I read The Day the Music Dies in the SF Weekly yesterday. I had heard about this issue but didn’t realize it was so pressing. I am a huge Pandora Listener – I love it because I don’t remember music names and stuff…I don’t have a “music brain” but I like music…so I put in a song I like and it plays more like it.
I encourage you if you are in America and have a congress person call them. (I can’t vote so I feel weird engaging in the political process until I can.)
Government
German Data Retention, NSA doesn't Trust itself & FBI and "spying student" profiles
From Slashdot:
“Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it’s new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google’s German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google’s practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.”
Well if the can’t collaborate maybe they can’t spy on us all that well?
Linked to the Baltimore Sun from Slashdot:
NSA employees also do not trust one another, which has left the agency fragmented and in search of a “unity of purpose,” according to a task force report released to employees late last month.”What we need is fundamental change in the way we manage NSA and what we expect of management and ourselves,” concluded the study, which was led by George “Dennis” Bartko, the NSA’s deputy chief of cryptanalysis. The Sun obtained unclassified portions of the report and eight related documents.
US university students will not be able to work late at the campus, travel abroad, show interest in their colleagues’ work, have friends outside the United States, engage in independent research, or make extra money without the prior consent of the authorities, according to a set of guidelines given to administrators by the FBI.
“FBI is offering to brief faculty, students and staff on what it calls ‘espionage indicators’ aimed at identifying foreign agents. Unexplained affluence, failing to report overseas travel, showing unusual interest in information outside the job scope, keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences are all considered potential espionage indicators.”
Yeah! for the Fourth Amendment
I have been worried about this for a while (see this post from Dec 2006 and way back when in August 2005 when I first was alerted to this issue) Just when things were looking really grim on the online privacy front this ruling came in…..from Wired Blogs:
The ruling by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio upheld a lower court ruling that placed a temporary injunction on e-mail searches in a fraud investigation against Steven Warshak, who runs a supplements company best known for a male enhancement product called Enzyte. Warshak hawks Enzyte using “Smiling Bob” ads that have gained some notoriety.
The case boiled down to a Fourth Amendment argument, in which Warshak contended that the government overstepped its constitutional reach when it demanded e-mail records from his internet service providers. Under the 1986 federal Stored Communications Act (SCA), the government has regularly obtained e-mail from third parties without getting warrants and without letting targets of an investigation know (ergo, no opportunity to contest).
It is sort of odd that it is about penis spam but hey – freedom is freedom is freedom.
To reach its decision, the court relied on two amici curiae that presented compelling arguments for shoring up current privacy law with respect to e-mail. The article is worth reading in full.
Genetic Non-Descrimination bill in house
From Slashdot….on New Scientist.
Soon it will be illegal to deny US citizens jobs or insurance simply because they have an inherited illness, or a genetic predisposition to a particular disease.
On 25 April, the House of Representatives voted 420 to 3 to pass the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). The Senate is expected to endorse the act within a few weeks, which is also supported by President Bush. “I am so stunned by the majority,” says Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance, a charity lobbying for the rights of people with inherited illnesses.
“Clearly the House finally understood the incredible significance this has. The American public can now access genetic tests, feel safe about their genetic information not being misused and participate in research that involves genetic information.”
This is all good news. I also got me wondering about a form of discrimination that I think about regularly and face it is what I call “where I happened to emerge out of my mothers womb.” This fact my place of birth has incredibly little do with who I am the content of my character who I am where I fit in my social context how much I contribute to the society I live in but is regularly requested by institutions.
Credit Checks by the Government 'legal'
More privacy invasion by the Executive Branch:
Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people’s rights by examining the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel will be the judge of that.
National security letters permit the executive branch to seek records about people in terrorism and spy investigations without a judge’s approval or grand jury subpoena.
Just what I was afraid of.
From Slashdot: Federal prosecutors say they don’t need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else’s computer.
“We’re looking at a future in which almost all of our private papers are in the hands of third parties and not protected by the Fourth Amendment,” said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation
I hope the EFF, ACLU, EPIC and everyone else who can possibly pile on to this one.
From the Star Tribue:
The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don’t need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else’s computer.
That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers — Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google — that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.
Twenty years ago, when only a relative handful of scientists and scholars had e-mail, Congress passed a law giving state and federal officials broad access to messages stored on the computers of e-mail providers.
