Mass surveillance

The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever

What I showed those journalists was proof, in the form of the government’s own classified documents, that the self-described “Five Eyes”—the state security organs of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—had together conspired to weaken their laws. They had forced clandestine access to the networks of their largest telecommunications and internet titans (some of whom hadn't needed much in the way of arm-twisting) in pursuit of a single goal: the transformation of the free and fragmented internet into history’s first centralized means of global mass surveillance. This violation of our fundamental privacy occurred without our knowledge or consent, or even the knowledge and consent of our courts and most lawmakers.

Here’s the thing: Although the global response to this violation was furious, producing the largest intelligence scandal of the modern age, mass surveillance itself continues to work today, virtually unimpeded. Nearly everything you do, and nearly everyone you love, is being monitored and recorded by a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not.

Mass surveillance

National Security Surveillance on U.S. Soil Fell Amid Scrutiny of Russia Inquiry

The number of people targeted for court-approved surveillance by counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigators in 2019 plunged to its lowest level in at least seven years, a drop that coincided with intense scrutiny on the F.B.I.’s use of its national-security wiretapping power in the Trump-Russia investigation.

There were 1,059 such targets of wiretap and search warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, in 2019, according to a newly declassified report released on Thursday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The number of such FISA targets had been on an upward trend during the previous six years, when investigators used FISA to eavesdrop on an average of more than 1,500 people each year. 

Mass surveillance

The Facial Recognition Company That Scraped Facebook And Instagram Photos Is Developing Surveillance Cameras

Clearview AI, the secretive company that’s built a database of billions of photos scraped without permission from social media and the web, has been testing its facial recognition software on surveillance cameras and augmented reality glasses, according to documents seen by BuzzFeed News.

Clearview, which claims its software can match a picture of any individual to photos of them that have been posted online, has quietly been working on a surveillance camera with facial recognition capabilities. That device is being developed under a division called Insight Camera, which has been tested by at least two potential clients according to documents.

On its website — which was taken offline after BuzzFeed News requested comment from a Clearview spokesperson — Insight said it offers “the smartest security camera” that is “now in limited preview to select retail, banking and residential buildings.”

Mass surveillance

Why Does DARPA Want To Turn Earth’s Atmosphere Into a Surveillance Sensor?

DARPA, the Pentagon’s pet research agency, says the Atmosphere as a Sensor (AtmoSense) program is meant to detect natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and asteroid strikes. But DARPA is a military research organization, which raises the question of what else this research can be used for.

The theory behind AtmoSense is that natural events occur that aren’t detected because there is no continuous global surveillance system to spot them. Nonetheless, the energy of an earthquake leaves telltale signs in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“It’s well known that energy propagates from the Earth’s surface to the ionosphere, but the specifics of how that happens is not currently known enough to use the atmosphere as a sensor,” according to a DARPA press release. “Scientific literature has clearly documented that events like thunderstorms, tornadoes, volcanos, and tsunamis make big ‘three-dimensional wakes; that propagate to the upper reaches of the ionosphere and leave a mark there. Since that energy traverses several other layers of the atmosphere—the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere—on its way up to the ionosphere, the idea is to try and identify the disturbances the “wake” is making along its way to see if researchers can capture information to indicate what type of event caused it.

Mass surveillance

Coronavirus could be a ‘catalyst’ for China to boost its mass surveillance machine, experts say

China could use the coronavirus outbreak to boost its mass surveillance capabilities as it looks to technology to help contain the epidemic in the world’s second-largest economy.

The Communist Party has built a vast surveillance state through different methods with technology at its core.

As artificial intelligence and the use of data becomes more advanced, Beijing has found increasingly effective ways to track the Chinese population, including facial recognition.

China is trying to control the spread of the spread of the virus, believed to have first emerged from Wuhan city in Hubei province, which has already killed at least 2,500 people in the mainland.

With over 77,000 coronavirus cases confirmed in China alone, the government has mobilized its surveillance machine, a move experts said could continue even after the virus has been contained.
Drones and QR codes

Beyond using facial recognition to track people, China is also utilizing novel methods based on existing technology.

For example, Chinese state-backed publication Global Times posted a video on Twitter showing a drone with a camera telling people to wear masks.

Mass surveillance

Judge orders MI5 not to delete databanks before end of surveillance trial

MI5 has been ordered by a senior judge not to delete vast databanks of personal information it is storing pending the outcome of a trial over the legality of its surveillance procedures.

