New Documents Suggest IRS Reads Emails Without a Warrant
By Nathan Freed Wessler | ACLU | April 10, 2013
Everyone knows the IRS is our nation’s tax collector, but it is also a law enforcement organization tasked with investigating criminal violations of the tax laws. New documents released to the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that the IRS Criminal Tax Division has long taken the position that the IRS can read your emails without a warrant—a practice that one appeals court has said violates the Fourth Amendment (and we think most Americans would agree).
Last year, the ACLU sent a FOIA request to the IRS seeking records regarding whether it gets a warrant before reading people’s email, text messages and other private electronic communications. The IRS has now responded by sending us 247 pages of records describing the policies and practices of its criminal investigative arm when seeking the contents of emails and other electronic communications.
So does the IRS always get a warrant? Unfortunately, while the documents we have obtained do not answer this question point blank, they suggest otherwise. This question is too important for the IRS not to be completely forthright with the American public. The IRS should tell the public whether it always gets a warrant to access email and other private communications in the course of criminal investigations. And if the agency does not get a warrant, it should change its policy to always require one.
The IRS and Email: Reading Between the Lines
The federal law that governs law enforcement access to emails, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), is hopelessly outdated. It draws a distinction between email that is stored on an email provider’s server for 180 days or less, and email that is older or has been opened. The former requires a warrant; the latter does not. Luckily, the Fourth Amendment still protects against unreasonable searches by the government. Accordingly, in 2010 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in United States v. Warshak that the government must obtain a probable cause warrant before compelling email providers to turn over messages.
However, the IRS hasn’t told the public whether it is following Warshak everywhere in the country, or only within the Sixth Circuit.
The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant. Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all. A 2009 “Search Warrant Handbook” from the IRS Criminal Tax Division’s Office of Chief Counsel baldly asserts that “the Fourth Amendment does not protect communications held in electronic storage, such as email messages stored on a server, because internet users do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” Again in 2010, a presentation by the IRS Office of Chief Counsel asserts that the “4th Amendment Does Not Protect Emails Stored on Server” and there is “No Privacy Expectation” in those emails.
Other older documents corroborate that the IRS did not get warrants across the board. For example, the 2009 edition of the Internal Revenue Manual (the official compilation of IRS policies and procedures) explains that “the government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage for more than 180 days” without a warrant.
Then came Warshak, decided on December 14, 2010. The key question our FOIA request seeks to answer is whether the IRS’s policy changed after Warshak, which should have put the agency on notice that the Fourth Amendment does in fact protect the contents of emails. The first indication of the IRS’s position, from an email exchange in mid-January 2011, does not bode well. In an email titled “US v. Warshak,” an employee of the IRS Criminal Investigation unit asks two lawyers in the IRS Criminal Tax Division whether Warshak will have any effect on the IRS’s work. A Special Counsel in the Criminal Tax Division replies: “I have not heard anything related to this opinion. We have always taken the position that a warrant is necessary when retrieving e-mails that are less than 180 days old.” But that’s just the ECPA standard. The real question is whether the IRS is obtaining warrants for emails more than 180 days old. Shortly after Warshak, apparently it still was not.
The IRS had an opportunity to officially reconsider its position when it issued edits to the Internal Revenue Manual in March 2011. But its policy stayed the same: the Manual explained that under ECPA, “Investigators can obtain everything in an account except for unopened e-mail or voice mail stored with a provider for 180 days or less using a [relevant-and-material-standard] court order” instead of a warrant. Again, no suggestion that the Fourth Amendment might require more.
The first indication that the IRS was considering the effect of Warshak came in an October 2011 IRS Chief Counsel Advice memorandum available on the IRS website but not provided in response to our FOIA request. An IRS employee sought guidance about whether it is proper to use an administrative summons, instead of a warrant, to obtain emails that are more than 180 days old. (The emails in question were located on an internet service provider’s (ISP) server somewhere in the territory covered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). The memo summarized the holding of Warshak and advised that “as a practical matter it would not be sensible” to seek older emails without a warrant. This is good advice, but the memo’s reasoning leaves much to be desired. The memo explained that Warshak applies only in the Sixth Circuit but that, because the ISP had informed the IRS that it did not intend to voluntarily comply with an administrative summons for emails, there was not “any reasonable possibility that the Service will be able to obtain the contents of this customer’s emails . . . without protracted litigation, if at all.” Any investigative leads contained in the emails would therefore be “stale” by the time the litigation could be concluded, making attempted warrantless access not worthwhile.
The memo misses another chance to declare that agents should obtain a warrant for emails because the Fourth Amendment requires it. Instead, the memo’s advice (which may not be used as precedent and is not binding in other IRS criminal investigations) is limited to situations in the Ninth Circuit where an ISP intends to challenge warrantless requests for emails. The IRS shouldn’t obey the Fourth Amendment only when it faces the inconvenience of protracted litigation; it should recognize that the Fourth Amendment requires warrants for the contents of emails at all times.
Finally, to the present: has the IRS’s position changed this tax season? Apparently not. The current version of the Internal Revenue Manual, available on the IRS website, continues to explain that no warrant is required for emails that are stored by an ISP for more than 180 days. Apparently the agency believes nothing of consequence has changed since ECPA was enacted in 1986, or the now-outdated Surveillance Handbook was published in 1994.
