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Category: Privacy & Surveillance

Trump babbles about conspiracies, plots, and how great he is for foiling them

Um …

“The Hill” is a right-of-center political news site — not whackadoodle time, and often informative, but averaging out usually pro-GOP. Which makes this nearly incoherent story about Trump being interviewed by them quite a bit more … disturbing.

I mean, individual elements of it are zany enough, like Trump’s Queeg-like fascination with some massive FBI plot against him that he has now foiled by releasing a selected bunch of classified documents tomorrow … which documents he says he hasn’t read but is sure will make it clear that the entire FBI has been out to get him, which is why he should have fired Comey back when he won his first primary, oh, wait, no, he couldn’t have fired him then, he should have fired him his first day on the job …

Anyway, all that conspiracy, and the texts, all the texts, and the documents, and FISA, and maybe those FISA judges were misled, or maybe they were actually in on it, hmmmmm, he’s not sure because he isn’t doing anything to the FISA courts (yet), but poor Carter Page …

… anyway, he’s happy to grandiosely …

… show the public the FBI probe started as a “hoax,” and that exposing it could become one of the “crowning achievements” of his presidency. “What we’ve done is a great service to the country, really,” Trump said in a 45-minute, wide-ranging interview in the Oval Office.

“I hope to be able to call this, along with tax cuts and regulation and all the things I’ve done… in its own way this might be the most important thing because this was corrupt,” he said.

Right. The crowning glory of his presidency will be to … have stopped a plot … against his presidency. Because it’s always about him.

I mean, the individual components of what he’s quoted as saying are tinfoil hat crazy enough. But if the conversation actually is paralleled by how it’s presented here, or, worse, assuming The Hill has tried to actually beat it into some sort of narrative sense … well, the whole thing is a huge, rambling mess. I mean, literally, has me wondering about his mental fitness sort of a mess.

Just wait until he starts investigating who stole the frozen strawberries from the White House refrigerator …




EXCLUSIVE: Trump says exposing ‘corrupt’ FBI probe could be ‘crowning achievement’ of presidency
By John Solomon and Buck SextonOpinion Contributors

Original Post

SCOTUS rules that cell phone records can require a search warrant

Cell phone companies have records of calls and locations (via tower records) that can provide a bonanza of data for law enforcement trying to see where someone (or their phone, at least) is at any given time, potentially for years.

The Supreme Court, in a narrow 5-4 decision, has decided that if the police want that data, they need to get a search warrant from a judge. Which, honestly, is not all that high of a burden, but it prevents fishing expeditions and casual use of such info.

Cops dislike search warrants, because they require arguing that there's a reason for them to search. This decision is a significant win for American privacy rights, without actually doing that much to slow legitimate law enforcement efforts.




Supreme court bans police access to phone records without a warrant | Law | The Guardian

Original Post

None dare call it a police state

Sean Hannity, Fox News’ preeminent talent, on how to solve the problems of school shootings (emphasis added):

The issue here — well, there is some issues with gun safety, you can’t let mentally ill people have guns. Criminals don’t obey the laws by their very nature. We also have to have, every school district needs to have some person that monitor’s every kid’s social media postings, maybe they need two people. This is a reality now that they’re telegraphing what they’re going to do. Terrorists do it. These school shooters do it.

Remember when it was the commies who were (openly) trying to monitor what everyone said and did?




After shooting in Texas, Sean Hannity calls for the government to monitor every student’s social media
Hannity: “It’s not a gun issue … it’s always a different gun. So that’s not the issue”

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Google loses a “right to be forgotten” case in the UK

European law around the “right to be forgotten” is pretty zany to start with. The idea is that people should be able to petition to have annoying, inconvenient, or possibly misleading information taken down off the Internet — or, in many cases, removed from search engines like Google.

For example, X is convicted of a crime, which is covered by the news media, and those articles get linked to by Google. Later, the conviction is overturned. That may generate less linkage than the original arrest, trial, and conviction — such things usually do. Now X discovers that when people Google their name, the top results are the trial and conviction, not the overturning. So X sues to have Google “forget” about the trial and conviction, remove the links to those articles, so that we can pretend it never happened. The information is “outdated” or “irrelevant,” so X should be able to ask to take it down.