Now that law, the Stored Communications Act of 1986, is being challenged in federal court in Ohio by Steven Warshak, a seller of “natural male enhancement” products who was indicted for mail fraud and money laundering after federal investigators sifted through thousands of his e-mails.
I would like the language in the i-broker agreements for XDI.org to have language that basically says they will treat personal data held as if it were in someone’s house and therefore protected under the 4th amendment.
CALEA in the news
So my legal namesake CALEA has been a source of interesting eyebrow raising for those who know its name when they are introduced to me.
Today it is in the news again.
Paul Kouroupas, vice president of regulatory affairs for Global Crossing, strongly criticized the Federal Communications Commission’s broadening of a 1994 law–originally intended to cover telephone providers–as disproportionately costly, complex, and riddled with privacy concerns. His company is one of the world’s largest Internet backbone providers.
“Our customers are large Fortune 500 companies–not too many of those companies are conducting drug deals or terrorist activities out of Merrill Lynch’s offices or using their phones in that way,” Kouroupas said at an event here sponsored by the DC Bar Association. “By and large we don’t get wiretap requests, yet we’re faced with the costs to come into compliance,” which he estimated at $1 million.
At issue is an order issued last fall by the Federal Communications Commission that set a deadline of May 14, 2007, by which most broadband and Internet phone providers are required to reengineer their networks for easier snooping by law enforcement. The move expanded the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which Congress wrote to impose obligations on telephone companies, but not Internet providers.
Net Nuetrality to-Regulate or Not-to-Regulate
This NYTimes piece hightlights an interesting perspective about why regulating the Internet may not be a good idea to protect Net Nuetrality.
It’s tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.
Economists have dubbed this process “regulatory capture,” and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970’s. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition.
Of course, incumbent broadband providers do have some limited monopoly powers, and there is cause for concern that they might abuse them. Last fall, the chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, argued that Internet giants like Google and Microsoft should begin paying for access to his “pipes”— never mind that consumers already pay AT&T for the bandwidth they use to gain access to these services. If broadband providers like AT&T were to begin blocking or degrading the content and services of companies that didn’t pay up, both consumers and the Internet would suffer.
Patriot Act Renewed – BooHoo
From the not-dead-yet dept: Senate Passes Patriot Act Renewal
“The Senate has passed a renewal of the Patriot act, 89-10, after two extensions caused by months of negotiations. The only thing standing in the way of a full renewal is a House vote, expected to pass next week. The renewal comes with some privacy protections attached, however, some worry they are only cosmetic. Some lawmakers who voted for the package acknowledged deep reservations about the power it would grant to any president. “Our support for the Patriot Act does not mean a blank check for the president,” said Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who voted to pass the bill package. Certain lawmakers supported passing the bill even though they were still wary about it – Arlen Specter urged his colleagues to pass it even as he promised to introduce a new measure and hold hearings on how to fix it. Terrorism aside, the bill also includes new legislation that has almost nothing to do with terrorism, like one measure, which would make it harder for illicit labs to obtain ingredients for methamphetamine by requiring pharmacies to sell nonprescription cold medicines only from behind the counter. I know that people like Arlen Specter promise further hearings – but why pass what you know is flawed?”
GOP Phone Home
From the everyone-has-an-angle dept: Minnesota GOP’s CD Raises Privacy Concerns
ThinkProgress blog is reporting that the Minnesota Republican Party has been distributing a new CD about a recent proposed amendment. The CD poses questions about some of the hot-button issues like abortion, gun control, and illegal immigration. The problem with this CD, however, is that it “phones home” to the Minnesota GOP, without making it clear that your name is attached. So, if you take a look at the CD and take time to answer the questions, beware. Once you are finished they will know not only who you are, but where you stand on the issues at hand.
IAA – TIA continues and PATRIOT expanded?
Surveillance society quietly moves in
It’s a well-known dirty trick in the halls of government: If you want to pass unpopular legislation that you know won’t stand up to scrutiny, just wait until the public isn’t looking. That’s precisely what the Bush administration did Dec. 13, 2003, the day American troops captured Saddam Hussein.
Bush celebrated the occasion by privately signing into law the Intelligence Authorization Act – a controversial expansion of the PATRIOT Act that included items culled from the “Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,” a draft proposal that had been shelved due to public outcry after being leaked.
Specifically, the IAA allows the government to obtain an individual’s financial records without a court order. The law also makes it illegal for institutions to inform anyone that the government has requested those records, or that information has been shared with the authorities.
