'Surveillance Society' - December 2010

'Stalin's Delight'
Wall St Journal Issues Surveillance Warning
About Smartphones
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/ssmobile.htm
'It's Always With Us, It's Always On'

"Few devices know more personal details about people than the smartphones in their pockets: phone numbers, current location, often the owner's real name—even a unique ID number that can never be changed or turned off. These phones don't keep secrets. They are sharing this personal data widely and regularly, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. An examination of 101 popular smartphone 'apps'—games and other software applications for iPhone and Android phones—showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders. The findings reveal the intrusive effort by online-tracking companies to gather personal data about people in order to flesh out detailed dossiers on them. .... 'In the world of mobile, there is no anonymity,' says Michael Becker of the Mobile Marketing Association, an industry trade group. A cellphone is 'always with us. It's always on.'... Smartphone users are all but powerless to limit the tracking."
Your Apps Are Watching You
Wall St Journal, 18 December 2010

"I'm On The train. No, Wait A Minute, There's More.  I'm On The Database."

'Stalin's Delight', Above - Your Innocent Looking Mobile Phone

Are you delighted that you increasingly lead most aspects of your life via your mobile phone or SD ('Stalin's Delight')? Commerce certainly is, and it wants to know everything about you in the process, including your real-time location. And it is succeeding, as the latest report from the Wall St Journal on 'smart phones' reveals (below). The really big question, however, is not about commerce, but about the State. Does your government have this information also? And if not, how long will it be before it is able to get it? And when it does, what are going to be the political implications? Whether you are on the Right and thinking about going on a protest in favour of fox hunting or 'the right to bear arms' (say), or you are on the Left and thinking about going on a protest against war or education cuts (say), how do you feel about that? It's fairly obvious what Stalin or Hitler's views on the subject would have been, as it's hard to imagine a better tool for 'rounding people up' when things get really difficult. But your mobile phone is only one part of the problem as the 'Surveillance State' spreads across the world in the digital age. Whilst governments continue to insist on protecting their own privacy (secrecy) they are busy eroding that of their citizens. Much of this is being promoted on the back of the alleged 'national security' needs of 'counter-terrorism'. Yet statistically terrorism is a barely measurable source of death and injury in western society compared to other causes. Whilst both types of misfortune always involve deep personal tragedy, on average you are more likely to commit suicide as a result of the recession than you are to be killed by terrorists, despite an essentially unlimited number of unprotectable potential targets being permanently at their disposal. In the words of the former Director of MI5, Dame Stella Rimington, "It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state."' nlpwessex.org

Keep Up To Date With Developments With 'Surveillance Society News' Click Here

'The KGB Never Had Anything Like It'

"'About 90% of Americans are walking around with a portable tracking device all the time, and they have no idea,' says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office..... The federal government's position is that it should be able to get most of this data if it decides it is relevant to an investigation, with no need for a search warrant. ...... Without this requirement, the government can get locational data pretty much anytime it wants. It is not hard to imagine that the government could also one day use cell-phone data to stifle dissent. Cell-phone records could tell them who attended an antigovernment rally. It could also tell them who is going into the opposition party's headquarters or into the home of someone they have questions about. Cell-phone data may be the most efficient way ever invented for a government to spy on its people — since people are planting the devices on themselves and even paying the monthly bills. The KGB never had anything like it."
What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government
TIME, 15 September 2010

"Our privacy is being invaded by the world's security services in every second of every day, as a routine matter. Vast quantities of information are collected by commercial enterprises such as Google or Tesco. Against these invasions of our privacy we have little or no protection."
Lord Rees-Mogg
London Times, 25 July 2008

'Big Society' Or 'Big Brother'?
The Fat End Of A Massive Wedge As Cameron-Clegg Coalition Caves Into The State Security Apparatus

"Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans. It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet. Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state. The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them. It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to 'end the storage of internet and email records without good reason'. Any suggestion of a central 'super database' has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time. That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.... Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: 'One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.  'Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy of law abiding Britons.' Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: 'We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.  It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness.'"
Every email and website to be stored
Daily Telegraph, 20 October 2010

From Baghdad To Baltimore
An Assault On The Citizen On All Fronts

"A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its 'volunteers,' researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April. Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labeled 'Collateral Murder.' ...... According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can 'develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.' 'We don’t do anything illegal,' says Uber. 'If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don’t, we can’t.' And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details. ISP monitoring is just one form of intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers a variety of open source intelligence and employs numerous agents around the world."
Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant
Forbes (blog), 1 August 2010

'Google Has Enough Dirt To Destroy Every Marriage In America'

"I don't want to live in a world where everyone is watched all the time.... Everyone everywhere should be able to speak and read and form their own beliefs without being monitored..... It's not just the state. If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy every marriage in America.... I love Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I'm terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. Most of all, they can see what questions you're asking, in real time. Quite literally, they can read your mind."
Jacob Appelbaum, the only known American member of Wikileaks
The American Wikileaks Hacker
Rolling Stone, 1 December 2010

