Civil liberties – Page 24

US To Give Telcos Retrospective Immunity From Spying Lawsuits, Expand Spying

Published on April 12, 2007

Spy Chief Seeks to Expand Power

The new director of national intelligence is seeking to expand the government’s ability to conduct black bag searches, allow the National Security Agency to spy on foreigners inside the United States without a warrant, kill off lawsuits against telecoms for helping the government spy on American’s phone calls, and make it easier for the government to get phone and email records, even as the FBI remains mired in a scandal over its illegal and widespread use of a Patriot Act power, according to the Associated Press.

The draft bill being circulated by spy chief Mitch McConnell would, according to the AP:

Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.[…]

Clarify the standards the FBI and NSA must use to get court orders for basic information about calls and e-mails — such as the number dialed, e-mail address, or time and date of the communications. Civil liberties advocates contend the change will make it too easy for the government to access this information.

Triple the life span of a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant for a non-U.S. citizen from 120 days to one year, allowing the government to monitor much longer without checking back in with a judge.

Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush’s terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.

Extend from 72 hours to one week the amount of time the government can conduct surveillance without a court order in emergencies.

The bill would be yet another attempt to update FISA, a bill that seems to always be not up to the task. It was last updated in 2005. Shortly thereafter, the government’s warrantless wiretapping program and a related program in which phone companies dumped their phone call databases to the NSA were revealed, giving lie to campaign assurances from President Bush that all wiretaps had court approval.

The provision to include what can only be retroactive immunity for telcos is very interesting in that this provision has been widely rumored in many bills floating around Congress, but has never been inserted in a publicly introduced bill. It’s evidence that the telcos remain afraid that they could be found liable for billions of dollars in fines if a court finds they indeed helped the government spy on Americans without requiring valid legal process.

McConnell is going to have a tough road ahead of him, given the bill needs the blessing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which these days is talking about rolling back Patriot Act powers, not increasing them.

The Enemy Is Us

Published on April 10, 2007

It seems bloggers and socialists really are percieved as a threat by the powers that be. The UK Ministry of Defence has published a report enumerating future situations it sees as likely threats to the military, and quietly dropped in amongst the dire predictions of anthropogenic climate change, worldwide drought, and a billion refugees on the move was this paragraph:

[…]

The 90-page report comments on widely discussed issues such as the growing economic importance of India and China, the militarisation of space, and even what it calls “declining news quality” with the rise of “internet-enabled, citizen-journalists” and pressure to release stories “at the expense of facts”. It includes other, some frightening, some reassuring, potential developments that are not so often discussed.

[…]

Marxism

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

[My emphasis]

They’re scared of us. Good, they should be.

Attacks on the independence and free speech of bloggers come from several directions and seem diffuse but aren’t. Digby and others have written extensively recently on the paid media’s repeated attempts to impose ‘civility’ on bloggers (they’ll decide what civility is, duh). The latest push is couched as criticism of blogs in general, but it’s clear that it’s left political bloggers that are meant.

Of course it’s ridiculous given the US’ First Amendment that anyone could impose a civility code on US bloggers.and they have even less power over us non-USanian bloggers. And speaking as an avowed Marxist I can say with some confidence that most leftish political blogs are far from Marxist – most are woolly liberal – and they’d be horrified to described as such, the prejudice against socialism in the US being what it is.

But that’s not the point.

The point is to push the meme that left political bloggers are wreckers, communistic vandals and traitorous foul-mouthed criminals that must be controlled or eliminated. It’s a meme that, once launched and spreading virally, produces the handily deniable side-effect oframping up and justifying the right’s inchoate ill-feeling to the point where the ‘public’ (ie a bunch of rightwing nutjobs) decides that Something Must Be Done.

In the UK the latest ammunition being used by the papers agaisnt bloggers and online freedom is concern about schoolchildren harassing teachers online. In the US Kathy Sierra’s horrible experience is being conflated by the right with left bloggers’ contempt for Coulter and Malkin and portrayed as undifferentiated sexism, with the intent of painting left political blogs as little more than vehicles for bigotry. (Project, much?)

