be deployed in anti-terror investigations. But how are its provisions actually used? Here is a summary of the use of the Act’s delayed-notice search warrant provisions from 2006-2009:
More from New York Magazine. (via Boing Boing)
Victor Vinge first predicted the singularity in 1993. Here is a recent interview.
(via Boing Boing)
We want to be conscious of civil liberties and civil rights protections—and we are. We don’t do anything without kind of [kind of?] running it through our own civil rights and privacy office. We’re one of only two departments in the federal government that actually has a presidentially-appointed privacy office and officer.
We run all of our programs our technology buys all of those kinds of things we think about privacy and when too much is too much, but on the other hand our responsibility is to maximize our ability to prevent something violent from being successful. So we’re always striking that balance but we think we’ve hit it pretty right.
– Janet Napolitano, arguing that porno scanners protect the privacy of US citizens.
Several states purport to make it a crime to record the public activities of law enforcement officers. This is outrageous, but fortunately in a recent case, the right of citizens to record such activity was affirmed.
In Massachusetts, meanwhile, the right of citizens to record the police has been upheld by the United States Court of Appeals For The First Circuit in the case of Glik v. Cunniffe. Passerby Simon Glik caught sight of three police officers arresting a young man. Hearing an onlooker shout that the officers were hurting the man, Glik turned on his cellphone and began capturing video. The police officers objected to being recorded, arresting Glik and charging him with violating the state’s “wiretap” law by recording them without their consent, seizing his camera and memory chip as evidence.
The U.S. Court of Appeals held that the right to record police officers in public is a “clearly established” part of the First Amendment’s protections, and held the officers were thus not entitled to qualified immunity, meaning that they could be sued for their actions. The decision partially rectifies a situation in which for ordinary citizens, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but for police officers and other government officials, it’s an excuse that protects them from being sued.
In these cases, the courts (and juries) stood up for what should be an obvious proposition: Police officers, doing their jobs on the public dime, don’t have any sort of privacy right against the citizens who pay their salaries. Those who feel otherwise — mostly police officers and those connected with them — need to rethink the relationship of government to the citizenry, and perhaps reread the Constitution’s prohibition on “titles of nobility.”
In an era when government feels free to record citizens whenever they’re out in public, government officials need to recognize that this recording business works both ways. Want a surveillance society? Be prepared to live in it.
And there is this from Reason:
It seems that whenever Americans feel insecure the first actions are to jettison long held Constitutional protections that were created only by revolution and bloodshed. The latest such action, of course, was what happened after the 9/11 attacks, 10 years ago next week.
David Shipler, writing in The American Prospect, outlines chapter and verse of this sad time for the US Constitution. The entire article is worth a read. The litany of civil liberties abuses is long and should be sufficient to illuminate the very real risks to freedom that fear has generated even in the US.
Here is an excerpt:
… the Patriot Act of 2001 emasculated an array of privacy statutes that had been enacted in the last quarter of the 20th century. In 2008, Congress further amended one of those laws, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to legalize the extensive surveillance that Bush had clandestinely authorized during the weeks following the attacks. At the time, while legislators and civil-liberties groups were arguing over the Patriot Act’s changes to FISA, Bush was evading FISA by ordering the National Security Agency to monitor Internet and phone communications without judicial oversight. Bush’s program sparked outrage in Congress when The New York Times reported it in 2005, but in the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, Congress “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than the president had given himself, according to a joint report by the inspectors general of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice and Defense departments, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The inspectors general did not credit the program with many successes. While it “had value in some counterterrorism investigations,” they found, “it generally played a limited role in the FBI’s overall counterterrorism efforts.” Most officials interviewed for the report “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the monitoring had contributed to counterterrorism. A senior CIA official told the investigators that the surveillance “was rarely the sole basis for an intelligence success, but that it frequently played a supporting role.” Other CIA officials discounted the intelligence as “vague or without context.”
Bad news out of Massachusetts.
Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour — storing that information indefinitely where local cops, staties, feds and prosecutors could access it as they choose.
This is Big Brother in the extreme. How will this data be used? How will it be secured? How long will it be retained? Will private parties (e.g., litigants) be able to subpoena the data?
Just because technology allows this kind of tracking doesn’t mean it should be implemented. The loss of privacy and potential abuse of this kind of data is not outweighed by any legitimate law enforcement benefit.
Since the UK is not an Arab country sitting next to Egypt we are going to hear a lot of complaining about social media. You’ll hear that none of this would have happened if it were not for social media. Twitter is bad. Facebook is bad.
Investigations need to take place. Can we mine the social media companies for information about would-be rioters? Can we call them terrorists?
This will eventually spill over to the US where there is already talk about mining the social media sites. Let’s run everyone’s Twitter feed through Quantico and see if we can profile and find troublemakers. Let’s just throw them in jail now in a pre-crime move that could save lives!
I have argued that the next step on the agenda of tyranny is to license the Internet so only certain users can use it. You’ll need a license to podcast or run a blog. This will be to protect the public of course. France and other countries have already promoted the idea that if you are caught downloading copyrighted material you get put on a three strikes program and can have all your Internet privileges taken away for life. The logic of this is just plain weird. But it is a trend.
Something is afoot and none of it is good. Let’s see how it plays out in the UK. Maybe we should put a no-fly zone over the country? Oh wait, what am I thinking? These are thugs and punks, not freedom fighters and dissidents. These are just plain criminals.