Secrecy For The State
But Surveillance For The Citizen

"One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is its fixation on hiding everything it does behind a wall of secrecy while simultaneously monitoring, invading and collecting files on everything its citizenry does.  Based on the Francis Bacon aphorism that 'knowledge is power,' this is the extreme imbalance that renders the ruling class omnipotent and citizens powerless. In The Washington Post today, Dana Priest and William Arkin continue their 'Top Secret America' series by describing how America's vast and growing Surveillance State now encompasses state and local law enforcement agencies, collecting and storing always-growing amounts of information about even the most innocuous activities undertaken by citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.... Today, the Post reporters document how surveillance and enforcement methods pioneered in America's foreign wars and occupations are being rapidly imported into domestic surveillance (wireless fingerprint scanners, military-grade infrared cameras, biometric face scanners, drones on the border).... Meanwhile, the Obama Department of Homeland Security has rapidly expanded the scope and invasiveness of domestic surveillance programs -- justified, needless to say, in the name of Terrorism..... The results are predictable.  Huge amounts of post/9-11 anti-Terrorism money flooded state and local agencies that confront virtually no Terrorism threats, and they thus use these funds to purchase technologies -- bought from the private-sector industry that controls and operates government surveillance programs -- for vastly increased monitoring and file-keeping on ordinary citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.  The always-increasing cooperation between federal, state and local agencies -- and among and within federal agencies -- has spawned massive data bases of information containing the activities of millions of American citizens.  'There are 96 million sets of fingerprints' in the FBI's data base, the Post reports.  Moreover, the FBI uses its 'suspicious activities record' program (SAR) to collect and store endless amounts of information about innocent Americans... Even the FBI admits the huge waste all of this is -- ''Ninety-nine percent doesn't pan out or lead to anything' said Richard Lambert Jr., the special agent in charge of the FBI's Knoxville office -- but, as history conclusively proves, data collected on citizens will be put to some use even if it reveals no criminality. ... To understand the breadth of the Surveillance State, recall this sentence from the original Priest/Arkin article:  'Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.'  As Arkin and Priest document today, there are few safeguards on how all this data is used and abused.  Local police departments routinely meet with neoconservative groups insisting that all domestic Muslim communities are a potential threat and must be subjected to intensive surveillance and infiltration.  Groups engaged in plainly legal and protected political dissent have been subjected to these government surveillance programs.  What we have, in sum, is a vast, uncontrolled and increasingly invasive surveillance state that knows and collects more and more information about the activities of more and more citizens. But what makes all of this particularly ominous is that -- as the WikiLeaks conflict demonstrates -- this all takes place next to an always-expanding wall of secrecy behind which the Government's own conduct is hidden from public view.  Just consider the Government's reaction to the disclosures by WikiLeaks of information which even it -- in moments of candor -- acknowledges have caused no real damage:  disclosed information that, critically, was protected by relatively low-level secrecy designations and (in contrast to the Pentagon Papers) none of which was designated 'Top Secret.'.... That's the mindset of the U.S. Government:  everything it does of any significance can and should be shielded from public view; anyone who shines light on what it does is an Enemy who must be destroyed; but nothing you do should be beyond its monitoring and storing eyes.  And what's most remarkable about this -- though, given the full-scale bipartisan consensus over it, not surprising -- is how eagerly submissive much of the citizenry is to this imbalance. .... the imbalance has become so extreme -- the Government now watches much of the citizenry behind a fully opaque one-way mirror -- that the dangers should be obvious.  And this is all supposed to be the other way around:  it's government officials who are supposed to operate out in the open, while ordinary citizens are entitled to privacy.  Yet we've reversed that dynamic almost completely.  And even with 9/11 now 9 years behind us, the trends continue only in one direction."
Glenn Greenwald - The government's one-way mirror
Salon, 20 December 2010

"A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its 'volunteers,' researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April. Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labeled 'Collateral Murder.' Lamo, who Uber said worked as an 'adversary characterization' analyst for Project Vigilant, had struck up an online friendship with Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who currently faces criminal charges for releasing the classified video. In June, Uber said he learned from Lamo’s father that the young researcher had identified Manning as the video’s source, and pressured him to meet with federal agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks’ whistleblower. He then arranged a meeting with employees of 'three letter' agencies and Lamo, who Uber said had mixed feelings about informing on Manning. 'I’m the one who called the U.S. government,' Uber said. 'All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying.' Uber says that Lamo later called him from the meeting, regretting his decision to inform on Manning. 'I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want to do this,' Uber says Lamo told him at the time. Uber says he responded, 'You don’t have any choice, you’ve got to do this.' 'I said, ‘They’re not going to throw you in jail,’' Uber said. '‘Give them everything you have.'' Wikileaks didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IDG reporter Robert McMillan confirmed Uber’s relationship with Lamo, who told McMillan that 'Mr. Uber was, among a few others, an instrumental voice in helping me come to my ultimate decision.' Uber’s Wikileaks revelation is one of the first public statements from the semi-secret Project Vigilant. He says the 600-person 'volunteer' organization functions as a government contractor bridging public and private sector security efforts. Its mission: to use a variety of intelligence-gathering efforts to help the government attribute hacking incidents. 'Bad actors do bad things and you have to prove that they did them,' says Uber. 'Attribution is the hardest problem in computer security.' According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can 'develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.' 'We don’t do anything illegal,' says Uber. 'If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don’t, we can’t.' And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details. ISP monitoring is just one form of intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers a variety of open source intelligence and employs numerous agents around the world."
Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant
Forbes (blog), 1 August 2010

'Data Mining' And 'Repressive Regimes'

"Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users. Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear. 'I can confirm that F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is visiting Facebook during his trip to Silicon Valley,' said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public policy manager. Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, acknowledged the meetings but did not elaborate. Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies. The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order. Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year. The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped."
F.B.I. Seeks Wider Wiretap Law for Web
New York Times, 16 November 2010