That’s a relatively straightforward case, but the one that Google just lost is even dodgier. The judge basically ruled that, sure, the conviction happened, but it was a while ago, and it isn’t likely to happen again, and that the plaintiff has shown remorse … so those Internet links to news articles about the conviction should be taken down, too.

Explaining his decision, the judge said … NT2 had shown remorse. He also took into account the submission that NT2’s conviction did not concern actions taken by him in relation to “consumers, customers or investors”, but rather in relation to the invasion of privacy of third parties. “There is not [a] plausible suggestion … that there is a risk that this wrongdoing will be repeated by the claimant. The information is of scant if any apparent relevance to any business activities that he seems likely to engage in,” the judge added.

He said his key conclusion in relation to NT2’s claim was that “the crime and punishment information has become out of date, irrelevant and of no sufficient legitimate interest to users of Google search to justify its continued availability”.

It’s not that what happened was legally revised. Google just has to censor the record to pretend it never happened. Even though it did.

This is not just more dangerous (letting the government decide what picture of historical reality is in the best interests of society and individuals, because how could that possibly ever be abused), but the judge’s guidelines in the ruling are so vague and subjective, that I don’t see how Google (or anyone else) could possibly replicate them.

I understand Europeans’ focus on privacy (at least from business and other citizens; not so much from their governments), but it really strikes me that what’s being put forward here is not privacy, but something Orwellian.




Google loses landmark ‘right to be forgotten’ case | Technology | The Guardian

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When Census Data Was Abused

The inclusion of a “citizenship” question in the 2020 US Census has been highly contentious — but supporters note that census information could never, ever be used to identify individuals, and so any concern by resident aliens or even illegally present aliens — who are actually supposed to be counted by the federal census, according to the US Constitution — that responding to the census would be a dangerous thing to do are clearly overblown paranoia.

Except that the US Census has been used for nefarious purposes against individuals in the past — specifically, against Japanese-Americans at the outbreak of WW2.

Does anyone actually doubt that Trump would push for a similar use of census data, and coerce Congress into passing legislation to allow such thing (assuming he didn’t just command it by fiat)?




Secret use of census info helped send Japanese Americans to internment camps in WWII – The Washington Post
The abuse of data from the 1940 census has fueled fears about a citizenship question on the 2020 census form.

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Right-wing sting group tries to discredit Roy Moore’s accusers

A woman apparently associated with James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas” approached the Washington Post multiple times, claiming that Moore had made her pregnant at 15, leading to an abortion. She repeated asked reporters for their opinion about how such a story would affect Moore’s campaign. The WaPo didn’t find her story held together, declined to publish an article with her story, and then later spotted her going into the Project Veritas offices.

O’Keefe’s been responsible for any number of so-called “sting” operations against those considered enemies of conservatism, usually including hidden mic recordings released in a highly edited format.

Interestingly enough, the woman approached the WaPo only “hours” after their initial story on women alleging Moore approached or assaulted them as teenagers.

This is yet another in a series of attempts to spread “fake news” or raise doubts about the reporting on the Moore allegations. It just has the additional sleazy element of O’Keefe’s band of right-wing pranksters being involved.




washingtonpost

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The IRS has hired Equifax to help verify your identity. Yes, really

Equifax’s CEO was just before congress testifying how the company’s ineptness allowed a prolonged series of hacks to unveil the names, SSNs, DoBs, and other key identifying data of 150 million Americans (and some Canadians and Brits). That data could be invaluable in, among other things, tax fraud.

Which is why it makes perfect sense for the IRS to award a no-bid, single-source contract to Equifax for over $7 million to help them “verify taxpayer identity” to combat, of course, tax fraud.

Nice work, if you can get it.

