Oral Argument on DNA Searches Provides Scary Glimpse Into the Future of Privacy
By Hanni Fakhoury | EFF | March 4, 2013
The Supreme Court recently heard oral argument in Maryland v. King, a case considering the constitutionality of warrantless DNA collection from arrestees. We’ve long warned about the privacy problems with the rise of cheap, easy and fast blanket DNA collection, and filed an amicus brief with the Court urging it to hold the government can only obtain this sensitive genetic material with a search warrant. While it can be fruitless trying to read the tea leaves of oral argument, one specific idea — that technological advances making DNA analysis faster means warrantless collection may be OK — should leave you worried about the fate of privacy going forward in the digital age.
One of the main disagreements surrounding the issue of DNA collection is whether the state is collecting DNA from arrestees for immediate identification — to figure out if they’ve arrested the right person and learn who that person is for purposes of making a bail determination — or for past and future investigation — to solve cold cases and to store DNA for future searches. The state has long claimed they used DNA for both, while we’ve argued the government simply isn’t able to use DNA collection for immediate identification purposes since there’s currently a delay in analyzing DNA ranging from several days up to a few months. But with the rise of rapid DNA analyzers which can analyze DNA in 90 minutes, law enforcement is chomping at the bit to purchase and install these devices at police stations across the country. When the lawyer challenging the blanket DNA collection argued that law enforcement’s interest in using DNA for immediate identification was simply not possible because of the lengthy delays in DNA analysis, Chief Justice Roberts interrupted to note (PDF):
Now, your brief says, well, the only interest here is the law enforcement interest. And I found that persuasive because of the concern that it’s going to take months to get the DNA back anyway, so they are going to have to release him or not before they know it. But if we are in a position where it now takes 90 minutes or will soon take 90 minutes to get the information back, I think that’s entirely different…
Other members of the court echoed this idea, hinting that if DNA analysis was done faster, than there could be a legitimate identification — as opposed to investigative — need for the practice. And if that was the case, then DNA collection was no different than fingerprinting, and the police could swab and collect DNA without a search warrant. This would be a dangerous Fourth Amendment precedent.
The reasonableness of a search under the Fourth Amendment has always depended on whether the search is reasonably related in scope to the circumstances that justify the search in the first place. But that determination shouldn’t hinge on how long it takes to do the search, but rather what the search reveals. And with DNA searches, an enormous amount of sensitive information is being revealed to the government: a person’s entire genome. Ignoring the breadth of this intrusion by focusing on the ease of collection — implicitly believing the easier it is to intrude into a private place, the less protected it is — elevates form over substance to the detriment of the right of privacy enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.
This dangerous thinking extends beyond DNA collection. We’ve already warned about the problems with warrantless home video surveillance and stingrays, or fake cell phone towers which the government has been very secretive about. As technological advances like these allow the government to easily collect and catalog greater amounts of information, courts run the risk of allowing broader and more intrusive searches to pass Fourth Amendment scrutiny simply because of the possibility of exposure. Instead, courts should be focusing on the actual intrusion and people’s expectation that private information will not be exposed, regardless of how technological advances can make government access easier or faster.
The fact the government can do something now it couldn’t do before doesn’t make it constitutional. In fact, it should be the opposite. As it becomes easier for the government to seize and analyze, institutional checks — like a search warrant — on the government’s power is necessary to protect privacy before it becomes a casualty to technological advances.
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DARPA scientists want to create database of all conversations
RT | March 4, 2013
Your digital footprint could be getting a whole lot bigger: Pentagon scientists are searching for a way to transcribe every real-world conversation that happens into computer-readable files.
Robert Beckhusen of Wired’s Danger Room says it wouldn’t be unlike a real-life Twitter feed or an “email archive for everyday speak.”
“Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved together,” Beckhusen writes in an article this week that explores a Defense Department project that’s been undertaken by its Darpa laboratories and is now in the hands of a University of Texas computer scientist named Matt Lease.
Least has received a few hundred thousand dollars from Darpa — the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — to help find a way to take cell phone conversations, board room meetings and every miniscule real world back-and-forth and have them digitized.