It’s a created narrative being put together in Washington and Westminster because it’s in the paid media’s own interests to cut down their rivals (all that child support and alimony to pay and all those expensive habits to support). They’re circling the wagons and using the weapons they’ve got: access to the airwaves and an infinite facility for bending the truth.

This, happily for the Republicans and New Labour, both with so much to lose from the truth coming out, neatly co-incides with long-term strategies for the silencing of polical opposition. Their tools are the tools of government:The Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, biometric ID cards, fingerprinting children, control orders, ASBOs, domestic spying, the use of the Justice department, FBI and IRS to target political enemies, the attempt by the Bush administration to take over control of the internet’s DNS root servers – all speak of preparations for a crackdown on dissenters of all kinds, and these days the most pesky, effective and visible dissenters are political bloggers.

Criticise the President, pay the price.

The corporate media’s threatened by a medium it knows will eventually make it obsolete. British and American governments’re threatened by millions of citizens who finally have an unconstrained public voice and plan to use it.

There’s a lot at stake – is it any wonder government and corporate media are fighting back in concert to protect their interests? We may not know our own strength yet, but the establishment has an inkling of where this could lead and they’re making preparations for revolt.

Mr. Smith’s Not Going To Washington.

Published on April 5, 2007

“>

In comments to the Bush/Cheney shrubbery video, commenter Swan brought to my attention this article from Carpetbagger about media disinterest in the US Attorney scandal:

[…]

One should be cautious about throwing around phrases like “journalistic malpractice” casually, but for the nation’s leading news-weekly to entirely ignore the nation’s biggest political controversy, just as it’s reaching crisis mode for the White House and the Justice Department, at a minimum raises questions about the magazine’s editorial judgment.

To be fair, Time altered its publishing schedule recently, and the new issue was released today, making it practically impossible to offer any kind of meaningful coverage of yesterday’s Sampson hearings. Also, Time did report on a new poll, which at least mentions the story in passing.

But given the circumstances, it’s hard to fathom why the controversy has been given short shrift.

Indeed, there were plenty of key developments in this story earlier in the week, any and all of which would have made good copy. A senior Justice Department official has taken the 5th, Gonzales gave an unpersuasive interview on national television, Republican lawmakers are increasingly unwilling to defend the DoJ’s decision making, the White House is getting antsy, new questions have arisen every day this week about exactly what happened and why.

But Time magazine, to borrow its editor’s word, finds all of this so “uninteresting” that there’s no need to even mention it to readers.

[…]

Swan asked whether I thought it possible that there could be coercion involved.

Oh dear, you had to ask… and by the time I’d finished blathering at length about my views on US domestic spying and its purpose I realised I’d written a whole post, not a comment. So here it is, tidied up and with links added.

It’s been conclusively proven that the Bush administration has been spying internally within the US since well before 9/11. The fact that Bushco hired the former heads of the Stasi and the KGB to advise Homeland Security is also well known, and they didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts.

The politicisation of the organs of state control, the NSA, CIA, FBI and the Justice Department, has been going on since the beginning, as has the development of TIA, the total informational awareness programme, which was officially quashed but continues under other names and other budgets. This is no scatttergun approach, it’s being done for a purpose; it looks in certain lights like a deliberate, targeted programme of corruption and blackmail. It’s all about the practical application of power to individuals to to coerce them to circumvent pesky, inconvenient rules.

Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.

Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull and that’s where the spying comes in. One iill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo… it doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.

There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo’s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example. Such is the venality and of Republicans that most involved walked right into what was a was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA… but they did it anyway. Have willy, will follow.

That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private wingnut ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country… I expect thee’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.

Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly Christian people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.

This sounds like a description of the US or UK media to me:

The press in **** is heavily biased in favor of the ruling party, *****. Most private newspapers also are biased in favor of the ruling party, since they in fact are not entirely “private.” Government supporters very often provide some of the financing for the “private” press, making news tipped in favor of the president and the key government positions and views. The opposition press is likewise political, in that the newspapers associated with opposition party candidates present their party perspectives and criticize the president and his party.

But no, it’s from a critical US-authored report on… Kazakhstan.

Since the days of Reagan networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the GOP lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.

The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why. Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.

A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.

Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?

Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president ..

If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they’ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.

This is the way it is now.

