Caution: You hug trees? Well did you twitter about your over zealous love for trees? Cause then you may have just slipped into a spot on the terrorist watch list.
As read in the report:
A chapter on “Potential for Terrorist Use of Twitter” notes that Twitter members sent out messages, known as “Tweets,” reporting the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than news outlets and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used it to provide information on police movements.
“Twitter has also become a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences,” the report said.
Okay-so is that the new terrorist watch list? Political enthusiasts? Boy, I’m in trouble. How many of you fit the above criteria? Think about it.
What does this mean? It means that Border Patrol & Customs authority is a lot bigger than we thought! Over two thirds of the American population to be exact. This unit of DHS has the right to stop, search and seize for any reason at all. And while these powers have been enabled for a while, only after the DHS took head of the organization have abuses started to occur. (Big shocker right?) Check out a few of the stories below:
Shortly after 9/11 when the government went from “there are procedures” to “fuck all” the NSA set up a wiretapping program in Georgia.
Witness the before:
William Weaver, who worked in the U.S. Army signals intelligence for eight years in Berlin and Augsberg, Germany, concurred with her assessment of how seriously USSID 18 was regarded.
“The way USSID 18 was treated by us was that it came down from God and was sacrosanct,” said Weaver, who is now an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, El Paso. “We were told at training and many times after that, that if you violated USSID 18 you could spend the rest of your life in prison. The mindset was that you do not intercept U.S. citizens. And the minute you recognized that you intercepted, you immediately reported up the chain of command.”
To the after:
Kinne said that in the nearly two years she was monitoring conversations, her group received calls in numerous languages, including Farsi, Pashtu, Dari, Tagalog, Japanese, Chinese and Russian. Between 10-20 percent of the calls she monitored involved English-speakers, which included Americans, Canadians and British citizens. Nearly 99 percent of the calls she monitored were non-military related. Comparatively few of the calls she processed were in Arabic.
Found this at the Precursor Blog, “In 2006, Google acquired a leading company in facial recognition, and Google is using it now to help simplify the tagging and organization of people’s rapidly growing archives of digital pictures through its Picassa photo application.”
Add this to the money quote from the USA Today article:
“I don’t like it at all,” says Rob Williams, who blogs for the Techgage website. “Google knows what I search for, where I live and how much time I spend on websites. Now they know what my friends look like, too. That’s just too much.”
ALARMING! ALL CHICAGOANS LISTEN UP CAUSE I’M TYPE-YELLING AT YOU!
Mayor Daly announced on Sept. 9th (Seriously-how did I miss this?) that he will be installing 2,000 remote-control cameras and motion-sensing software to spot crimes or terrorist acts “as they happen” for Chicago.
Let’s be realistic here. It will not be terrorism being spotted but drunks running around in Wrigleyville. Crime ridden area cameras will simply be shot out. As for “terrorist threats”, the only threat Chicago has faced was a sadly botched scheme in 2006. Not worthy of $5 million dollars of taxpayer money so that the government can play Peeping Tom.
Where’s the money coming from? The Department of Homeland Security of course with the intention of tracking all “suspicious” activity. This is so enraging. No there is no “expectation” of privacy on a public street, but I sure as hell don’t expect government surveillance either!
Two personal yahoo accounts for Sarah Palin were hacked today. Check it out here.
The accounts included family photos, contact lists and state communication. Quite the dilemma. Your thoughts? I’m torn between screaming “privacy rights violation!” to “Right to know laws violated!”
It’s all fun and games until it’s you under surveillance right? Well the NSA has developed a program specifically to track those journalist and bloggers who venture to talk about the department. Below are excerpts from an article revealing the program:
“NSA maintains a database that tracks unofficial and negative articles written about the agency. Code named ‘FIRSTFRUITS,’ the database is operated by the Denial and Deception (D&D) unit within SID [Signals Intelligence Division]. High priority is given to articles written as a result of possible leaks from cleared personnel.
According to those familiar with FIRSTFRUITS, Bill Gertz of The Washington Times features prominently in the database. Before [NSA Director Michael] Hayden’s reign and during the Clinton administration, Gertz was often leaked classified documents by anti-Clinton intelligence officials in an attempt to demonstrate that collusion between the administration and China was hurting U.S. national security. NSA, perhaps legitimately, was concerned that China could actually benefit from such disclosures.
