tagged w/ Wiretapping
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A Mississippi woman has sued Facebook in federal court, accusing it of violating federal wiretap laws to track her online activity, even when she wasn't logged onto the site.
Facebook denies the allegations, but it has conceded in the past that it inadvertently tracked users through so-called cookies -- small files a website sends to your computer when you visit. It has said it fixed the problem before the Mississippi suit was filed.
"Leading up to September 23, 2011, Facebook tracked, collected, and stored its users' wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to portions of their Internet browsing history even when the users were not logged-in to Facebook," reads the complaint by Brooke Rutledge of Lafayette County, Miss. "Plaintiff did not give consent or otherwise authorize Facebook to intercept, track, collect, and store her wire or electronic communications, including but not limited to her Internet browsing history when not logged-in to Facebook."
It is not the first lawsuit of its kind (there are suits in Kansas, Kentucky and Louisiana), and Facebook is not the only large company to be accused of violating visitors' privacy. But the issue has spread since Faceook's Mark Zuckerberg introduced the site's new Timeline and Ticker features in September. "All your stories, all your apps, a new way to express who you are," he said at the introduction.
Oleksiy Maksymenko/Getty ImagesA Mississippi woman has sued Facebook in... View Full Size Oleksiy Maksymenko/Getty ImagesA Mississippi woman has sued Facebook in federal court, accusing it of violating federal wiretap laws to track her online activity, even when she wasn't logged onto the site.A Mississippi woman has sued Facebook in federal court, accusing it of violating... more
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The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat a hasty retreat from its earlier proposal to require providers of encrypted communications services to include a backdoor for law enforcement wiretaps.
FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni told Congress that new ways of communicating online could cause problems for law enforcement officials, but categorically stated that the bureau is no longer pushing to force companies like RIM, which offers encrypted e-mail for business and government customers, to engineer holes in their systems so the FBI can see the plaintext of a communication upon court order.
“Addressing the Going Dark problem does not require fundamental changes in encryption
technology,” Caproni said in her written testimony (.pdf). “We understand that there are situations in which encryption will require law enforcement to develop individualized solutions.”
(“Going Dark” is the FBI’s codename for its multimillion-dollar project to extend its ability to wiretap communications as they happen.)
That’s a far cry from what Caproni told The New York Times last fall:
“No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a U.S. court order,” Ms. Caproni said. “They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.”
Those remarks indicated the FBI seemed to want to revisit the encryption wars of the 1990s. That largely ended with the government scrapping its plans to mandate backdoors in encryption, after security researchers discovered flaws in the idea, and the National Research Council concluded that strong encryption made the country safer.
But that retreat didn’t satisfy Susan Landau, a privacy and cryptography expert who testified alongside Caproni in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee Thursday.
That’s because the FBI is still pushing for more online-communications companies to build real-time spying capabilities into their software, which Landau said will harm innovation and introduce security flaws that will be used against American companies, government agencies and citizens.
Innovation happens too fast on the internet to require companies that provide chat and voice-calling capabilities, which these days includes online games, social networking sites and a myriad of online chat and photo-sharing services, to comply with detailed wiretapping specifications that cost hundreds of dollars just to read, according to Landau.
“Requiring that internet applications with communications systems — [which] means anything from speak-to-tweet to Second Life to software supporting music-jam sessions — be vetted first will put American innovation at a global disadvantage,” Landau said. “For American competitiveness it is critical that we preserve the ease and speed with which innovative new communications technologies can be developed.”
And she added the wiretapping holes are serious security risks.
“Building wiretapping into communications infrastructure creates serious risk that the communications system will be subverted either by trusted insiders or skilled outsiders, including foreign governments, hackers, identity thieves and perpetrators of economic espionage,” Landau said in her written testimony (.pdf), pointing to incidents in Greece, Italy and the United States where equipment built to comply with U.S. wiretapping rules were subverted. Those rules, known as CALEA, were enacted in 1994 to require phone companies to engineer their networks to be wiretap-compliant. The rules were expanded by the FCC in the George W. Bush Administration to apply to ISPs as well.