Lord Justice Singh, the president of the investigatory powers tribunal (IPT), delivered a sharp rebuke to lawyers for MI5 who questioned the feasibility of his legal directive.

“This is an order of a judicial tribunal,” Singh said. “If it turns out the respondents [MI5] have breached the orders of the tribunal that will have consequences.”

The IPT hears complaints about the operation of the intelligence services.

The sharp exchange between the judge and MI5’s lawyers came at the end of an opening hearing into a joint-claim by the human rights groups Liberty and Privacy International. Both have called for interception warrants obtained unlawfully by MI5 to be quashed.

Mass surveillance

The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans

“When the government tracks the location of a cellphone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” wrote John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, in a 2018 ruling that prevented the government from obtaining location data from cellphone towers without a warrant.

“We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the decision, Carpenter v. United States.

With that judicial intent in mind, it is alarming to read a new report in The Wall Street Journal that found the Trump administration “has bought access to a commercial database that maps the movements of millions of cellphones in America and is using it for immigration and border enforcement.”

Mass surveillance

Coronavirus brings China's surveillance state out of the shadows

...Chinese have long been aware that they are tracked by the world’s most sophisticated system of electronic surveillance. The coronavirus emergency has brought some of that technology out of the shadows, providing the authorities with a justification for sweeping methods of high tech social control.
Artificial intelligence and security camera companies boast that their systems can scan the streets for people with even low-grade fevers, recognize their faces even if they are wearing masks and report them to the authorities.

If a coronavirus patient boards a train, the railway’s “real name” system can provide a list of people sitting nearby.

Mobile phone apps can tell users if they have been on a flight or a train with a known coronavirus carrier, and maps can show them locations of buildings where infected patients live.

Although there has been some anonymous grumbling on social media, for now Chinese citizens seem to be accepting the extra intrusion, or even embracing it, as a means to combat the health emergency.

Mass surveillance

These activists use makeup to defy mass surveillance

Anyone who happened to be loitering in the London borough of Greenwich on the evening of 16 January may have spotted a strange sight. Ten or so individuals, faces daubed in brightly painted patterns, winding their way in complete silence through rain-slicked streets, passing the borough’s sleek residential new-builds and empty redevelopment sites.

But this wasn’t some London-based subset of juggalos. This was the monthly outing of the Dazzle Club, a collective of artists using anti-facial recognition paint and choreographed walks to explore surveillance and public space in the 21st century. And I was along for the ride.

The Dazzle Club is a relatively new project, albeit one that’s already attracted an intense amount of interest, thanks to sitting at a particularly hot-button intersection of art, politics and activism. It’s a collaboration between two different collectives and formed by four founding artists, Emily Roderick, Georgina Rowlands, Anna Hart and Evie Price. As a duo, Emily and Georgina focus on performance-based work and curation questioning surveillance politics and cyber-feminist theory under the name Yoke Collective. Anna and Evie represent Air, a more sprawling group of artists who explore existence in the everyday and the concept of being ‘public’.

Mass surveillance

The Surveillance State Quietly Lost a Major Court Case

Republicans are publicly howling at the U.S. surveillance panopticon now that it ensnared Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. But it’s hard to believe they’ll do much to actually constrain it. When they controlled Congress, whatever Trump-prompted hesitancy Republicans had about the government’s broadest and most intrusive activities dissolved when it was time to renew the authorities underlying them for another five years. They joined congressional Democrats in resurrecting those authorities, continuing an act of genuine bipartisanship that ravenously eats away at Americans’ freedom.

Relief may come instead from the courts. A little-noticed ruling earlier this month from a federal appellate court took a modest step toward curbing the FBI’s practice of searching—warrantless—for Americans’ data inside the National Security Agency’s dragnets ostensibly aimed at foreigners. Congress may be disinclined to close what’s known as the “backdoor search provision,” but there’s a renewed chance the courts might.

Mass surveillance

Spy Agencies Stopped Collecting GPS, Phone Location Data Last Year

The intelligence community no longer collects cell phone location or GPS data under the law used to justify spy agencies’ bulk surveillance programs, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a letter to a lawmaker.

The disclosure comes as lawmakers decide whether to reauthorize the law—Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act—which is set to expire on Dec. 15.