In order that the database did not violate United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, which specifies that the names of ‘U.S. persons’ are to be deleted through a process known as minimization, the names of subject journalists were blanked out. However, in a violation of USSID 18, certain high level users could unlock the database field through a super-user status and view the ‘phantom names’ of the journalists in question. Some of the ‘source’ information in FIRSTFRUITS was classified — an indication that some of the articles in the database were not obtained through open source means. In fact, NSA insiders report that the communications monitoring tasking system known as ECHELON is being used more frequently for purely political eavesdropping having nothing to do with national security or counter terrorism.
In addition, outside agencies and a ‘second party,’ Great Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are permitted to access the journalist database,. FIRSTFRUITS was originally developed by the CIA but given to NSA to operate with CIA funding. The database soon grew to capacity, was converted from a Lotus Notes to an Oracle system, and NSA took over complete ownership of the system from the CIA.
Tens of thousands of articles are found in FIRSTFRUITS and part of the upkeep of the system has been outsourced to outside contractors, such as Booz Allen, which periodically hosts inter-agency Foreign Denial and Deception meetings within its Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility or ‘SCIF’ in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Currently, in addition to NSA and GCHQ, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) routinely access the database, which is, in essence, a classified and more powerful version of the commercial NEXIS news search database.
In addition to Gertz, other journalists who feature prominently in the database include Seymour Hersh of The New Yorke,; author and journalist James Bamford, James Risen of The New York Times, Vernon Loeb of The Washington Post, John C. K. Daly of UPI, and this journalist [Wayne Madsen].
Despite the consistent coverage the RFID chip is easily hackable, the DHS remains determined to put American’s at the risk of identity theft in exchange for the chance to easily track our whereabouts by radio signal. Not to mention the ease for them to collect information.
This is exactly why they will begin collecting information recording personal data for all those that cross the border. When an US citizen opts to perfectly, legally cross the border they are also opting to engage int the following:
All data collected by states but be shared with DHS in order to compare information
This data will be merged and kept in a database for 15 years
Again, but do we really want the government tracking our every movement by radio signal?
The DHS’s response to privacy concerns was as follows:
“A person opts to go over the border, their information is going to be collected and held anyway,” she said. “If you don’t want to go over the border, you don’t have to.”
We have until Monday to file complaints with the DHS. Call this number to voice your concerns:202-282-8495
The EFF addressed that the government continues to try and shield the public from how insecure RFID technology is today. District Judge Douglas Woodlock of the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts granted a temporary restraining order requested by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority for three students trying to expose the weakness in the technology..
The MBTA sought to bar three students enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Zack Anderson, R.J. Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa — from presenting a talk at DefCon about vulnerabilities in magnetic stripe tickets and RFID cards that are used in the MBTA’s payment system.
The MBTA feared that the students planned to teach the audience how to fraudulently use the cards without additional payments to the system.
The EFF believes the judge’s order sets a dangerous precedent. EFF staff attorney Marcia Hoffman told reporters:
“Basically, what the court is suggesting here is that giving a presentation involving security to other security researchers is a violation of federal law,” she said. “As far as I know, this is completely unprecedented, and it has a tremendous chilling effect on sharing this sort of research. . . . And we intend to fight it with everything we’ve got.”
My questions however are as follows:
Why did the MBTA invest in such an easily corruptable technology?
Is there any relation to the opposed use of RFID in the REAL ID linked to this?
Seriously-this technology sucks. Why is anyone using it for transaction or identification purposes?
What do you get when you add FISA and the new Homeland Security Customs search practices?
Well here is an excellent way to put it from Steve Bellovin:
“…it would seem to make little difference if the information is ‘imported’ into the US via a physical laptop or via a VPN, or for that matter by a Web connection. The right to search a laptop for information, then, is equivalent to the right to tap any and all international connections, without a warrant or probable cause. (More precisely, one always has a constitutional protection against ‘unreasonable’ search and seizure; the issue is what the definition of ‘unreasonable’ is.)”