The project is being called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech,” and Lease will receive $300,000 in all from the government to work on it after winning a 2012 Young Faculty Award from Darpa last year.
Lease has previously worked with the Pentagon scientists on another project, Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which had him trying to find a better way to transcribe dialogue into text. Now after winning the respect of Darpa, he’s putting that research to work in hopes of finding a way to streamline all real world conversations into digital transcriptions. And by strategically crowd-sourcing the information, he thinks he might be able to do just that.
“Like other AI [artificial intelligence], it can only go so far, which is based on what the state-of-the-art methodology can do,” Lease tells Wired. “So what was exciting to me is thinking about going back to some of that work and now taking advantage of crowdsourcing and applying that into the mix.”
Lease says he saw both the “need and opportunity to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward,” Lease adds.
Wired reports that the end result could mean that conversations and events could be transcribed and edited through crowdsourcing, then eventually and easily be shared with friends, family and colleagues. Once digitized, those dialogues could also be perused for general search purposes. By uploading everything, though, some concerns are quickly showing up. For one, there’s the matter of possible privacy violations brought on by the seemingly constant collection of data. Then, of course, there’s the matter of what is being done with it.
According to a 2003 memo from the Congressional Research Service, the EARS project that first got Lease involved in the Pentagon was being considered for a rather particular kind of use. That report said that dialogue could be inputted into the system by way of telephone conversations so that “the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities” could “extract clues about the identity of speakers.”
For now, Lease won’t even speculate as to why the Pentagon wants him to develop his crowdsourcing project. He agrees, however, that there is an issue with “respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved.”
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Drone ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Now Has A Name: ARGUS
By Jay Stanley | ACLU | February 21, 2013
The PBS series NOVA, “Rise of the Drones,” recently aired a segment detailing the capabilities of a powerful aerial surveillance system known as ARGUS-IS, which is basically a super-high, 1.8 gigapixel resolution camera that can be mounted on a drone. As demonstrated in this clip, the system is capable of high-resolution monitoring and recording of an entire city. (The clip was written about in DefenseTech and in Slate.)
In the clip, the developer explains how the technology (which he also refers to with the apt name “Wide Area Persistent Stare”) is “equivalent to having up to a hundred Predators look at an area the size of a medium-sized city at once.”
ARGUS produces a high-resolution video image that covers 15 square miles. It’s all streamed to the ground and stored, and operators can zoom in upon any small area and watch the footage of that spot. Essentially, it is an animated, aerial version of the gigapixel cameras that got some attention for super-high resolution photographs created at Obama’s first inauguration and at a Vancouver Canucks fan gathering.
At first I didn’t think too much about this video because it seemed to be an utterly expected continuation of existing trends in camera power. But since it was brought to my attention, this technology keeps coming back up in my conversations with colleagues and in my thoughts. I think that’s because it is such a concrete embodiment of the “nightmare scenario” for drones, or at least several core elements of it.
First, it’s the culmination of the trend towards ever-more-pervasive surveillance cameras in American life. We’ve been objecting to that trend for years, and many of our public spaces are now under 24/7 video surveillance—often by cameras owned and operated by the police. But even in our most pessimistic moments, I don’t think we thought that every street, empty lot, garden, and field would be subject to video monitoring anytime soon. But that is precisely what this technology could enable. We’ve speculated about self-organizing swarms of drones being used to blanket entire cities with surveillance, but this technology makes it clear that nothing that complicated is required.
Second and more significantly to me, this technology also makes real a key threat that drones pose to privacy that we’ve talked about: the ability to do location tracking. The video shows cars and pedestrians near Quantico, Virginia automatically tagged with colored boxes, which follow them as they move around. As the technology’s developer told NOVA,
Everything that is a moving object is being automatically tracked. The colored boxes represent that the computer has recognized the moving objects. You can see individuals crossing the street, you can see individuals walking in parking lots.
