Check this from Michael Arrington.
Facebook continues its attack on privacy. It has always been unconcerned with its users’ privacy and it continues to up the ante.
Sometimes indefinitely. Check out the details from this formerly secret Justice Department memo.
The nation’s major mobile-phone providers are keeping a treasure trove of sensitive data on their customers, according to newly-released Justice Department internal memo that for the first time reveals the data retention policies of America’s largest telecoms.
The single-page Department of Justice document, “Retention Periods of Major Cellular Service Providers,” (.pdf) is a guide for law enforcement agencies looking to get information — like customer IP addresses, call logs, text messages and web surfing habits – out of U.S. telecom companies, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.
The software on the Kindle Fire includes a new web browser called Silk, designed by Amazon. It is designed to use Amazon’s online computing resources to speed downloads for users. Sounds good.
However, this also means that every web page a Kindle Fire user accesses goes through Amazon computers. This gives Amazon the ability to track (and analyze) the detailed browsing history of Fire users.
Another way the browser aims to speed things up is by predicting the future. Silk uses machine learning to predict browsing patterns and pre-load pages that the user is likely to request next. Just as Amazon can guess which books and other products you’ll be interested in, it can also figure out which pages you’re likely to navigate to on the Web.
“The browser observes aggregate user behavior across a large number of sites,” said Jon Jenkins, Silk’s director of software development. “For instance, we might notice that people who view the New York Times homepage, often go to the New York Times business page afterwards. Our browser is capable of detecting these aggregate user behavior patterns and actually requesting the next page you’re likely to need before you even know you need it.”
Consider carefully the privacy implications of a retailer accumulating such data.
Update: More from Chris Espinosa.
The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
And from Naked Security:
Fortunately Amazon will support an “off-cloud” mode for Silk. This lets users opt-out of the benefits of using EC2 while retaining the traditional privacy benefits of connecting directly to remote web sites.
While most of us roll our eyes when confronted with long privacy policies and pages of legalese, privacy risks lurk around every corner. If you buy a Fire device, think carefully as to whether your privacy is worth trading for a few milliseconds faster web surfing experience.
The Wall Street Journal, a Murdoch publication and part of the family that brought you phone hacking in the UK (and the US?), has announced that they are changing their privacy policy to explicitly allow them to match up personally identifiable information with your account. In other words, they track your web usage and aggregated it directly with your name.
You can read the new policy here.
More from Dan Gillmor here.
Scum.
A constitutional challenge to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has survived an en banc rehearing in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The challenge was brought by human rights groups, lawyers and journalists who claim to have been wiretapped or believe they will be wiretapped under FISA without probable cause and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The hearing was focused on whether such claimants have standing to bring the challenge. A three judge panel initially ruled that the plaintiffs had standing, and the the defendants (the government) sought an en banc rehearing. The en banc appellate panel evenly split 6-6 denying the request for such rehearing. As a result, the initial Second Circuit ruling affirming standing remains in effect and, unless the decision is appealed to the Supreme Court, the constitutionality of FISA will be, at least initially, be determined by the lower court.
More info here.
Great news.
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.
If so, you better read this.
Update: More from Wired.
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)
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.
The fiction that the vast majority of the American population consents to warrantless government access to the records of a significant share of their movements by ‘choosing’ to carry a cell phone must be rejected. In light of drastic developments in technology, the Fourth Amendment doctrine must evolve to preserve cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.
– US District Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York, ruling that probable cause must be demonstrated by prosecutors as a pre-condition to demanding location-driven cell phone records from a phone company. In other words, get a warrant.
Full-text of the decision here.
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.
Two Senators have claimed that the Federal government has developed and is using a very broad interpretation of the Patriot Act‘s provisions. They claim it is so broad that it supports massive surveillance of Americans far larger than a plain reading of the Act would support. They have called for a report from the National Director of Intelligence and the DOJ fully explaining their interpretations.
“There is a significant discrepancy between what most Americans – including many members of Congress – think the Patriot Act allows the government to do and how government officials interpret that same law,” wrote the Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. “We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. ”
The Senators tried to get the government to reveal some of the law’s contents, by forcing the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General to produce a report outlining when this secret surveillance has gone overboard. Yesterday, the effort failed. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said no to the report by rejecting Wyden and Udall’s amendment to the FY2012 Intelligence Authorization Act.
In other words: we are all still in the dark about how the government is spying on us.
