Verizon & Obama: all your calls are belong to us.

Shakey

Shakey

Here it is. It was from the owner himself. :
"There's information that I can't even share with my lawyer, let alone with the American public. So if we're talking about secrecy, you know, it's really been taken to the extreme, and I think it's really being used by the current administration to cover up tactics that they may be ashamed of," he said.
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Shakey

Shakey

stienman said:
Guess what the government can't read without a court order?

USPS first class letters.
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They can't read the contents, but they get the "Metadata".
Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.
Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.
The mail covers program, used to monitor Mr. Pickering, is more than a century old but is still considered a powerful tool. At the request of law enforcement officials, postal workers record information from the outside of letters and parcels before they are delivered. (Opening the mail would require a warrant.) The information is sent to the law enforcement agency that asked for it. Tens of thousands of pieces of mail each year undergo this scrutiny.
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AshburnerX

AshburnerX

Metadata in this case is basically just the sender's name and address (which can be cross referenced with other databases to get more vital info) and the recipient's same. By itself it's only evidence of a conversation and association... but when used with information they can gleam from other databases, it's more than enough to possibly figure out why you'd be talking to someone.

Too bad who you can and can't call changes every fucking day.
 
strawman

strawman

Yes, but you can mail a letter without sender or return info, and post it from a postbox, which eliminates one half of the information they could glean from it. If your partner does the same, it would be difficult for them to connect the two of you. So there are trivial methods around this data collection without additional cost.
 
Shakey

Shakey

stienman said:
Yes, but you can mail a letter without sender or return info, and post it from a postbox, which eliminates one half of the information they could glean from it. If your partner does the same, it would be difficult for them to connect the two of you. So there are trivial methods around this data collection without additional cost.
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To me it's more an issue of whether or not we want the government retaining or having access to this information without a warrant, not so much if we can get around it.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Filed a Freedom of Information Act request recently?


If so, don't hold your breath because it's going to take longer than usual to hear back. According to MuckRock, the only fax machine used by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to process these requests has been out of order for two weeks, leading to more than 1,000 backlogged requests that have been submitted by journalists in light of the National Security Agency scandals. In responding to the reports, a Defense Department spokesperson projected that the machine probably won't be back up until "sometime in October, but could extend into November."

Cause, you know, I guess there isn't a fax machine to be found in the DC area.
 
Eriol

Eriol

GasBandit said:
Cause, you know, I guess there isn't a fax machine to be found in the DC area.
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One of my favorite quotes from a show that visited somewhere that was just post-revolution: "There isn't a paper shredder to be had anywhere for love or money."

Seems related.
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

AshburnerX said:
This is all from something I read a few weeks back, so bear with me.

Attorneys have to be vetted before they can receive top secret or higher clearance, which they need before they can be involved in this sort of thing. There are maybe a few dozen such individuals in the entire Untied States and most of them are ether involved with prisoners in Gitmo or other such things. Very few are in private practice, mostly because it's almost impossible to make money with the clearance. The few that are are, once again, doing stuff for prisoners at Gitmo.

This means the government is doing an end run around representation by it's use of secret orders, simply because they aren't providing council (which would be tainted already) and are preventing the search for outside council. As such, the individuals/companies being issued the orders aren't being adequately represented and could be unaware of all the legal culpability they are exposed to by complying with said orders.

Basically, it's a legal sham and the only reason it hasn't been stopped is because no one wants to be the guy who goes to jail while this is all sorted out.
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Even if your lawyer has top clearance, this doesn't guarantee he can have insight in the content of secret orders. Not only are there several different levels of clearance (obviously), there are also different types of clearances - if your lawyer's a civilian not employed by the government, he can be 100% barred from being read into some programs or being given information about quite a few things dealing with national security. Anything that can potentially compromise (which is a very broad way of stating it, on purpose) the security of NATO military operations, for example, is illegal under international law to reveal to non-government, non-military people, regardless of clearance level. For example, while I do have NATO clearance (only NC though :p), and I have access codes in a lockbox at work, I don't actually know - or am authorized to know - what's actually in there. Could be the atomic launch codes, I dunno. (oh, hello NSA agent. Time for a coffee break, no? :p)

As a complete aside, I love the arrogance of having a "Cosmic Top Secret" level :p
 
Espy

Espy

GasBandit said:
Filed a Freedom of Information Act request recently?