The surveillance potential of such a tracking algorithm attached to such powerful cameras is worth pausing to think about. To identify someone there’s no need for face or license-plate recognition (which may be impractical from above anyhow), cell phone tracking, gait recognition, or what have you. Even knowing where a little green square starts and finishes its day can reveal a lot, because it turns out that even relatively rough location information about a person will often identify them uniquely. For example, according to this study, just knowing the zip code (actually census tract, which is basically equivalent) of where you work, and where you live, will uniquely identify 5% of the population, and for half of Americans will place them in a group of 21 people or fewer. If you know the “census blocks” where somebody works and lives (an area roughly the size of a block in a city, but much larger in rural areas), the accuracy is much higher, with at least half the population being uniquely identified.
However, ARGUS-type tracking could be used to get more precise data than that—in many cases, to determine a vehicle’s home address, which pretty much reveals who you are if you’re in a single-family home, and narrows it down pretty well even if you’re in a large apartment building. (Academic papers have been written on inferring home address from location data sets.) Add work address and I expect that would nail virtually everybody. And of course lodged in the data set would be not just where a particular vehicle starts and finishes its day, but all the places it stopped in between—potentially revealing, as we so often point out, an array of information about a person such as their political, religious, and sexual activities.
True, such tracking using ARGUS would be disrupted whenever a subject disappears from aerial view. For example, pedestrians who travel by subway or bus or walk under foliage, or vehicles entering tunnels, would be harder to track. But even there, datamining large data sets collected over time could probably reveal a lot of things about people’s daily patterns and I would bet could eventually be used to identify a surprisingly large number of them. I expect that ARGUS would be used (if it’s not already) to generate a database consisting of location tracks of moving vehicles or pedestrians beginning in one place and ending in another. Think of them as little strings on a map. Some of these strings would stretch from a person’s home to their work, with stops in between, while others might be fragments, interrupted by a tunnel or other obstruction. But even the fragments, when the dimension of time is added to the equation, could probably be correlated together.
Of course low-lying clouds or fog might also interfere with aerial tracking, though imaging technologies already in existence could probably be deployed to see through them.
NOVA was not allowed to show images of the ARGUS censor, and stated that part of the program remained classified, including whether it has yet been deployed. (Though, we know it has been deployed domestically at least once, over Virginia as shown on NOVA. I’m going to assume it has not been deployed domestically in any more routine manner.) But, it is good that the Air Force allowed NOVA to see its capabilities. I’d like to think it’s because as Americans, Air Force officials have respect for our country’s values and democratic processes and don’t want to let such powerful and potentially privacy-invasive tools to be created in secret. It could also be, however, because the Air Force needs private-sector help in figuring out how to analyze the oceans of data the device can collect (5,000 hours of high-def video per day).
Either way, it’s important for the public to be aware of the kinds of technologies that are out there so that it can better decide how drones should be regulated.
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Supreme Court Dismisses Challenge to FISA Amendments Act; EFF’s Lawsuit Over NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Remains
By Cindy Cohn and Trevor Timm | EFF | February 27, 2013
Yesterday, the Supreme Court sadly dismissed the ACLU’s case, Clapper v. Amnesty International, which challenged the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the unconstitutional law that allows the government to wiretap Americans communcating with people overseas. Under the FAA, the government can conduct this surveillance without naming individuals and without a traditional probable cause warrant, as the Fourth Amendment requires.
The court didn’t address the constitutionality of the FAA itself, but instead ruled that the plaintiffs—a group of lawyers, journalists, and human rights advocates who regularly communicate with likely “targets” of FAA wiretapping—couldn’t prove the surveillance was “certainly impending,” so therefore didn’t have the “standing” necessary to sue. In other words, since the Americans did not have definitive proof that they were being surveilled under the FAA—a fact the government nearly always keeps secret—they cannot challenge the constitutionality of the statute.
EFF’s Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Jewel v. NSA, Is Not Affected by Clapper
It’s shameful that the courts again have cut off another avenue for accountability regarding the NSA’s warrantless and unconstitutional surveillance activities. But as disappointing as the Clapper decision is, the good news is the decision likely won’t adversely affect our Jewel v. NSA lawsuit, which we argued in district court in December of 2012. Indeed, the Clapper decision makes the Jewel case one of the last remaining hopes for a court ruling on the legality of the warrantless surveillance of Americans, now conducted for over a decade.