The FBI’s further push for expanded powers to wiretap online communications in real time comes against the backdrop of revolutions in the Middle East that relied heavily on social media communication tools and as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for worldwide internet freedom.
“I urge countries everywhere to join the United States in our bet that an open internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries,” Clinton said Tuesday, speaking at George Washington University.
But Caproni argued that law enforcement officials are occasionally running into cases where criminals are using online communication tools that aren’t wiretappable in real-time, because the provider had not built-in that capability. Caproni did not mention that the FBI has not encountered a single case of encryption hampering its criminal investigations for the past four years, according to reports to Congress, nor that the FBI has never run into a single case over the last 10 years where it could not get the plaintext of a target’s communications.
Landau told Congress the FBI was overlooking some very good news.
“While there is a genuine problem with intercepting some communications, the FBI now has access to more
communications, and more metadata about communications, than ever before in history,” Landau said.
But Caproni said that’s not enough and the FBI needs to find new technical solutions — though she did add that the Obama administration has no “formal position at this time” about needed changes to the law.
But she warned Congress that the country was in danger from a surveillance gap.
“As the gap between authority and capability widens, the government is increasingly unable to collect valuable evidence in cases ranging from child exploitation and pornography to organized crime and drug trafficking to terrorism and espionage –- evidence that a court has authorized the government to collect,” Caproni said. “This gap poses a growing threat to public safety.”
Also on Thursday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation released some government documents about the FBI’s so-called Going Dark program, which it got under the Freedom of Information Act. Those documents show the project dates to 2006, and that the FBI had hired high-powered consultants from the Rand Corporation and Booz Allen Hamilton to help come up with solutions.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/02/fbi-backdoors/The FBI pushed Thursday for more built-in backdoors for online communication, but beat... more
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As Sweden battles for the extradition of Julian Assange, Wikileaks cables on the country's close cooperation with the U.S. are provoking a public backlash. The text revealed Washington's push to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country can be intercepted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTAbgAMrXnU&feature=player_embeddedAs Sweden battles for the extradition of Julian Assange, Wikileaks cables on the... more
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WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy Newspapers.
That assertion was revealed - perhaps inadvertently - by the department in its response to a McClatchy Newspapers request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.
Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.
The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush administration's war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/11/2062565/justice-department-assertion-fbi.html#ixzz1Dqssu5GNWASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the... more
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http://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2011/01/13/11/judge01-13-11.slideshow_main.prod_affiliate.91.jpg
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration's Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.
That assertion was revealed — perhaps inadvertently — by the department in its response to a McClatchy request for a copy of a secret Justice Department memo.
Critics say the legal position is flawed and creates a potential loophole that could lead to a repeat of FBI abuses that were supposed to have been stopped in 2006.
The controversy over the telephone records is a legacy of the Bush administration's war on terror. Critics say the Obama administration appears to be continuing many of the most controversial tactics of that strategy, including the assertion of sweeping executive powers.
For years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI sought and obtained thousands of telephone records for international calls in an attempt to thwart potential terrorists.
The bureau devised an informal system of requesting the records from three telecommunications firms to create what one agent called a "phone database on steroids" that included names, addresses, length of service and billing information.
A federal watchdog later said a "casual" environment developed in which FBI agents and employees of the telecom companies treated Americans' telephone records so cavalierly that one senior FBI counter-terrorism official said getting access to them was as easy as "having an ATM in your living room."
In January 2010, McClatchy asked for a copy of the Office of Legal Counsel memo under open records laws after a reference to it appeared in a heavily excised section of a report on how the FBI abused its powers when seeking telephone records.
In the report, the Justice Department's inspector general said "the OLC agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a qualifying emergency."
