1st 121 million Verizon phone records, now web giants comply

[Hashi Lebwohl]

We would, as a nation, never stand for being issued national identity cards to prove our citizenship or status....but damned if a lot of people wouldn't support a national facial recognition database used to check identities to help solve crimes or "keep us safe". When the fingerprint and facial photo database fails or is found to be insufficient to meet their need to keep an eye on us, they will want to add DNA to the database so that the likelihood of "false positives" is minimized.

This is almost enough to make me want to start wearing something over my face at all times. When I get questioned about this by police I will identity myself then politely reply "it isn't against the law to wear a mask, is it?"

*sigh* The "land of the free" was great while it lasted. I sure am going to miss it.

[SoulBiter]

We would, as a nation, never stand for being issued national identity cards to prove our citizenship or status....but damned if a lot of people wouldn't support a national facial recognition database used to check identities to help solve crimes or "keep us safe".

Its not like we dont have enough people in jail now....This smacks of creating a 'compliant' society.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Threatening someone with a baseball bat is bad enough but it is possible to get out of that situation unscathed. Threaten someone with jail time or property seizure and you really have them by the short-and-curlies. There are enough instances of "separated at birth?" (lookalikes) that getting a positive hit in a facial recognition database is easier than you might think.

The defenders of things like this still always respond with "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear". My question to them is this: how do you know you have nothing to fear when you don't know what they are looking for?

[Rawedge Rim]

Threatening someone with a baseball bat is bad enough but it is possible to get out of that situation unscathed. Threaten someone with jail time or property seizure and you really have them by the short-and-curlies. There are enough instances of "separated at birth?" (lookalikes) that getting a positive hit in a facial recognition database is easier than you might think.

The defenders of things like this still always respond with "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear". My question to them is this: how do you know you have nothing to fear when you don't know what they are looking for?

so you would............................?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

That is the real problem--there isn't anything I can do other than argue against such things. The FBI is going to move ahead with this plan regardless of what anyone says or does unless some Congressional committee, the Attorney General, or the President says "you really shouldn't do that". Even in that circumstance it is likely that they would implement the database anyway.

I suppose law enforcement won't be happy until it has everyone's biometrics in a searchable database so that they can minimize the amount of time they have to spend investigating a crime or a crime scene. It makes more sense, from their point of view, to presume that everyone is guilty and rule people out than to presume that everyone is innocent until they can find the guilty party.

[Cail]

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

“It’s not just the traditional communications we’re after: It’s taking a full-arsenal approach that digitally exploits the clues a target leaves behind in their regular activities on the net to compile biographic and biometric information” that can help “implement precision targeting,” noted a 2010 document.

One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies.

It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.

Because the agency considers images a form of communications content, the N.S.A. would be required to get court approval for imagery of Americans collected through its surveillance programs, just as it must to read their emails or eavesdrop on their phone conversations, according to an N.S.A. spokeswoman. Cross-border communications in which an American might be emailing or texting an image to someone targeted by the agency overseas could be excepted.

Civil-liberties advocates and other critics are concerned that the power of the improving technology, used by government and industry, could erode privacy. “Facial recognition can be very invasive,” said Alessandro Acquisti, a researcher on facial recognition technology at Carnegie Mellon University. “There are still technical limitations on it, but the computational power keeps growing, and the databases keep growing, and the algorithms keep improving.”

State and local law enforcement agencies are relying on a wide range of databases of facial imagery, including driver’s licenses and Facebook, to identify suspects. The F.B.I. is developing what it calls its “next generation identification” project to combine its automated fingerprint identification system with facial imagery and other biometric data.

The State Department has what several outside experts say could be the largest facial imagery database in the federal government, storing hundreds of millions of photographs of American passport holders and foreign visa applicants. And the Department of Homeland Security is funding pilot projects at police departments around the country to match suspects against faces in a crowd.

The N.S.A., though, is unique in its ability to match images with huge troves of private communications.