The Ninth Circuit has already ruled that the Jewel plaintiffs have standing under settled law. The court’s decision is based on solid ground because we have presented the court with evidence that dragnet warrantless surveillance has already occurred, through testimony and documents from AT&T and NSA whistleblowers. In fact, the court specifically differentiated the two cases in its Jewel opinion: “Jewel has much stronger allegations of concrete and particularized injury than did the plaintiffs in Amnesty International. Whereas they anticipated or projected future government conduct, Jewel’s complaint alleges past incidents of actual government interception of her electronic communications.”
Clapper v. Amnesty’s Catch-22
Nonetheless, the Supreme Court’s requirement in Clapper that a future harm must be “certainly impending” to allow a case to go forward is very troubling, especially in the context of cases involving secret surveillance.
As Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent points out, future conduct can never be predict anything with 100% certainty, and if certainty was a requirement for standing, then virtually no cases would ever reach conclusion. Justice Breyer runs through dozens of cases where standing has been found for plaintiffs in situations where plaintiffs had a reasonable fear of harm, and in many of those cases, the plaintiffs were much less certain than the lawyers, human rights workers and journalist in Clapper.
Breyer summed absurdity of the “certainly impending” standard by saying, “One can, of course, always imagine some special circumstance that negates a virtual likelihood, no matter how strong. But the same is true about most, if not all, ordinary inferences about future events. Perhaps, despite pouring rain, the streets will remain dry (due to the presence of a special chemical).”
This standard is especially problematic when the harm is illegal surveillance conducted via secret government programs. Unlike physical searches of the home, communications surveillance is by its nature hidden from the people affected, and national security surveillance is rarely made public or used in domestic criminal prosecutions. Thus, under the Supreme Court’s rule, regardless of whether its surveillance was legal or constitutional, the government can deny standing to a victim of illegal surveillance just by never revealing its illegal actions to the person affected. Essentially, one can’t challenge the government’s surveillance unless the government agrees.
Indeed, in arguing that its ruling does not mean that government surveillance under the FAA can never be reviewed by the courts, the Court could only point to situations in which the government intentionally revealed its surveillance.1
Allowing the Executive broad unfettered powers to “turn the Constitution on and off at will,” is exactly what the Supreme Court refused to do in Boumediene v. Bush, but what it appears to have allowed here.
It’s not even clear that the majority even understands the real scope of the FAA. In the opinion’s first sentence, Justice Alito refers to “individuals” that can be warrantlessly surveilled, but as we’ve explained many times, and the dissent notes, one of the most odious parts of the law is that it allows the government to get one court order for groups or categories of people—potentially thousands of people can be affected at a time.
The Shrinking Ranks of Warrantless Wiretapping Cases
This is the second ruling in the past year in which the government has convinced the court to dismiss challenges to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program on technical grounds, when there is ample evidence of wrongdoing. In 2012, the Ninth Circuit reluctantly dismissed the Al-Haramain case on “sovereign immunity” grounds despite a lower court ruling the government had violated the Fourth Amendment. The court reasoned that because of a glitch in the language of FISA statute, the plaintiffs had to sue individuals in the government in their personal capacities and couldn’t sue government agencies themselves or government officials in their official capacities.
We look forward to the district court in Jewel v. NSA determining that our case can move forward, and that the government can, once and for all, be held to account for the NSA’s unlawful and unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping program.
- 1. The court also noted that a provision of the FAA allows a service provider, presumably in a fit of patriotic fervor and a willingness to pay expensive attorneys for its customers, challenges the government on its own, in secret. Yet even under this provision, the victim of the surveillance is unable to seek judicial review.
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Israel detains Palestinian cartoonist, family says
Ma’an – 16/02/2013
JENIN – Israeli authorities on Saturday detained a Palestinian cartoonist on his way back to the West Bank from Jordan, according to his family.
Muhammad Abdul-Ghani Sabanah, 30, was detained at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, his brother Tamir told Ma’an, adding that Sabanah was in Jordan for a meeting.
He said that on his way back, Israeli troops detained Sabanah, who is from the Jenin town of Qabatia, without giving any explanation.
Sabanah’s cartoons are widespread in the Arab world. He is well-known for his criticism through his cartoons, which focus mainly on the Palestinian people’s problems and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
He works as a public information officer at the Arab American University in Jenin.
