Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours

David Miranda, partner of Guardian interviewer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, questioned under Terrorism Act

Glenn Greenwald: a failed attempt at intimidation

• Guardian staff
• The Guardian, Sunday 18 August 2013

Glenn Greenwald (right) and his partner David Miranda, who was held by UK authorities at Heathrow airport. Photograph: Janine Gibson

The partner of the Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency was held for almost nine hours on Sunday by UK authorities as he passed through London's Heathrow airport on his way home to Rio de Janeiro.
David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers at 8.05am and informed that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. The controversial law, which applies only at airports, ports and border areas, allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

The 28-year-old was held for nine hours, the maximum the law allows before officers must release or formally arrest the individual. According to official figures, most examinations under schedule 7 – over 97% – last less than an hour, and only one in 2,000 people detained are kept for more than six hours.
Miranda was released, but officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.Since 5 June, Greenwald has written a series of stories revealing the NSA's electronic surveillance programmes, detailed in thousands of files passed to him by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Guardian has also published a number of stories about blanket electronic surveillance by Britain's GCHQ, also based on documents from Snowden.

While in Berlin, Miranda had visited Laura Poitras, the US film-maker who has also been working on the Snowden files with Greenwald and the Guardian. The Guardian paid for Miranda's flights."This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," Greenwald said. "To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.

"But the last thing it will do is intimidate or deter us in any way from doing our job as journalists. Quite the contrary: it will only embolden us more to continue to report aggressively."A spokesperson for the Guardian said: "We were dismayed that the partner of a Guardian journalist who has been writing about the security services was detained for nearly nine hours while passing through Heathrow airport. We are urgently seeking clarification from the British authorities."

A spokesperson for Scotland Yard said: "At 08:05 on Sunday, 18 August a 28-year-old man was detained at Heathrow airport under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was not arrested. He was subsequently released at 17:00."Scotland Yard refused to be drawn on why Miranda was stopped using powers that enable police officers to stop and question travellers at UK ports and airports.

There was no comment from the Home Office in relation to the detention. However, there was surprise in political circles and elsewhere. Labour MP Tom Watson said he was shocked at the news and called for it to be made clear if any ministers were involved in authorising the detention.
He said: "It's almost impossible, even without full knowledge of the case, to conclude that Glenn Greenwald's partner was a terrorist suspect."I think that we need to know if any ministers knew about this decision, and exactly who authorised it."

"The clause in this act is not meant to be used as a catch-all that can be used in this way."
Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act has been widely criticised for giving police broad powers under the guise of anti-terror legislation to stop and search individuals without prior authorisation or reasonable suspicion – setting it apart from other police powers.

Those stopped have no automatic right to legal advice and it is a criminal offence to refuse to co-operate with questioning under schedule 7, which critics say is a curtailment of the right to silence.
Last month the UK government said it would reduce the maximum period of detention to six hours and promised a review of the operation on schedule 7 amid concerns it unfairly targets minority groups and gives individuals fewer legal protections than they would have if detained at a police station.

The government of Brazil issued a statement in which it expressed its "grave concern" over the detention of one of its citizens and the use of anti-terror legislation. It said: "This measure is without justification since it involves an individual against whom there are no charges that can legitimate the use of that legislation. The Brazilian government expects that incidents such as the one that happened to the Brazilian citizen today are not repeated."

Widney Brown, Amnesty International's senior director of international law and policy, said: "It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance.

"David's detention was unlawful and inexcusable. He was detained under a law that violates any principle of fairness and his detention shows how the law can be abused for petty, vindictive reasons.
"There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analysing the data released by Edward Snowden."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ained-heathrow

Amash Vows Renewed Effort To Stop The NSA

August 19, 2013 by Sam Rolley

Representative Justin Amash (R-Mich.) vowed over the weekend to revive a legislative attempt to block the National Security Agency from collecting American phone and Internet data en masse following the narrow defeat of a similar effort last month.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have another opportunity,” Amash said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It might not be exactly the same amendment.”

In the time since the first attempt to throttle the NSA was defeated, whistle-blower Edward Snowden has produced more leaks for journalists. His most recent, chronicled in a piece byThe Washington Post, details thousands of instances in which the NSA overstepped and abused its authority in violation of American privacy.

Because of the new information, Amash said he believes that many of his colleagues in the House would change their vote to give the measure a better chance of passing.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have a way to amend some kind of policy legislation in the future,” he said.

The Representative went on to say that a combination of new information and continued efforts by the Presidential Administration to disregard the privacy violations as a necessary evil in a post-9/11 America clearly indicate problems with the Nation’s surveillance apparatus.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have a way to amend some kind of policy legislation in the future,” he said.