Stella Rimington On The Creation Of A Police State

"A former head of MI5 has accused the government of exploiting the fear of terrorism and trying to bring in laws that restrict civil liberties. In an interview in a Spanish newspaper, published in the Daily Telegraph, Dame Stella Rimington, 73, also accuses the US of 'tortures'....Dame Stella, who stood down as the director general of the security service in 1996, has previously been critical of the government's policies, including its attempts to extend pre-charge detention for terror suspects to 42 days and the controversial plan to introduce ID cards. 'It would be better that the government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, precisely one of the objects of terrorism - that we live in fear and under a police state,' she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia....Dame Stella's comments come as a study is published by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) that accuses the US and the UK of undermining the framework of international law. Former Irish president Mary Robinson, the president of the ICJ said: 'Seven years after 9/11 it is time to take stock and to repeal abusive laws and policies enacted in recent years. 'Human rights and international humanitarian law provide a strong and flexible framework to address terrorist threats.' The BBC's security correspondent Frank Gardner said the ICJ report would probably have more of an impact than Dame Stella's remarks because it was a wide-ranging, three-year study carried out by an eminent group of practising legal experts....Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said: 'This is damning testament to just how much liberty has been ineffectually sacrificed in the 'war on terror'.' Dame Stella became the first female head of MI5 in 1992."
Ministers 'using fear of terror'
BBC Online, 17 February 2009

The Spy In Your Pocket
How Much Do You Really Love Your Mobile Phone?

'It's Always With Us, It's Always On'

How Do You Know If Your Phone Has Been Compromised? You Don't

'The KGB Never Had Anything Like It'

"Smart phones do many things these days: surf the Internet, send e-mail, take photos and video (and — oh, yes — send and receive calls). But one thing they can do that phone companies don't advertise is spy on you. As long as you don't leave home without your phone, that handy gadget keeps a record of everywhere you go — a record the government can then get from your telephone company. The law is unclear about how easy it should be for the government to get its hands on this locational data — which can reveal whether you've been going to church, attending a Tea Party rally, spending the night at a date's house or visiting a cancer-treatment center. A federal appeals court ruled last week that in some cases the government may need a search warrant. And while that's a step forward, it's not good enough. The rule should be that the government always needs a warrant to access your cell-phone records and obtain data about where you have been. When you carry a cell phone, it is constantly sending signals about where you are. It 'pings' nearby cell-phone towers about every seven seconds so it can be ready to make and receive calls. When it does, the phone is also telling the company that owns the towers where you are at that moment — data the company then stores away indefinitely. There is also a second kind of locational data that phone companies have, thanks to a GPS chip that is embedded in most smart phones now. This is even more accurate — unlike the towers, which can only pinpoint a general area where you may be, GPS can often reveal exactly where you are at any given moment within a matter of meters. 'About 90% of Americans are walking around with a portable tracking device all the time, and they have no idea,' says Christopher Calabrese, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Washington office..... The federal government's position is that it should be able to get most of this data if it decides it is relevant to an investigation, with no need for a search warrant. If the government needs a warrant, it would have to show a judge evidence that there was probable cause to believe that the cell-phone user committed a crime — an important level of protection. Without this requirement, the government can get locational data pretty much anytime it wants. It is not hard to imagine that the government could also one day use cell-phone data to stifle dissent. Cell-phone records could tell them who attended an antigovernment rally. It could also tell them who is going into the opposition party's headquarters or into the home of someone they have questions about. Cell-phone data may be the most efficient way ever invented for a government to spy on its people — since people are planting the devices on themselves and even paying the monthly bills. The KGB never had anything like it. And, indeed, the U.S. government already appears to be sweeping up a lot of data from completely innocent people. The ACLU recently told Congress of a case in which, while looking for data on a suspect, the FBI apparently used a dragnet approach and took data on another 180 people. The FBI has said that if it does happen to gather data on innocent people in the course of conducting an investigation, it keeps that information for as long as 20 years....Last week, the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit pushed back. A federal magistrate judge, in a good and strong decision, had ruled that the government must always get a warrant if it wants cell-phone data. The appeals court scaled that back a bit, ruling that magistrate judges have the power to require the government to get a warrant, depending on the facts of the particular case. The fight over cell-phone tracking is similar to one now going on in the courts over GPS devices — specifically, whether the government needs a warrant to place a GPS device on someone's car."
What Your Cell Phone Could Be Telling the Government
TIME, 15 September 2010

"iPhones generally store more data than other high-end phones -- and investigators such as Fazio frequently can tap in to that information for evidence. And while some phone users routinely delete information from their devices, that step is seldom as final as it seems. 'When you hit the delete button, it's never really deleted,' Fazio said. The devices can help police learn where you've been, what you were doing there and whether you've got something to hide. Former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics (O'Reilly Media) for law enforcement, said the devices 'are people's companions today. They organize people's lives.' And if you're doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone: • Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime. • iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it. • Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user's browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said some of it could be useful to police. Clearing out user histories isn't enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners. Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone's screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another. 'Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory,' Minor said. • The keyboard cache logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect so that it can correct a user's typing mistakes. Apple doesn't store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted."
Cops love iPhone data trail
Chicago Sun-Times, 1 August 2010