For years, the government relied on Section 215 to conduct a number of sweeping data collection operations under the guise of fighting terrorism. Among other surveillance efforts, the measure permitted the intelligence community to sweep up “cell-site location information” and other geolocation data from individuals’ cell phones, giving the government an intimate view into the movements of an untold number of Americans.

But on Thursday, the ODNI confirmed agencies stopped collecting cell phone location data last year after the Supreme Court limited the practice by law enforcement agencies. In the 2018 Carpenter v. United States case, the court ruled that in criminal investigations, the government must obtain a warrant to collect more than a week’s worth of cell phone location data.

Mass surveillance

A DECLASSIFIED COURT RULING SHOWS HOW THE FBI ABUSED NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE DATA


THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE Surveillance Court found that the FBI may have violated the rights of potentially millions of Americans — including its own agents and informants — by improperly searching through information obtained by the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program.

U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg, who serves in the District of Columbia and the FISA court, made his sweeping and condemnatory assessment in October 2018 in a 138-page ruling, which was declassified by the U.S. government this week.

To longtime critics of the government’s mass surveillance program, the FBI’s abuses are confirmation that federal law enforcement agents are combing through the communications of Americans without warrants, in violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

“These opinions reveal devastating problems with the FBI’s backdoor searches, which often resembled fishing expeditions through Americans’ personal emails and online messages,” said Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “But the court did not go nearly far enough to fix those abuses. The Constitution requires FBI agents to get a warrant before they go combing through our sensitive communications.”

Mass surveillance

Giving Government Permanent Authority To Spy on Everyone in America

While most of us have been thinking about the end of summer and while the political class frets over the Democratic presidential debates and the aborted visit of two members of Congress to Israel, the Trump administration has quietly moved to extend and make permanent the government’s authority to spy on all persons in America.

The president, never at a loss for words, must have been asked by the intelligence community he once reviled not to address these matters in public.

These matters include the very means and the very secret court about which he complained loud and long during the Mueller investigation. Now, he wants to be able to unleash permanently on all of us the evils he claims were visited upon him by the Obama-era FBI and by his own FBI. What’s going on?

Here is the backstory.

After the lawlessness of Watergate had been exposed – a president spying on his political adversaries without warrants in the name of national security – Congress enacted in 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It prescribed a means for surveillance other than that which the Constitution requires.

Mass surveillance

Government Surveillance Of Political Activists Is Scary, Illegal, And Common

In the early years of the Obama administration, newly formed conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status were subjected to lengthy delays and inappropriate demands for information, preventing the Tea Party from operating at full strength.

Then there was the John Doe fiasco in Wisconsin, which saw conservative activists subjected to pre-dawn police raids as part of a sprawling investigation ultimately shut down by the state supreme court. Even when a group is not charged with violating the law, constantly being watched and hassled by the government takes a heavy toll.

More recently, conservatives and libertarians have criticized states like California for demanding nonprofits turn over supporters’ names and addresses as a precondition for fundraising in the state. A lawsuit against California revealed that the state had carelessly put the private information of Americans who donated to any registered charity online, without password protection. That means not just rogue bureaucrats but private parties, or even foreign entities, could surveil and harass Americans who support certain causes.

If there is a silver lining, it is that as the government continues to overreach, more people become aware of the dangers of surveilling political advocacy. Now many left-leaning groups are also speaking out against government harassment, in response to U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) clumsy efforts to track and monitor activists, attorneys, and journalists at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Mass surveillance

NSA 'unmasking' of American surveillance targets peaked in 2018, new report says

The National Security Agency shared the names of almost 17,000 US residents whose data was slurped up under FISA surveillance with other federal agencies in 2018, which makes a 75 percent increase in so-called “unmaskings.”

Names of people or entities caught in the NSA’s electronic dragnet are normally redacted in intelligence reports to protect their privacy from being violated further, unless requested by other federal agencies. It is illegal to unmask individuals for political purposes or to leak classified information, or for any other reason aside from “national security” – though this rationale has proven extremely flexible in the past.

The explosion in privacy violations in 2018 was for our own good, according to Alex Joel, head of civil liberties and transparency at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the report. Joel said the agencies requesting the unmasking were just trying to find out who had been victimized by foreign intelligence agencies’ cyberattacks.