The IRS Owes the American Public an Explanation—and a Warrant Requirement
Let’s hope you never end up on the wrong end of an IRS criminal tax investigation. But if you do, you should be able to trust that the IRS will obey the Fourth Amendment when it seeks the contents of your private emails. Until now, that hasn’t been the case. The IRS should let the American public know whether it obtains warrants across the board when accessing people’s email. And even more important, the IRS should formally amend its policies to require its agents to obtain warrants when seeking the contents of emails, without regard to their age.
(We also sent FOIA requests to the FBI and other components of the Department of Justice—we will be receiving records from those offices in the coming weeks).
Related articles
- Like rest of the feds, the IRS can get your e-mails with no problem (arstechnica.com)
- When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking “Warrant” Isn’t a Warrant (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Palestinian Cameraman Shot In The Face In Bethlehem
By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC & Agencies | April 08, 2013
Bethlehem, Monday April 8, 2013, Palestinian medical sources reported that a Palestinian cameraman was shot in the face, on Monday evening, by a rubber-coated metal bullet, in the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank city of Bethlehem.
The Palestine News Network (PNN) has reported that Mohammad Waleed Al-Azza was shot during clashes that took place between Israeli soldiers invading the camp and local youths who hurled stones at them.
PNN added that Al-Azza, who works at the Refugee Media Center in addition to freelancing for PNN and other agencies, was deliberately shot in the face by the soldiers who tried to stop him from documenting the invasion.
The soldiers tried to push him away, and when he refused to leave, one of the soldiers pointed his gun at him and shot him from a relatively close range.
Al-Azza’s medical condition was described as moderate; he was moved to the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation, in Bethlehem, where he will undergo surgery.
The camp has been witnessing an extended wave of escalation since several months now, due to repeated Israeli invasions and attacks against the residents, PNN said.
Several reporters have been injured in recent clashes between the soldiers and the Palestinians in different parts of the occupied West Bank, and occupied East Jerusalem.
Supporters Say All The Wrong Things to Try and Pass CISPA
By Mark M. Jaycox | EFF | April 8, 2013
Ever since reintroducing CISPA, the so-called “cybersecurity bill,” its supporters promote the bill with craftily worded or just plain misleading claims. Such claims have been lobbed over and over again in op-eds, at hearings, and in press materials. One “fact sheet” by Rep. Rogers and Ruppersberger titled “Myth v. Fact” is so dubious that we felt we had to comment.
Here are some of the statements supporters of CISPA are pushing and why they’re false:
Supporters of CISPA say, “There are no broad definitions”
Supporters are keen to note that the bill doesn’t have broad definitions. In the “Myth v. Fact” sheet, the authors of CISPA specifically point to the definition of “cyber threat information.” Cyber threat information is information about an online threat that companies can share with each other and with any government agency—including the NSA. In hearings, experts have said that they don’t need to share personally identifiable information to combat threats. But the definition in the bill allows for any information related to a perceived threat or vulnerability—including sensitive personal information—to be shared. Cyber threat information should be a narrowly defined term.
Another example of a broad (or missing) definition is the term “cybersecurity system.” Companies can use a “cybersecurity system” to “identify or obtain” information about a potential threat (“cyber threat information”). The definition is critical to understanding the bill, but is circular. CISPA defines a “cybersecurity system” as “a system designed or employed” for a cybersecurity purpose (i.e. to protect against vulnerabilities or threats). The language is not limited to network security software or intrusion detection systems, and is so broadly written that one wonders if a “system” involving a tangible item—e.g., locks on doors—could be considered a “cybersecurity system.” In practical terms, it’s unclear what is exactly covered by such a “system,” because the word “system” is never defined.
The best example of a dangerous undefined term in the bill is found within the overly broad legal immunity for companies. The clause grants a company who acts in “good faith” immunity for “any decisions made” based off of the information it learns from the government or other companies. Does this cover decisions to violate other laws, like computer crime laws? Or privacy laws intended to protect users? Companies should not be given carte blanche immunity to violate long-standing computer crime and privacy law. And it is notoriously hard to prove that a company acted in bad faith, in the few circumstances where you would actually find out your privacy had been violated.
Supporters of CISPA say, “The bill is not a government surveillance program”
Supporters are adamant CISPA doesn’t create a wide-ranging “government surveillance program.” It’s true the bill doesn’t create such a surveillance program like the one described in the ongoing warrantless wiretapping lawsuits.
But the trick here is what is meant by “government surveillance.” We think that if the bill aims at having our information flow to the government, it’s tantamount to government surveillance, whether or not the government initially collected the information.
The bill creates a loophole in the privacy laws that prevented companies from disclosing your information to the government and gives companies broad legal immunity for sharing information with the government. As a result, CISPA makes it more likely that companies will surveil their own users and then disclose that information. The sly wording dodges the key issue: that CISPA encourages companies to conduct surveillance on their networks and hand “cyber threat information” to the government. In short, the bill encourages a de facto private spying regime, with the same end result.