In its cover letter to McClatchy, however, the OLC disclosed more detail about its legal position, specifying a section of a 1978 federal wiretapping law that the Justice Department believes gives the FBI the authority. That section of the law appears to be what was redacted from the inspector general's report and reveals the type of records the FBI would be seeking, experts said.
"This is the answer to a mystery that has puzzled us for more than a year now," said Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney and expert on electronic surveillance and national security laws for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"Now, 30 years later, the FBI has looked at this provision again and decided that it is an enormous loophole that allows them to ask for, and the phone companies to hand over, records related to international or foreign communications," he said. "Apparently, they've decided that this provision means that your international communications are a privacy-free zone and that they can get records of those communications without any legal process."
That interpretation could be stretched to apply to e-mails as well, he said.
However, Bankston said, even if the law allows the FBI to ask for the records — an assertion he disagrees with — it would prohibit the telecommunication companies from handing them over.
Meanwhile, the refusal to provide to McClatchy a copy of the memo is noteworthy because the Obama administration — in particular the OLC — has sought to portray itself as more open than the Bush administration. The decision not to release the memo means the details of the Justice Department's legal arguments in support of the FBI's controversial and discredited efforts to obtain telephone records will be kept from the public.
The FBI and Justice Department have refused to comment on the matter.
For years, the Bush administration had refused to release the memos that provided the legal underpinning for harsh interrogations of overseas terror suspects, citing national security, attorney-client privilege and the need to protect the government's deliberative process.
In April 2009, the Obama administration released four of the Bush-era memos that detailed many of the controversial interrogation methods secretly authorized by the Bush administration — from waterboarding to confining prisoners in boxes with insects.
Experts that track government spying and the Freedom of Information Act said the refusal to release the FBI memo to McClatchy appears to be improper and contrary to the intent of FOIA.
Since the memo appears to be exclusively on the OLC's legal justification for getting the phone records, the Justice Department should be able to release at least portions of it, experts said.
"It's wrong that they're withholding a legal rationale that has to do with the authorities of the FBI to collect information that affects the rights of American citizens here and abroad," said Michael German, a former FBI agent of 16 years who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union. "The law should never be secret. We should all understand what rules we're operating under and particularly when it comes to an agency that has a long history of abuse in its collection activities."
Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., demanded more than a year ago that Attorney General Eric Holder release a copy of the memo.
The Justice Department has responded, Wyden said this week, but he declined to elaborate on the exchange.
"I do think the level of secrecy that surrounds the executive branch's interpretation of important surveillance law is a serious problem," he told McClatchy, "and I am continuing to press the executive branch to disclose more information to the public about what their government thinks the law means."
When President Barack Obama authorized the release of the interrogation memos, he said at the time that he was compelled to release them in part because of an open records lawsuit by the ACLU.
"While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security," he said.
Obama said he'd concluded the documents could be released because they wouldn't jeopardize national security and because the interrogation techniques described in the memos had been widely reported. By then, the practices were no longer in use.
The FBI's activities discussed in the most recent and still secret OLC memo also have been widely publicized. An inspector general report that revealed the existence of the FBI memo was one in a series on the FBI's informal handling of telephone records and it concluded the bureau had committed egregious violations of the law.
When revealing the existence of the OLC memo, the inspector general described it as having "significant policy implications that need to be considered by the FBI, the Department, and the Congress."
Since 2006, it appears the bureau has refrained from using the authority it continues to assert, according to another heavily redacted section of the inspector general's report.
"However, that could change, and we believe appropriate controls on such authority should be considered now, in light of the FBI's past practices and the OLC opinion," the inspector general warned.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/02/11/108562/obama-assertion-fbi-can-get-phone.html#ixzz0IIBmvV6Lhttp://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2011/01/13/11/judge01-13-11.slideshow_main.prod_aff... more
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Talk about money going down the drain... make sure you check out the New York Times link included in this article.
Article:
"An Obama administration taskforce is seeking to overhaul a federal law requiring telephone and broadband carriers to ensure their networks can be wiretapped, The New York Times reported Tuesday (link).
Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the FBI and other federal agencies told the Times tougher legislation was necessary because some telecommunications firms have launched new services and system upgrades that impede surveillance.
As part of their draft legislation to expand and strengthen the 1994 law, the officials want more legal incentives and penalties to push AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other carriers to make sure any changes to their networks will not disrupt efforts to conduct wiretaps, the report added.
According to the Times, President Barack Obama's administration intends to submit a package of draft legislation to Congress next year. Citing officials familiar with the deliberations, it noted there was still no agreement over the details.
Officials cited two previously undisclosed episodes during which major carriers struggled for weeks or months when they tried to comply with court-approved wiretap orders in criminal or terrorism investigations.
Story continues below...
The newspaper said the FBI spends about 20 million dollars a year on efforts to help companies fix such problems.
Last month, the Times reported that the White House is also pushing to require all online services that enable communications -- such as Gmail, Facebook, BlackBerry and Skype -- to be technically capable of complying with a wiretap order, bringing them under the law's mandate for the first time.
Among proposals floated by the Obama administration, one would increase the likelihood that a firm would pay a fine for wiretapping lapses, while another would create incentives for companies to show new systems to the FBI before implementing them, the Times said."
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/10/ease-telecom-wiretapping-report/Talk about money going down the drain... make sure you check out the New York Times... more
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WASHINGTON — Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.
The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.
An Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the F.B.I. and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that says telephone and broadband companies must design their services so that they can begin conducting surveillance of a target immediately after being presented with a court order.
There is not yet agreement over the details, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, but they said the administration intends to submit a package to Congress next year.
Albert Gidari Jr., a lawyer who represents telecommunications firms, said corporations were likely to object to increased government intervention in the design or launch of services. Such a change, he said, could have major repercussions for industry innovation, costs and competitiveness.
“The government’s answer is ‘don’t deploy the new services — wait until the government catches up,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now.”
To bolster their case that telecom companies should face greater pressure to stay compliant, security agencies are citing two previously undisclosed episodes in which investigators were stymied from carrying out court-approved surveillance for weeks or even months because of technical problems with two major carriers.
The disclosure that the administration is seeking ways to increase the government’s leverage over carriers already subject to the 1994 law comes less than a month after The New York Times reported on a related part of the effort: a plan to bring Internet companies that enable communications — like Gmail, Facebook, Blackberry and Skype — under the law’s mandates for the first time, a demand that would require major changes to some services’ technical designs and business models.
The push to expand and the 1994 law is the latest example of a dilemma over how to balance Internet freedom with security needs in an era of rapidly evolving — and globalized — technology. The issue has added importance because the surveillance technologies developed by the United States to hunt for terrorists and drug traffickers can be also used by repressive regimes to hunt for political dissidents.
An F.B.I. spokesman said the bureau would not comment about the telecom proposal, citing the sensitivity of internal deliberations. But last month, in response to questions about the Internet communications services proposal, Valerie E. Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, emphasized that the government was seeking only to prevent its surveillance power from eroding.
Starting in late 2008 and lasting into 2009, another law enforcement official said, a “major” communications carrier was unable to carry out more than 100 court wiretap orders. The initial interruptions lasted eight months, the official said, and a second lapse lasted nine days.
This year, another major carrier experienced interruptions ranging from nine days to six weeks and was unable to comply with 14 wiretap orders. Its interception system “works sporadically and typically fails when the carrier makes any upgrade to its network,” the official said.
In both cases, the F.B.I. sent engineers to help the companies fix the problems. The bureau spends about $20 million a year on such efforts.
The official declined to name the companies, saying it would be unwise to advertise which networks have problems or to risk damaging the cooperative relationships the government has with them. For similar reasons, the government has not sought to penalize carriers over wiretapping problems.
Under current law, if a carrier meets the industry-set standard for compliance — providing the content of a call or e-mail, along with identifying information like its recipient, time and location — it achieves “safe harbor” and cannot be fined. If the company fails to meet the standard, it can be fined by a judge or the Federal Communication Commission.
