Tag: terrorism

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Mission

Friends Don’t Let Friends Support the NSA

Building on work by Christopher Soghoian, local data visualization expert MC McGrath has come up with a fascinating exploration of the network of firms and agencies supporting the major electronic surveillance programs run by NSA and GCHQ, using data scraped from the individual LinkedIn profiles of people advertising their expertise in those particular programs.

To explore just one tiny corner of this visualization, the NSA has a program called “DISHFIRE” which collects SMS messages. The SMS messages of suspected terrorists? Bless your heart, no! Everybody’s SMS messages. The visualization makes clear that every branch of the military draws on people with DISHFIRE expertise, and that certain private companies appear to do so too – DC area-based companies with anodyne names like L-3 Communications (“Our products and services play a critical role in the protection and defense of freedoms worldwide”) Six3 Systems (“High quality Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Counterterrorism solutions”), and PiccoTek (“Uniquely talented people with the right “can do” attitude”).

I’m glad they’re so positive about their work. How devastating it would be if the employees of these firms raking in vast quantities of tax dollars in exchange for smoothing the broad downward path toward turnkey tyranny, felt, in unguarded moments, a crawling sense of unease. Trawling through their profiles, it’s easy to find a certain defensiveness in tone – they’re saving “countless lives everyday“? Really?

Most of the people who list this program in their LinkedIn profiles are or have been in Afghanistan, a country we never should have invaded, and which we’re still in thirteen long years later in America’s longest ever war. If it were me, maybe I’d have to believe that I was “saving countless lives” in order to make it seem worth while.

And so they beaver away, in Virginia and Afghanistan and many other places, devising more and more refined technological solutions to the problem of detecting anti-American sentiments people are texting to one another; and it seems impossible to have us stand back and look at whether it is truly productive to expend so much energy squashing – sometimes in a very literal way – every hint of dissent.

drones-seamless

…But in matters of vital importance – meaning, in effect, war and police espionage – the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life. Orwell, 1984.

Listen. The NSA’s purpose is very simple. It’s not to thwart terrorist attacks. It’s to buttress empire, over there, and, through use of the exact same tools developed to “thwart terrorism”, over here and in our towns and schools as well. The money flows towards them, and towards their work of destruction; and is sucked away from our vulnerable, our poor, our schools and our towns. Our own ability to voice sentiments opposing the decisions of the American government, or to enjoy due process protections before being deprived of life or liberty, look increasingly like localized exceptions to a different and worse rule we have been imposing on the rest of the world, and now also on various categories of people deemed unacceptable here at home.

So I’ll say this now: Friends don’t let friends support the NSA, its associated agencies or its nexus of security firms that feed off of and sustain it. If you know people who work for them, help them find a better line of work. They have better things to do with their lives, and it is not yet too late. We are already working with former intelligence people who have grown disenchanted with what their country asked them to do, and there are a thousand Snowdens waiting in the wings.

Help them. Join us. Support our movement. Spend your time really “protecting and defending” the freedom of your neighbors and fellow people, instead of the revenues of a machine that profits directly every single time the Constitution is violated by an unwarranted intrusion on our lives.

May we all, one day, be left in peace – peace here, abroad, and with each other.

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Mission News

The Wall Begins To Crack: Fourth Amendment Challenge to Bulk Metadata Spying Program “Likely to Succeed on the Merits”

Ever since the 2005 revelations of Mark Klein (yes, that long ago) that the NSA was intercepting phone traffic on a mass basis, successive presidential administrations have employed every possible species of legal trickery to prevent a constitutional challenge to the program on the merits.

The key question is, Why? Surely, if either Bush or Obama believed their rhetoric that what they’re doing is Constitutional, they would welcome the courts’ review, which would surely result in a thumping endorsement of bulk metadata spying, probably based on the 1979 Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland, which ruled the collection of much more limited metadata to be constitutional.

The actions of both administrations suggest otherwise. Their problem was always that the plain text of the Fourth Amendment didn’t seem to support their position. Shall we take a look at it again? I never get tired of it.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrant shall issue, except upon probable cause, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In order to be “reasonable”, a “search” must have a warrant, which is supported by “probable cause”, and which “particularly describes” the “place” to be searched.

So let’s say, then, just hypothetically, that you set up a massive phone data interception program without bothering with a warrant at all, and got Congress to retroactively immunize anyone participating in it from prosecution (hey there, W!), or that your response to the existence of this program when you got into office was to get a secret court to issue a secret ruling approving a warrant allowing the “seizure” of all phone metadata for all calls in the United States (howdy, BarackO!). How would a reasonable court interpret the requirements for probable cause, or for particularly describing the “persons or things” to be seized, for a program like that?