The IRS contract award — which was made weeks after news of the breach was made public (which was, in turn, months after the breach had been detected by Equifax and that months after the first hacks actually occurred) — at least partially clarifies the rationale for what seems an extremely goofy thing to do. Equifax is the only company that can do what the IRS wants (it says), and the functionality is critical for the agency (well, duh, yeah, with all those SSNs out the in the wild …). The IRS also says that Equifax has already been doing this service for them, that none of the data the hackers broke into was their data, and that they haven’t seen any tax fraud from the hacking (yet).

Apparently various Congressfolk are just as confused about the IRS doing this as, well, I am.

Reps. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) separately penned letters to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen demanding he explain the agency’s rationale for awarding the contract to Equifax and provide information on any alternatives the agency considered. “I was initially under the impression that my staff was sharing a copy of the Onion, until I realized this story was, in fact, true,” Blumenauer wrote.

I suspect the eventual answer from the IRS will be, “Um, there really is nobody else who can or will do this for us, so we’re stuck with them.” Which always seems to be the lament of companies everywhere who thought that outsourcing was a great idea …




IRS awards Equifax no-bid, $7.25 million contract after hack
“This is considered a critical service that cannot lapse.”

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Use of Stingray devices without a warrant declared unconstitutional

One of the disadvantages of a more connected world — a world where those connections are not just fun, but a critical part of daily life — is that connections make it easier to track you in various ways.

Stingray devices are highly secret tools that effectively simulate cell towers to your phone; once your phone has checked in by coming into range, it can be used to real-time locate and track you. The technology was developed by the Feds, and has slowly trickled out to law enforcement, but on a high confidential basis; the government has often refused to admit that Stingrays exist, or that their tech was used in gathering evidence in certain investigations.

In some cases, though, it’s come out, and the courts — including the DC Appeals Court — have tended to be unhappy with Stingray use without a warrant.

We thus conclude that under ordinary circumstances, the use of a cell-site simulator to locate a person through his or her cellphone invades the person’s actual, legitimate, and reasonable expectation of privacy in his or her location information and is a search. […] We agree with [the defendant] that the government violated the Fourth Amendment when it deployed the cell-site simulator against him without first obtaining a warrant based on probable cause.

Search warrants are not actually all that hard to get, if you have probable cause to think that a particular person has information needed; judges are not usually that difficult to persuade. Searching without a warrant is sloppy, or lazy, or indicates a fishing expedition, whether we’re talking about a Stingray or throwing someone’s apartment — and it leads to cases being dismissed or convictions overturned.

EFF analysis here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/appeals-court-rules-against-warrantless-cell-site-simulator-surveillance




Court rules Stingray use without a warrant violates Fourth Amendment
The ruling could impact how cell-site simulators are used by law enforcement.

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Social Security Numbers are broken. What is the alternative?

We are increasingly a data-driven world. There are electronic records about us everywhere, and we rely on them in a thousand different ways to identify us.

But anyone who’s ever worked with a system that tries to reliably and consistently identify people knows that it’s a problem. What identifier is ever continuous or persistent? Names have a dozen variations and spellings, and can be changed (for legal, marital, or other personal reasons). Addresses are inconsistent, as are phone numbers (though mobile numbers are getting more portable and perpetual, anyone can still change them). State IDs like drivers licenses are … well, bounded by the state, so a person could have more than one over time.

The closest thing we have in the US to a national identification number is the Social Security Number — a unique identifier that used to be issued upon going to work, and now is obtained at birth, and stays with the person perpetually.

The SSN has some significant problems, though. It’s a unique identifier, but is also meant to be a secret (or at least confidential) one. Employers have to know it for tax reporting purposes, but are not allowed to use it as an employee number. People doing credit checks of you ask for it, but aren’t supposed to reveal it to anyone else. Knowledge of it is considered to be an essential part of personal security, such that someone knowing your SSN (even the last four digits!) can pretend to be you for a number of sensitive purposes.