Supporters of CISPA say, “The government can’t read your private email”
Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger are adamant CISPA doesn’t grant the government access to read private emails. The claim was recently repeated by James Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But the broad definitions do allow for personal information to be gathered by companies and then sent to the government without any mandatory minimization of personal information. And under the vague definitions an aggressive company could claim that private messages are related to the threat, obtain them, and share then with the government. If Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger did want content of emails disclosed under CISPA, it would be easy enough to exclude them explicitly.
Supporters say, “CISPA follows advice from privacy and civil liberty advocates”
In his introduction of the bill, Rep. Rogers assured the audience that he has listened to the privacy and civil liberties community.
This year’s CISPA does contain some language added after privacy and civil liberties advocates complained in 2012. But those changes didn’t address some big issues that were raised last year, and this year’s privacy and civil liberties complaints about CISPA remain unaddressed.
Let’s Stop CISPA
Reps. Rogers and Ruppersberger are on a strong publicity offensive to make sure the bill passes. The American public deserves full explanations and clear meanings about what CISPA can do and the extent to which it can do it. The public doesn’t need carefully worded messaging materials that obfuscate and mislead a discussion on CISPA. The issues at stake—like the broad legal immunity and new spying powers that allow for companies to collect private, and sensitive, user information—are too serious.
To stop this type of misinformation—and to stop CISPA—we urge you to tell your members of Congress to stand up for privacy.
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Israeli military court sentences cartoonist to five months in jail
Palestine Information Center – 06/04/2013
JENIN — The Israeli military court in Salem, north of Jenin, has sentenced Palestinian cartoonist Mohammed Sabana to five months imprisonment on the charge of contacting “hostile parties”.
Family members told the PIC reporter on Saturday that the court passed the sentence on Friday and charged Sabana with making such contacts during his visit to Jordan.
They said that the charges were unfounded, adding that the sentence was illegal and proved the summary trials conducted against Palestinian citizens.
The relatives affirmed that Sabana was not involved with any political party or organization and was just an activist who employs his cartoons in exposing the Israeli occupation’s crimes.
Sabana was arrested on his return from Jordan last February and held for interrogation. His brother, Thamer, was also detained for his pro-prisoners’ activities.
Related articles
- Israel detains Palestinian cartoonist, family says (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Palestinian Journalists jailed by Israelis (english.pravda.ru)
Report Details Government’s Ability to Analyze Massive Aerial Surveillance Video Streams
By Jay Stanley | ACLU | April 5, 2013
Yesterday I wrote about Dayton Ohio’s plan for an aerial surveillance system similar to the “nightmare scenario” ARGUS wide-area surveillance technology. Actually, ARGUS is just the most advanced of a number of such “persistent wide-area surveillance” systems in existence and development. They include Constant Hawk, Angel Fire, Kestrel (used on blimps in Afghanistan), and Gorgon Stare.
One of the problems created by these systems—which have heretofore been used primarily in war zones—is that they tend to generate a deluge of video footage. A 2010 article says that American UAVs in Iraq and Afghanistan produced 24 years’ worth of video in 2009, and that that number was expected to increase 30-fold (which would be 720 years’ worth) in 2011. Who knows what that’s up to this year, or where it will be by, say, 2025. The human beings who operate these systems can’t possibly analyze all that footage.
In an attempt to solve this problem, Lawrence Livermore Labs has created a system for the military called “Persistics.” It can be used in conjunction with drone (or manned) camera systems such as ARGUS to help manage the vast oceans of video data that are now being generated. The system is
designed to help the Department of Defense and other agencies monitor tens of square kilometers of terrain from the skies, with sufficiently high resolution for tracking people and vehicles for many hours at a time.
That’s from a May 2011 report that I recently came across with the faintly ominous title “From Video to Knowledge.” Produced by Livermore Labs, it contains a lot of interesting detail about Persistics and the problems and solutions involved in massive aerial video surveillance.
The Persistics system consists of algorithms that “analyze the streaming video content to automatically extract items of interest.”
Its analysis algorithms permit surveillance systems to “stare” at key people, vehicles, locations, and events for hours and even days at a time while automatically searching with unsurpassed detail for anomalies or preselected targets.
With Persistics, the report boasts, “analysts can determine the relationships between vehicles, people, buildings, and events.” Among the capabilities touted in the report are:
- “Seamless stitching” together of images from multiple cameras to create “a virtual large-format camera.”
- Stabilizing video (“essential for accurate and high-resolution object identification and tracking”).
- Eliminating parallax (the difference in how an object appears when viewed from slightly different angles).
- Differentiating moving objects from the background.
- The ability to automatically follow moving objects such as vehicles.
- Creating a “heat map” representation of traffic density in order to “automatically discern if the traffic pattern changes.”
- Comparing images taken at different times and automatically detecting any changes that have taken place.
- Super-high “1,000-times” video compression.
- The ability to provide all the locations a particular vehicle was spotted within a given time frame.
- The ability to provide all the vehicles that were spotted at a particular location within a given time frame.
Technologically, according to the report, the Persistics program relies heavily on the explosion in the power of consumer Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) used in video games and the like.
