Tag Archives: privacy

TSA debate is over

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The debate hosted by The Economist that I wrote about earlier is now over.

And the proposition “This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good” has won overwhelmingly.

Voters have roundly declared that the frustrations, the delays, the loss of liberty and the increase in fear that characterise their interactions with airport-security procedures vastly outweigh the good these procedures achieve. For some, indeed, the benefits are essentially non-existent: any sensible terrorist can find a work-around or choose a different point of attack, as Bruce Schneier explains. And so the widely expressed hope is that changes made to security in the (near) future will make the whole regime less reactive, more rational, more flexible and more intelligence-driven. The results of this debate suggest that these changes should be made with some urgency: passengers are angry.

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Massive cell phone tracking uncovered

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From today’s New York Times:

Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.

The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.

This has to moved to the courts, sooner rather than later.  The practice of cell carriers turning such operations into profit centers is certainly not mentioned in their advertising.

Secret laws in America

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The existence of secret laws, unknown and unknowable by citizens of a country, is anathema to democracy, due process, and open government. Secret laws are tools of repressive regimes, not democracies.

But in the US today, we are subject to secret laws under the guise of secret interpretations of public laws by the Federal government. Specifically, two Senators allege that the Federal government has aggressively interpreted the application of the so-called US Patriot Act. The aggressive interpretation would alarm citizens, but the Federal government (i.e., the Obama administration) refuses to disclose its interpretation and the actions it takes based on those interpretations.

There appears to be both an ordinary use for Section 215 orders — akin to using a grand jury subpoena to get specific information in a traditional criminal investigation — and a separate, classified intelligence collection activity that also relies upon them.

The interpretation of Section 215 that authorizes this secret surveillance operation is apparently not obvious from a plain text reading of the provision, and was developed through a series of classified rulings by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Read this letter to Eric Holder from Senators Wyden and Udall. Stunning.

On a related noted, James Bamford, writing in Wired reports on a new, huge data center being built in Utah by the NSA, in which it notes:

… for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

* * *

Binney [formerly of the NSA] left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

So much for transparency. So much for democracy.

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Law enforcement GPS tracking: how widespread?

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After the recent Supreme Court decision ruling unconstitutional at least certain types of warrantless tracking of automobiles with GPS devices attached to the cars, the FBI has apparently turned off many of its trackers.

After the ruling, the FBI had a problem collecting the devices that it had turned off, Mr. Weissmann said. In some cases, he said, the FBI sought court orders to obtain permission to turn the devices on briefly – only in order to locate and retrieve them.

What I find interesting is that it appears that around 3,000 of the devices were deactivated.  That represents 3,000 people who up to a couple of weeks ago were secretly tracked by their government without the minimum requirement of a simple search warrant. Not a huge number, but it is the number of devices in operation at one point in time. The number of people tracked by the FBI over the past several years is probably at least 180,000, assuming 30 days per person tracked over five years. And this estimate only covers the FBI. Surely other Federal agencies were using the same techniques.

This represents a significant victory over the continuing erosion of privacy rights in the United States.

A victory for privacy

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From the EFF:

A federal appeals court has found a Florida man’s constitutional rights were violated when he was imprisoned for refusing to decrypt data on several devices. This is the first time an appellate court has ruled the 5th Amendment protects against forced decryption – a major victory for constitutional rights in the digital age.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed an amicus brief under seal, arguing that the man had a valid Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, and that the government’s attempt to force him to decrypt the data was unconstitutional. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that the act of decrypting data is testimonial and therefore protected by the Fifth Amendment. Furthermore, the government’s limited offer of immunity in this case was insufficient to protect his constitutional right, because it did not extend to the government’s use of the decrypted data as evidence against him in a prosecution.

You can read the full opinion here.

Unfortunately, a second case reached the opposite position. An analysis of the two opinions seems to indicate that police can force a suspect to provide the password if they know what is included in the encrypted data, but not if they don’t.

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Send in the drones

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In a new law signed by the President on Tuesday, the FAA is compelled to allow unmanned drones to be used in the United States for commercial purposes, as well as law enforcement and emergency purposes.

