Enemy of the State 1998 - All about the NSA - Said Beautifully
I’ve been reading the news, researching on the Net, listening to sources on TV, networking with friends, and doing some deep level searches about the state of affairs in the United States, and unless I am badly mistaken, my conclusions are indeed frightening. But, first, you must see events, revelations in context, parts of a bigger whole, not just isolated things.
We have the SCOTUS deciding that police have no legal duty to ANY individual. We have the SCOTUS deciding that police can TAKE DNA forcibly if they need to, from you, without a warrant, pursuant to an arrest. Now, some say, “Oh, it’s only an arrest for a “serious crime” “, but once you start questioning them about the specifics of what constitutes a “serious crime” (we would consider murder a serious crime), they start to hem and haw on it.
With the DNA decision,with the FISA, Verizon phone record demands,
with the now acknowledged PRISM, Blarney, and of course, the previous spy programs of Echelon, Carnivore, Tempest, Einstein, Trapwire, etc, we are seeing a “legal framework” being laid for this government to routinely (and I say with malice of forethought) violate ALL our rights of privacy without a warrant. We must ALSO take note that these all inclusive dragnets of BigData would include our medical records or portions thereof, which are personally identifiable, and thus, HIPAA is being routinely violated.
If the NSA is hacking (accessing without authorization) ANY protected servers, getting info from the network, most probably not only are they criminally violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, but also, the Terms of Service of any website so accessed. There are MANY other examples of the government, law enforcement, routinely violating the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of many citizens at once (remember Boston after the bombing and warrantless house to house searches?), in fact, there are too many examples to list at this time.
So, there we have PART of the legal framework they are establishing for grabbing ALL our data, all the time. There is also a PHYSICAL infrastructure, which is part hardware, part software. Toward explaining that, Enter CALEA. What is CALEA you ask ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
“The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is a United States wiretapping law passed in 1994, during the presidency of Bill Clinton (Pub. L. No. 103-414, 108 Stat. 4279, codified at 47 USC 1001-1010).
CALEA’s purpose is to enhance the ability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to conduct electronic surveillance by requiring that telecommunications carriers and manufacturers of telecommunications equipment modify and design their equipment, facilities, and services to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities, allowing federal agencies to monitor all telephone, broadband internet, and VoIP traffic in real-time.
The original reason for adopting CALEA was the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s worry that increasing use of digital telephone exchange switches would make tapping phones at the phone company’s central office harder and slower to execute, or in some cases impossible. Since the original requirement to add CALEA-compliant interfaces required phone companies to modify or replace hardware and software in their systems, U.S. Congress included funding for a limited time period to cover such network upgrades. CALEA was passed into law on October 25, 1994 and came into force on January 1, 1995.
In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband internet traffic. From 2004 to 2007 there was a 62 percent growth in the number of wiretaps performed under CALEA — and more than 3,000 percent growth in interception of internet data such as email.[1]
By 2007, the FBI had spent $39 million on its DCSNet system, which collects, stores, indexes, and analyzes communications data.[1]”
and..
“In its own words, the purpose of CALEA is:
To amend title 18, United States Code, to make clear a telecommunications carrier’s duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for Law Enforcement purposes, and for other purposes.
The U.S. Congress passed the CALEA to aid law enforcement in its effort to conduct criminal investigations requiring wiretapping of digital telephone networks. The Act obliges telecommunications companies to make it possible for law enforcement agencies to tap any phone conversations carried out over its networks, as well as making call detail records available. The act stipulates that it must not be possible for a person to detect that his or her conversation is being monitored by the respective government agency.
Common carriers, facilities-based broadband Internet access providers, and providers of interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service – all three types of entities are defined to be “telecommunications carriers” and must meet the requirements of CALEA.
The CALEA Implementation Unit at the FBI has clarified that intercepted information is supposed to be sent to Law Enforcement concurrently with its capture.
On March 10, 2004, the United States Department of Justice, FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration filed a “Joint Petition for Expedited Rulemaking” in which they requested certain steps to accelerate CALEA compliance, and to extend the provisions of CALEA to include the ability to perform surveillance of all communications that travel over the Internet — such as Internet traffic and VoIP.
As a result, the FCC adopted a “First Report and Order” concluding that CALEA applies to facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected (with the public switched telephone network) Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services.
In May 2006, the FCC adopted a “Second Report and Order”, which clarified and affirmed the First Order:
- The CALEA compliance deadline remains May 14, 2007.