The report also says that the system “is being further enhanced” to work with ARGUS, and includes new details about that system:
Persistics can simultaneously and continuously detect and track the motion of thousands of targets over the ARGUS-IS coverage area of 100 square kilometers. ARGUS-IS can generate several terabytes of data per minute, hundreds of times greater than previous-generation sensors.
Previous reports said that ARGUS could cover 15 square miles; here it reports 100 square kilometers, which is 38.6 square miles. (I suppose we should expect Moore’s Law-like expansion in the capabilities of these systems.)
Of course, the system is designed to store and retrieve all the records and data about everything that it surveils:
Persistics supports forensic analyses. Should an event such as a terrorist attack occur, the archival imagery of the public space could be reviewed to determine important details such as the moment a bomb was placed or when a suspect cased the targeted area. With sufficiently high-resolution imagery, a law-enforcement or military user could one day zoom in on an individual face in a heavily populated urban environment, thus identifying the attacker.
As with every privacy-invading technology designed and/or sold as helping foil terrorists, we have to wonder how long it will be before it’s applied to tracking peace activists.
Future work on Persistics is focused on the kind of behavioral analytics that have been discussed in the context of programs such as “Trapwire.” Livermore scientists, according to the report, are now working on automated methods for identifying “patterns of behavior” that could indicate “deviations from normal social and cultural patterns” and “networks of subversive activity.”
Also under development are efforts to allow the three-dimensional viewing of targets, as well as “methods to overlay multiple sensor inputs—including infrared, radar, and visual data—and then merge data to obtain a multilayered assessment.”
Of course, much of this is unobjectionable from a domestic civil liberties point of view when it’s used as originally intended: on foreign battlefields. The problem comes when the government brings the technology home and turns it inward upon the American people. In fact, at the close of the report, Livermore contemplates exactly that:
Unmanned aircraft have demonstrated their ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] value for years in Afghanistan and Iraq. As U.S. soldiers return home, the role of overhead video imagery aided by Persistics technology is expected to increase. Persistics could also support missions at home, such as monitoring security at U.S. borders or guarding ports and energy production facilities. Clearly, with Persistics, video means knowledge—and strengthened national security.
Among the federal agencies most interested in the technology, the report says, is DHS.
Related article
- Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Until Today, If You Were 17, It Could Have Been Illegal To Read Seventeen.com Under the CFAA
By Dave Maass and Kurt Opsahl and Trevor Timm | EFF | April 3, 2013
If you are 17 or under, a federal prosecutor could have charged you with computer hacking just for reading Seventeen magazine online—until today.
It’s not because the law got any better. Earlier today, we wrote about news sites that alarmingly prohibit their youth audiences from accessing the news and the potential criminal consequences under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In response, the Hearst Corporation modified the terms of service across its family of publications, including the Hearst Teen Network, which notably includes titles like Seventeen, CosmoGirl, Teen and MisQuince.
Seventeen highlights the absurdity of giving terms of service the force of law under the CFAA. It boasts a readership of almost 4.5 million teen readers with an average age of 16 and a half, and yet, until today, the average reader was legally banned from visiting Seventeen.com. That’s right, for a magazine dedicated to teen fashion, the publisher’s terms explicitly restricted online access to readers 18 and older. What’s worse, the Justice Department could choose to bring the might of the government to enforce this contract against a Seventeen reader who may never have even seen the agreement.
Federal prosecutors have argued in court that accessing a website in violation of terms of service is a crime. If the website’s terms, like Seventeen magazine’s previous version, explicitly state that you must be an adult to visit their sites or participate in their interactive features, then teenagers accessing the site “without authorization” under the CFAA and could be doing jail time, according to the DOJ.
Hearst removed the following line from the terms for publications ranging from the Houston Chronicle to the San Francisco Chronicle, from Popular Mechanics to Seventeen:
YOU MAY NOT ACCESS OR USE THE COVERED SITES OR ACCEPT THE AGREEMENT IF YOU ARE NOT AT LEAST 18 YEARS OLD.
The revisions are dated “April 23, 2013,” but presumably they meant April 3. Thank you Hearst, we appreciate your prompt response. But the real problem is the CFAA, which allows prosecutors to use these silly terms to manufacture computer crimes. And prosecutors have plenty of opportunities, as ridiculous terms of service abuond throughout the Internet.
We also previously reported on a variety of other websites—including the New York Times, Boston Globe, and NPR—that have similar terms of service that restrict people 12-and-under from reading the news. Atlantic Wire expanded on our blog post by pointing to even more news sites that do the same thing. While these terms weren’t as absurd as Hearst’s, Atlantic Wire also highlighted the law’s farcical implications using photos showing which of Shaquille O’Neal’s children were allowed to visit a lengthy list of news sites.
Thankfully, the Ninth and Fourth Circuits have rejected the government’s aggressive interpretation of the CFAA (with amicus help from EFF), but the Justice Department has shown no signs that it has given up on aggressive interpretations. The vague language of the law could turn virtually every Internet user into a potential criminal, allowing the Justice Department to use their discretion to go after any citizen they don’t like, rather than only harmful criminals the bill was intended to stop.