"Apple updated its privacy policy today, with an important, and dare we say creepy new paragraph about location information. If you agree to the changes, (which you must do in order to download anything via the iTunes store) you agree to let Apple collect store and share 'precise location data, including the real-time geographic location of your Apple computer or device.' Apple says that the data is 'collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you,' but for some reason we don't find this very comforting at all. There appears to be no way to opt-out of this data collection without giving up the ability to download apps."
Privacy Change: Apple Knows Where Your Phone Is And Is Telling People
The Consumerist, 21 June 2010

"Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices. In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no 'reasonable expectation of privacy' in their--or at least their cell phones'--whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that 'a customer's Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records' that show where a mobile device placed and received calls. Those claims have alarmed the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, which have opposed the Justice Department's request and plan to tell the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia that Americans' privacy deserves more protection and judicial oversight than what the administration has proposed. 'This is a critical question for privacy in the 21st century,' says Kevin Bankston, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who will be arguing on Friday. 'If the courts do side with the government, that means that everywhere we go, in the real world and online, will be an open book to the government unprotected by the Fourth Amendment.'"
Feds push for tracking cell phones
CNET News, 11 February 2010

"We've heard a lot about security issues with the iPhone, but the BlackBerry isn't immune to threats from malicious apps. Tyler Shields, a senior researcher at the Veracode Research Lab, has written a piece of spyware that allowed me to shoot an SMS command to his phone and have his contact list forwarded to my e-mail address in a demonstration. With another short text command, I was able to get his BlackBerry to e-mail me any SMS messages he sends. And if I had wanted--and he had allowed me--I could have seen a log of all his calls, monitored his inbound text messages, tracked his location in real-time based on the GPS (Global Positioning System) in his device and turned his microphone on to listen to conversations in the room and record them. 'It's trivial to write this type of code using the mobile provider's own API [application programming interface] they provide to any developer,' Shields said in an interview in advance of his talk on the spyware scheduled for the ShmooCon security show on Sunday....He calls his program 'TXSBBSpy' and is releasing the source code but not an executable version of it. 'My goal is to show how easy it is to create mobile spyware,' he said. TXSBBSpy 'can take data from the phone, both in real-time and in snapshots, and send it off via SMS or e-mail to any Web server or TCP [Transmission Control Protocol] or UDP [User Diagram Protocol] network connections,' Shields said. While I was able to control the spyware using text messages sent from my mobile phone, the spyware had to be first installed on his BlackBerry for the snooping to work. This can be done by sending the target victim an e-mail or text with a link to a Web page where the spyware is surreptitiously installed. Or it can be hidden inside a legitimate-looking app downloaded from the App Store.  The risks are similar to those posed by Swiss researcher Nicolas Seriot in his iPhone spyware demo at the Black Hat DC security conference on Wednesday. 'These types of behaviors we're demonstrating will be universal across all mobile platforms,' Shields said."
BlackBerry has spyware risk too, researcher says
CNET News, 7 February 2010

Every MP Who Has An Extra-Martial Affair And A Mobile Phone Is Vulnerable To Blackmail
(About Half Of Them? - Even The Most Unlikely: John Major, John Prescott, Paddy Ashdown, etc)

"Coulsongate is throwing some very important light into a very murky area. It now seems clear that the police knew that the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and the News of the World royal reporter Clive Goodman had illegally intercepted the voicemail messages of many more politicians, sportsmen, celebrities and others than just the 8 for which they were jailed.  The New York Times has quoted detectives, however,  as alleging they did not pursue these investigations because of their close relationship with Murdoch’s newspaper. This raises key questions about Britain’s power structure and how it works..... A central tenet of a civilised and democratic society is that the various power institutions – the political system, the banks and financial sector, industrial corporations, criminal justice and security services, and the media – must operate independently and at arm’s length from each other in a manner that is transparent and accountable.   If they are found covertly to collude with each other in order to give surreptitious and improper assistance to one of the other powerful forces in society, it is a very serious threat about which Parliament should be urgently demanding a thorough and comprehensive public inquiry."
Police in league with Murdoch?
Michael Meacher MP (Blog), 5 September 2010

What Can Be Used For Genuine Law Enforcement Can Also Be Used For Commercial And Political Surveillance
Don't Want To Be Bugged Or Followed Via Your Own Mobile Phone? Then Remove The Battery

"The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance.... The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the 'roving bug' was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone. Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique 'functioned whether the phone was powered on or off.' Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set.... 'If a phone has in fact been modified to act as a bug, the only way to counteract that is to either have a bugsweeper follow you around 24-7, which is not practical, or to peel the battery off the phone,' Atkinson said. Security-conscious corporate executives routinely remove the batteries from their cell phones, he added..... A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. 'A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug,' the article said, 'enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down.'"
FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool
CNet News, 1 December 2006

Surveillance Society
State Monitoring Of Legitimate Political Dissent

Who's Trying To Scare The Public The Most? The Terrorists Or The Authorities?
FBI Helps Ineffectual Loner With 'Weapon Of Mass Destruction'

