Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Posts Tagged Surveillance

Just as we have long suspected

Mar 8

Posted by Marlena in Civil Rights, Corruption & Crime, Media, Surveillance | No Comments

The dam of secrecy sure has sprung a few leaks lately. As the FISA battle wears on, we find out more and more how the government has co-opted various companies and organizations to do their illegal surveillance on American citizens. We known about the phone companies, of course, but this past week we heard about the US Postal Service helping out. And now, confirming what many of us have long suspected, we see that Google and Microsoft have been playing, too. Their role may be the most important one of all.

Little-noticed comments by a senior Justice Department official suggest Congress’ fight over renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surround interception of email and Internet data.

At a Monday breakfast sponsored by the American Bar Association, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Kenneth Wainstein remarked that the fight over the eavesdropping bill actually centers on US interception of email.

“In response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA’s current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States,” the Washington Post reported Tuesday. “The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because “essentially you don’t know where the recipient is going to be” and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.”

Unlike phone calls, email messages are generally stored before being transmitted to the sender. Most messages are stored on an email provider’s servers before they are accessed by the recipient.

Because they can be located anywhere, this means any portion of the law related to the Web could snare Americans’ data overseas.

Microsoft declined to comment when asked about their participation in any NSA program, saying only that they have 300 million active email accounts.

Google told CNET: “As our privacy policy states, we comply with law enforcement requests made with proper service. We do not discuss specific law enforcement requests and generally do not share aggregate information about them. There are also some legal restrictions on what information we can share about law enforcement requests.”

Google’s defense here is that they comply with law enforcement requests ‘made with proper service’. And they can’t share that with you, Citizen, but please do sign up for a gmail account right away. Why delete those message? We have unlimited storage!! You’ll never run out of room, so why not just save everything. Yes, please do. You never know when law enforcement will ask us to look at them because we don’t have to tell you, but trust us, you have nothing to worry about.

Did you ever wonder why Google is so generous with the storage? Now you know. ‘Not evil’ indeed.

And regarding the strenuous oversight process? If the Republicans get their way on FISA and telecom immunity, there will be essentially no oversight. The idea of ‘proper service’ for law enforcement requests basically means nothing. From the Washington Post:

Privacy advocates have raised concerns that the Senate bill contains a provision that would allow the attorney general to erect a new barrier to future privacy cases brought under the nation’s foreign intelligence surveillance law.

Contrary to current practice, the Senate bill would halt such lawsuits if the attorney general certifies that the assistance provided by the telecom carrier is lawful. The only check on that certification would be a court review as to whether the attorney general “abused” his discretion, which experts said yesterday is the lowest possible standard of judicial review.

“This provision is yet another example of the executive branch ‘just trust us’ mentality when it comes to intelligence matters,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

A key congressional aide said that the issue is one that must be reviewed carefully, and a balance must be struck between appropriate court review and avoiding “protracted litigation.”

In other words, if you get spied on and complain, your lawsuit will go nowhere. All these companies need do is say they complied with a legal request, and that request will be certified by the Attorney General, and the only way the certification can be overturned is if a judge determines that the AG abused his discretion. Good luck with that.

Notice how the balance is now between ‘appropriate court review’ and avoiding ‘protracted litigation’. How about putting our Constitutional 4th Amendment privacy rights on the scales there, you sons of bitches!

These people suck.

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Doesn’t this say it all about domestic surveillance?

Mar 6

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Politics, Stupidity, Surveillance | No Comments

The RNC chooses Qwest to be their telecom provider of choice.

Qwest, you may recall, is the only telecom provider that failed to cooperate with the NSA on illegal domestic surveillance.

I’m sure that made them a bad telephone company at the time in certain circles. Bad bad bad. But now? Not so much. Now that the RNC wants some privacy, they have nowhere else to turn. They fall, sighing, into the private embrace of Qwest. Oh, what a relief! Those psychopaths Bush and Cheney can’t eavesdrop on us planning to throw them under the bus! Phew! It’s too bad we let them fuck up the whole country, but what the hell. We’re moving on.

Reminds me of that saying…don’t shit where you eat. It’s too bad Qwest didn’t tell the RNC to go screw.

Sorry to be crude today. The bitter irony just wrings it out of me.