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Academy Awards for the Promotion of Torture?
By Dave Clennon | Dissident Voice | February 16th, 2013
I’m a member of Hollywood’s Motion Picture Academy. At the risk of being expelled, for disclosing my intentions, I will not be voting for Zero Dark Thirty — in ANY Academy Awards category.
Everyone who contributes skill and energy to a motion picture — including actors — shares responsibility for the impressions the picture makes and the ideas it expresses. If I had played the role that was offered to me on Fox’s 24 (Season 7), I would have been guilty of promoting torture, and I couldn’t have evaded my own responsibility by blaming the writers and directors.
So Jessica Chastain won’t get my vote for Best Actress. With her beauty and her tough-but-vulnerable posturing, she almost succeeds in making extreme brutality look weirdly heroic.
There’s plenty of “Oscar buzz” around Zero Dark Thirty. Several associations of film critics have awarded it their highest honors. I have watched the film (2hrs, 37min). Although torture is an appalling crime under any circumstances, Zero never acknowledges that torture is immoral and criminal. It does portray torture as getting results. The name of Osama Bin Laden’s courier is revealed (in the movie) by a “detainee,” Ammar, who has endured prolonged and horrifying torture.
The two lead interrogators, both white, are not torturing Ammar at the moment he gives up the name (Abu Ahmed), but he is still utterly depleted from at least 96 hours of sleep-deprivation, and he knows they will torture him again, if he resists. “Y’know, I can … hang you back up to the ceiling,” says chief interrogator Dan.
The “moral” of this particular screen story? Torture sometimes works. Not always. Later, the female interrogator (and Zero’s heroine Maya [Chastain]), supervises
the “enhanced interrogation” of another detainee, Faraj. These are some of the enhancements we see her employ: first, a thick brown liquid is poured into a funnel which has been pushed into Faraj’s mouth and rammed part-way down his throat; then Maya supervises his beating and near-drowning (aka waterboarding); he gasps for air, gags, shudders and chokes.
Director Kathryn Bigelow then shows Chastain in a clean, well-lighted restroom, looking pretty, but tired and frustrated; Bigelow does not give us a view of Faraj after HIS ordeal. Next we see Maya complaining to her mentor Dan that Faraj hasn’t cracked. “You want to take a run at him?” she asks, smiling hopefully.)
In minute 45 of Zero, we learn that Faraj has “gone south.” Maya’s relentless, merciless torture has finally killed her detainee. She is now a murderer. So, for the next hour and 45 minutes, we’re rooting for a gorgeous, murdering thug to track down a charismatic, murdering jihadist.
If, in fact, torture is a crime (a mortal sin, if you will) — a signal of a nation’s descent into depravity — then it doesn’t matter whether it “works” or not. Zero Dark Thirty clearly condones torture. Not a single character involved in “The Greatest Manhunt in History” expresses any regret about the CIA’s use of torture. Maya/Chastain gets her man (code named “Geronimo”!) and that’s all that counts. The end justifies the vicious means.
Individuals and groups protesting the easy tolerance of torture in Zero Dark Thirty have been dismissed by some commentators as having “a political agenda.” The grievous problem presented by torture is NOT political. It’s moral. And it’s criminal. Decent people of the left, the right, and the center would all judge the torture in Zero Dark Thirty as immoral and criminal.
If the deeply racist landmark film Birth of a Nation were released today, would we vote to honor it? Would we give an award to Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant pro-Nazi documentary, Triumph of the Will? Hundreds of millions around the world watch the Oscars, we’re told. Are we going to show the world that we Americans STILL approve of torture?
After Jessica Chastain won Zero Dark Thirty’s only Golden Globe Award, it occurred to me that she is the new face of American torture — as Kiefer Sutherland was, for several years. If the Academy votes her an Oscar, it wouldn’t be surprising if the world community concluded that the U.S.A. still tolerates this vicious, criminal behavior.
Sometimes, it’s not just a movie. And acting in it isn’t just a job. It’s a moral choice.
Dave Clennon can be reached at djjc123@earthlink.net.