“The law also broadens the definition of ‘financial institution’ to include insurance companies, travel and real-estate agencies, stockbrokers, the US Postal Service, jewelry stores, casinos, airlines, car dealerships, and any other business ‘whose cash transactions have a high degree of usefulness in criminal, tax, or regulatory matters’ “ warned Nikki Swartz in the Information Management Journal. According to Swartz, the definition is now so broad that it could plausibly be used to access even school transcripts or medical records.
“In one fell swoop, this act has decimated our rights to privacy, due process, and freedom of speech,” Anna Samson Miranda wrote in an article for LiP magazine titled “Grave New World” that documented the ways in which the government already employs high-tech, private industry, and everyday citizens as part of a vast web of surveillance.
Miranda warned, “If we are too busy, distracted, or apathetic to fight government and corporate surveillance and data collection, we will find ourselves unable to go anywhere – whether down the street for a cup of coffee or across the country for a protest – without being watched.”
Sources: “PATRIOT Act’s Reach Expanded Despite Part Being Struck Down,” Nikki Swartz, Information Management Journal, March/April 2004; “Grave New World,” Anna Samson Miranda, LiP, Winter 2004; “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7,” Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue June 7, 2004.
Censored – or bogus? (see below) was a caveat to caveat offered to the above story. I would like to know what others in our network/community know about this and see if the identity community can uncover what information is actually is being shared with government about our day to day personal transactions without our awareness.
Some stories get ignored by the mainstream media because they’re too controversial, or too much of a challenge to the rich and powerful, or just too hot to handle.
But some stories get dismissed because they’re just not credible – and unfortunately, one of the pieces Project Censored cites this year appears to fall into that category.
Almost everything on the Project Censored list is well sourced and, at the very least, plausible. But one of the stories listed under “Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In” is a piece titled “Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7.” Written by Teresa Hampton and Doug Thompson, the piece was published on www.capitolhillblue.com, a Virginia Web site that’s been around since 1994.
The piece makes some pretty spectacular allegations. Hampton and Thompson claim not only that the Pentagon is defying Congress and covertly operating the notorious Total Information Awareness program (TIA) (which Congress explicitly killed), but also that the feds now monitor “virtually every financial transaction of every American,” in real time (that is, as it’s happening). They also maintain that the Pentagon uses the information to launch investigations of “persons of interest” and as a basis for adding names to the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly” lists.
It’s pretty far-fetched to think that the Pentagon could run an operation so vast as to review almost every financial transaction in the country as it happens. But beyond that, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed two suits against the feds trying to pinpoint just how it collates TSA’s “no fly” lists and still hasn’t been able to figure it out.
The principal sources Hampton and Thompson base their story on seem to be an anonymous “security consultant who worked on the … project” and an “Allen Banks” – someone identified simply as a “security expert,” without any detail as to who he is or how he would be privy to such information.
Thompson, who is the site’s publisher, defended the accuracy of the story, saying that he’d spoken with “over 30 sources” – police, banks, credit card agencies – and that he reached his conclusions based on those sources as well as on the fact that there were “too many coincidences.” (None of that is explained in the story.)
“To some extent,” he added, “it was a conclusion by me, looking at the links.” Banks and other private industries had been instructed to e-mail data to the feds under TIA, and they continued sending data to the same places after TIA was killed, because they never received orders to stop, Thompson said. His caveat: “If I had to go into court and prove this, there’s no way I could prove it.”
We’re still dubious.
CTT
Technorati Tags: Patriot Act, surveillance, TIA
Condi Caught by Emerging Participatory Panopticon
Condi Returns to D.C. After Bloggers and ‘Post’ Expose Vacation
This story is an interesting one because it shows what a citizenry empowered with almost omni-present communication tools can do to share information and build a coherent picture of one person’s movement over time creating the participatory panopticon. I wonder how much citizen surveillance of government officials and their actions will become the norm. Here is the original Gawker page – where all the intelligence was gathered.
Hopefully as CatherineAustinFitts has said again and again..
Our democracy depends on honest leaders who promote transparency and accountability in the management of our resources. How do we protect such leaders from being terrorized by corrupt special interests that play dirty?
The only way is with real accountability of the action of government officials and transparency of where money and rescues flow.
Just in case Condi was wondering if her help would be needed. This disaster is WAS NOT UNPREDICTABLE – in-fact it was anticipated and she would likely be needed in her role as secretary of state to get help from other countries.