That’s not only problematic in trying to actually identify you, but it’s increasingly untenable. The Equifax break-in put 134 million SSNs into the wild — but then we are told that we have to be careful monitoring our credit because companies (and the IRS!) will still treat knowledge of our SSN as proof that someone is us, even though they know that strangers now have that information.

Or, as the article says, an SSN is not just your userid, but still serves as your password. And that’s crazy from a security standpoint.

The article’s basic suggestion that the SSN needs to be retire from at least one of those functions it carries — userid or password — is spot-on. The question becomes which one, and what to replace it with, and how to make that work in terms of valid initial assignment (if we can’t get everyone registered to vote, how do we get them a new national ID?), in the face of fraud (though SSN-related fraud is largely due to it being a quasi-secret number), error (how do you correct erroneous data associated with your identity, and prove that you have the right to assert that it’s erroneous), and potential abuse (if all the facts about you are associated with a single number, someone in authority can find out anything about you) and paranoia (OMG IT’S THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST AIEEEEE!).

But those are implementation details to work out (if non-trivial ones). The current situation — SSNs are so “secret” that knowing them is “proof” that you are you, but so unsecret that tens of millions of them are known to hackers — is unworkable, and will only grow more so over time.

[h/t +John E. Bredehoft]




Time to Retire Social Security Numbers | RealClearPolicy
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The hackers who breached the credit bureau Equifax scored big. They made off with the personal identities of 143 million Americans — names, Social Security…

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The Equifax Debacle

Yeah, pretty much this.

I’m following along the news as the best “next” steps to take as a consumer. Things continue to change so fast in terms of (a) things Equifax is doing and (b) ways Equifax is being criticized for stuff they are doing, that taking any steps for the moment (aside from watching my credit card charges, etc.) seems premature.

Of course, I also keep thinking that the Federal Government might step in regarding something that has seriously compromised the financial privacy and security of most American adults. And then I realize who’s running the circus in DC, and just grind my teeth.

Originally shared by +Les Jenkins:




Don’t Hit Save – Comic: Equifax
The webcomic that dares to take on the gritty world of software, technology, and indie game development.

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On 9-11, sixteen years later

As I look around at posts and shares and tweets this morning saying, “Never forget,” I have to ask, “How could I?”

I’ve started and discarded over a dozen posts on 9-11 over the years, mostly because they got into too-tangled webs of blame and accusation and grief — grief not just over the loss of thousands of lives in the terror attacks themselves, but the hundreds of thousands, millions of lives cut short or crippled by the conflicts since, and the veering of American history (and that of the world) into something darker and more dangerous.

It’s important to remember 9-11, not just for what happened, but for what changed, and continues to change, following it. We won’t have the perspective to appreciate it fully until decades more have passed, but what we can see from within the still-ongoing blast wave is more than sufficient to mourn over.

#911

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California rejects the idea of never-ending generic “police investigations”

The ACLU and EFF have won a ruling in the California Supreme Court that the massive databases California law enforcement collect by simply recording the license plates of every car that passes by a given spot cannot be held indefinitely or in secret just because they might some day be useful in some currently unidentified criminal investigation.

The organizations had asked for the release of a week’s worth of Automated License Plate Reader data from the LAPD and LASD, to demonstrate to the public the extensiveness of what’s being collected. The law enforcement agencies refused, saying that the data might include bits that could, someday, be used by them — that would exempt the data from public record requests laws in California as “records of law enforcement investigations.”

EFF and the ACLU SoCal argued the ruling was tantamount to saying all drivers in Los Angeles are under criminal investigation at all times. The ruling would also have set a dangerous precedent, allowing law enforcement agencies to withhold from the public all kinds of information gathered on innocent Californians merely by claiming it was collected for investigative purposes.

The state Supreme Court has ruled that the “investigative purposes” excuse is invalid , and told a lower court to examine how the data could be released without violating any personal privacy.




Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU Win Court Ruling That Police Can’t Keep License Plate Data Secret
San Francisco, California—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU won a decision by the California Supreme Court that the license plate data of millions of law-abiding drivers, collected indiscriminately by police across the state, are not “investigative records” that law…

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Tweetizen Trump – 2016-12-16 "Deflectors On Full!"