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More Warrantless Surveilling

Mar 6

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Civil Rights, Surveillance | No Comments

Not content to funnel all of our voice and electronic communications through a secret warrantless surveillance program, in utter violation of the 4th Amendment, the government also makes notes on and opens citizens’ snail mail! It’s yet another warrantless surveillance program, which you pay for, and which is used against….YOU! Without you even needing to know about it! In fact, it’s really important that you don’t know about it, because then you might censor yourself and that would ruin all the fun for these government voyeurs.

The US postal service approves more than 10,000 requests from US law enforcement each year to record names, addresses and other information from the outside of packages, according to information released through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The warrantless surveillance mail program — as it is known — requires only the approval of the US Postal Inspection Service Director, and not a judge.

I’m sure that’s very helpful in the ‘War on Terror’. The inspector has approved almost 100% of such requests since 2004. No word on who he is or why he considers an occasional request beyond the pale.

“The idea of the government tracking that amount of mail is quite alarming,” Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national security project Jameel Jaffer told the paper. “When you realize that (the figure) does not include national security matters, the numbers are even more alarming.”

Officials would not disclose how much mail was monitored in national security or “terror”-related investigations. Under the PATRIOT ACT, those who received letters notifying them that they were being investigated often were gagged from even reporting their being targeted.

Responding to a USA Today request for the national security-related data, “inspection service counsel Anthony Alverno wrote that even revealing the frequency of the surveillance would undermine its effectiveness “to the detriment of the government’s national security interests.”

In true authoritarian style, any information about the ‘frequency of the illegal surveillance would undermine its effectiveness’. So it appears that they want people to live and behave under the impression that they have a functioning US Constitution behind them, but in fact, our government uses our own imaginary ‘freedoms’ to entrap us in their unconstitutional surveillance.

Sometimes people who have had amputations report that they can feel phantom pains from their missing limbs. I think this is like that. We continue to behave as if we have these rights to privacy and to freedom of speech. We think we can feel them and use them. But the rights have been amputated. Unfortunately, Americans are too jacked up on consumerism and junk tv to understand what’s going on. Meanwhile, the government has analyzed what we’ve said, written, purchased, read, joined, supported, etc. to categorize individuals as dangerous or not.

Dangerous to them. Not to our fellow citizens, but to the current regime. Not dangerous through violence, but merely through resistance.

At the appointed hour, they will round up all these ‘dangerous’ people and tell the rest to obey. And that should be pretty easy because the very people they round up will be the ones paying close attention. Once they remove anyone with the capacity to lead a resistance to government tyranny, the people left will be easier to control. And at that point the free flow of information will have ceased, so anyone who was planning on getting up to speed later will be shit out of luck. There won’t be anyone to ask.

The time to pay attention is now.

There’s reason to believe more mail may be being opened, as well.

In late 2006, a signing statement issued by President Bush suggested that his office had expanded executive branch power to open mail without a warrant.

The signing statement accompanied H.R. 6407, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which reiterated a prohibition on opening first class mail without a warrant.

“In 1996, the postal regulations were altered to permit the opening of First Class mail without a warrant in narrowly defined cases where the Postal Inspector believes there is a credible threat that the package contains dangerous material like bombs,” the ACLU said in a press release at the time. “Instead of referencing the narrow exception in the postal regulations, the president’s signing statement suggests that he is assuming broader authority to open mail without a warrant.”

In January 2007, the ACLU and Center for National Security Studies filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking information regarding any additional warrantless mail surveillance.

The goal is always the same: to destroy our civil liberties so that martial law can be implemented at will and at a time of their choosing, probably sometime this year, as a result of a false flag incident. Believe me, I hope I’m wrong. But anyone who refuses to see the writing on the wall is a fool, in my humble opinion.

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The Inside of Blogging

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Civil Rights, Media, Surveillance | No Comments

For years I read blogs and occasionally commented. Blogging is better. However, there is the issue of getting readers and finding out who they might be. This involves checking stat logs. By spending a little time checking IP addresses, a blogger can find out when ‘persons of interest’ stop by, you know like Pentagon, CIA, Quantico, psyops, military, etc. To my disgust, I have noticed that whenever I have written about or linked to military technology and certain other sensitive subjects, lo and behold our government seems to have plenty of people on hand to have a look-see. No lowly blogger escapes the eye of Big Brother. Oh no. They have deep pockets for this crap, courtesy of the US taxpayers. We hand them the money they use to despoil us of our civil rights.