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The Drug Trade and the Increasing Militarization of the Caribbean
By Kevin Edmonds | The Other Side of Paradise | February 8, 2013
Given the current controversy surrounding the extent of the U.S. drone program and targeted killings, it is important to revisit that in the summer of 2012, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency announced that unmanned drones would begin patrolling Caribbean airspace as an expansion of the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI). This is only one aspect of how the War on Drugs in the Caribbean is increasingly looking like the War on Terror.
The U.S.–Caribbean border is the often ignored “Third Border,” which the Department of Homeland Security has referred to as an “open door for drug traffickers and terrorists.” A recent study by the National Defence University has stated that “the region’s nexus to the United States uniquely positions it in the proximate U.S. geopolitical and strategic sphere. Thus, there is an incentive, if not an urgency, for the United States to proactively pursue security capacity-building measures in the Caribbean region.”
While the drones are unarmed for the time being, they will be primarily used to locate drug traffickers operating fishing boats, fast boats, and semi-submarines and would relay information to the Coast Guard, Navy or Caribbean authorities to carry out the interception and arrests. It has been revealed that the drones will be operating out of bases in Corpus Christi, Texas, Cocoa Beach, Florida and potentially the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
The shift towards the use of drones in the region is largely based off of an unconvincing pilot program carried out over 18 months in the Bahamas, in which “During more than 1,260 hours in the air off the southeastern coast of Florida, the Guardian (drones) assisted in only a handful of large-scale busts.” That said, the Caribbean governments increased militarization in the region when they implemented the never-ending War on Drugs without any public consultation or debate. This erosion of regional sovereignty may be a slippery slope to a dangerous future in which Caribbean nationals may very well find themselves on kill lists instead of facing a trial.
Such a conclusion is not baseless, as a November 2012 report by the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security recommended that Latin American drug cartels be classified as terrorist organizations “so there is increased ability to counter their threat to national security.” Furthermore, in 2009, the U.S. Military drew criticism for placing 50 suspected Afghani drug traffickers on a “kill list” as part of their ongoing efforts to cut off finance stream of the Taliban. The controversy arose due to the fact that drug traffickers (generally classified as civilians) had now been placed into the same legal category as the Taliban “insurgents” and thus became legitimate targets.
This is especially important in light of how the extradition of Jamaican kingpin Christopher “Dudus” Coke was handled. In September 2009, the United States requested his extradition to face drug trafficking charges, but Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding blocked the request due to his deep political connections with Coke. It was only after months of intense pressure that Golding caved in May 2010. Jamaican Police and the Jamaican Defense Forces led the bloody operation to arrest Coke, which resulted in the deaths of more than 70 civilians—the vast majority of which were unarmed.
The resulting scandal led to the downfall of Golding as Prime Minister but highlighted the power that drug traffickers and gang leaders have had in Jamaican government and politics. It has since been reinforced that the operation was “assisted by the U.S. government and carried out, to a large degree, at its behest.” Information has emerged which reveals that a U.S. spy plane participated in the raid of Coke’s stronghold of Tivoli Gardens, and a Freedom of Information Act action has recently been levied against the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) by a group of law students to reveal the extent of U.S. involvement.
To prevent such explosive outcomes in the future, there has been a call for closer integration between Caribbean police forces and the U.S. DEA in a clear escalation of the War on Drugs. A September 2012 Senate Report revealed that Jamaica has been floated as a target for a Sensitive Investigative Unit, which consists of a highly trained police that collaborate with the DEA. A similar program exists in Kandahar, where U.S. and British troops have created and participated in a task force made up of Afghan police officers and U.S. DEA agents to disrupt the drug trade and investigate corrupt Afghan officials.
According to a seemingly benign Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release announcing the drone program, the “DHS is partnering with Caribbean nations to enhance border security in the region through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) . . . . The DHS is conducting border security training in conjunction with CBSI to increase partner nation capacity to secure their borders.” The problem with such statements is that there is always more shady business going on behind the scenes. Given the direction of U.S. policy in the region, it will only be a matter of time until the War on Drugs becomes eerily similar to the War on Terror.
