Tag Archives: United States Department of Homeland Security

The latest government privacy invasion

Posted on by at 8:54 am

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a huge new database is being created by the government that will track virtually all citizens, even those not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal. Counterterrorism officials wanted to create a government dragnet, sweeping up millions of records about U.S. citizens—even people suspected of no crime.

Not everyone was on board. “This is a sea change in the way that the government interacts with the general public,” Mary Ellen Callahan, chief privacy officer of the Department of Homeland Security, argued in the meeting, according to people familiar with the discussions.

A week later, the attorney general signed the changes into effect.

* * *

Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” may be permanently retained.

The changes also allow databases of U.S. civilian information to be given to foreign governments for analysis of their own. In effect, U.S. and foreign governments would be using the information to look for clues that people might commit future crimes.

Your tax dollars at work. It really makes you feel safer, doesn’t it? And this is a clear indication of the effectiveness of so-called “privacy officers” in most organizations.

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Congress questions domain name seizures

Posted on by at 8:47 am

The Federal government, acting as a private security force for the entertainment industry, has been seizing domains (i.e., shutting them down without a trial) based on claims of intellectual property violations. There is a complete lack of due process in such seizures which are actually direct attacks on free speech.

Finally, a group in Congress is demanding answers from the Obama Justice Department.

The Representatives’ letter focused on the case of former hip hop website Dajaz1. Dajaz1’s domain name had been seized for over a year, despite evidence that the website had lawful material, and that “many of the allegedly infringing links to copyrighted songs, and specifically the links that were the basis of the seizure order, were given to the site’s owner by artists and labels themselves” including Kanye West, Diddy, and a vice president of a major record label.

Adding to the injustice, the government refused to cooperate with Dajaz1’s attorneys for months, and sought numerous extensions of the seizure authority in secret. When the court records were finally released, it showed that the government was waiting on the RIAA to evaluate a “sampling of allegedly infringing content” and respond to other “outstanding questions.” While the RIAA fiddled, Dajaz1 lost the right to speak and the public lost its right to read what was published there.

Finally, after a year, control over dajaz1.com was handed back to the owners with no apology, and no explanation. It is disturbing enough that DHS has been effectively acting as the tax-funded hired gun of the content industry, but, even more horrifying, it censored the wrong targets, for no good reason, for a year.

You can read the full letter here. And you can read about another similar case, in which the Federal government delayed (18 months) a decision to dismiss the case, here.

This behavior has to stop.

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Another (expensive) DHS failure

Posted on by at 7:35 am

The Los Angeles Times is reporting another huge failure by the Department of Homeland Security. After spending billions on bio-hazard detectors, it is clear that they simply do not work effectively.  And a new line of detectors seem little better.

As Chris Lindley drove to work that morning in August 2008, a call set his heart pounding.

The Democratic National Convention was being held in Denver, and Barack Obama was to accept his party’s presidential nomination before a crowd of 80,000 people that night.

The phone call was from one of Lindley’s colleagues at Colorado’s emergency preparedness agency. The deadly bacterium that causes tularemia — long feared as a possible biological weapon — had been detected at the convention site.

Should they order an evacuation, the state officials wondered? Send inspectors in moon suits? Distribute antibiotics? Delay or move Obama’s speech?

Another question loomed: Could they trust the source of the alert, a billion-dollar government system for detecting biological attacks known as BioWatch?

Six tense hours later, Lindley and his colleagues had reached a verdict: false alarm.

BioWatch had failed — again.

***

The ultimate verdict on BioWatch is that state and local health officials have shown no confidence in it. Not once have they ordered evacuations or distributed emergency medicines in response to a positive reading.

The land of the free

Posted on by at 5:25 pm

Most Federal courts have ruled that the government is free to confiscate a US citizen’s computer and cellphone when the citizen enters the US from a foreign country. The contents of those devices can be fully copied and retained without any time limit. And this action requires no warrant or reasonable cause.

Glen Greenwald describes the plight of a US documentary film-maker who has been stopped, and had her devices confiscated, on every entry she makes returning from abroad.

… Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke. They have exhibited a particular interest in finding out for whom she works.

She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).

Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps — ones that hamper her ability to do her work — to ensure that she can engage in her journalism and produce her films without the U.S. Government intruding into everything she is doing. She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work — raw film and interview notes — to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the U.S., she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear — obviously well-grounded — that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.

That’s the climate of fear created by the U.S. Government for an incredibly accomplished journalist and filmmaker who has never been accused, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing whatsoever. Indeed, documents obtained from a FOIA request show that DHS has repeatedly concluded that nothing incriminating was found from its border searches and interrogations of Poitras. Nonetheless, these abuses not only continue, but escalate, after six years of constant harassment.

When will the assaults on liberty and freedom implemented in the name of “security” be limited? When will the Constitution be restored? This article indicates that one Federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit against such actions can proceed, but we need legislation to broaden the protections.

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

Posted on by at 2:29 pm

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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Michigan Homeland Security agency buys snow cones machines

Posted on by at 7:37 am

 

Snow cone with cherry syrup

We will not be safe without snow cones. And we cannot allow a “snow cone” gap to develop relative to the terrorists.

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What happened to the Constitution?

Posted on by at 7:39 am

The Department of Homeland Security has a practice of seizing domain names of various sites and alleging that such sites traffic stolen intellectual property. Such seizures are made without any prior hearing and with no notification to the owners of such domains.

One seized domain was Dajaz1.com, a hip-hop music site. After the domain was seized by DHS, here is part of what happened:

After continuing to stall and refusing to respond to Dajaz1′s filing requesting the domain be returned, the government told Dajaz1′s lawyer, Andrew P. Bridges, that it would begin forfeiture procedures (as required by law if it wanted to keep the domain). Bridges made clear that Dajaz1 would challenge the forfeiture procedure and seek to get the domain name back at that time. Then, the deadline for the government to file for forfeiture came and went and nothing apparently happened. Absolutely nothing. Bridges contacted the government to ask what was going on, and was told that the government had received an extension from the court. Bridges, quite reasonably, asked how that was possible without him, as counsel for the site, being informed of it or given a chance to make the case for why such an extension was improper.

He also asked for a copy of the the court’s order allowing the extension. The government told him no and that the extension was filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He asked for the motion papers asking for the extension. The government told him no and that the papers were filed under seal and could not be released, even in redacted form.

He again asked whether he would be notified about further filings for extensions. The government told him no.

He then asked the US attorney to inform the court that, if the government made another request for an extension, the domain owner opposed the extension and would like the opportunity to be heard. The government would not agree.

And file further extensions the government did. Repeatedly. Or, at least that’s what Bridges was told. He sent someone to investigate the docket at the court, but the docket itself was secret, meaning there was no record of any of this available.

Due process?

On Friday, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) demanded that DHS provide his office with full details of this seizure and its aftermath.

“I expect the administration will be receiving a series of FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests from our office and that the senator will have very pointed questions with regard to how the administration chooses to target the sites that it does,” said Jennifer Hoelzer, a Wyden spokeswoman. She said the senator was “particularly interested in learning how many secret dockets exist for copyright cases. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious precedent or explanation for that.”

Wyden’s interest comes a day after federal authorities returned the domain name dajaz1.com, which was back online greeting visitors Friday with a powerful message about proposed web-censorship legislation that expands the government — and copyright holders — power to shutter and cripple sites suspected of copyright infringement.

More on the latest developments in this case to watch here.

Meanwhile, two prominent capitol hill staffers who promoted the SOPA and ProtectIP bills have taken jobs with the MPAA and the NMPA. Money talks.

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Be careful what you ask for

Posted on by at 8:58 am

Hasan M. Elahi has a fascinating op-ed in today’s New York Times. He describes how in 2002, despite being an American citizen, he was stopped in Detroit upon entering the country and grilled for hours by Federal agents who believed he might be involved in terrorist activity. The Feds followed up with lie detector tests, numerous interviews and other activities.

In response Elahi, decided to log virtually all his activities, travel, and small details of his life, and then continuiusly forward the information to the FBI. He also posted all the information, in an unorganized fashion to his website. He suggests that this might be the best response to government spying. He just might be right.

Excerpt:

On my Web site, I compiled various databases that show the airports I’ve been in, food I’ve eaten at home, food I’ve eaten on the road, random hotel beds I’ve slept in, various parking lots off Interstate 80 that I parked in, empty train stations I saw, as well as very specific information like photos of the tacos I ate in Mexico City between July 5 and 7, and the toilets I used.