That’s right, the bastards know whenever anyone gets near to their criminal activity. Nine million blogs to sort through? No problem. It’s pretty obvious, once you start blogging about anything important, that the government must be spending lots of money on data-mining capabilities in order to find every needle in every haystack on the internet. These are your tax dollars at work, paying for government employees to spy on bloggers and intimidate them into staying quiet so that you, dear reader, may not come to a proper understanding of the crimes committed in your name. They don’t care about terrorists. They made that whole thing up to justify spying on you and your fellow Americans, especially the bloggers and activists who they consider the real terrorists.

The people in the DC, Virginia, and Maryland area spend lots of time reading blogs. Yes. They are busy as bees sucking up all that alternative news nectar, ascertaining just how much we scrappy bloggers, citizen journalists and news junkies have figured out. And then they go back to their propaganda hives and make more of that psychedelic honey. They decide how to spin the next pitch to the networks, when to send the next email chain letter (pass it on or else!!), when to have another ‘incident’ to scare the crap out them and stir up their fears and hostilities. The drones just eat it up and do what they’re told.

I think it’s the dirty little secret of blogging: they are watching us, and we know it. Do you know it, dear reader? You should.

Does that freak you out? It freaked me out. But listen, you can turn off the computer and run away, or you can grab somebody who thinks this is all a big haha and start cluing them in. The more people who understand what’s really happening to our country, the better off and safer we will all be. It’s as simple as that. Nothing will change until we change it. There is safety in numbers, and there is power in the Truth.

If your neighbor will not come to the Truth, bring the Truth to your neighbor. And do it now.

Originally published 2/23/08.

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Blackmail, black bags, black hearts

Feb 27

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Civil Rights, Corruption & Crime, Politics, Surveillance | No Comments

Paul Craig Roberts has an accurate and brutally honest piece up about the abhorrent Protect America Act.

President George W. Bush and his director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, are telling the American people that an unaccountable executive branch is necessary for their protection. Without the Protect America Act, Bush and McConnell claim, the executive branch will not be able to spy on terrorists, and we will all be blown up. Terrorists can only be stopped, Bush says, if Bush has the right to spy on everyone without any oversight by courts.

He goes on to handily undo this claptrap, and along the way he offers this explanation for certain confounding events:

As the lawmakers who gave us FISA understood, spying on people without warrants lets a political party collect dirt on its adversaries with which to blackmail them.

As Bush illegally spied a long time before word of it got out, blackmail might be the reason the Democrats have ignored their congressional election mandate and have not put a stop to Bush’s illegal wars and unconstitutional police state measures.

Perhaps the Democrats have finally caught on that they cannot function as a political party as long as they continue to permit Bush to spy on them. For one reason or another, they have let the Orwellian-named Protect America Act expire.

This is not the first time we’ve heard this, so I’d just like to put a couple of things in closer relation to one another.

The first time I heard this was in Luke Ryland’s January 6, 2008 post about Sibel Edmunds.

The article notes that Larry Franklin was one of those implicated in the scheme. However, Sibel has previously noted that Franklin was essentially a pawn in the system. More significant is the fact that high-level Pentagon officials were maintaining ‘dossiers’ on the sexual and financial proclivities of their underlings in order to be able to blackmail them.

I know that many of you have been (rightly) concerned about FISA, and many of you have (rightly) been confused by the inexplicable behaviour of Democrats in Congress, and wonder why they behave as though they are being blackmailed.

Now you know.

If any American journalists/media wants to step up, please remember that the nuclear black market story covered by The Times is just one element of Sibel’s case.

Could this dossier program on our elected officials and on other Americans, done via the illegal wiretap program, be the unnamed thing that caused the forceful, principled pushback from Ashcroft, Mueller and Comey? A comment to one of Glenn Greenwald’s many posts about this lawbreaking noted the heavy involvement of the FBI sheds a little more light:

Note that nowhere in Comey’s story are NSA officials mentioned. But FBI Director Robert Mueller was a central player in the drama — he even met personally with President Bush — and also was one who threatened resignation. This indicates that, whatever was going on before the program was modified, those activities were being conducted by the FBI, not just the NSA. That could mean purely domestic unwarranted wiretaps, unwarranted black-bag jobs, or similar misconduct.

Being a law-abiding citizen generally unfamiliar with FBI slang, I had to look up black-bag jobs. In the old days they involved the FBI illegally sneaking into people’s homes and offices. Today the options for sneaking around have expanded dramatically. This analysis from 10/07 asks whether the Senate FISA bill immunizes black-bag jobs. Um, yes? Just a guess.

Perhaps even Ashcroft, Comey and Mueller could see that nobody is safe. Not even them.

Originally published 2/22/08.

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