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Israel bars reports on secret prisoner
Al-Akhbar | February 12, 2013
Israel’s Office of the Prime Minister on Tuesday summoned the owners and top editors of country’s media establishments to forbid them from publishing reports on a prisoner who had been secretly jailed in 2010.
Haaretz reported that the office called an “emergency meeting” with the Israeli Editors Committee where they were reportedly ordered to “withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency.”
The order comes in response to a new investigative report by Australia’s ABC TV news program Foreign Correspondent which alleges to have revealed the identity of a former inmate in Israel’s Ayalon Prison who was found dead in his cell in 2010.
The secret inmate, known as “Prisoner X,” was reportedly kept in a cell built for the man who assassinated former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Haaretz had earlier posted, then quickly removed a story linking to the Australian report, presumably under government orders.
At 12:38pm, the newspaper Tweeted the story, which was titled: “Report: Security prisoner who committed suicide in Israeli prison in 2010 was Australian.” Less than two hours later a user pointed out that the story had vanished.
No details had previously been released about the prisoner’s identity or reasons behind his incarceration.
The ABC report, which came out Tuesday, identified the man as Ben Zygier, an Australian citizen who had been living in Israel for 10 years before his death.
The report said it had found evidence to suggest that Zygier had been recruited by Israel’s Mossad spy agency, but that it remained unclear why he was being secretly held.
An Israeli court order – issued shortly after his imprisonment in 2010 – that barred media from covering the story remains in effect, the report added.
The prisoner was found hanging from his cell after being held for several months in an apparent suicide.
Media scholars have written on Israel’s tight media restrictions over issues it claims may compromise the security of the Jewish state.
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As Secretive “Stingray” Surveillance Tool Becomes More Pervasive, Questions Over Its Illegality Increase
By Trevor Timm | EFF | February 12, 2013
A few months ago, EFF warned of a secretive new surveillance tool being used by the FBI in cases around the country commonly referred to as a “Stingray.” Recently, more information on the device has come to light and it makes us even more concerned than before.
The device, which acts as a fake cell phone tower, essentially allows the government to electronically search large areas for a particular cell phone’s signal—sucking down data on potentially thousands of innocent people along the way. At the same time, law enforcement has attempted use them while avoiding many of the traditional limitations set forth in the Constitution, like individualized warrants. This is why we called the tool “an unconstitutional, all-you-can-eat data buffet.”
Recently, LA Weekly reported the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) got a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant in 2006 to buy a stingray. The original grant request said it would be used for “regional terrorism investigations.” Instead LAPD has been using it for just about any investigation imaginable.
In just a four month period in 2012, according to documents obtained by the First Amendment Coalition, the LAPD has used the device at least 21 times in “far more routine” criminal investigations. The LA Weekly reported Stingrays “were tapped for more than 13 percent of the 155 ‘cellular phone investigation cases’ that Los Angeles police conducted between June and September last year.” These included burglary, drug and murder cases.
Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process.
Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants” as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched.
The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier. It allows police to point a cell phone signal into all the houses in a particular neighborhood, searching for one target while sucking up everyone else’s location along with it. With one search the police could potentially invade countless private residences at once.
In another recent development, the FBI handed over two documents—out of an estimated 25,000 they have on Stingrays—to EPIC as part of the privacy group’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain more information about the use of mysterious devices. As Slate’s Ryan Gallagher reported:
Two heavily redacted sets of files released last month show internal Justice Department guidance that relates to the use of the cell tracking equipment, with repeated references to a crucial section of the Communications Act which outlines how “interference” with communication signals is prohibited.
It’s a small but significant detail. Why? Because it demonstrates that “there are clearly concerns, even within the agency, that the use of Stingray technology might be inconsistent with current regulations,” says EPIC attorney Alan Butler. “I don’t know how the DOJ justifies the use of Stingrays given the limitations of the Communications Act prohibition.”
The documents also suggest that the FBI is loaning out the devices to local police.
On March 28th, the judge overseeing the Rigmaiden case, which we wrote about previously, will hold a hearing on whether evidence obtained using a stringray should be suppressed. It will be one of the first times a judge rules on the constitutionality of these devices in federal court.