Filed Under: Liberty News, Privacy, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/1...-stop-the-nsa/

Paul: Let SCOTUS Rule On NSA Constitutionality

August 20, 2013 by Sam Rolley

UPI FILE

Most people in the United States have a hard time believing that the National Security Agency reforms President Barack Obama announced earlier in the month or any number of Congressional inquiries will do anything to protect Americans’ privacy from government spies. So Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is proposing that the government system of checks and balances be used as it is designed, to allow for a Supreme Court review of the NSA’s tactics.

“I think the constitutionality of these programs needs to be questioned, and there needs to be a Supreme Court decision that looks at whether what they are doing is constitutional or not,” Paul said Sunday onFOX News.

Paul was speaking on the news network following The Washington Post’s publishing of a new Edward Snowden sourced report that detailed how the NSA breaks privacy rules and oversteps its legal authority thousands of times per year.

Paul contends that allowing NSA to operate in a manner that is totally unConstitutional evidences Obama’s lack of understanding of government checks and balances.

“The checks and balances are supposed to come from independent branches of government,” Paul said. “So he thinks that if gets some lawyers together from the NSA, and they do a powerpoint presentation and tell him everything’s ok, that the NSA can police itself.”

Furthermore, Paul said, the President and Congress cannot be trusted to fix the problem as long as they are deliberately misleading the public about the scope of the NSA programs.

“They chose not to report the program, period,” Paul said. “They said they weren’t looking at any American data or any phone calls, and it turns out they’re looking at billions of phone calls every day.”

Paul said that the only way to make sure the NSA doesn’t abuse its surveillance power is for a discussion led by people who are more skeptical of the NSA than the intelligence insiders currently acting as placebo watchdogs to take place before an open court. The Senator added that he thinks the Supreme Court would be the best option.

Filed Under: Conservative Politics, Liberty News, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/2...titutionality/

Electronic Frontier Foundation
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August 20, 2013 | By Hanni Fakhoury


Court Rules Accessing a Public Website Isn't A Crime, But Hiding Your IP Address Could Be



In the ongoing legal battle between craigslist and 3taps, a new court opinion makes clear that people are "authorized" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to access a public website. But what the court gave with one hand it took with the other, as it also ruled that sending a cease-and-desist letter and blocking an IP address is enough to "revoke" this authorization.
3taps collects real-estate data from craigslist and makes it available to other companies to use. One of those companies, Padmapper, republished craigslist apartment postings over a map to enable users to view apartment listings geographically, a feature then unavailable on the craigslist site. Craigslist's terms of service prohibits people from "scraping" or copying data from craigslist's site.
After learning about 3Taps and its clients, craigslist sent 3taps a cease-and-desist letter demanding they stop using craigslist data this way and then blocked 3taps' IP address from accessing the craigslist site. Ultimately, craigslist sued 3taps in federal court, arguing that 3taps had violated the CFAA. 3taps moved to dismiss the case, arguing that under the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in United States v. Nosal, 3taps could not be liable under the CFAA for violating craigslist's terms of service.
While the court agreed with 3taps on this point, it questioned whether the CFAA even protected information available on a publicly accessible website like craigslist in the first place. After the court agreed to accept additional briefing on this point, we along with a number of law professors, filed an amicus brief with the court urging it to rule that everyone is "authorized" to visit a public website under the CFAA.
Last week, the court ruled that this interpretation of the CFAA "makes sense," meaning that everyone starts out as "authorized" to access a publicly accessible website. But it found that, with respect to 3taps, craigslist had used its "power to revoke, on a case-by-case basis, the general permission it granted to the public to access the information on its website" by sending the cease and desist letter and blocking 3taps' IP address. The decision is certainly a mixed bag.
First the positive.
It is encouraging to see courts recognize that the CFAA—which creates both civil and criminal liability—doesn't criminalize accessing information from a publicly accessible website. The government used that precise theory to prosecute Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer for exposing an AT&T security flaw that publicly revealed thousands of customers' email addresses. The possibility of imposing CFAA liability on someone from using information made freely available on the web posed a major threat on the openness and innovation of the Internet.
Moreover, by focusing on the IP blocking, the court essentially agreed with the basic principle we've suggested as a means to limit the reach of the CFAA: that there must be circumvention of a technological barrier before a person can be found to have "accessed" information or data "without authorization." In fact one proposal to reform the CFAA currently before Congress, "Aaron's Law," defines "access without authorization" to mean precisely that: "knowingly circumventing one or more technological or physical measures that are designed to exclude or prevent unauthorized individuals from obtaining that information." The court adopted this idea in principle when it found that craigslist's CFAA claim was based on something more than violating the terms of service of a publicly accessible website, and indeed something more than the cease and desist letter alone.
Now for the troubling part of the court's opinion.
We believe that the CFAA requires hacking—doing something that breaches a technological barrier, like cracking a password or taking advantage of a SQL injection.
Changing your IP address is simply not hacking. That's because masking your IP address is an easy, common thing to do. And there's plenty of legitimate reasons to do so, whether its to protect your privacy, preserve innovation or avoid price discrimination. Plus, in the context of this case, craigslist's IP address blocking and cease-and-desist letter combined to essentially act as a "use" restriction. In other words, craigslist relied on these two things to enforce its terms of service upon 3taps.
There's a serious potential for mischief that is encouraged by this decision, as companies could arbitrarily decide whose authorization to "revoke" and need only write a letter and block an IP address to invoke the power of a felony criminal statute in what is, at best, a civil business dispute.
Hopefully future courts thinking about these issues can use the good aspects of this decision to recognize that violating a technological measure is necessary. But they need to think more critically about whether IP address blocking, even if coupled with a cease and desist letter, is enough for a CFAA violation.
Accessing a public website isn't a crime. Neither is hiding your online identity.