Hearst changed its terms of use within a matter of hours and a couple of mouse clicks. Unfortunately, fixing the CFAA won’t be as simple. If the absurdity is getting to you, now would be the time to write your members of Congress, demanding they get on board with CFAA reform and reject the House Judiciary Committee proposal that would make this bad law worse.
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We don’t spy on US citizens, just anti-government groups, says fusion center director
PrivacySOS – 03/28/2013
The Arkansas State Fusion Center
An official from an Arkansas State Fusion Center recently spoke to the press to clear up what he called “misconceptions” about what his office actually does, with depressingly hilarious results. (For some background on fusion centers, click here.)
“The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do,” fusion center director Richard Davis told the local press.
Fusion center employees are in a tight spot to justify the existence of their operations after multiple congressional reports over the past year took them to task for being poorly run, duplicative of other counterterrorism efforts, privacy violative wastes of money, or some combination of the three.
So what does Mr. Davis’ fusion center do, then? Why does it exist?
The Arkansas fusion center director, after having flatly denied that his office spies on US citizens, told the reporter the following:
“I do what I do because of what happened on 9/11,” Davis says. “There’s this urge and this feeling inside that you want to do something, and this is a perfect opportunity for me.”
Davis says Arkansas hasn’t collected much information about international plots, but they do focus on groups closer to home.
“We focus a little more on that, domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government,” he says. “We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information.“
So the fusion center does in fact spy on US citizens! Among them, “groups that are anti-government.” But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here: perhaps Mr. Davis thinks that people who hold “anti-government” views should not be treated as US citizens?
The fact is, in the United States, holding “anti-government” views is protected by the First Amendment. And everyone in the United States, not just its citizens, is protected by the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights.
Disliking the government isn’t a crime. But that’s not stopping many fusion centers from associating dissent with terrorism.
Here in Boston we learned that the Boston police intelligence unit spied on anti-war and other activist groups for years, filing “intelligence reports” on activists at its fusion center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. Fusion centers in other states have reported on people for high crimes like putting political stickers up in restrooms, or participating in anti-death penalty organizing.
Activists in Los Angeles have brought their concerns about inappropriate political spying straight to the fusion center itself. Perhaps people in Arkansas should tell Mr. Davis how they feel about their tax dollars supporting shadowy surveillance of so-called “anti-government” groups. Then again, they might not want to be listed as “anti-government.”
When a Secretive Stingray Cell Phone Tracking “Warrant” Isn’t a Warrant
By Hanni Fakhoury | EFF | March 28, 2013
An Arizona federal court this afternoon will be the battleground over the government’s use of a “Stingray” surveillance device in a closely watched criminal case, United States v. Rigmaiden. And in an important development, new documents revealed after an ACLU of Northern California Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request should leave the government with some explaining to do.
“Stingray” is the brand name of an International Mobile Subscriber Identity locator, or “IMSI catcher.” A Stingray acts as a fake cell-phone tower, small enough to fit in a van, allowing the government to route all network traffic to the fake tower. We’ve warned that Stingrays are dangerous because they have the capability to obtain the contents of electronic and wire communications while necessarily sucking down data on scores of innocent people along the way.
The Fourth Amendment requires searches be “reasonable,” generally meaning they must be accompanied by a warrant. To get a warrant, the government must show there is probable cause to believe the place they want to search will have evidence of a crime. And it means the judge must ensure the warrant is “particular,” or limited to only allow searches into areas where the evidence is most likely to be found. The only way a judge can make these tough decisions is with the government being forthright about what it’s doing.
But when it comes to Stingrays the government has been extremely secretive about its use, withholding documents in FOIA requests, failing to explain (or even understand) the technology to a Texas federal judge and in Rigmaiden, misleading the court about the fact it’s even using one at all.
Daniel David Rigmaiden is charged with a variety of tax and wire fraud crimes. Hoping to pinpoint Rigmaiden’s precise location within an apartment complex, federal agents applied for an order requesting the court to order Verizon to help the agents pinpoint the physical location of a wireless broadband access card and cell phone they believed Rigmaiden was using. The order is clearly directed towards Verizon:
The Court therefore ORDERS, pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41(b); Title 18, United States Code, Sections 2703 and 3117; and Title 28, United States Code, Section 1651, that Verizon Wireless, within ten (10) days of the signing of this Order and for a period not to exceed 30 days, unless extended by the Court, shall provide to agents of the FBI data and information obtained from the monitoring of transmissions related to the location of the Target Broadband Access Card/Cellular Telephone…
Ultimately, it turns out the government did not just get Verizon to give it the data. It also used a Stingray device to find Rigmaiden, sucking up loads of other data from other electronic devices in the complex as well, which it deleted.
When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this “order” wasn’t a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn’t authorize the government—rather than Verizon—to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a “general warrant,” the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent.
The FOIA documents bolster our argument that this isn’t a warrant. The documents are a series of internal emails from DOJ attorneys in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, the district where the order in Rigmaiden’s case was issued. The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:
As some of you may be aware, our office has been working closely with the magistrate judges in an effort to address their collective concerns regarding whether a pen register is sufficient to authorize the use of law enforcement’s WIT technology (a box that simulates a cell tower and can be placed inside a van to help pinpoint an individual’s location with some specificity) to locate an individual. It has recently come to my attention that many agents are still using WIT technology in the field although the pen register application does not make that explicit.