"A Somali-born teenager who thought he was detonating a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony downtown here was arrested by the authorities on Friday night after federal agents said that they had spent nearly six months setting up a sting operation. The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake - planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting - but 'the threat was very real,' Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.'s special agent in charge in Oregon, said in a statement released by the Department of Justice. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said. Mr. Balizan identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen. He graduated from Westview High School in Beaverton, Ore., a Portland suburb, and had been taking classes at Oregon State in Corvallis until Oct. 6, the university said Saturday. Mr. Mohamud was charged with trying to use a weapon of mass destruction. ... The F.B.I.'s surveillance started in August 2009 after agents intercepted his e-mails with a man he had met in Oregon who had returned to the Middle East, according to a law enforcement official who described the man as a recruiter for terrorism. According to the affidavit, the man had moved to Yemen and then northwest Pakistan, a center of terrorism activity. Mr. Mohamud was then placed on a watch list and stopped at the Portland airport in June 2010 when he tried to fly to Alaska for a summer job. Later in June, aware of Mr. Mohamud's frustrated attempts to receive training as a jihadist overseas, an undercover agent first made contact with him, posing as an associate of the man in Pakistan. On the morning of July 30, the F.B.I. first met with Mr. Mohamud in person to initiate the sting operation..... For the next several weeks, the F.B.I. let the plot play out, assisting Mr. Mohamud with the details, providing him with cash, scoping out a parking spot near the square, sketching out the plan on paper. At the end of September, Mr. Mohamud mailed bomb components to agents he thought were fellow operatives who would assemble the device. Planning to leave the country afterward, he sent passport pictures to the undercover agent. On Nov. 4, Mr. Mohamud went with undercover agents to a remote spot where they exploded a bomb in a backpack. .... Although Mr. Mohamud's arrest marks another episode in which a Somali-American has been accused of radical attempts at violence, there was no evidence that Mr. Mohamud had any current link to Somalia or was a sympathizer of the Shabab, a militant Islamic group in Somalia. And despite Mr. Mohamud's contacts with militants abroad, officials said he appeared to have acted alone in his pursuit of the bombing here. In a similar case in September 2009, a 19-year-old Jordanian was arrested after placing a fake bomb [supplied by the FBI] at a 60-story Dallas skyscraper. "
F.B.I. Says Oregon Suspect Planned Grand Attack
New York Times, 27 November 2010

'It Can't Happen Here'

"The FBI improperly opened investigations into Greenpeace and other animal rights and anti-war groups after the September 11 attacks of 2001, the US government has admitted. Inspector-General Glenn Fine said the FBI tactics were 'troubling' because they singled out some of domestic groups for investigations that ran for up to five years and were extended 'without adequate basis'. He said: 'In several cases there was little indication of any possible federal crimes. In some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to non-violent civil disobedience under its Acts of Terrorism classification.' As well as Greenpeace, groups that were investigated included People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and anti-war groups the Catholic Worker and the Thomas Merton Centre in Pittsburgh."
FBI investigated Greenpeace for terror links after 9/11
Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2010

"Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to investigate claims that a company hired to provide information to the state's Office of Homeland Security was gathering information on groups who staged various protests and rallies. The Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee has scheduled a Sept. 27 hearing in Harrisburg regarding the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response. Committee chair Sen. Lisa Baker, R-Luzerne, said she wants to know if people were targeted for exercising their rights of free speech and assembly. Gov. Ed Rendell on Tuesday apologized to the groups, who became the subject of regular anti-terrorism bulletins distributed by his homeland security director, James Powers. The governor said he was embarrassed to learn of the bulletins, and added he's canceling a $125,000 contract with the Philadelphia-based company. He did not fire Powers. The bulletins were shared with representatives of the natural gas industry because of concern over acts of vandalism at wells in the Marcellus Shale region."
Pa. Lawmakers to investigate security bulletins
ABC News, 18 September 2010

"A Liberal Democrat adviser to Nick Clegg has called on Scotland Yard to explain why it held his details as well as Clegg’s name on a secret police database. Fiyaz Mughal, who advises the deputy prime minister on combating violent extremism, wrote to Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan police commissioner, last week demanding to know why surveillance officers logged his identity on the database after he spoke at a peaceful rally in Trafalgar Square. A spokesman for Clegg, who will be running the country this week while David Cameron is on holiday, said he would look into the matter. Details of the surveillance appear on a police criminal intelligence report of a rally last year to protest against the BBC’s refusal to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza. A team of surveillance officers from the forward intelligence team of the Met’s public order unit were watching the demonstration to gather information about various protesters linked to groups including Stop the War and the Socialist Workers party. Although they were spying only on the demonstrators, they noted the presence of several speakers. One of them was Mughal, who was identified in the log as 'the inter-faith adviser to Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats'. Another was Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour MP for Islington North. Corbyn was unavailable for comment this weekend. But Mughal expressed his fury in a letter to Stephenson. 'It seems that simply speaking at a lawful demonstration warrants a criminal intelligence report,' he wrote. 'Such activity by the Met, in my opinion, is tantamount to an intrusion into the human and civil rights of citizens who are undertaking their legitimate right to demonstrate.' Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, the human rights group, said the Met needed stricter controls on what information is placed in databases. 'It is bad enough that swaggering officers from so-called ‘forward intelligence’ use aggressive photography and other tactics to discourage peaceful protest and turn activists into enemies of the state,' she said."
Clegg aide on secret Yard database
Sunday Times, 15 August 2010

"The Archbishop of York yesterday revealed he has been stopped and searched by police eight times, as he warned new anti-terrorist powers are a threat to civil liberties. Dr John Sentamu said police should not be able to ask for someone's bank accounts to be frozen merely because they are suspected of terrorism. The Ugandan-born Archbishop told peers that he had been stopped and searched by officers because he had been suspected of crime, warning that the new asset-freezing law could lead to people losing their money and property just because their faces did not fit. His warning is likely to carry weight with ministers because of his powerful record both as an opponent of racism and a critic of left-wing 'multiculturalism'. Dr Sentamu, who is second to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England hierarchy, was speaking in the Lords on the Terrorist Asset-Freezing Bill. The law, which is not opposed by Labour, would allow the courts to freeze assets on 'reasonable suspicion' that someone is a terrorist, rather than the more demanding rules that there must be a 'reasonable belief' of their involvement in terrorism. Revealing his experience of being stopped and searched, the Archbishop said: 'When the policeman suddenly realised that I was a bishop, that didn't stop me being stopped and searched.' And he claimed that such police checks were often on the basis of 'he doesn't look like one of us'."
Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu stopped and searched by police EIGHT times
Daily Mail, 28 July 2010