Under the law, within 90 days, the F.A.A. must allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they keep them under an altitude of 400 feet and meet other requirements. The agency must also allow for “the safe integration” of all kinds of drones into American airspace, including those for commercial uses, by Sept. 30, 2015. And it must come up with a plan for certifying operators and handling airspace safety issues, among other rules.

What could possibly go wrong with this? From the point of view of privacy, this could be a very big deal indeed. Drones are relatively inexpensive, and becoming more so every day.  And, under current US law, there is no right to privacy for images taken from the air.

Imagine your neighbor (or the police) flying a drone equipped with an HD video camera over your back yard while you having a party or over your swimming pool.  When I lived in Los Angeles, there were frequent law enforcement uses of the sky by helicopter. While the noise could be very annoying, it also made clear that law enforcement was watching. With drones, the noise level will be greatly reduced or even eliminated. The ACLU has prepared a report on the implications of drone deployment in this country and suggested privacy protections.

Routine aerial surveillance in American life would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States. Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a “surveillance society” in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by the authorities.

Aside from privacy, imagine the damage that could be caused by unskilled operators of the drones. And what about possible mid-air collisions with piloted aircraft? There is no technology in the current crop of commercial drones for locating or communicating with nearby aircraft.

One wonders who in Congress seriously considered these risks (other than the lobbyists for the drone industry).

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Don’t be evil

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According to this report from the Wall Street Journal, Google has been secretly tracking users of the Safari browser on iPhones and computers even though such users had changed their settings to block tracking.

Google Inc. and other advertising companies have been bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Inc.’s Web browser on their iPhones and computers—tracking the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

This is a company that is in the midst of a total rewrite of its privacy policies in order to allow it to compile and cross-reference information across all its platforms to create a  complete data on its users.   The FTC should immediately investigate whether this tracking violates Google’s existing privacy policies.

More from the EFF.

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Female passengers claim they were targeted for body scans

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Via Wired:

TSA agents in Dallas singled out female passengers to undergo screening in a body scanner, according to complaints filed by several women who said they felt the screeners intentionally targeted them to view their bodies.

One woman who flew out of Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport several months ago said a female agent sent her through a body scanner three times after the agent commented on her “cute” body.

“She says to me, ‘Do you play tennis?’ And I said, ‘Why?’‘You just have such a cute figure,’” Ellen Terrell recalled to CBS News in Dallas.

Terrell said the female agent appeared to be acting on a request from male agents who were in a separate room viewing the scans and who apparently asked the agent to send Terrell back through the scanner twice because the scan was blurry.

After the third scan, Terrell said the agent seemed frustrated with her co-workers in the screening room. “She’s talking into her microphone and she says, ‘Guys, it is not blurry, I’m letting her go,’” Terrell said.

Terrell, who was traveling with her husband at the time, told the TV station, “I feel like I was totally exposed. They wanted a nice good look.”

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Your tax dollars at work

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The FBI is circulating a set of flyers purported to identify suspicious behaviors that indicates possible terrorist activities that therefore should be reported to the FBI by all good citizens.  The flyers are headlined “Communities Against Terrorism” and there are at least 25 versions.

The version for Internet Cafes is particularly disturbing in that is essentially says that anyone protecting their privacy online is quite possibly a terrorist.  Among the “suspicious” activities listed on the flyer are:

  • Always pay cash
  • Evidence of a residential based internet provider (signs on to Comcast, AOL, etc.)
  • Use of anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address
  • Encryption or use of software to hide encrypted data in digital photos, etc.
  • Suspicious communications using VOIP or communicating through a PC game
  • Gather information about vulnerable infrastructure or obtain photos, maps or diagrams of transportation, sporting venues, or populated locations

So people who want to protect their privacy online, or who wish to pay for things with money, or who look up a sports stadium (maybe to find their seat for an event, say) ought to be reported to the FBI?

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Supreme Court blocks at least some warrantless GPS tracking

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The US Supreme Court today unanimously blocked GPS tracking by law enforcement without a warrant, at least in certain cases.  The decision concluded that GPS tracking did constitute a “search” within the meaning of the fourth amendment, but various groupings of Justices offered differing rationales.

A good summary of the case is available at Wired’s Threat Level.

“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority. The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.

All nine justices, however, agreed to toss out the life sentence of a District of Columbia drug dealer who was the subject of a warrantless, 28-day surveillance via GPS.