- Carriers are permitted to meet their CALEA obligations through the services of “Trusted Third Parties (TTP)” — that is, they can hire outside companies, which meet security requirements outlined in CALEA, to perform all of the required functions.
- Carriers are responsible for CALEA development and implementation costs.
Technical implementation
USA telecommunications providers must install new hardware or software, as well as modify old equipment, so that it doesn’t interfere with the ability of a law enforcement agency (LEA) to perform real-time surveillance of any telephone or Internet traffic. Modern voice switches now have this capability built in, yet Internet equipment almost always requires some kind of intelligentDeep Packet Inspection probe to get the job done. In both cases, the intercept-function must single out a subscriber named in a warrant for intercept and then immediately send some (headers-only) or all (full content) of the intercepted data to an LEA. The LEA will then process this data with analysis software that is specialized towards criminal investigations.
All traditional voice switches on the U.S. market today have the CALEA intercept feature built in. The IP-based “soft switches” typically do not contain a built-in CALEA intercept feature; and other IP-transport elements (routers, switches, access multiplexers) almost always delegate the CALEA function to elements dedicated to inspecting and intercepting traffic. In such cases, hardware taps or switch/router mirror-ports are employed to deliver copies of all of a network’s data to dedicated IP probes.
Probes can either send directly to the LEA according to the industry standard delivery formats (c.f. ATIS T1.IAS, T1.678v2, et al.); or they can deliver to an intermediate element called a mediation device, where the mediation device does the formatting and communication of the data to the LEA. A probe that can send the correctly formatted data to the LEA is called a “self-contained” probe.
In order to be compliant, IP-based service providers (Broadband, Cable, VoIP) must choose either a self-contained probe (such as made by IPFabrics), or a “dumb” probe component plus a mediation device (such as made by Verint, or they must implement the delivery of correctly formatted for a named subscriber’s data on their own.”
Basically, CALEA makes it the duty of common carriers such as phone companies AND internet service providers, to bend over for the FEDS, essentially providing a backdoor to spy on your phone and internet traffic,
For this reason, we saw that, way back in 1994 (and even earlier with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984), they were building both a physical and software basis for spying on you, as well as building the legal framework for saying “It’s all legal”. Of course, enter the Patriot Act to “enhance” their spy ing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act,_Title_II Section 215 is of particular interest.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/06/07/nsa_prism_scandal_what_patriot_act_section_215_does.html This is what Section 215 does.
“To understand Section 215, you first need to read Section 103(a) of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established the FISA court system that grants the government permission to conduct electronic surveillance.
The relevant section:
The Chief Justice of the United States shall publicly designate seven district court judges from seven of the United States judicial circuits who shall constitute a court which shall have jurisdiction to hear applications for and grant orders approving electronic surveillance anywhere within the United States under the procedures set forth in this Act, except that no judge designated under this subsection shall hear the same application for electronic surveillance under this Act which has been denied previously by another judge designated under this subsection.
Under Section 215, the government can apply to the FISA court to compel businesses (like Verizon) to hand over user records. Here’s what Slate wrote about Section 215 in a 2003 guide to the Patriot Act:
Section 215 modifies the rules on records searches. Post-Patriot Act, third-party holders of your financial, library, travel, video rental, phone, medical, church, synagogue, and mosque records can be searched without your knowledge or consent, providing the government says it’s trying to protect against terrorism.
As Section 215 stands today—in the reauthorized version of the Patriot Act passed in 2005—”tangible things” (aka user data) sought in a FISA order “must be ‘relevant’ to an authorized preliminary or full investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a U.S. person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” It also established congressional oversight for the FISA program, requiring the DOJ to conduct an audit of the program and the “effectiveness” of Section 215, and to submit an unclassified report on the audit to the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary and Intelligence.
That was during the Bush administration. How has the Patriot Act changed since President Obama was elected?
Not very much. Sen. Obama voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act in 2005, a decision hedefended on the campaign trail in 2008 with the caveat that some provisions contained in Section 215, like allowing the government to go through citizens’ library records, “went way overboard.” But in 2011 President Obama signed a bill to extend the Patriot Act’s sunset clause to June 1, 2015—with Section 215 intact in its 2005 form.
Did the NSA also use Section 215 to obtain Internet data for its PRISM program?