Not a lot in the Donald's Twitter account since last time. A couple of Victory Tour posts about Pennsylvania and Mobile, and then …

► Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?

Just a random thought bubbling to the surface. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Again, when denial doesn't work (or even if it does), Trump always pivots to an attack, to deflecting the matter toward another target, hopefully by changing the subject. Insult his restaurant? He doesn't reply to the criticisms, he notes the magazine they appeared in is failing. That sort of thing.

I mean, think about it. What would the normal Presidential response be to "US intelligence services all agree that Russia was behind hacking attempting to influence the election, and CIA analysis indicates it was an attempt to get X into the White House"? What would Obama, or B Clinton, or either Bush, or Reagan, have said if these sorts of charges were leveled about how they got into the White House?

I would imagine something like:

"I am deeply concerned over the charges that Russia was attempting to influence our election through unlawful cyberattacks on our nation. While I am fully confident that the American People have spoken in electing me to the Presidency, I fully support efforts by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to investigate this matter thoroughly, as a question of national security, and I will take all measures necessary over the coming months to ensure that this nation is protected from such attacks."

Yeah, that sounds normal, even laudable. It doesn't admit to what happened, but it shows a desire to protect the nation and determine the truth. It's political, but it's also the right answer.

Versus:

"Nuh-uh! Didn't happen! Obvious fake news. And if it did, it made the Democrats look like poopyheads!"

Very presidential.

For the record, yes, info from the hacked emails Russia provided to WikiLeaks does indicate Donna Brazile was passing on some information about likely questions / questioners in some of the debates.¹ And, yes, that's wrong. And, no, that has nothing to do with the source of the leaks and whether they are something that we should be concerned about.

Indeed, by wrapping up a foreign power's intentional hacking to influence elections with a political kerfuffle, Trump is (intentionally?) trivializing the whole matter.

Also for the record, there's no basis in saying that this action was "illegal". Unethical, perhaps. In violation of contract, maybe. But nothing criminal about it. But nice throwing about of an attack term, Donald.

I will be curious to see how this method of operating works (or doesn't) during the actual presidential administration of Trump. How long can he pull off not addressing critiques and deflecting to an attack? Is there anyone who can really stop him from dealing with all his problems that way over the next four years?

—-

¹ As the Russians either failed to break into the RNC computers, or declined to leak anything they found there (reports are mixed), we have no idea whether the Trump campaign got any advance notice from, for example, its many contacts with Fox News. If they did, their candidate didn't seem to take much advantage of them. And if they did, that doesn't exonerate Brazile of shenanigans. Neither does it address the more important question at this point of Russian cyberattacks in the first place.

 

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State governments will get invoices of stuff you buy online. Oh, boy!

As part of the growth of sales taxing of online purchases, and some oddities around SCOTUS rulings, states that are collecting sales taxes from online vendors will now not only get the taxes levied, but a line item list of what it was you bought, so that the state governments can verify the taxes remitted are on the up and up.

So, yeah, that vibrator, or that copy of the Koran, or that book on how to cheat on your spouse, or that video that the current party in power was so outraged about, or that porno DVD, or pretty much anything you buy from Amazon, eBay, or any other online vendor, will all be in a state government database, just waiting for some bureaucrat or law enforcement officer to decide to data mine for some more interesting purpose (or for some hacker to break into it for ditto).

I suspect this will get litigated pretty quickly, because the room for abuse here is nightmarish.




If you bought a dildo in Denver, the government must legally be told
Or smut in South Dakota, Anarchist Cookbook in Alabama or Windows 10 in Wyoming

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Surveillance for Thee but not for Me

The Director of the FBI basically says that encryption is primarily used by people who have something to hide, i.e., criminals and terrorists … but cops shouldn't be filmed by civilians because it keeps them from doing their jobs.

Yeesh.




Encryption is “essential tradecraft” of terrorists, FBI director says
Comey also says cops may not police well out of fear of being in a viral video.