While we continue work on a long term fix for this problem, it is important that we are consistent and forthright in our pen register requests to the magistrates…
These emails, combined with the text of the disputed order itself, suggest agents obtained authorization to use a pen register without indicating they also planned to use a Stingray. Either at the time of the application or after the fact, the government attempted to transform that order into a warrant that authorized the use of a Stingray.
Judicial superivison of searches is most needed when the government uses new technologies to embark into new and unknown privacy intrusions. But when the government hides what it’s really doing, it removes this important check on government power. We hope the court sees its been duped, and makes clear to the government that honesty and a warrant are requirements to using a Stingray.
Journalists detained in Hebron, leading to two arrests and threats to restrict Palestinian movement
International Solidarity Movement | March 24, 2013
Hebron, Occupied Palestine – In the afternoon of the 24th March, two Palestinian Al Jazeera journalists arrived into Hebron to interview a Palestinian family living near the illegal Israeli settlement in the area of Tel Rumeida. When they arrived, settlers called the Israeli military and police, who arrived and confiscated the journalists’ ID cards, despite having seen their press credentials. The Al Jazeera reporters had their ID cards returned after around an hour, but two Hebron Palestinians who attempted to intervene on their behalf with police were arrested and removed in a police car. Their status is currently unknown and no reason was given for their arrest.
After the journalists were apprehended, police and settlers arrived into the area with rolls of barbed wire, informing another Palestinian resident that his primary access to the main road would be closed. Hashem Azzeh and his family live underneath the Tel Rumeida settlement, with their access to the main road running directly next to the settlement. This path has been repeatedly closed by the Israeli authorities since 2000, and was only opened most recently in late 2012 after extensive legal battles in the Israeli courts.
The police and settlers claimed today that the path would be closed because unapproved people had been walking along it. According to the Israeli authorities, only Hashem, his family and guests walking with them have permission to use the path. Hashem states that he has no knowledge of strangers using this route to access his house.
Without the path, Hashem and his family have to travel a much longer, rock-strewn and hazardous route to leave their home. Hashem said today, “I think they will close my access now, they will say it is for security reasons.” He thinks that the settlers used the arrival of the journalists and the subsequent confusion as a pretext to close his path and restrict his family’s movement, in further attempts to drive them from their home – they already face regular hassle from Israeli authorities and attacks from the settlers, including on Hashem’s young children.
Related articles
- 9 Year old Palestinian boy attacked by settlers (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Stranded in Shuhada: Hebron’s Qurtuba school (alethonews.wordpress.com)
The Ugly Truth Behind Obama’s Cyber-War
By ALFREDO LOPEZ | CounterPunch | March 22, 2013
Last week, a top U.S. government intelligence official named James Clapper warned Congress that the threat of somebody using the Internet to attack the United States is “even more pressing than an attack by global terrorist networks”. At about the same time, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, announced that the government is forming 13 teams to conduct an international “cyber offensive” to pre-empt or answer “Internet attacks” on this country.
This, as they say, means war.
Clapper issued his melodramatic assessment during an appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. As Director of National Intelligence, he testified jointly with the heads of the CIA and FBI as part of their annual “Threat To the Nation” assessment report.
While undoubtedly important, these “threat assessment” appearances are usually a substitute for sleeping pills. The panel of Intelligence honchos parades out a list of “threats” ranked by a combination of potential harm and probability of attack. Since they began giving this report (shortly after 9/11), “Islamic fundamentalist terrorist networks” have consistently ranked number one. Hence the sleep-provoking predictability of it all.
But Clapper’s ranking of “cyber terrorism” as the number one threat would wake up Rip Van Winkle.
“Attacks, which might involve cyber and financial weapons, can be deniable and unattributable,” he intoned. “Destruction can be invisible, latent and progressive.” After probably provoking a skipped heartbeat in a Senator or two, he added that he didn’t think any major attack of this type was imminent or even feasible at this point.
So why use such “end of the world” rhetoric to make an unfeasible threat number one?
The answer perhaps was to be found in the House of Representatives where, on that same day, Gen. Alexander was testifying before the Armed Services Committee about, you got it, “cyber-war”.
Besides being head of the NSA, Alexander directs the United States Cyber Command. I’m not joking. Since 2010, the United States military has had a “Cyber Command”, comprised of a large network of “teams” some of whose purpose is to plan and implement what he called “an offensive strategy”.
Up to now, the Obama Administration’s stated policy has been to prioritize protection and defense of its own Internet and data systems and, unsurprisingly, those of U.S. corporations. Now we realize that the President has been cooking another dish on the back burner. When these military leaders talk about “offensive strategy”, they mean war and in warfare, the rules change and warriors see democracy as a stumbling block at least and a potential threat at worst.
Is there a “cyber threat”? Sure, just like there’s a “personal security threat” at your front door. You live among other humans and a few of them sometimes rob people. The Internet is a neighborhood of two billion people in constant communication. To do what it was developed to do, it has to be an open, world-wide communications system and people can exploit that by harming your website or stealing your data if you don’t protect these things adequately. Developing protections is part of what technologists in every setting, including government services, do every day and they do it well, minimizing the incidence of an on-line hack.