Surveillance Society Developments
In Britain

'Vast Government Databases'

"Every email, phone call and website visit is to be recorded and stored after the Coalition Government revived controversial Big Brother snooping plans. It will allow security services and the police to spy on the activities of every Briton who uses a phone or the internet. Moves to make every communications provider store details for at least a year will be unveiled later this year sparking fresh fears over a return of the surveillance state. The plans were shelved by the Labour Government last December but the Home Office is now ready to revive them. It comes despite the Coalition Agreement promised to 'end the storage of internet and email records without good reason'. Any suggestion of a central 'super database' has been ruled out but the plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time. That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism. The information will include who is contacting whom, when and where and which websites are visited, but not the content of the conversations or messages.... Isabella Sankey, director of policy at Liberty, said: 'One of the early and welcome promises of the new Government was to ‘end the blanket storage of internet and email records’.  'Any move to amass more of our sensitive data and increase powers for processing would amount to a significant U-turn. The terrifying ambitions of a group of senior Whitehall technocrats must not trump the personal privacy of law abiding Britons.' Guy Herbert, general secretary of the No2ID campaign group, said: 'We should not be surprised that the interests of bureaucratic empires outrank liberty.  It is disappointing that the new ministers seem to be continuing their predecessors' tradition of credulousness.'"
Every email and website to be stored
Daily Telegraph, 20 October 2010

"The Home Office has created a new unit to oversee a massive increase in surveillance of the internet, The Register has learned, quashing suggestions the plans are on hold until after the election. The new Communications Capabilities Directorate (CCD) has been created as a structure to implement the £2bn Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), sources said. The CCD is staffed by the same officials who have have been working on IMP since 2007, but it establishes the project on a more formal basis in the Home Office. It is not yet included on the Home Office's list of directorates. The intelligence and law enforcement agencies have pushed hard for new laws to force communications providers to store details of who contacts whom, when, where and how via the internet. However, following a consultation last year, when the Home Office's plans were heavily criticised by ISPs and mobile companies, it was widely assumed progress on IMP would slow or stop. The CCD has continued meeting with industry to try to allay concerns about the project's costs, effect on customer privacy and technical feasibility.....Officials envisage communications providers will maintain giant databases of everything their customers do online, incluing email, social networking, web browsing and making VoIP calls. They want providers to process the mass of data to link it to individuals, to make it easier for authorities to access. Access to communications data is currently governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Under European legslation ISPs are required to retain basic information about what their customers do online, but not to open their data packets to record who they contact on Facebook, for example."
Home Office spawns new unit to expand internet surveillance
The Register, 28 January 2010

"Internet users are being spied on in their own home as the Government uses the threat of terrorism and the spread of child pornography to justify launching a dramatic expansion of surveillance society, according to a leading academic. The authorities have taken 'advantage of the terrorist bombing in London' to erode civil liberties, according to Professor Ian Walden, an expert on internet communication and online security. He said today’s 'Orwellian' surveillance of our online habits was even more intrusive than the introduction of CCTV on Britain's streets. You can now hide cameras but generally cameras are a physical manifestation of surveillance. With the internet, you are sitting at home which you think is private, but of course it is declared a public space because your service provider knows everywhere you’ve gone, everything you’ve downloaded, it knows everything, potentially', he told The Daily Telegraph. His comments come after the Government announced it was pressing ahead with privately held 'Big Brother' databases that opposition leaders said amounted to 'state-spying' and a form of 'covert surveillance' on the public. The police and security services are set to monitor every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens. The details are set to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by government bodies. All telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by law to keep a record of every customer's personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited. Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government run database, but backed down after privacy concerns were raised. 'Once happy to leave cyberspace ‘unregulated’, Governments, including that of the UK, seem increasingly willing to encroach on what we do, say and see over the Internet,' said Professor Walden, head of the Institute of Computer and Communications Law at Queen Mary, University of London. He warned that increasing use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter will give the authorities access to information about individuals' private lives....Professor Walden, a former trustee on the Internet Watch Foundation, the industry self regulatory body, said that problems such as child pornography, illegal file sharing and terrorism are used to justify ‘Big Brother-like’ scrutiny of all internet activity, even though the vast majority of web users are law abiding. 'The police clearly took advantage of the terrorist bombing in London to get an agenda, which has been around for years, pushed to the forefront' he said. 'They would never have got Government support for data retention, which became a European issue, without the Madrid and London bombings.' The 2004 Madrid bombers used one shared web based email account to make plans, rather than exchanging messages that could be intercepted....'Concerns from civil liberty groups are we will lose the liberties that we thought we had without necessarily notifying us. Why does the data on all of us have to be retained in order to find out about those that are bad?' He highlighted the danger of laws created to catch dangerous criminals later being manipulated to spy on millions on households. Local councils have been criticised for using anti-terrorism (RIPA) laws to snoop on residents suspected of littering and dog fouling offences. 'My concern is that its easy policy-making… if you say it’s against terrorism and it’s against child pornography then nobody is going to say no.' His comments echo those made by Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, who last year accused ministers of interfering with people's privacy and playing straight into the hands of terrorists, by creating a 'police state'. The shift towards greater state control of online content, and how it will impinge on our rights, will be discussed by Professor Walden in his inaugural lecture at Queen Mary, University of London on Wednesday 3 February 2010."
Terrorism and child pornography used to justify surveillance society, says academic
Telegraph, 23 January 2010