On Thursday, September 1 on Good Morning America George W. Bush said, “I don’t think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees.†This is a flat, baldfaced lie. In early 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) identified the three most likely megadisasters that would strain the country’s ability to respond: a terrorist attack in New York City, an earthquake in Southern California, and a hurricane hitting New Orleans. The levees in New Orleans have been breached before. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 did so. Every disaster planning exercise involving New Orleans has assumed that part of the tragedy would be breached levees, a flooded city, and human beings trapped with no food, water, or sanitary facilities. A few minutes of searching the Internet will turn up literally dozens of studies showing that a hurricane of category 3 or more hitting the lower Mississippi would breach the flood protection levees. Breached levees were no surprise and to say that they were is a lie
Ms. Rice should have been on the phone to countries who’s help we could well use not to cope with the situation faced by the south. This references the letter from my last post.
The Mississippi Delta region is the natural ecological home of a long list of infectious microbial diseases. It is America’s tropical region, more akin ecologically to Haiti or parts of Africa than to Boston or Los Angeles. The most massive Yellow Fever epidemics in the Americas all swept, in the 19th Century, up the Mississippi from the delta region.
It is perhaps ironic that the only real experience with this scale of insect control for the last two decades has been in developing countries: the CDC and State health folks should be reaching out to PAHO and the insect control expertises of Africa and the Caribbean right now. If we cannot manage to get ahead of the insects, there could very well be a disease crisis ahead.
Can open sourceintelligence and societal information sharing help us as a society get around the need to have ‘government officials’ who are responsible but instead give us the power collectively organize ourselves.
Information and Governance – Disaster and Disease
“If government cannot inform, there is no government.”Burce Sterling highlights this as the pull quote from the below. I would tend to agree and wonder how it informs our work in considering governance for the next layer of the internet.
This is from Laurie Garrett “the emergent-disease guru” who’s comments in an e-mail titled Hurricane Katrina Analysis – CFR Global Health Program.
To read the full text hop over here.
6) Mental Health issues AND lack of information increasing them.
The mental health of hundreds of thousands of people must now be a priority. Uprooted, homeless, jobless, rootless and in many cases grieving for lost loved ones: These people will all suffer for a very long time. A key to their recovery is, again, a lesson from 9/11: information…Knowing what is going on ‘back home’ is essential to mental health recovery. We have been in disasters in poor countries where wild rumors flowed among the poor for months, each one sparking a fresh round of anxiety and fear. If government cannot inform, there is no government.
-) Establishing Trust between Government and People to abate public health crises in the aftermath.
I found myself recalling the way the Chinese people responded to the SARS
epidemic. Because they knew that their government had lied to them many
times in the past and had covered up cases in the capital, people turned
away from official government sources of information. Rumors spread like
wildfire via cell phone text messaging, spawning a mass exodus from Beijing
of tens of thousands of people. The medical system in China is notoriously
corrupt and the peasants stay away from hospitals unless it is a matter of
life and death. When government told the masses to go to the hospitals if
they had fevers, the Chinese refused. The SARS situation spiraled out of
control in large part because the people had long-standing, sound reasons
for distrusting their government. Public health collapses if the bond of
trust between government and its people breaks, or never exists. I saw the
same thing with plague in India in ’94.
7) Poliitcal Backlash
America, and this government, is going to witness an enormous political backlash from these events, stemming primarily from the African American community, if steps are not boldly taken to demonstrate less judgment, and greater assistance, for the black poor of the region. Cries of racism will be heard. In every disaster we have been engaged in we have witnessed a similar sense by the victims of disasters that they were being singled out, and ignored by their government, because of their ethnicity, religion or race. The onus is on government to prove them wrong.
5) Debrise – where to put it all?
We have never in history tried to dispose of this much waste. It is hoped that before any officials rush off thinking of how to burn or dump a few hundred thousand boats, houses and buildings, some careful consideration is given to recycling that material for construction of future levees, dams, and foundations. Looking at aerial images of the coastline one sees an entire forest worth of lumber, and the world’s largest cement quarry. No doubt tens of thousands of the now unemployed of the region could be hired for a reclamation effort that would be rational in scale and intent. It would be horrible if all that debris were simply dumped or burned without any thought to its utility.
8) Continued support of medical personal in the region.