But in practice, law enforcement officials say, neither option is ever invoked. When problems come to light, officials are reluctant to make formal complaints against companies because their overriding goal is to work with their technicians to fix the problem.
That dynamic can create an incentive to let problems linger: Once a carrier’s interception capability is restored — even if it was fixed at taxpayer expense — its service is compliant again with the 1994 law, so the issue is moot.
The F.C.C. also moves slowly, officials complain, in handling disputes over the “safe harbor” standard. For example, in 2007 the F.B.I. asked for more than a dozen changes, like adding a mandate to turn over additional details about cellphone locations. The F.C.C. has still not acted on that petition.
Civil liberties groups contend that the agency has been far too willing on other occasions to expand the reach of the 1994 law.
“We think that the F.C.C. has already conceded too much to the bureau,” said Marc Rotenberg, the president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “The F.B.I.’s ability to have such broad reach over technical standard-setting was never anticipated in the 1994 act.”
The Obama administration is circulating several ideas for legislation that would increase the government’s leverage over carriers, officials familiar with the deliberations say.
One proposal is to increase the likelihood that a firm pays a financial penalty over wiretapping lapses — like imposing retroactive fines after problems are fixed, or billing companies for the cost of government technicians that were brought in to help.
Another proposal would create an incentive for companies to show new systems to the F.B.I. before deployment. Under the plan, an agreement with the bureau certifying that the system is acceptable would be an alternative “safe harbor,” ensuring the firm could not be fined.
The proposal may also modify how the “safe harbor” standard is established. Five years ago, the F.B.I. drafted legislation that would have given the Justice Department greater power over the standard while requiring the F.C.C. to act more quickly on petitions. That bill, however, was not ultimately filed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/us/19wiretap.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1WASHINGTON — Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in... more
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Your Golden Hero wants to eavesdrop on your private conversations. Not content to occupy the office of the executive as a sloth occupies a tree, Mr. Obama wants to listen in on what active people are doing.Your Golden Hero wants to eavesdrop on your private conversations. Not content to... more
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Cops hate it when citizen-journalists video them. In the video below, during a raid on an art event in Brooklyn, New York, a cop displayed his hatred of the public when he told a citizen he would be raped if he persisted in documenting the raid.
It is now not only illegal in much of the country to film police in public. It is also an offense, according to the cops, that deserves imprisonment and rape.
And you thought this sort of thing only happened in third-world police states.Cops hate it when citizen-journalists video them. In the video below, during a raid on... more
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While the government continues to defend its warrantless wiretapping program -- despite it being found illegal and prone to serious privacy violations -- the latest report on official wiretaps that did receive a warrant shows not only that they were way up in 2009, but that not a single request for a warrant to wiretap was turned down. Not a single one. Now, admittedly, these are different types of wiretaps: by the police, mostly for drug cases, rather than the feds for terrorism cases. But it does suggest that the judicial system is pretty open to approving wiretap requests, and still makes us wonder why the government keeps insisting that actually getting a warrant -- as is required by the law -- is too much to ask in many cases.While the government continues to defend its warrantless wiretapping program --... more
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Obama is NOT Change, At Least Not For The Better.... More wars, more wiretapping, more taxes, more loss of personal liberties.....
When I voted for Obama I was hoping for the opposite of George W. Bush. Instead, I just got a different version guiding us further and further into the abyss. I am changing his name to Barack H. O'Bush. Washington is the same no matter who is in office.
The President has no power to make 'Change'. The Federal Reserve and Wall Street have staged a silent, invisible to the people, non-violent coup of the United States. We have been taken over by a third party and that third party has all the money, all the influence, all the power, all the media and all of our representatives bought and paid for.
It's time to put aside partisan politics and work together as a country to resolve the problems we face in Washington. Study your Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Un-Patriot Act, your local laws and get involved. Together we can take the lawyers and the bankers who have only their interests in mind out of Washington, ban the lobbyists, arrest those that have lied to the American people and start from scratch.