This is less clear, but leaked PRISM program documents seem to indicate yes. The PRISM presentation seems to imply that Section 215 applies not only to phone metadata but also to email, chats, photos, video, logins, and other online user data. Referring to the type of data the government is allowed to collect as “tangible things” allows a pretty wide berth for interpretation.”
Layering atop this is that, from what I read, law enforcement agencies, including NSA, are daily accessing your driver license photo, scanning that picture with facial recognition software. Think about WHY they are doing this. Their stated purpose is they are looking for criminals. (Excuse my laughter…the dog ate my homework is a better excuse).
Now, as the cherry on the top, they have a million square foot facility to concentrate and store their data on you, with what I have heard, has a billion dollar database. A billion dollars buys a lot, even these days.
Google is putting balloons up so that the whole planet will be internet monitorable.
And, let’s listen to the head of the CIA
CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasherhttp://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
“More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.
Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an “Internet of Things” — that is, wired devices — at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. “‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,” Petraeus enthused, “particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.”
All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the “smart home,” you’d be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living room’s ambiance.
“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said, “the latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”
Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices “change our notions of secrecy” and prompt a rethink of “our notions of identity and secrecy.” All of which is true — if convenient for a CIA director.
The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.
That’s not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. He’s interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies — and sweeping away the “digital footprints” of agents who suddenly need to vanish.
“Proud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come,” Petraeus observed. “Moreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.”
It’s hard to argue with that. Online cache is not a spy’s friend. But Petraeus has an inadvertent pal in Facebook.
Why? With the arrival of Timeline, Facebook made it super-easy to backdate your online history. Barack Obama, for instance, hasn’t been on Facebook since his birth in 1961. Creating new identities for CIA non-official cover operatives has arguably never been easier. Thank Zuck, spies. Thank Zuck.”
So, let me ask you a question. If the government has all your phone records, all your emails, all access to your Facebook, to your purchases online, to all your Google searches, if they, through GMAIL can actually read what you are writing in an email in real time (see their patent application for a “violation checker”) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/google-policy-violation-checker_n_3224363.html (they could stop you from sending an email based on what you are typing, in real time ) could watch your thoughts evolve as you type an email, were able, through your phone to track your daily route, know where you live, who you call, where you are when you call people, and kept track of this for years…and if you have one of those cards from the grocery store that gives you a small discount on your purchases if you use it, but it keeps a computerized record of what you bought, how much, which store, what days you shopped, etc., and, perhaps even remotely turn on your webcam without your knowledge, if they could do all that (which they probably are), they would also have a list of your friends, family, your address, what you do for a living, what you search for from the “privacy of your home”, and much, much more..including all your school records, list of licenses, professional, driver’s , etc., if they have all your records of arrest, traffic tickets, any calls to your home for domestic abuse, etc., if they had all that, don’t you think they could build a fairly complete picture of who you are, what you do, what sites you go to, and in effect, to borrow a term from my fellow Anons..in essence, you have the mother of all d0xes on you, probably sitting on a server in Utah right now. And, heaven forbid you come onto their radar by mistake… because, they will probably be able to build SOME kind of case on you for something. Auditing tax records alone can sometimes find an innocuous mistake that they will claim was intentional .
Now, if you’ve followed my train of thought, imagine that every citizen, young, old, middle aged, rich, poor, uneducated, educated, black, white, brown, red…every religion, every race, has a similar dossier, a similar folder on the drive of a super computer in Utah.
Think “Oh, I don’t break the law, they wouldn’t be after me”…really…were they so discriminating in demanding ALL Verizon phone records of millions of people without regard to their guilt, innocence, or any probable cause ?
Privacy and the Fourth Amendment apparently mean NOTHING to the present administration, and once a program of spying on every human in the USA is put in place, it will NOT go away. Already, some people are pushing for RFID type chips to be implanted in children , “for their safety”. Apparently, law enforcement is acting as if warrants are just a thing of the past.
I hope you understand why I assert that this movement is scary indeed.
We DESERVE to have privacy. It is a right as far as I am concerned. If people can just invade your house, your computer, access your medical, financial records, as well as do the same to your children’s records, their thoughts, their pictures, then the draconian future that Sci Fi movies used to warn us about as a possibility, is no longer a possibility, but instead, a reality.
If privacy dies, if the Fourth Amendment dies, we are no longer free, and no longer have the right to pursue liberty, because it will forever elude us under the lights of the security camera in your home.
`Anon99