“We would not be doing our job if we didn’t seek ways to continuously improve the precision of signals intelligence activities — aiming to counteract the efforts of valid foreign intelligence targets to disguise themselves or conceal plans to harm the United States and its allies,” said Vanee M. Vines, the agency spokeswoman.

She added that the N.S.A. did not have access to photographs in state databases of driver’s licenses or to passport photos of Americans, while declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. She also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media through means other than communications intercepts.

“The government and the private sector are both investing billions of dollars into face recognition” research and development, said Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer and expert on facial recognition and privacy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. “The government leads the way in developing huge face recognition databases, while the private sector leads in accurately identifying people under challenging conditions.”

Ms. Lynch said a handful of recent court decisions could lead to new constitutional protections for the privacy of sensitive face recognition data. But she added that the law was still unclear and that Washington was operating largely in a legal vacuum.

Laura Donohue, the director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown Law School, agreed. “There are very few limits on this,” she said.

Congress has largely ignored the issue. “Unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data,” said Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, in a letter in December to the head of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is now studying possible standards for commercial, but not governmental, use.

Facial recognition technology can still be a clumsy tool. It has difficulty matching low-resolution images, and photographs of people’s faces taken from the side or angles can be impossible to match against mug shots or other head-on photographs.

Dalila B. Megherbi, an expert on facial recognition technology at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, explained that “when pictures come in different angles, different resolutions, that all affects the facial recognition algorithms in the software.”

That can lead to errors, the documents show. A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair. The document says the program returned 42 results, and displays several that were obviously false hits, including one of a middle-age man.

Similarly, another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden. Among the search results were photos of four other bearded men with only slight resemblances to Bin Laden.

But the technology is powerful. One 2011 PowerPoint showed how the software matched a bald young man, shown posing with another man in front of a water park, with another photo where he has a full head of hair, wears different clothes and is at a different location.

It is not clear how many images the agency has acquired. The N.S.A. does not collect facial imagery through its bulk metadata collection programs, including that involving Americans’ domestic phone records, authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, according to Ms. Vines.

The N.S.A. has accelerated its use of facial recognition technology under the Obama administration, the documents show, intensifying its efforts after two intended attacks on Americans that jarred the White House. The first was the case of the so-called underwear bomber, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, tried to trigger a bomb hidden in his underwear while flying to Detroit on Christmas in 2009. Just a few months later, in May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, attempted a car bombing in Times Square.

The agency’s use of facial recognition technology goes far beyond one program previously reported by The Guardian, which disclosed that the N.S.A. and its British counterpart, General Communications Headquarters, have jointly intercepted webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users.

The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. That ability to cross-reference images has led to an explosion of analytical uses inside the agency. The agency has created teams of “identity intelligence” analysts who work to combine the facial images with other records about individuals to develop comprehensive portraits of intelligence targets.

The agency has developed sophisticated ways to integrate facial recognition programs with a wide range of other databases. It intercepts video teleconferences to obtain facial imagery, gathers airline passenger data and collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries, the documents show. They also note that the N.S.A. was attempting to gain access to such databases in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The documents suggest that the agency has considered getting access to iris scans through its phone and email surveillance programs. But asked whether the agency is now doing so, officials declined to comment. The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.

In addition, the agency was working with the C.I.A. and the State Department on a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries.

One of the N.S.A.’s broadest efforts to obtain facial images is a program called Wellspring, which strips out images from emails and other communications, and displays those that might contain passport images. In addition to in-house programs, the N.S.A. relies in part on commercially available facial recognition technology, including from PittPatt, a small company owned by Google, the documents show.

The N.S.A. can now compare spy satellite photographs with intercepted personal photographs taken outdoors to determine the location. One document shows what appear to be vacation photographs of several men standing near a small waterfront dock in 2011. It matches their surroundings to a spy satellite image of the same dock taken about the same time, located at what the document describes as a militant training facility in Pakistan.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I would recommend buying a surgical mask, scarf, masquerade ball mask, or Halloween mask to wear at all times but eventually some smart-ass police officer is going to question me as to why I am wearing it. His line of questioning will be some variant of "what have you got to hide?".