This time, let's listen to everyone, even the conspiracies and weigh the evidence to keep this from happening ever again. Take a look at History and see the signs of fascism and false flags.
We are at a turning point in our history. Take it from a former Democrat that voted for Obama, we are heading toward a fascist police state. I was worried about this during George W's eight years and was hoping all of that would 'change'. From what I am seeing with the people that Obama has surrounded himself with, the only thing that changed is the rate that our land of the free is being destroyed. It's is like a locomotive that reached the top of the hill of fascism with Bush and started going downhill when Obama took office. Yes we can, oh yes we can, oh yes we can, oh yes we can.....chug a chug a chug.
We're in trouble people, changing from one party to the next hasn't changed anything since JFK. We The People no longer matter to these people.
Isn't it time we reminded them who's in charge?
For We Are Change Kentucky
Christopher Hignite 2010Obama is NOT Change, At Least Not For The Better.... More wars, more wiretapping, more... more
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Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.
“One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,’’ Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, “my phone was seized, and I was arrested.’’
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.
There are no hard statistics for video recording arrests. But the experiences of Surmacz and Glik highlight what civil libertarians call a troubling misuse of the state’s wiretapping law to stifle the kind of street-level oversight that cellphone and video technology make possible.
“The police apparently do not want witnesses to what they do in public,’’ said Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who helped to get the criminal charges against Surmacz dismissed.
Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected the notion that police are abusing the law to block citizen oversight, saying the department trains officers about the wiretap law. “If an individual is inappropriately interfering with an arrest that could cause harm to an officer or another individual, an officer’s primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of the situation,’’ she said.
In 1968, Massachusetts became a “two-party’’ consent state, one of 12 currently in the country. Two-party consent means that all parties to a conversation must agree to be recorded on a telephone or other audio device; otherwise, the recording of conversation is illegal. The law, intended to protect the privacy rights of individuals, appears to have been triggered by a series of high-profile cases involving private detectives who were recording people without their consent.
In arresting people such as Glik and Surmacz, police are saying that they have not consented to being recorded, that their privacy rights have therefore been violated, and that the citizen action was criminal.
“The statute has been misconstrued by Boston police,’’ said June Jensen, the lawyer who represented Glik and succeeded in getting his charges dismissed. The law, she said, does not prohibit public recording of anyone. “You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want; you can do that.’’Continued... at link:Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three... more
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A federal appeals court in New York has ruled that US government agencies may now refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request that might disclose sensitive intelligence activities, sources, or methods.A federal appeals court in New York has ruled that US government agencies may now... more
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After the conflicting statements of mobsters Graviano and Spatuzza the loyalists of the premier, including the director of Tg1, claim victory saying that there was never any negotiation between the party of Berlusconi and the Mafia. Too bad that in reality this assumption is not only based on the statements of Spatuzza, now denied by his boss, but on a number of other witnesses and evidences. Indeed Dell'Utri before them had already been sentenced in first instance.
http://www.inaltreparole.net/en/news/mafiastato121209.htmlAfter the conflicting statements of mobsters Graviano and Spatuzza the loyalists of... more
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Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?
That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.
continued....Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel... more
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In high-profile court cases, the NSA has refused to confirm or deny the existence of the documents detailing the surveillance of lawyers who represent prisoners of the so-called "war on terror," on the grounds that knowledge of the existence or nonexistence of the documents is itself a classified piece of information.
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Ok, there's a lesson here. Republicans brought us war abroad and totalitarianism at home. Democrats bring us war abroad and totalitarianism at home. But - get this - there are OTHER OPTIONS. Obama voters, get ready to make up for your mistake in 2010 and 2012!In high-profile court cases, the NSA has refused to confirm or deny the existence of... more
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If you haven't called your representatives about opposing the Patriot Act renewal, do it now.If you haven't called your representatives about opposing the Patriot Act... more
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