That’s contemporary society. You lock the door to your house, turn on your car alarm on and protect your computer’s data. Most of the time it’s unnecessary but you do it for those rare occasions that it might be called for.
You do not, however, break into a thief’s home, kill him or her and wipe out everyone in the house. That’s what President Obama is proposing. No longer is this Administration interested in just “protection of data”; it now plans to pre-emptively attack data operations and Internet systems in other countries. The non-euphemistic term for this kind of “offensive strategy” is hacking and hacking takes two forms: data theft and disruption of service. In other words, the government plans to do what it throws people in jail for doing.
Clearly, this isn’t only about data theft or service disruption. It’s entwined with the political conflicts Washington has with other countries like China and Iran. The Internet is now another battlefield and this offensive strategy gives our government another weapon in its ceaseless war on the world.
While this weapon might sound benign, almost game-like, compared to other military adventures, it is actually a vicious and punishing strategy promising a festival of unavoidable collateral damage.
A “cyber offensive” can target just about anything in a country (like the computers running an Iranian power plant) and, depending on how the Internet systems are inter-connected, almost automatically cut service to people, schools, hospitals, security services and governments themselves. This is the digital version of nuclear warfare, horrific for its impact and its fundamental immorality.
When the announcements were made, the mainstream media flew into a frenzy of evaluation and analysis. Is this cyber threat real, commentators asked? Most of them found that, at this point, it isn’t. But that’s not the point and it isn’t the real threat.
The carefully planned and coordinated Clapper/Alexander testimony provides a pretext for the array of repressive Internet-governing laws, strategies and programs the Administration already has in place. Their purpose is a ratcheting control of the Internet by the government, a redefinition of our constitutional rights and the eviscerating of our, and the world’s, freedoms. Now, with this “cyber war” scenario, these measures can be more easily defended and made permanent.
We can group those laws and programs into three categories.
”Extreme Data Collection”
The Obama Administration is building a huge data center in Bluffdale, Utah whose role is to capture and store all data everyone in this country (and most of the world) transmits. You read that right.
“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication,” wrote James Bamford in Wired Magazine, “including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”
While having your entire on-line life tracked and stored in Utah is pretty creepy, the more pressing issue is how government officials plan to use this data and how they are collecting it. To mine its value, they need to order it to make searches, filtering and lists possible. You need a strategy and while Obama officials have been pretty open about what they’re building, they are closed-mouth about what they intend to do with it.
We know they are working hard on developing code-breaking technology which would allow them to read data which is super-encrypted, the last wall of privacy and protection we have. We also know that, to get this data, they have a remarkable system of surveillance that includes direct capture (capturing data from your on-line sessions), satellite surveillance and the tapping (through easily available data captures) of major information gatherers like Google and Yahoo. The fact that they plan to open this center in September, 2013 means that the intense surveillance and data gathering is in place. You are now never alone.
This is the kind of information on “the enemy” they need in a cyber-war but this information is about us and so the question pertains: who is the enemy here?
“Internet Usage Restriction”
If you’re conducting a war, you can’t have people running around the battlefield trading information and distributing it because, after all, you need secrecy. But collecting and distributing information is entirely what the Internet is about.
No reasonable person expects the entire shut-down of the Internet but the curtailment of on-line expression is now happening and getting worse, re-defining the meaning of free speech and making it an embattled concept.
Under the law, for instance, any corporation or individual can claim you are violating their copyright and demand you remove offending material from a website. You can challenge and litigate that but it doesn’t really matter because, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act your web hosting service faces huge penalties if they keep the site on-line and the copyright violation is proven. So, to avoid the legal fees and the risk, they’ll just wipe your website. This happens all the time.
If the hosting service stands strong — as some progressive providers do — the people claiming the violation will just go “upstream” to the company that provides your web hosting service’s connection to the Internet and, to avoid legal problems, that “upstream provider” will just unplug the server. Servers host many websites, sometimes in the hundreds, and other services and so not only do you lose your site but everyone else on the server has theirs taken off-line. And this happens without even going in front of a judge.
Sure, there is still robustly exercised “freedom of speech” on the Internet. But the laws are in place to curtail it and, if the government wants, it can (and will) curtail. It’s a modern-day version of benevolent dictatorship which can, as history demonstrates, become pretty darn malevolent pretty fast.
“Selective Repression”
There are hundreds of criminal cases against Internet activists world-wide right now and scores in the United States. The ones most of us are most familiar with, those involving Aaron Swartz and Bradley Manning, are only the tip of the frightening iceberg.
A day after the testimony before Congress, for example, federal authorities announced the case of a techie named Matthew Keys . Keys, who worked for a TV station in Los Angeles owned by the Tribune Company, is accused of leaking a username and password to an activist from the well-known hacker organization Anonymous. Authorities say the Anonymous activist used that user/password combo to satirically alter a headline on the website of the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times.
Keys is now charged with conspiracy to transmit information to damage a protected computer; transmitting information to damage a protected computer and attempted transmission of information to damage a protected computer. Each count carries a 10 year jail sentence, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000. For giving someone who changed a headline a username and password!