FISA surveillance is a beloved technique of intelligence agencies because it doesn’t require individual warrants to collect massive amounts of data on the communications of American citizens. While FISA was originally designed to collect foreign intelligence information – hence the “Foreign” in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – targeting international calls and emails from individuals believed to be security threats, like much else in the national security apparatus it has also ensnared hundreds of thousands of Americans. This allegedly includes President Donald Trump, who accused his predecessor Barack Obama of using FISA to spy on his campaign during the 2016 election.

Mass surveillance

NSA recommends dropping controversial mass surveillance program, report says

The National Security Agency has reportedly recommended that the White House abandon a controversial surveillance program that collects vast amounts of information about Americans' phone calls and text messages, claiming the legal and logistical burdens of maintaining it outweigh its benefits to the intelligence community.

The recommendation, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal and involved input from NSA, the FBI and the Department of Justice, appears to represent an about-face regarding a program – long criticized by privacy advocates – that federal officials previously said was vital to finding and disrupting terrorist plots against the United States.

The once-secret program known as Stellarwind, which was revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and has been seen as not viable for some time now, is now seen as something that provides limited intelligence to the U.S., according to the Journal.

Mass surveillance

DEA Never Checked If Its Massive Surveillance Operations Are Legal, Watchdog Says

The Drug Enforcement Administration skirted numerous legal checks on a trio of bulk data collection programs dating back to the early 1990s, according to an internal watchdog.

In a heavily redacted, 144-page report published Thursday, the Justice Department Inspector General revealed the administration failed to fully assess the legal basis for three massive international surveillance operations that ran largely unchecked from 1992 to 2013. Two of the programs remain active in some form today.

Under one initiative, which investigators called “Program A,” the administration used “non-target specific” subpoenas to force multiple telecom providers to provide metadata on every phone call made from the U.S. to as many as 116 countries with “a nexus to drugs.” Investigators found some companies also provided the officials with data on all calls made between those foreign countries.

The administration also conducted two other bulk surveillance programs during that time without assessing their legality, investigators found. Under “Program B,” officials used similarly sweeping subpoenas to collect information on anyone who purchased specific products from participating vendors. Through “Program C,” DEA purchased telephone metadata for targets of ongoing investigations through a contractor for a separate government agency.

Mass surveillance

Time to revisit cyber mass surveillance - Simon Bridges

Simon Bridges says it might be time to revisit an internet surveillance programme canned by the previous National-led Government.

Project Speargun, publicly revealed by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2014, was cancelled in 2013 according to then-Prime Minister John Key for being too intrusive.

"It was set too broadly," he told NZME in 2017. "What we ultimately did, when it comes to Speargun, in my opinion, I said it's set too far. I don't even want to see the business case."

Snowden claimed Project Speargun would have allowed the Government to tap into New Zealanders' communications.

Bridges, current National Party leader, has called for a royal commission of inquiry into the security and intelligence failings that allowed a white supremacist to amass an arsenal and shoot 100 people in Christchurch earlier this month, killing 50 of them. The alleged gunman wasn't on any watchlists here or in his native Australia.

Mass surveillance

Snowden warns Israelis of dangers of state surveillance

US  whistle-blower Edward Snowden urged Israelis to be on guard against heavy-handed government and private surveillance in a speech on Tuesday.

Snowden, a former government contractor, blew the lid off the United States' vast surveillance programme in 2013, triggering an international debate on the mass spying by governments.

The US whistleblower highlighted Israel's hi-tech capabilities but warned that accepting too much government surveillance and too easily acceding to the argument that it is needed for security reasons posed serious risks.

"If we can allow ourselves to be terrorised by someone with nothing but a knife, to reorder our societies for the convenience of state power ... we've stopped being citizens and we've started being subjects," said Snowden, who spoke via video link from an undisclosed location in Moscow.

Mass surveillance

European court rules against Britain over mass surveillance

Britain's mass surveillance programme has violated people's right to privacy, Europe's human rightscourt ruled on Thursday.

Judges voted six to one the effort by its intelligence agency GCHQ for obtaining data from communications providers was "not in accordance with the law", and there were "insufficient safeguards in respect of confidential journalistic material".

They also voted by five to two the mass trawling for information violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteeing the right to privacy.

The GCHQ programme was revealed by American whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) operative, as part of his sensational leaks on US spying.

The UK case, brought by civil liberties, human rights and journalism groups and campaigners, challenged British surveillance and intelligence-sharing practices revealed by Snowden.