Australia’s attorney-general has suggested that no warrants should be needed to access the nation’s planned trove of telecommunications metadata, because the data isn’t an invasion of privacy to rank with entering a home.
In a submission to the inquiry into Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014. the attorney-general’s department suggests that the process of obtaining a warrant would slow down investigations and that warrants therefore aren’t warranted.
The submissions contradicts conclusions reached by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, which last year recommended warrants before acces to the data.
Category: Spying
FBI Defuses Another Of Its Own Terrorist Plots; John Boehner Pretends It’s Evidence That We Need To Renew The PATRIOT Act
Last week, as you may have heard, the Justice Department breathlessly announced that it had uncovered and broken up a terrorist plot against the government, leading to the arrest of a 20 year-old man, Christopher Lee Cornell, in Ohio. According to the FBI, Cornell was planning to go to the US Capitol and kill government officials. As often happens with these kinds of announcements, the press was quick to jump in and fuel the narrative of some big terror plot that the FBI was able to miraculously disrupt at the last minute.
For years now, we’ve pointed out a pattern of how nearly every big headline about the US disrupting a domestic terrorist attack was almost always about the FBI creating its very own plot, and then pressuring and cajoling some vulnerable, poverty-stricken, desperate Muslim (almost always Muslim) young men into “joining” this plot. This happens despite those individuals rarely having expressed direct interest in any sort of terrorist activity, or having any connections or means to carry out such activity. But with continued pressure from “FBI informants” (who tend to either by paid by the FBI or are trying to reduce punishment for other crimes they’ve been charged with — or both), eventually these men agree to take part in a “plot” that was entirely designed by the FBI and had no chance of ever happening.
Increased gov spy powers are NOT the way to stay safe against terrorism
This really needs to be reiterated:
Riddle me this, May. Given that France not only operates a PRISM-like dragnet surveillance operation, but had the Charlie Hebdo murderers under surveillance until six months before the slaughter of the magazine’s cartoonists, would any of these new measures help stop terrorists in Blighty?
Of course, we all know the answer already: they wouldn’t. None of them would. This is a knee-jerk response to a problem which the government doesn’t know the answer to.
New Snowden Leak Reveals GCHQ Collected Emails Of Journalists At NYT, WaPo, Guardian, BBC And Elsewhere
GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.
Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.
Horace Edwards Snowden And Others For Billions Of Dollars Adds The United States As An Involuntary Plaintiff
Remember when former Kansas Secretary of Transportation Horace Edwards filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras and others connected to the CitizenFour documentary “on behalf of the American people?” And remember when plenty of American people said, “STFU Edwards, you don’t speak for me?”
Well, suck it, dissenters. Horace Edwards has other plans for you.
Horace Edwards, the retired naval officer who last month sued the makers and distributors of Citizenfour, has filed an amended complaint that names the “United States of America” as a putative involuntary plaintiff.
John Brennan Exonerates Himself
The outrageous whitewash issued yesterday by the CIA panel John Brennan hand-picked to lead the investigation into his agency’s spying on Senate staffers is being taken seriously by the elite Washington media, which is solemnly reporting that officials have been “cleared” of any “wrongdoing“.
But what the report really does is provide yet more evidence of Brennan’s extraordinary impunity.
The panel concluded that CIA officials acted reasonably by scouring Senate computer drives in early 2014 when faced with a “potential security breach”. (That “breach” had allowed Senate staffers investigating CIA torture to access, more than three years earlier, a handful of documents Brennan didn’t want them to see.)
But the CIA yesterday also released a redacted version of the full report of an earlier investigation by the CIA’s somewhat more independent inspector general’s office. And between the two reports, it is now more clear than ever that Brennan was the prime mover behind a hugely inappropriate assault on the constitutional separation of powers, and continues to get away with it.
David Cameron: I’m off to the US to get my bro Barack to ban crypto
UK Prime Minister David Cameron is hoping to gain the support of US President Barack Obama in his campaign-year crusade to outlaw encrypted communications his spies can’t break, sources claim.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Conservative Cameron would like to see left-leaning Obama publicly criticize major US internet companies like Facebook and Google, many of which have made strong encryption the default on their online services.
The President hasn’t taken a public position on the issue so far, but several prominent federal law enforcement officials have given internet firms lashings over their use of encryption tech, which they claim undermines national security interests.
Last September, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey went as far as to describe encrypted communications as “something expressly to allow people to place themselves above the law.”
NSA: SO SORRY we backed that borked crypto even after you spotted the backdoor
“With hindsight, NSA should have ceased supporting the Dual EC DRBG algorithm immediately after security researchers discovered the potential for a trapdoor. In truth, I can think of no better way to describe our failure to drop support for the Dual EC DRBG algorithm as anything other than regrettable,”
President Obama’s Plan For ‘Securing Cyberspace’ Has A Lot Of Problems
On Monday, President Obama gave a speech kicking off his big push on cybersecurity, with many of the details being released on Tuesday, and they don’t look very good. There are a lot of different pieces, but we’ll just highlight the two that concern us the most.
First up: information sharing/”cybersecurity.” The key issue here: is it the return of CISPA? CISPA, of course, is the cybersecurity “information sharing” bill that is introduced each year, but which is really about giving the NSA a tool to pressure companies into sharing their information (by granting immunity from liability to those companies). In 2012, President Obama rejected the CISPA approach as not having enough protections for privacy and civil liberties. And, indeed, contrary to what some have said, the official proposal is not “endorsing CISPA.” The approach is definitely more limited and the most major concern is addressed. Rather than giving the information to the NSA (or the FBI), Homeland Security gets it. DHS isn’t wonderful, but it’s better than the other two alternatives. Companies can still give the info to the NSA or FBI (or others), but won’t get full immunity from lawsuits if they do.
But, where the new proposal falls woefully short is in its lack of privacy protections. It basically handwaves its way through the privacy question, saying there will be guidelines, but the guidelines aren’t written yet, and they’re fairly important here.
PEN America: “The Harm Caused by Surveillance…is Unmistakable”
PEN America published a report this week summarizing the findings from a recent survey of 772 writers around the world on questions of surveillance and self-censorship. The report, entitled “Global Chilling: The Impact of Mass Surveillance on International Writers,” builds upon a late 2013 survey of more than 500 US-based writers conducted by the organization.
The latest survey found that writers living in liberal democratic countries “have begun to engage in self-censorship at levels approaching those seen in non-democratic countries, indicating that mass surveillance has badly shaken writers’ faith that democratic governments will respect their rights to privacy and freedom of expression, and that—because of pervasive surveillance—writers are concerned that expressing certain views even privately or researching certain topics may lead to negative consequences.”
Specifically, more than 1 in 3 writers living in “free” countries (as classified by watchdog Freedom House) stated that they had avoided speaking or writing on a particular topic since the Snowden revelations, and only seventeen percent of writers in these countries felt that the United States offers more protection for free speech than their countries. A whopping sixty percent of writers in Western Europe and fifty-seven percent in the remaining Five Eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK) think that US credibility “has been significantly damaged for the long term” by NSA spying.