Computer Fraud And Abuse Act Reform

EFF Victory Results In Release Of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Opinion Finding NSA Surveillance UnConstitutional

August 21, 2013 by Electronic Frontier Foundation

In response to EFF’s FOIA lawsuit, the government has released the 2011 FISA court opinion ruling some NSA surveillance unConstitutional.

For almost two years, EFF has been fighting the government in Federal court to force the public release of an 86-page opinion of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). Issued in October 2011, the secret court’s opinion found that surveillance conducted by the NSA under the FISA Amendments Act was unConstitutional and violated “the spirit of”� Federal law.
Today, EFF can declare victory: a federal court ordered the government to release records in our litigation, the government has indicated it intends to release the opinion today, and ODNI has called a 3:00 ET press conference to discuss “issues” with FISA Amendments Act surveillance, which we assume will include a discussion of the opinion.
It remains to be seen how much of the opinion the government will actually make available to the public. President Obama has repeatedly said he welcomes a debate on the NSA’s surveillance: disclosing this opinion—and releasing enough of it so that citizens and advocates can intelligently debate the Constitutional violation that occurred—is a critical step in ensuring that an informed debate takes place.
Here are examples of documents previously released by the administration in response to our Freedom of Information Act request. Anything even resembling those “releases” would be utterly unacceptable today. But we’ve come a long way since then, it took filing a lawsuit; litigating (and winning) in the FISC itself; the unprecedented public release of information about NSA surveillance activities; and our continuing efforts to push the government in the district court for release of the opinion.
Release of the opinion today is just one step in advancing a public debate on the scope and legality of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs. EFF will keep fighting until the NSA’s domestic surveillance program is reined in, Federal surveillance laws are amended to prevent these kinds of abuse from happening in the future, and government officials are held accountable for their actions.

Filed Under: Courts, Liberty News, Privacy, Staff Reports


http://personalliberty.com/2013/08/2...onstitutional/

LIFE WITH BIG BROTHER

NSA 'goes after man who mocked agency'

'The only part of government that actually listens'

Published: 7 hours ago
Joe Kovacs



The NSA has claimed copyright infringement after a businessman created a parody version of the agency's logo.

The National Security Agency, the secretive federal department under fire for spying on U.S. citizens, is now accused of crushing the free-speech rights of a businessman clowning around about the NSA.

LibertyManiacs.com, a company that markets “freedom products for liberty lovers,” says the NSA is using a claim of copyright infringement to stop it from selling T-shirts and other products making fun of the Big Brother agency.
“Two months ago the NSA’s lawyers came after our parodies of the rogue agency and forced our host to take them down,” the company said Friday on its Facebook page.

At issue is use of the NSA logo, which was partially altered by LibertyManiacs owner Dan McCall. He kept the name of the agency and most of the artwork intact, but changed the bottom portion from “United States of America” to the laugh-inspiring “Peeping while you’re sleeping.”

Underneath the doctored logo is the phrase “The NSA, the only part of government that actually listens.”

In an interview with online journalist Ben Swann, McCall said, “I tried to visually take the most obvious direction at pointing at them that I could. It was their logo. I just tried to adulterate it a little bit and put a few jabs in there and that will be it. So it wasn’t a huge design coup and it did the job basically.”

After the shirt went on sale, the NSA sent a series of “cease and desist” orders in June, seeking to halt further sales of the items.

McCall commented at the time: “Well, on the positive side I could get the unenviable honorific of being ‘the 1st man to receive a cease and desist from the National Security Agency for telling a joke.’”



The NSA's real logo

The online retailer Zazzle.com subsequently yanked the shirt from its site, giving this explanation:

“Unfortunately, it appears that your product, The NSA, contains content that is in conflict with one or more of our acceptable content guidelines. We will be removing this product from the Zazzle Marketplace shortly.

“Policy Notes: Design contains an image or text that may infringe on intellectual property rights. We have been contacted by the intellectual property right holder and we will be removing your product from Zazzle’s Marketplace due to infringement claims.”