Image via Wikipedia
Officials of Bay Area Rapid Transit block cellular communication at its some of its stations and all underground subway tunnels throughout the San Francisco Bay area yesterday. They did because they believe it would disrupt protestors, who were upset by the shooting of a 45 year old man by BART officers last month.
Officials were concerned that the protestors “would use mobile devices to coordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of Bart police,” the transit agency said Friday afternoon in a statement. Cutting off cellphone service for several hours at selected stations was “one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform,” Bart said.
Where have we seen this before? Perhaps Egypt’s action in shutting off the Internet to its citizens during the recent uprising.
How can a public agency in this country take this sort of action unilaterally? The consequences of such a communications black-out could be extremely bad. Imagine doctors’ emergency calls not getting through? How could people call the police if needed for protection? And further, since when can a governmental agency cut off public communication without violating the First Amendment? As stated by the EFF:
Cell phone service has not always been available in BART stations. The advent of reliable service inside of stations is relatively recent. But once BART made the service available, cutting it off in order to prevent the organization of a protest constitutes prior restrain[t] on the free speech rights of every person in the station, whether they’re a protestor or a commuter. Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. Censorship is not okay in Tahrir Square or Trafalgar Square, and it’s still not okay in Powell Street Station.
Oh, and the anticipated demonstrations never even occurred.
The House Judiciary has passed a bill that is yet another assault on privacy. And, consistent with past practice, such bills are always named so as to produce a compliant public response.
Proponents of the H.R. 1981 bill have titled it the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It’s believed by some that the legislation will help lift law enforcement out of the “dark ages”. Agents will be able to subpoena IP information instead of needing a court-ordered warrant. Investigators will have a further leg up when identifying child porn distributors and users since the bill ensures that the “footprints of predators are not erased,” according to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan believes the bill is mislabeled. “This is not protecting children from Internet pornography. It’s creating a database for everybody in this country for a lot of other purposes,” he says.
This is so typical. There is a massive invasion of privacy by the Federal government and one of the scary “3Ps” is trotted as the primary purpose of the bill. The three Ps, as all Americans should know by now are pedophilia, pornography and piracy.
Besides civil libertarians, who else is opposed to the bill? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, EPIC, and others.
Update: More from LifeHacker, including what to do to protect yourself, here.
Your best bet is to find yourself a good VPN provider and hook it up to a good VPN tool to encrypt and route all your internet traffic through a third-party that isn’t your ISP. Virtual Private Networks creates secure, encrypted connections between your computer and a server on the internet, then routes all your internet activity through that server. Your ISP would only really be logging the IP address of your VPN server, which doesn’t give them much of your private info.
Tor is one of the easiest ways to browse anonymously online (even if it isn’t perfect). If you’re a Chrome user, you can even create a simple Tor toggle button to use it only when you really need it. By anonymizing your browsing, your ISPs won’t have a record of what you’ve been doing. They’ll know you were online, but the details won’t be available to them or the police. Of course, there’s no assurance that any anonymous browsing tool will provide full protection but it’s definitely better than nothing at all. If setting up Tor seems a little daunting, Vidalia can help simplify the process. You’ll also want to read our guide on protecting your privacy when downloading for more suggestions.
So now, it is not enough for the TSA to hassle citizens at the airports. The highways offer new opportunities.
An off-duty Transportation Security Administration agent faces a misdemeanor harassment charge after allegedly tailing, flashing his badge and blowing his car horn at a woman who was driving too slowly for him, police said on Wednesday.
In a free country, you should never feel comfortable being searched. This is not the country I was born in. We’re a fascist nation now.
– Jesse Ventura, former wrestler and governor of Minnesota, speaking to a DOJ attorney following a court hearing. Ventura has filed a case challenging the legality of TSA groping procedures.
In an earlier post, I pointed to the Thomas Drake case in which the federal government was accusing Mr. Drake under the Espionage Act for blowing the whistle on what he saw as monumental waste of resources at the NSA. Then the prosecution’s case fell apart shortly before trial.
And now, the judge has delivered his ruling:
Judge Richard D. Bennett of the Federal District Court praised the former National Security Agency official, Thomas A. Drake, for his exemplary record of public service before giving him a mild scolding for improperly providing information on alleged agency mismanagement to The Baltimore Sun.
But Judge Bennett reserved his strongest condemnation for the Justice Department, saying the two and a half years that elapsed between the search of Mr. Drake’s home and his indictment in 2010 was far too long.
The visibly angry judge said that Mr. Drake had been through “four years of hell” and that the dragging out of the investigation — and then the dropping of the major charges on the eve of trial — was “unconscionable.”
“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” he said.
Federal government over-reach, as usual in cases with the slightest connection to the “war” on terror.
Petty little power crazy bureaucrats.
Dozens of law-enforcement agencies from Massachusetts to Arizona are preparing to outfit their forces with controversial hand-held facial-recognition devices as soon as September, raising significant questions about privacy and civil liberties.
With the device, which attaches to an iPhone, an officer can snap a picture of a face from up to five feet away, or scan a person’s irises from up to six inches away, and do an immediate search to see if there is a match with a database of people with criminal records. The gadget also collects fingerprints.
This device should only be used if there is probable cause to suspect criminal activity. That is the standard generally applied to allow law enforcement to take a person’s fingerprints and an iris scan is substantively the same.
Bill Johnson, executive director at the National Association of Police Organizations, a group of police unions and associations, says he is concerned in particular that iris scanning, which must be done at close range and requires special technology, could be considered a “search.”