I was particularly impressed by this dicta from Justice Sotomayor, which seems to get at the current reality of modern digital life:

Physical intrusion is now unnecessary to many forms of surveillance.  [In the case of G.P.S. devices], I would ask whether people reasonably expect that their movements will be recorded and aggregated in a manner that enables the government to ascertain, more or less at will, their political and religious beliefs, sexual habits, and so on.

[Further,] it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties.

People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the e-mail addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries, and medications they purchase to online retailers. I for one doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every Web site they had visited in the last week, or month, or year.

Top 10 TSA “good catches” of 2011 (updated)

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What do the billions of dollars we spend on the TSA bring us in terms of results? Well, from the TSA’s official blog, comes the TSA’s own list of their top 10 good catches in 2011.

Yes, a number of firearms were found, obviously carried aboard by our nation’s gun-lovers and by accident.

But there is one word you will not find anywhere in the top 10 list: terrorist. Can anyone explain how we are getting our money’s worth from this program and why it is not unconstitutional to begin with?

Update: For fiscal year 2011, the TSA budget for air travel security was $5.83 Billion, not counting air marshals. So each of those 1200 guns cost $4,800,000 to identify. This is a ridiculous waste of money. And of course that does not include the additional costs imposed on passengers for delay, humiliation and arrogant, over-reaching screeners who pretend to police officers but who are not.

And TSA offers no details on how many fines or other actions were taken in response to those guns, but I will assume that overwhelmingly there were small fines for simple errors and virtually none of the firearms presented a real threat.

There is ample deterrence without the bloated TSA in the fact that, after 9/11, all airplane passengers fully understand that a highjacking will likely end in their death. Passengers will very quickly take action to protect the plane. And terrorists have far better/softer targets to take now, like schools, theaters, shopping malls, hospitals, etc. See this article.

More importantly, these statistics are worse than the performance of airport security prior to 9/11. For more than a decade prior to 9/11, the FAA was required to report to Congress semi-annually the number of firearms discovered by the FAA’s airport security program. [Section 325(a) of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958.] Take a look at those reports if you want. One example that I picked at random is for January through June, 1988. The report indicated that for the six month period covered by the report 1,291 firearms were detected. This means that the limited, cheaper and less intrusive security program at the time detected twice as many firearms than does the current TSA (and there are likely to be far more air travelers now than in 1988).

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Massive wiretap case can proceed

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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a case claiming that the Federal government (with the active participation of some of the telcos) illegally wiretapped millions of Americans following the 9/11 attack could proceed on the merits.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today blocked the government’s attempt to bury the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF’s) lawsuit against the government’s illegal mass surveillance program, returning Jewel v. NSA to the District Court for the next step.

The court found that Jewel had alleged sufficient specifics about the warrantless wiretapping program to proceed. Justices rejected the government’s argument that the allegations about the well-known spying program and the evidence of the Folsom Street facility in San Francisco were too speculative.

“Since the dragnet spying program first came to light, we have been fighting for the chance to have a court determine whether it is legal,” said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. “Today, the Ninth Circuit has given us that chance, and we look forward to proving the program is an unconstitutional and illegal violation of the rights of millions of ordinary Americans.”

The full opinion is available here.

Congress passed a bill providing immunity from suit to the participating telcos, but the court has ruled that there is no immunity for unconstitutional actions by the Federal government.

This case was backed primarily by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and they deserve your support.

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85 year old woman strip searched at airport

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Details here. And more here.

An 85-year-old woman said Saturday that she was injured and humiliated when she was strip searched at an airport after she asked to be patted down instead of going through a body scanner, allegations that transportation security officials denied.

Lenore Zimmerman said she was taken to a private room and made to take off her pants and other clothes after she asked to forgo the screening because she worried it would interfere with her defibrillator. She missed her flight and had to take one 2 1/2 hours later, she said.

“I’m hunched over. I’m in a wheelchair. I weigh under 110 pounds (50 kilograms),” she said from her winter home at a seniors community in Coconut Creek, Florida. “Do I look like a terrorist?”

And here is the serious threat herself in a photo by The New York Daily News.

The TSA says she is lying.