We hear in movies and TV shows the classic line of "this is on a need-to-know basis and you don't need to know" and that will have to be my response. Unless I am breaking a law the government doesn't need to know who I am, where I am, or what I am doing.

At some point, some numb-nut will probably try to make it illegal to wear a mask and thus prevent security cameras from being able to match your face to a database.

[Avatar]

Domino masks.

--A

[Rawedge Rim]

www.wired.com/2014/06/feds-seize-stingray-documents/

U.S. Marshals Seize Cops’ Spying Records to Keep Them From the ACLU
By Kim Zetter 06.03.14 | 6:15 pm | PermalinkShare on Facebook0 inShare411

A routine request in Florida for public records regarding the use of a surveillance tool known as stingray took an extraordinary turn recently when federal authorities seized the documents before police could release them.

The surprise move by the U.S. Marshals Service stunned the American Civil Liberties Union, which earlier this year filed the public records request with the Sarasota, Florida, police department for information detailing its use of the controversial surveillance tool.

The ACLU had an appointment last Tuesday to review documents pertaining to a case investigated by a Sarasota police detective. But marshals swooped in at the last minute to grab the records, claiming they belong to the U.S. Marshals Service and barring the police from releasing them.

ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler called the move “truly extraordinary and beyond the worst transparency violations” the group has seen regarding documents detailing police use of the technology.

“This is consistent with what we’ve seen around the country with federal agencies trying to meddle with public requests for stingray information,” Wessler said, noting that federal authorities have in other cases invoked the Homeland Security Act to prevent the release of such records. “The feds are working very hard to block any release of this information to the public.”

Stingrays, also known as IMSI catchers, simulate a cellphone tower and trick nearby mobile devices into connecting with them, thereby revealing their location. A stingray can see and record a device’s unique ID number and traffic data, as well as information that points to its location. By moving a stingray around, authorities can triangulate a device’s location with greater precision than is possible using data obtained from a carrier’s fixed tower location.

The records sought by the ACLU are important because the organization has learned that a Florida police detective obtained permission to use a stingray simply by filing an application with the court under Florida’s “trap and trace” statute instead of obtaining a probable-cause warrant. Trap and trace orders generally are used to collect information from phone companies about telephone numbers received and called by a specific account. A stingray, however, can track the location of cell phones, including inside private spaces.

The government has long asserted it doesn’t need a probable-cause warrant to use stingrays because the device doesn’t collect the content of phone calls and text messages, but instead operates like pen-registers and trap-and-traces, collecting the equivalent of header information. The ACLU and others argue that the devices are more invasive than a trap-and-trace.

Recently, the Tallahassee police department revealed it had used stingrays at least 200 times since 2010 without telling any judge because the device’s manufacturer made the police department sign a non-disclosure agreement that police claim prevented them from disclosing use of the device to the courts.

The ACLU has filed numerous records requests with police departments around the country in an effort to uncover how often the devices are used and how often courts are told about them.

In the Sarasota case, the U.S. Marshals Service claimed it owned the records Sarasota police offered to the ACLU because it had deputized the detective in the case, making all documentation in the case federal property. Before the ACLU could view the documents Sarasota had put aside for them, the agency dispatched a marshal from its office in Tampa to seize the records and move them to an undisclosed location.

The U.S. Marshals Service declined to comment, saying it “does not discuss pending litigation.”

Florida public records law requires that even if a dispute over records occurs, the Sarasota Police Department was legally obligated to hold onto the records for at least 30 days once it had received the ACLU’s request. That period would have given the ACLU a chance to argue its case in court to obtain the records.

“We’ve seen our fair share of federal government attempts to keep records about stingrays secret, but we’ve never seen an actual physical raid on state records in order to conceal them from public view,” the ACLU wrote in a blog post today.