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Bring Us Back Food, Or Be Food Yourself: The FBI and Ayyub Abdul-Alim

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The Deep State requires terrorists as its food. Only by claiming, falsely, to thwart terrorist attacks before they happen, can the three-letter agencies justify their vast increases in budget, manpower and technology over the last ten years. The problem is that there’s just not enough terrorism to go around. On the amount of actual terrorism we have – which, excluding school shootings, has killed about thirty Americans in the last twelve years – you simply can’t justify NSA mass surveillance, 78 state-funded fusion centers, the massive and unnecessary DHS, or the ruinously expensive foreign adventures that have resulted in over 100,000 deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. If you can’t find enough terrorists, the obvious recourse – obvious, that is, if you have no decency and no actual love for justice – is to make your own terrorists. In Oregon and California and Ohio and New York and Massachusetts, the FBI has offered Muslims the same, terrible deal: Be our spy with your fellow Muslims, or we will ruin your life.

I have not come to this analysis lightly. It is a terrible observation to make about people who are supposed to protect us. But the bureaucratic imperative at work here is too powerful. Bring back a terrorist, and your career is made. Fail to find any, and people will start asking questions about why you need all those tax dollars to do your work.

Which brings us to the sad story of Amherst-born Springfield resident Ayyub Abdul-Alim – building manager, owner of the “Nature’s Garden” store, and the creator of “Connections Transportation”, which provided families with free commuter services to and from local prisons to visit their loved ones.

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Thou Shalt Not Connect The Dots: FBI Flat-Out Refusing All FOIA Requests From MIT PhD Candidate, Because He Might Learn Too Much

eco-enigma

Item #2 on the NSA’s Official Talking Points to Justify Mass Surveillance (see p. 3) is “The NSA And Its Partners Must Make Sure We Connect The Dots So That The Nation Is Never Attacked Again Like On 9/11.” The government is fighting furiously against any attempt to restrict, say, its collection of metadata on all US telephone calls, because they argue that only collecting everything enables them to detect patterns and conduct analyses that would otherwise be impossible.

But what happens if instead of the government, the public starts using the same tools on the government? What happens when the burning eye of the surveillance state is turned back on itself?

Mother Jones reports that that’s what MIT PhD candidate Ryan Shapiro is doing. He has long been active in the field of animal rights, and became interested in the FBI’s characterization of “the eco-terrorism animal rights movement” as “the number one domestic terrorism threat” that we face. He has figured out a way of getting responses to FOIA that is so effective that the FBI is going to court to stop him.

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StopWatchingUs DC rally rocks out: 3,000+ people call for NSA reforms

This Saturday, DC saw something it had never seen before.

A city that treats the superficial hatreds of party politics as its lifeblood, saw thousands of people from across the political spectrum gather to denounce NSA mass spying. We heard, and roared approval for, the words of feminist Naomi Wolf, Dennis Kucinich (Democrat), Justin Amash (Republican), and Gary Johnson (Libertarian). Kymone Freeman spoke movingly about the impact of surveillance on minority communities and the civil rights movement. Whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Russell Tice were there, and Edward Snowden sent a message to be read by leading whistleblower-protecting attorney Jesselynn Radack. Tea Party people up from Richmond, VA, proudly put on Code Pink stickers labeled “Make Out Not War”. The press reported wonderingly that it was not put together “by any of the “usual” well-connected DC organizers.” I should know: I’m proud to say that, in a small way, I was one of them, and this was the first time most of us had done anything like this.

That wasn’t all. Here in Boston, activist Joan Livingston put together a solidarity rally at Park Street Station:

and ACLU organizer Raquel Ronzone arranged for the rally to livestream at the Digital Media Conference in Cambridge.

If you want updates on the StopWatchingUs campaign going forward, text “PRIVACY” to 877877. Stay tuned for the next stage of the campaign, which will be to pass the “USA FREEDOM Act.” Personally, just to hammer home the point, I’d have preferred the “USA FREEDOM Fourth Amendment Restoration – Objective: Undermining Tyranny Act of 2013”, because I too can do acronyms, but such frivolity is apparently frowned upon in the legislature that gave us the Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 in the first place.

UPDATE: Oh yeah, I nearly forgot. I’m the tall guy to the left of Rep. Amash!

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Thousands to Rally in DC Against Mass Surveillance on Patriot Act Anniversary 10/26

We’re now at over 4,000 signups for the Stopwatching.us anti-NSA rally down in DC this Saturday!

We’re looking for people who are driving down to DC from New England and have space in their car for fellow protesters: please email me if that’s you!

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We’ll deliver a petition with over half a million signatures to Congress, We’ll demand real NSA reforms and an end to mass surveillance programs that do an end-run around the Fourth Amendment. It’s time for the lies to end.

To sign the petition: https://optin.stopwatching.us/
To join the rally: https://rally.stopwatching.us

Details below the fold:

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Mission News

Clark Primary Victory May Be Good For Digital Privacy

In a seven-way primary with an all-star cast, Sen. Katherine Clark won the nomination for Democratic candidate for the U. S. House in my own district of MA-5, one of the most Democratic districts in the nation (D+22).