"The huge Commons majority he [Blair] enjoyed, the craven pusillanimity of his party, the implosion of the Conservatives and the consequent absence of opposition, other than in the Lords – and, to an extent, in the courts – conspired with a genuine, though irrational, fear of terrorism and rising street crime to let the State take greater control over the citizen than it has enjoyed before in modern peacetime..... Maya Evans found this out when she stood by the Cenotaph to recite the names of Britain’s Iraqi war dead. For this she was arrested, arraigned and left with a criminal record. It is hard to conceive of a police officer a generation ago taking any notice of her since she was causing no public order problem at all. But Ms Evans had fallen foul of a clause in the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act which established a one kilometre zone around the Palace of Westminster, within whose boundaries political criticism can be voiced only on application to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.... recent research has uncovered 266 separate powers under which the police and other state agents can enter your home, often using force to do so.... As Peter Lilley, the former minister who led the Cabinet revolt that resulted in the abandonment of the last ID scheme, observed: 'There is no policy that has been hawked, unsold, around Whitehall for longer than identity cards. It was always brought to us as a solution looking for problems.' September 11 and the threat from international terrorism was the problem it had most been looking for.... There are people who remember carrying the old wartime ID cards, scrapped in 1952, and cannot see what all the fuss is about. It is about the database, not the card. This is not about protecting our identities but about placing them at the disposal of the state and sundry other organisations that will have access to them. .... this extension of state control through the unfettered and unthinking deployment of modern surveillance technology and databases for which the Blair years (and those of his successor, unless he does something dramatic to change course) will most be remembered. Our children, and theirs, will be perplexed as to why their forebears came so easily, and with so little public debate, to allow the State to manipulate their lives."
Philip Johnston, home affairs editor and assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph
The Charles Douglas-Home Essay, 2007 - 'Are we a free country any more?'
London Times, 20 July 2007

Surveillance Society Developments
In America

"Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users. Mr. Mueller and the F.B.I.’s general counsel, Valerie Caproni, were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions. How Mr. Mueller’s proposal was received was not clear. 'I can confirm that F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is visiting Facebook during his trip to Silicon Valley,' said Andrew Noyes, Facebook’s public policy manager. Michael Kortan, an F.B.I. spokesman, acknowledged the meetings but did not elaborate. Mr. Mueller wants to expand a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, to impose regulations on Internet companies. The law requires phone and broadband network access providers like Verizon and Comcast to make sure they can immediately comply when presented with a court wiretapping order. Law enforcement officials want the 1994 law to also cover Internet companies because people increasingly communicate online. An interagency task force of Obama administration officials is trying to develop legislation for the plan, and submit it to Congress early next year. The Commerce Department and State Department have questioned whether it would inhibit innovation, as well as whether repressive regimes might harness the same capabilities to identify political dissidents, according to officials familiar with the discussions. Under the proposal, firms would have to design systems to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Services based overseas would have to route communications through a server on United States soil where they could be wiretapped."
F.B.I. Seeks Wider Wiretap Law for Web
New York Times, 16 November 2010

"Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say. The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps. An Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the F.B.I. and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that says telephone and broadband companies must design their services so that they can begin conducting surveillance of a target immediately after being presented with a court order."
Officials Push to Bolster Law on Wiretapping
New York Times, 18 October 2010

"Developers of email, instant-messaging and voice-over-internet-protocol applications would be forced to redesign their services so their contents can be intercepted by law enforcement agents armed with legal wiretap orders under federal legislation reported on Monday by The New York Times. The legislation would, among other things, require cellphone carriers, websites and other types of service providers to have a way to unscramble encrypted communications traveling over their networks, the report said. It specifically mentions companies such as Research in Motion and Skype, which are popular in part because their cellular communications and VoIP services respectively are widely regarded as offering robust encryption that's impractical if not impossible for government agents to crack."
Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email
The Register, 27 September 2010

"Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is 'going dark' as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally."
U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet
New York Times, 27 September 2010

"Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements. That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant. It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.... if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state — with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi. Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's — including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court."
The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves
TIME, 25 August 2010

"The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation. The administration wants to add just four words -- 'electronic communication transactional records' -- to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge's approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user's browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the 'content' of e-mail or other Internet communication. But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records."
White House proposal would ease FBI access to records of Internet activity
Washington Post, 29 July 2010

"Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency? Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (PDF) gives the president the ability to 'declare a cybersecurity emergency' and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any 'critical' information network 'in the interest of national security.' The bill does not define a critical information network or a cybersecurity emergency. That definition would be left to the president. The bill does not only add to the power of the president. It also grants the Secretary of Commerce 'access to all relevant data concerning [critical] networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy restricting such access.' This means he or she can monitor or access any data on private or public networks without regard to privacy laws....The cybersecurity threat is real,' says Leslie Harris, head of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), 'but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.' The bill could undermine the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), says CDT senior counsel Greg Nojeim. That law, enacted in the mid '80s, requires law enforcement seek a warrant before tapping in to data transmissions between computers. 'It's an incredibly broad authority,' Nojeim says, pointing out that existing privacy laws 'could fall to this authority.' Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that granting such power to the Commerce secretary could actually cause networks to be less safe. When one person can access all information on a network, 'it makes it more vulnerable to intruders,' Granick says. 'You've basically established a path for the bad guys to skip down.'"
Should Obama Control the Internet?
Mother Jones, 2 April 2009

How Will You Feel When The Day Comes
That Google Is Obliged To Hand Its Records Over To The State?