The ACLU filed an emergency motion seeking a temporary injunction preventing the police department from releasing additional files to the marshals. The motion also asks the court to find the department in violation of state law for allowing the U.S. Marshals Service to seize the documents. The ACLU wants the court to order the police department to retrieve the documents. Because the issue is a state matter and the ACLU filed the motion in a state court, the judge cannot directly order the U.S. Marshal Service, a federal agency, to return the documents.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

That is very telling. I suspect that neither police departments nor Federal agencies like any stories about these devices and that they would prefer it if no one ever talked about them again; this would allow them to continue to use those devices with impunity.

Welcome to the United States, the land where you are guilty until proven innocent, provided the proof of your innocence hasn't been classified, in which case you are shit out of luck.

[Cail]

Most. Transparent. Administration. Evah.


Don't forget that.

[Rawedge Rim]

So is GW still the worst president after Carter?

[Cail]

So is GW still the worst president after Carter?

The two worst.

[Rawedge Rim]

So is GW still the worst president after Carter?

The two worst.

So you telling me you prefer Pres. Obama to Pres. GW?

[Cail]

So is GW still the worst president after Carter?

The two worst.

So you telling me you prefer Pres. Obama to Pres. GW?

Ohgoshno, I was being sarcastic.

Obama has hands-down been the worst president the country's had. Aside from the fact that he's become the president Nixon dreamed of being regarding how he and the media treat his political enemies (as in anyone who doesn't fall into line with him), he's a tone-deaf narcissist who tries to celebrate every decision he makes, no matter how idiotic it is. No shit, this idiot did a Rose Garden photo-op with a traitor's family after he traded 5 terrorist for their son. He literally thought that was a good idea (and probably that it would get the VA mess out of the news). He's also been completely inept in everything having to do with foreign policy. "Amateurish" doesn't even cover it, as an amateur would have gotten something right at some point.

People were fooled into voting for him the first time. People who voted for him the second time did so due to party affiliation or some other superficial reason. People who continue to support him are idiots.

[Avatar]

I dunno about the worst, but by no means the best.

To be honest, he was much more of a non-entity than I expected. Nothing much changed on average, some things maybe got a little better, some things got a little worse.

Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss. Personally? I think the two party system is screwing you guys. (Not that multi-party systems don't have their own problems, but at least it's diluted a bit. )

--A

[Hashi Lebwohl]

Personally? I think the two party system is screwing you guys.

I have been telling people that for years and it is often difficult for me to get anyone to listen. So many of my fellow citizens are so stubbornly set on having only two major parties that they cannot see that those two parties are really one and the same and that they do not have our best interests at heart. Typically the rebuttal is some form of "but if we have lots of parties we would wind up with coalition governments like many nations have"; my reply to this, though, is "how would a coalition be worse than what we have now? at least in a coalition your representative is actually more likely to listen to you" rather than being ignored, which is what we get from our current representation.

[Avatar]

Agreed.

Once you vote, they've got your power for the next X years and can do pretty much what they want with it.

--A

[Hashi Lebwohl]

A mixed bag here. One step forward....

In the United States, a federal appeals court has ruled law enforcement agencies must seek a court warrant to obtain the location data of U.S. cellphone users. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said warrantless tracking through cell tower locations marks a violation of privacy rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld warrantless cellular tracking last year, setting up a likely case before the Supreme Court.

...and one step backwards. *sigh* We will never progress towards freedom from governmental spying at this rate.

A new report reveals the Obama administration is pressing local police departments to conceal information about powerful surveillance technology they are using to vacuum up cellphone data from entire neighborhoods. The Associated Press reports the administration has taken the unusual step of interfering in routine state public records requests and criminal trials to prevent information about the technology from getting out. The secrecy surrounds equipment like "Stingray" spy devices, which trick cellphones into transmitting a user’s location and identifying information to police.

From what I heard elsewhere the Administration was using Marshals to seize records about Stingray activity as "part of sensitive and ongoing investigations", which means those records will probably be archived and/or destroyed so we cannot find what they are *really* using them for, which is keeping tabs on our phone conversations or phone activity.