It’s time for local police and federal law enforcement agencies to come clean about the technology and how they are using it, before more ordinary citizens have their constitutional rights violated.
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Mandatory Black Boxes in Cars Raise Privacy Questions
EFF | February 11, 2013
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today to include strict privacy protections for data collected by vehicle “black boxes” to protect drivers from long-term tracking as well as the misuse of their information.
Black boxes, more formally called event data recorders (EDRs), can serve a valuable forensic function for accident investigations, because they can capture information like vehicle speed before the crash, whether the brake was activated, whether the seat belt was buckled, and whether the airbag deployed. NHTSA is proposing the mandatory inclusion of black boxes in all new cars and light trucks sold in America. But while the proposed rules would require the collection of data in at least the last few seconds before a crash, they don’t block the long-term monitoring of driver behavior or the ongoing capture of much more private information like audio, video, or vehicle location.
“The NHTSA’s proposed rules fail to address driver privacy in any meaningful way,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. “These regulations must include more than minimum requirements of what should be collected and stored – they need a reasonable maximum requirement as well.”
The current NHTSA proposal mandates a boilerplate notice to consumers that “various systems” are being monitored. The plan also calls for a commercial tool to be made available to allow user access to black box data. In its comments submitted to the NHTSA today, EFF calls for complete and comprehensive disclosure of data collection as well as a free and open standard to access black box information.
“The information collected by EDRs is private and must remain private until the car owner consents to its use,” said Cardozo. “Consumers deserve full disclosure of what is being collected, when, and how, as well as an easy and free way of accessing this data on their own. Having to buy access to your own data is not reasonable. ”
In addition to submitting its own comments to the NHTSA today, EFF also joined the Electronic Privacy Information Center and a broad coalition of privacy, consumer rights, and civil rights organizations in comments urging the NHTSA to adopt specific, privacy-protecting amendments to its proposed rules.
For EFF’s full comments submitted to the NHTSA:
https://www.eff.org/document/effs-comments-nhtsa-about-black-boxes-cars
Contact:
Nate Cardozo
Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
nate@eff.org
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- EFF to Supreme Court: Blanket DNA Collection Violates Fourth Amendment (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Black Boxes in Cars: Open Call for Comments (eff.org)
- EFF, others to Microsoft: Who’s requesting our Skype data? (zdnet.com)
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Israeli forces arrest Hamas-affiliates across West Bank
Ma’an – 12/02/2013
BETHLEHEM – Israeli forces launched multiple arrest raids overnight Monday against Hamas affiliates in the West Bank, Hamas sources and locals said.
Hamas leader Rafat Jamil Nasif, 45, was detained in Tulkarem in an arrest raid on his home, sources in the Islamist movement said. Nasif’s family were forced to stand outside in the cold while sniffer dogs searched his home.
Musab al-Ashqar, Abdullah Ismail al-Khalil and Ammar Jihad Ameir, students at al-Khadouri university, were also arrested in Tulkarem, together with the local Imam’s son Qitad Amar Bidawi.
In Nablus, Israeli forces detained a local Islamist student leader Muthanna Jamil Eshtayeh and students Osama Khalid Yamin and Walid Jamal Asida from An-Najah university, locals said.
Mousa Ahmad Yamin and Abed al-Ghani Ayesh Samara were also detained in nearby villages.
Four people were arrested in Qalandia refugee camp in Ramallah, including two ex-prisoners, and in Hebron two other students were detained.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said that 13 people were detained overnight, including four in Nablus, five in Tulkarem, three in Bethlehem and one in Hebron.
Another military spokesman said nine people arrested were affiliated with Hamas.
The latest detentions follow a sweep of arrests of Hamas-affiliated officials in the West Bank over the past week.
Last Tuesday, Israeli forces arrested 12 people including at least three Hamas-affiliates.
A day earlier, Israeli soldiers arrested 23 members of Hamas, including three lawmakers — Ahmed Attoun in al-Bireh, Hatem Qafisha in Hebron and Mohammed al-Tal in al-Dhahiriyya.
Hamas condemned the arrests as a “criminal act.”
Related article
- Israel arrests 22 Hamas members ahead of Fatah-Hamas talks (alethonews.wordpress.com)
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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