These images seem empty, and could be anywhere, but they’re not; they are extremely specific records of my exact travels to particular places. There are 46,000 images on my site. I trust that the F.B.I. has seen all of them. Agents know where I’ve bought my duck-flavored paste, or kimchi, laundry detergent and chitlins; because I told them everything….

PEOPLE who visit my site — and my server logs indicate repeat visits from the Department of Homeland Security, the C.I.A., the National Reconnaissance Office and the Executive Office of the President — don’t find my information organized clearly. In fact, the interface I use is deliberately user-unfriendly. A lot of work is required to thread together the thousands of available points of information. By putting everything about me out there, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life. Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.

 

There they go again

Posted on by at 9:27 am
Seal of the United States Department of Homela...

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Our friends at the Department of Homeland Security have somewhat quietly introduced yet another assault on the civil liberties of American citizens. This time in involves not an assault on the person, but rather an assault on the person’s data.  Glenn Greenwald provides some startling information over at Salon.

For those who regularly write and read about civil liberties abuses, it’s sometimes easy to lose perspective of just how extreme and outrageous certain erosions are.  One becomes inured to them, and even severe incursions start to seem ordinary.  Such was the case, at least for me, with Homeland Security’s practice of detaining American citizens upon their re-entry into the country, and as part of that detention, literally seizing their electronic products — laptops, cellphones, Blackberries and the like — copying and storing the data, and keeping that property for months on end, sometimes never returning it.  Worse, all of this is done not only without a warrant, probable cause or any oversight, but even without reasonable suspicion that the person is involved in any crime.  It’s completely standard-less, arbitrary, and unconstrained.  There’s no law authorizing this power nor any judicial or Congressional body overseeing or regulating what DHS is doing.  And the citizens to whom this is done have no recourse — not even to have their property returned to them.

When you really think about it, it’s simply inconceivable that the U.S. Government gets away with doing this.  Seizing someone’s laptop, digging through it, recording it all, storing the data somewhere, and then distributing it to various agencies is about the most invasive, privacy-destroying measure imaginable.  A laptop and its equivalents reveal whom you talk to, what you say, what you read, what you write, what you view, what you think, and virtually everything else about your life.  It can — and often does — contain not only the most private and intimate information about you, but also information which the government is legally barred from accessing (attorney/client or clergy/penitent communications, private medical and psychiatric information and the like).  But these border seizures result in all of that being limitlessly invaded.  This is infinitely more invasive than the TSA patdowns that caused so much controversy just two months ago.  What kind of society allows government agents — without any cause — to seize all of that whenever they want, without limits on whom they can do this to, what they access, how they can use it:  even without anyone knowing what they’re doing?

With only one or two exceptions, neither the Democrats or the Republicans in Congress seem to be particularly interested in addressing this issue. It is one more significant erosion to the Fourth Amendment.  If reading the Constitution at the beginning of the House’s first business day this year was more than a grandstanding effort, why is no real effort at protecting liberty underway?

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ACLU challenges border seizures

Posted on by at 5:50 pm
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Official ...

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The ACLU has filed a lawsuit challenging the seizure of electronic devices (cellphones, computers, cameras, etc.) from persons entering the United States. Such seizures occur even from individuals who are not suspected of any wrongdoing whatsoever.

The government has claimed the authority to undertake these suspicionless searches and seizures of electronic devices under a policy issued in August 2009 by the Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. This policy is a rewording of the same policy that came into effect during the Bush administration. Between October 1, 2008, and June 2, 2010, over 6,500 people were subjected to this policy — nearly 3,000 of them U.S. citizens.

We are not saying that the government can never search or seize electronic devices at the border, but only that border agents should have some suspicion that the search will turn up evidence of wrongdoing before looking through all the private information that people have stored in their devices. Americans travel internationally more than in the past, and usually with private information and intimate details of our lives condensed in small, electronic devices. We hope that the court will recognize that Americans don’t give up their right to privacy at the border, and strike down the DHS’s policy as unconstitutional.

This has to stop. If you travel for work purposes and want to be sure that confidential business information stays that way, be sure to securely wipe your devices before returning to the US.

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