Does Google Really Collect Information On As An Anonymous Basis As It Claims?

"It's not just the state. If it wanted to, Google could overthrow any country in the world. Google has enough dirt to destroy every marriage in America.... I love Google. And I love the people there. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are cool. But I'm terrified of the next generation that takes over. A benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. At some point people are going to realize that Google has everything on everyone. "
Jacob Appelbaum, the only known American member of Wikileaks
The American Wikileaks Hacker
Rolling Stone, 1 December 2010

"....online stalking is prompted by tiny files hidden inside... computers. These secretly identify their age, location, favourite movies, love of gadgets, the books they buy — sometimes even the words they type into websites. This data is packaged and sold to companies seeking customers. Welcome to the shadowy world of 'behavioural advertising', where the tastes, dreams, desires and family size of unsuspecting internet users are for sale to advertisers and even governments. ... How does it work? At its heart the technique relies on innocuous-sounding programs or software called cookies and beacons. They are either dumped onto your computer or identify it (and you) when you log onto a website. This allows all your movements on the internet to be tracked, often in real time.... Last week The Wall Street Journal tested the world’s top 50 websites to find out just how many cookies, beacons and other trackers they fed into your computer. The 50 sites installed 3,180 tracking files on a test computer used in the survey. Only one, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, installed none. One of those studied, the search engine Google, insisted last week that it did not store details of what individuals searched for, other than anonymously. So if you searched for something such as 'hair loss treatments', it would not sell on that information to interested parties. However, users of Google’s email service have been astonished by its seeming perspicacity....When you visit the auction site eBay or the travel site Expedia, information about what you were looking for and some basic information on the sort of person you are will be auctioned within seconds on a data exchange run by BlueKai, a Seattle-based firm. Every day BlueKai sells 50m pieces of information about individuals’ browsing habits so that advertisers can respond immediately. 'Advertisers have always collected information on people,' according to Emma Wilson, managing director of Harvest Digital, an ad agency. 'In the last year or so that has multiplied exponentially. You don’t know the specifics of each person — no one has my name and address, for instance — but ads that know my age, where I live and what I buy can follow me around Facebook or track me across the internet.' Some tracking companies pair up your online behaviour with data from other sources about household income, geography, family size and education to make well informed guesses in real time about what you might be about to do — or how much you might be able to spend — and sell those conclusions....Advertisers argue that the information they collect is anonymous but Professor Lilian Edwards, who teaches internet law at Sheffield University, warns that 'it is incredibly easy to de-anonymise data. If you are a household with more than an average number of children, for example, you are very easy to identify.'.... Data monitoring of this kind has alarmed campaigners for some time. In 2004 Richard Thomas, the then information commissioner, whose job it is to protect the public’s private information, sounded an urgent warning: 'My anxiety is that we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.' Edwards fears that that point has already arrived. 'Things have got desperately out of control,' she said. 'The problem isn’t just the ads, it’s the entire database held on you and how that database is combined with external research using quantitative methods. How do you know they haven’t made two plus two equal five? You may be branded a credit risk or affiliated with terrorist organisations without knowing it. And once it’s out, it is very, very hard to put the genie back in the bottle.' There is no doubt governments are in the market for this kind of data. Last week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced that they would ban some services available on BlackBerry smartphones. The problem was that the encryption on the phones was so good that it made it very difficult for the governments to spy on people’s email messages. Most observers agree that many people are unaware they can opt out of the constant monitoring and also that the means of doing so is too complex. Until recently the social media site Facebook required users to click 50 times to activate privacy settings."
Every click you make they’ll be watching you
Sunday Times, 8 August 2010

"One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users. The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none. • Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to 'cookie' files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months. The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages. In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests."
The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
Wall St Journal, 30 July 2010

"Every Google web search could be stored for up to two years under a controversial new EU plan that has the backing of more than 300 Euro-MEPs. 'Written Declaration 29' is intended to be used as an early warning system to stop paedophiles by logging what they look for using search engines. But civil liberty groups have hit out at the proposal which they say is a 'completely unjustifiable' intrusion into citizens' privacy. And they claim that there is no evidence that it would even be effective in trapping paedophiles who would never use search engines like Google to look for child pornography. The declaration, sponsored by an Italian and a Slovakian MEP, claims that it is 'essential to ensure that the internet continues to afford a high level of virtual democracy, which does not present any threat to women and children.' The motion asks for Directive 2006/24/EC to be extended to all web search engines, which would include Google, as part of a European early warning system for paedophiles. The directive came into effect in the March following the 2005 London terror attacks and lets EU member states monitor and store personal emails and other internet activity for up to two years for counter-terrorism puposes. Simon Davies, director of Privacy International which campaigns for tougher privacy laws, said: 'Most paedophiles operate through chatrooms and private communication rather than search engines like Google so they would not be affected,' he added."
Every Google search to be logged and saved for two years under new Euro MP plan
Daily Mail, 7 June 2010