Much more thought needs to be given immediately to the needs of medical and psychiatric responders located just outside of the region. The patient flow they are now receiving is minuscule compared to the tidal wave coming their way
1) Mosquitos
2) CDC warning about Vibrio cholerae
3) Sewage
4) Lack of Pharmaceutical supplies
TSA data cloud searching – Flights today, Subways tomorrow?
This article was slashdotted today.
TSA had promised it would only use the limited information about passengers that it had obtained from airlines. Instead, the agency and its contractors compiled files on people using data from commercial brokers and then compared those files with the lists.
The GAO reported that about 100 million records were collected.
The 1974 Privacy Act requires the government to notify the public when it collects information about people. It must say who it’s gathering information about, what kinds of information, why it’s being collected and how the information is stored.
And to protect people from having misinformation about them in their files, the government must also disclose how they can access and correct the data it has collected.
Before it began testing Secure Flight, the TSA published notices in September and November saying that it would collect from airlines information about people who flew commercially in June 2004.
Instead, the agency actually took 43,000 names of passengers and used about 200,000 variations of those names – who turned out to be real people who may not have flown that month, the GAO said. A TSA contractor collected 100 million records on those names.
It brings up some serious concerns about how information collection and validation is done by the TSA for airline passengers. How can we trust governments to collect this much information about us just because we travel.
This week I wonder why care about airlines passengers because security is so tight that airlines do not seem to be a place where the next round of attacks will be. If London is any indication it will be on mass transit. Given the level of police/security presence on the transit systems in the Bay Area this week is certainly seems like there is some concern that mass transit will be attacked. They have started random searching of bags to get on the NYC subway. One wonders if they will start issuing ‘identity passes’ to get on such systems.
On the city subways, which are used by 4.5 million people on the average workday, the inspections started on a small scale Thursday afternoon and were expanded Friday.
The New York Civil Liberties Union opposed the searches, saying they violated the Fourth Amendment. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he hoped the NYCLU would recognize that the city had struck the right balance between security and protecting constitutional rights. He said the bag-checking program is part of a policy to “constantly change tactics” and “may, or may not, be there tomorrow.”
Catalyst: Government Adoption of Federated Identity
This is drawn from David Temoshok’s Talk. He is the Director of Identity Policy and Management GSA Office of Government Policy
Homeland security directive 12
“Policy for Common Identification Standard For Federal Employees and Contractors” – August 2004
HSPD 12 Requirements
1. Secure and reliable forms of personal identification that are:
- Based on sound criteria to verify an individual employee’s identity
- Strongly resistant to fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation
- Rapidly verified electronically
- Issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process
2. Applicable to all government organizations and contractors except National Security Systems
3. Used for access to federally-controlled facilities and logical access to federally-controlled information systems
4. Flexible in selecting appropriate security level – includes graduated criteria from least secure to most secure
5. Implemented in a manner that protects citizens’ privacy
Expanding Electronic Government
Needing Common Authentication Services for
- 280 million Citizens
- Millions of Businesses
- Thousands of Government Entities
- 10+ Million Federal Civilian and Military Personnel
You can learn more on the GSA website – http://www.gsa.gov/aces
Catalyst: Information Compliance Scott Blackmer
One of the most interesting things Scott mentioned today was the proposed Leahy-Spector Bill in congress that would regulate identity brokers and come into effect in June 2005.
– Enact a bevy of new regulations that cover “data brokers,” defined as business or non-profits “in the practice of collecting, transmitting, or otherwise providing personally identifiable information on a nationwide basis on more than 5,000 individuals.” Among the regulations: data brokers would have to allow consumers the chance to change their information, and as with a credit report, receive a copy of that information at their request.
— Require businesses not already covered by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act or HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) to create a data privacy and security program. That part of the Leahy-Specter bill also expands disclosure rules nationwide, and mandates that customers be informed of any security breach involving more than 10,000 people, or that revolved around a database with more than a million entries.
— Limit the ways that Social Security numbers can be used as account numbers. This section also bans the sale of Social Security numbers, one of the data bits sold to fraudsters by ChoicePoint in 2004 and disclosed in February 2005.
— And forces the General Services Administration (GSA) to review government contractors’ the privacy and security programs before awarding contracts. This last item came from the recent news that the Internet Revenue Service had awarded a $20 million contract to ChoicePoint.
These new potential regulations have implications for the folks working on DB/datasharing in the nonprofit sector. Any individual with a big mailing list might be responsible to comply. Small businesses will be affected.