If so, don't hold your breath because it's going to take longer than usual to hear back. According to MuckRock, the only fax machine used by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to process these requests has been out of order for two weeks, leading to more than 1,000 backlogged requests that have been submitted by journalists in light of the National Security Agency scandals. In responding to the reports, a Defense Department spokesperson projected that the machine probably won't be back up until "sometime in October, but could extend into November."

Cause, you know, I guess there isn't a fax machine to be found in the DC area.
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Oh wow. These guys have some serious balls.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Ok, I had to turn it off again, it was interfering with this board's ability to jump to the latest post in a thread.
 
Shakey

Shakey

Secret court declassifies opinion providing rationale for metadata sharing

What I found the most interesting was this part.

The new opinion also reminds us that no telco has ever challenged the legality of such an FISC order, even though there is a legal means for them to do so. Currently, the only way that this order could be challenged would be if Verizon or another recipient of a government order did so. At present under the court’s logic, Verizon customers, or the customers of another telco, would have no standing to challenge the court’s order.
...
But, should Verizon or another party challenge the FISC’s order—either to its direct appellate court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR), or the Supreme Court—it may have new legal legs to stand on given the Supreme Court’s January 2012 decision in the United States v. Jones case. In that case, the court ruled that law enforcement did not have the right to warrantlessly place a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s vehicle (but the Court disagreed as to the precise legal rationale).

Some of the justices, notably Justice Sonia Sotomayor, seemed to indicate in the Jones decision that they would be amenable to review of the entire third-party doctrine.
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Shakey

Shakey

Meet the machines that steal your phone’s data

The National Security Agency’s spying tactics are being intensely scrutinized following the recent leaks of secret documents. However, the NSA isn't the only US government agency using controversial surveillance methods.

Monitoring citizens' cell phones without their knowledge is a booming business. From Arizona to California, Florida to Texas, state and federal authorities have been quietly investing millions of dollars acquiring clandestine mobile phone surveillance equipment in the past decade.

Earlier this year, a covert tool called the “Stingray” that can gather data from hundreds of phones over targeted areas attracted international attention. Rights groups alleged that its use could be unlawful. But the same company that exclusively manufacturers the Stingray—Florida-based Harris Corporation—has for years been selling government agencies an entire range of secretive mobile phone surveillance technologies from a catalogue that it conceals from the public on national security grounds.

Details about the devices are not disclosed on the Harris website, and marketing materials come with a warning that anyone distributing them outside law enforcement agencies or telecom firms could be committing a crime punishable by up to five years in jail.

These little-known cousins of the Stingray cannot only track movements—they can also perform denial-of-service attacks on phones and intercept conversations. Since 2004, Harris has earned more than $40 million from spy technology contracts with city, state, and federal authorities in the US, according to procurement records.
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Well that's good to know... They go on to explain what each device can do.
X
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

All I'm saying is, if you are a lion, and you hang out near the water hole so you can grab antelope as they come for a drink, and suddenly the antelope stop coming to your water hole, you can't really blame this on the antelope.

--Patrick
 
Covar

Covar

So Metadata is considered public data for the purposes of government collection of information and "Not invading" privacy. However, I'm unable to received the date that power was applied to my property (for the purposes of determining if my HVAC is still under warranty despite an expired serial number) because that would be a violation of customer privacy and is not allowed by the government. Fucking Bureaucrats.
 
Shakey

Shakey

Gilgamesh said:
It's adorable you think something like that hasn't been in place since they were Presidents. :rofl:
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It hasn't...
There were apparently two policy changes that allowed this to happen, and both occurred in the past three years. First, in November of 2010, the NSA was allowed to start looking at phone call and email logs of Americans to try to help figure out associations for "foreign intelligence purposes." Note that phrase. We'll come back to it. For years, the NSA had been barred from viewing any content on US persons, and the NSA, President Obama and others have continued to insist to this day that there are minimization procedures that prevent spying on Americans. Except, this latest revelation shows that, yet again, this isn't actually true.

The second policy change came in January of 2011, when the NSA was told it could start creating this massive "social graph" on Americans without having to make sure they weren't Americans any more, as indicated above.
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