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The dark side of genetic testing

Cheap, easy, and presumably accurate genetic testing could help millions be aware of potential future health issues, work to forestall them, etc. It could and will make lots of lives better.

It could also lead to discriminatory practices, as in the case described here.




DNA Got a Kid Kicked Out of School—And It’ll Happen Again
The genetic discrimination future is here.

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Police want what police want

Look, I get it.

1. Police access to every scrap of information in the world is precisely what they want. It would (in some ways) make their job much easier. Being able to strip search people on a whim, being able to enter your house to look for stuff (whether it's there or not), knowing everything there is to know about you — all that is a good thing from the perspective of their jobs.

2. We live in a society of advocacy and contention. Our justice system is not interested in a joint discovery of the truth, but of convincing a judge and/or jury of which argued truth is real. Nobody sits around and says, "What, on balance, is the best and right way to both ensure security and respect necessary privacy?" Instead, if there's something you need, you propose it, demand it, insist on it, advocate for it, and make it clear that if you don't get your way, the terrorists / drug dealers / pedophiles win.

So I understand federal law enforcement, and local law enforcement, both realizing that being able to crack into encrypted phones would be a good thing for their job, and treating it as a moral imperative that we do so with no consideration as to the unintended consequences.

That doesn't make it good idea that we should automatically trust because the police are asking for it. In fact, it remains a pretty awful idea.

Originally shared by +Boing Boing:

Manhattan District Attorney demands backdoors in all mobile operating systems http://boingboing.net/2015/11/18/manhattan-da-calls-for-backdoo.html

 

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Reveal a back door, go to prison

UK's proposed new "security" bill not only allows secret demands for back doors to be built into any software system (back doors that the government assures everyone will only ever be used for the best and most benign purposes, and will never, ever, ever be found or exploited by the Bad Guys), but makes any mention of such back doors, or back door orders, by anyone, to anyone, for any reason — in court, before Parliamentary panels, let alone to the media — punishable by imprisonment.

'It seems that the central purpose of the revamped Snooper's Charter is not so much the claimed tidying-up of existing surveillance powers, nor even the extension of those powers, although it certainly does that too. At the heart of proposed Investigatory Powers Bill is something much more insidious: an attempt to make it impossible for anyone in the know to discuss any details of the government's surveillance activities, ever. As Danezis puts it: "The gagging provisions are a clear example that calls for a mature debate around surveillance are mere rhetoric, the securocrats want one last discussion before making any discussion about surveillance simply impossible.'

This is not, of course, strictly a British thing. The "securocrats" in the US would dearly love to do do much the same. For your safety and mine, of course.




Snooper’s Charter: UK gov’t can demand backdoors, give prison sentences for disclosing them
The new law would prevent any discussion of government surveillance, even in court.

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Your laptop is not just a "container" (legally, at least)

A judge has ruled that laptops are more than just crates and cargo that can be willy-nilly seized and searched — without a warrant — in the border zone or at international airports. Rather, based on SCOTUS precedent, they can be presumed to hold so much private information that a warrant must be obtained to take them.

That's a good thing. The feds have long used seizure and inspection precedents at border crossings to take phones, drives, and computers for further extensive searches, particularly in cases where they did not have enough probable cause to get a warrant if the device were not crossing a border. That specfic legalistic trickery has been, for the moment, quashed.




Warrantless airport seizure of laptop “cannot be justified,” judge rules | Ars Technica
Feds said a laptop is simply a “container” that can be searched without warrant.

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If the police need warrants to eavesdrop, THEN THE TERRORISTS WIN!

Local cops will often not even acknowledge using Stingray devices (which basically act as fake cell towers to intercept calls), at the insistence of both the feds they borrow from and the manufactures of the devices themselves.

What a radical thought to actually require a warrent (eek!) before engaging in "search and seizure". What will they think of next?

Originally shared by +WIRED:

Federal lawmakers introduced a new bill that would require state and local law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before they could use stingray devices.




New Bill Would Force Cops to Get Stingray Warrants

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