Zazzle’s Diana Adair told WND her company couldn’t comment on the specifics of this incident, but issued a prepared statement saying: “While Zazzle does not manually review all designs that are uploaded, when a product is brought to our attention that violates our terms of service, we take swift action to remove it. We encourage the Zazzle community to use our platform to share their creativity, and we ask that they continue to maintain an open dialogue with us to ensure Zazzle features only the highest quality merchandise for our customers.”

McCall told Swann it wasn’t just one NSA T-shirt that got the hook from Zazzle.
“In terms of shirts, two, and then maybe four or five bumper stickers,” he noted. “Basically anything remotely relating to the NSA was taken down. So I’m not sure if that was subsequently a blanket policy that Zazzle themselves put up because they don’t want to deal with the hassle and they didn’t want to spend time interpreting each thing knowing they would run into problems or if they were plugged into NSA legal and they were watching things as they go.”
He added the NSA’s action is clearly a violation of his First Amendment right to free speech.

“First Amendment issues affect everybody and it specifically affects everybody who is expressing themselves – any artist, whether on the right or on the left or in the middle or whatever side,” McCall told Swann. “If you are not allowed to express yourself artistically or in many other ways, we have taken a turn for the worse.”

In a video news report about the case, Swann admitted, “This is a story I had a hard time believing until I looked into it for myself.”

Video at the Page Link:

“What you need to know is that because the work put out by LibertyManiacs is clearly a parody, it is not copyright infringement,” he stressed. “According to both the Electronic Freedom Foundation and the American Bar Association, ‘parody is recognized as a type of fair use, like other commentary and criticism, and courts recognize that a parody must often take recognizable elements from the work it comments upon.’”

The case has also caught the attention of Mark Gibbs of Computerworld, who calls the NSA’s actions “monstrously wrong.”

“First of all I’m amazed that any U.S. government agency can get away with claiming violation of ‘their’ intellectual property rights when they are, in reality, part of us, and we the people, paid for said intellectual property. Sure, go after those ripoff artists in England or France should they dare to illegally use the hallowed logos of U.S. government agencies, but going after U.S. citizens for parody?” Gibbs noted.

“Second, I’m even more amazed that the NSA doesn’t recognize the inherent <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym></acronym> problem they have created by a bureaucratic response to something that, given the negative publicity they’re already receiving, can only make them look even more devious and manipulative than we now think they are, which is a brand new realization for most Americans.”

“Of course, even if in reality the NSA has no legal leg to stand on, it is the 800-pound gorilla and can flex its muscles for what is, with respect to its budget, a trivial cost,” he added.

At LibertyManiacs, McCall has referred to executives at the NSA as “jerks,” and he’s not backing down in his battle to sell his merchandise.

He is now marketing the censored shirts and related parody items through another online platform at Cafepress.

In an ironic twist, while the NSA is claiming copyright infringement, the agency itself is allegedly using without permission an image for its top-secret data-mining program known as PRISM.



The NSA's PRISM logo, shown here upside down for comparison to the image below.

As WND reported in June, PRISM, which stands for “protect, respond, inform, secure and monitor,” is the NSA’s massive spy program scouring email and phone records.

Its official logo has reportedly been purloined from Adam Hart-Davis, formerly of the BBC program “Tomorrow’s World.”

Adam’s son, Damon Hart-Davis, has said in the Register newspaper that the image is free for use, as long as there’s acknowledgment of the source and a link to the material online, neither of which have been provided by the NSA.



The original prism image by Adam Hart-Davis, formerly of the BBC.

Some Americans are taking to the Internet to say that federal and state government programs paid for by tax dollars are not subject to copyright.
“The U.S. government CANNOT claim copyright. Period,” said Steve Moody.

“Anything created by the U.S. government is automatically in the public domain.”

And Ron Lahti noted: “We all need to the raise the bullsh-t flag on this! The NSA is a ‘publicly funded’ government agency. How can they claim ‘copyright infringement?’ It’s like saying everyone who publishes or manufactures anything with any of our other federal ‘public’ government agency symbols is violating copyright laws. Are we going to have every manufacturer and retailer that makes or sells any of our T-shirts, hats, coffee mugs, bumper/window stickers, etc. that contains, for example, ‘U.S. Army’ or any other military-service logo, from making these products available just because they have an ‘official’ emblem that is also now ‘copyrighted’ with their design? This is beyond fringe lunacy and seems as the NSA is just grasping at straws, for whatever reason. This action by our government is obnoxiously outrageous, and is nothing more than an arrogantly suppressive strong-arm tactic to infringe on the rights and liberties of the American taxpaying people!”


http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/nsa-crush...h-on-t-shirts/

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Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/nsa-crush...SqvMUg45v5r.99

Great list of links AB, thanks!