Last year, we at May First/People Link were raided by the FBI which literally stole a server from one of our server installations in New York City. They were investigating terroristic emails from some lunatic to people at the University of Pittsburgh and the dozens of servers this bozo used included one of ours. We have some anonymous servers which means there are no records of who used them, no traces… no information about the person sending the email; it’s to protect whistle-blowers and others needing total anonymity.
The FBI knew this but they stole the server anyway and then, about a week later, put it back. They never informed us of any of this. We found out because one of our techies went into the server installation and found one of the servers gone and installed a hidden camera which caught the agents when they returned the machine.
If all these developments seem disturbing to you, that’s justified. These repressive and intrusive measures target the very essence and purpose of the Internet. Created as a way for people to communicate with each other world-wide, this marvel of human interaction is now being turned into a field across which countries shoot programming bombs at each other while repressing and even punishing ordinary people’s communication: dividing us, perpetuating the feeling of loneliness that’s a constant in today’s societies and crippling the struggles for change that combat the division and loneliness and depend on the Internet to do it.
The Internet’s true purpose is to bring the world’s people closer to each other. The Obama Administration is doing just the opposite. It would advisable for those of us who have consistently opposed and fought against wars of all kinds to view this “cyber war” as an equally dangerous and destructive threat.
ALFREDO LOPEZ is the newest member of the TCBH! collective. A long-time political activist and radical journalist, and founding member of the progressive web-hosting media service MayFirst/PeopleLink, he lives in Brooklyn, NY
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Obama’s cybersecurity plan: Monitor more of the Internet
RT | March 21, 2013
President Barack Obama’s plan to protect the United States’ critical infrastructure against cyberattacks is accelerating quickly as more private sector businesses are signing on to share information with the federal government.
When Pres. Obama rolled out his ‘Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity’ executive order last month, he asked that classified cyber threat and technical information collected by the government be given to eligible commercial service providers that offer security services to businesses linked to the country’s critical infrastructure.
But in the few short weeks since the order was announced during the president’s annual State of the Union address, warnings of an imminent attack have only increased. CIA Director John Brennan told a panel last week that “the seriousness and the diversity of the threats that this country faces in the cyber domain are increasing on a daily basis,” and US national intelligence chief James Clapper claims there is “a remote chance of a major cyberattack against US critical infrastructure systems during the next two years that would result in long-term, wide-scale disruption of services, such as a regional power outage.”
Upon announcement of the executive order, a handful of defense contractors and telecom companies — namely Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, AT&T and CenturyLink — confirmed that they’d be voluntarily sharing information back and forth with the country’s top intelligence agencies in order to closely monitor any threats that could collapse the country’s critical infrastructure, a vaguely defined category assumed to include the nation’s power systems, telecommunication wires and other major utilities.
“The demand is there. I think the priority is there, and the threat is serious,” Steve Hawkins, vice president of information and security solutions for Raytheon, told Bloomberg earlier in the month.
As warnings of a cyberattack increase, however, the latest news out of Washington is that even more private sector companies with ties to critical infrastructure will be participating in the program. In a report published on Thursday by Reuters, the newswire notes that the framework first outlined during last month’s executive order is already quickly shaping up, with tasks being delegated throughout the US so that threat information can be adequately passed to applicable persons.
According to Reuters’ latest write-up, the executive order will require the National Security Agency to collect classified intelligence on serious hacking attempts aimed at American businesses, which will then be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security to pass on to the telecom and cybersecurity providers — Raytheon, AT&T and others — where employees holding security clearances will scan incoming emails and routine Web traffic for threats to the infrastructure.
But while the government has long asked the entities to open up lines of communication with the NSA and other offices, smaller private-sector businesses could soon be signing on. According to Joseph Menn and Deborah Charles of Reuters, the government is already expanding their cybersecurity program so that even more Web traffic heading into and out of defense contractors will be scanned to include far more of the country’s private, civilian-run infrastructure.
“As a result, more private sector employees than ever before, including those at big banks, utilities and key transportation companies, will have their emails and Web surfing scanned as a precaution against cyberattacks,” they write.
Once those participating companies sign on to get data from Homeland Security, the DHS will send them computer threat “signatures” obtained by the NSA that will offer a list of red flags to be watching out for as huge amounts of Web data is scanned second-by-second and bit-by-bit.
“The companies can use this intelligence to strengthen cybersecurity services they sell to businesses that maintain critical infrastructure,” Bloomberg News reports.
That intelligence, including but not limited to cyber timestamps, indicators and the critical sector potentially, can then be monitored to search for malicious code and viruses sent through America’s Internet with the intent of causing harm. In exchange, the critical infrastructure companies that could be targeted by cyberterrorists will pay the contractors and telecoms for their help.
The threat of a cyberwar crippling America’s power grid and communication systems has been ramped-up in recent weeks, particularly in light of a highly-touted report that linked Chinese state actors with repeated attempts to sabotage US businesses and conduct espionage to steal secrets.
“Increasingly, US businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale,” National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon told the Asia Society in New York last week. “The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country.”
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A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II (1941-1945) lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.
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