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She now faces Boston resident Frank Addivinola in the general, but it would essentially take a meteor strike for her to not head to Congress.

Here at Digital Fourth, we’ve been tough on Sen. Clark for her cosponsorship of Martha Coakley’s proposal to expand electronic wiretapping. Our #MassWiretap campaign gathered over 4,000 signatures against that bill, and it became an issue in the campaign, producing third-party negative ads against her from the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Curiously, though, there’s an argument that Sen. Clark’s victory in the primary may be positive for digital privacy. Let me explain.

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David House lawsuit sheds light on border laptop searches

david house

 

Cambridge resident David House got a nasty shock back in December 2010, when on his way back from vacation in Mexico he landed in Chicago, and found himself in a Homeland Security interrogation room. What was House’s crime? Being involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network. He was generally sympathetic to Wikileaks’ efforts to publicize the war crimes revealed by the Bradley Manning leaks. Or, as the “lookout” alert put it, he was “wanted for questioning re leak of classified material.”

 

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Mission

Globe reports on Saturday’s NSA/fusion center picnic

Michael Morisy at the Globe reports:

With speeches, flyers, and some family friendly songs, a few dozen protesters joined outside the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) yesterday to push back against what they said were increasingly invasive government intrusions into individuals’ privacy.

The event was dubbed an Orwell Day protest, after George Orwell’s 1984 (the date was 8/4), a novel about a totalitarian regime that maintains control largely through an aggressive surveillance program.

“I believe in the constitution, I believe in the Fourth Amendment,” said Alex Marthews, founder of Digital Fourth, a non-profit which advocates for strong Fourth Amendment protections and a strong emphasis on privacy. He blasted BRIC as an ineffective institution that wasted time and money investigating peace activists and graffiti artists rather than more serious threats.

“An agency that does no good and wastes your money should be closed,” he said.

Maximum attendance was around 75, which was much larger than the first event – looks like the movement is growing. Here’s full footage of the first hour, featuring great speeches from Steve Revilak of the Mass Pirates and Joan Livingston of Veterans for Peace. Many thanks to the activists from #MassOps and Restore the Fourth Boston who put the event together!

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Google The Wrong Stuff, Get Six Agents In Your Home (Nassau County, NY)

Long Island freelance writer Michele Catalano reported two days ago on a deeply disturbing incident where six officers from an undisclosed agency came to her family home:

At about 9:00 am, my husband […] saw three black SUVs in front of our house; two at the curb in front and one pulled up behind my husband’s Jeep in the driveway, as if to block him from leaving. Six gentlemen in casual clothes emerged from the vehicles and spread out as they walked toward the house, two toward the backyard on one side, two on the other side, two toward the front door. […] He could see they all had guns holstered in their waistbands. “Are you [name redacted]?” one asked while glancing at a clipboard. He affirmed that was indeed him, and was asked if they could come in. Sure, he said. They asked if they could search the house, though it turned out to be just a cursory search.

The “gentlemen” pepper her husband with questions about pepper cookers and backpacks; about where he’s from, about his wife, about their parents and their reading habits. They say that “they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing.”

 

How reassuring.
How reassuring.

It appears that Suffolk County CID had received a tip from “a Bay Shore based computer company” about the Google searches of a former employee, Ms. Catalano’s husband, who had searched while at work for terms including “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks” – the former because he was curious about how the Boston Marathon bombing had happened, and the latter because they were in the market for new backpacks.

It’s still unclear exactly what agency the “gentlemen” were from. The FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force are both denying involvement. Nor do we know exactly why such Google searches triggered a full-court press from no fewer than six officers. But there are two important points that arise out of this story.

One is how blunt the tools of Internet surveillance are. Your Google search for “pressure cooker bombs” tells the authorities only that you are interested in pressure cooker bombs at that moment. As part of my research for this article, I just put it into Google myself. It doesn’t tell them why, and by itself is not evidence of any criminal intent. Nor does separately searching on the word “backpacks” help to establish such an intent. If we were still operating in a world where the Fourth Amendment were consistently applied, this evidence alone would not be nearly enough to demonstrate probable cause to a judge that the person in question was engaged in or planning criminal activity. Instead, we’re operating in an environment of high governmental paranoia about people’s search activity, where agencies have to find ways of justifying an over-muscled and over-funded security state.

The second point is that we don’t know whether a warrant was issued, or whether the “gentlemen” felt that one was needed, because Ms. Catalano’s husband did not assert his Fourth Amendment rights (and may in fact have been afraid to do so). He could have refused them entry without a warrant; they may or may not have complied; but he had every right to refuse. It’s just not something many people think of doing, and in consequence law enforcement feels able to intrude on our homes at will. Like the “gentlemen” in Buffy, their success depends on our silence.

UPDATE: The author of this testimony has taken it down. Whether it was false, he had deeply misunderstood what was going on, or he was scared into withdrawing it, it can no longer be considered reliable.