Hey, You, Get Out Of My Head

Published on March 28, 20074 Comments

Ok, now I’m really pissed off. We all have our little digital pilotfish attached to our online personae but some are much more annoying and potentially dangerous than others.

This computer, despite all my former-anti-nuke activist paranoia about this sort of thing, has been invaded by a shitty little bit of spyware masquerading as adware called Specificlick, apparently via Sitemeter, which is gone, as soon as Martin and I find an alternative hitcounter. (Or maybe not. Are hitcounts actually that important? Discuss.)

It first made itself apparent by brazenly declaring itself in the address bar of my browser, prepended to the address of the site I was visiting, like this:

http://dg.specificclick.net/?u=http%3A//blogname.blogspot.com/&r= .

Cheeky fuckers.

Having updated my spyware and AV and run both no no avail, I figured I really should do a little reading, first on how to remove it, then (because of that whole paranoid former anti-nuke activist thing) I want to know who the bloody hell are these people that have invaded my privacy?

Specificlick is a cookie developed by Specific Media Inc. We’re used to cookies, ho, hum, but this is of a specialised kind. It allows advertisers from one site or ad network to follow you around the web wherever you go subsequently, provided they are subscribers to Specific Media Inc.’s services, bombarding you with their own ads all the while. Imagine a nutter following you down the street and round the corner and on to the bus, yelling “Oi, you, MUPPET!” in your ear.

But while it does this, because of Specific Media’s recent acquisition of Sitemeter’s traffic monitoring capability specificlick also accumulates data on sites visited, referrals, outclicks, length of page view and so on: all the data that Sitemeter compiles, but specific to you, the browser. Or me, in this particular instance.

What exactly is it they want to know, what will they do with it and why? Who benefits from that? That there is material benefit is undoubted – why bother, otherwise? Data is useful and saleable stuff. That’s why, because their little bit of code is installed on my pc via Sitemeter, from their comfortable homes in sunny Yorba Linda, California or their sleek offices in Irvine, the Vanderhook brothers or their employees can see exactly what I’ve been reading and thinking abouit. In effect they have a spy in my head.

Oh I’m sure they don’t think of it that way, it’s all business to them:

The Vanderhooks created Advertisement Banners.com from their parents’ Yorba Linda home.

It was one of the few companies to use “pop-under” technology that allows advertisers to place their product pitches underneath computer Web sites so that a person sees the ads after they close their browser rather than being confronted by the more annoying “pop-up” announcements while they’re looking at something else. .

Oh, those bastards. I remember them. It turns out the Vanderhook brothers, all still in their twenties, were ripped off by one of their popup ad customers so they sued and won $4.3 million, thus enabling for the nice little data-mining empire they run today.

In fact they’re doing so well they’ve attracted a major infusion of venture capital cash. Who from, I wondered? The investors are Shepherd Ventures, a fund working with the US Small Business Administration who have significant other investments in military tech r&d companies, and Southern California’s largest venture capital firm, Enterprise Partners, whose other investments are mainly in biotech. Why this sudden interest in data mining technology, I wonder?

Much as the tinfoil-hatted devil on my shoulder (and lord knows it has had provocation) is urging me to discern the outline of some grand military-industrial plot in all this, if there is one it’s so subfusc as to be invisible. So that’s not the road I’m going down here.

No, its the principle of the thing that bugs the fuck out of me – the fact that because of the US’ lack of any form of homegrown data protection legislation and its unique position as the largest purveyor of media in the English-speaking world, American data mining companies with dodgy motivations have free rein to spy on mine and other non-USAnians thinking, despite theoretically sufficient legal protections at home here in Europe.

It may be a purely commercial process now but how likely will entrepreneurs like the ambitious young Vanderhooks be to turn them down, should Homeland Security or the NSA come knocking with wads of investment cash or a Presidential Order? They may be clever coders, they may have worked hard, for all I know they’re Nice Guys – but what they’ve also done is developed the perfect tool for detecting thoughtcrime.

Where could it lead? Am I being alarmist? Recently there’ve been reports about commercial businesses turning down people for mortgages, car loans, apartments, even for buying a treadmill, because private businesses were accessing a list of ‘terrorists’ supplied by Homeland Security:

Businesses checking customers’ names against a Treasury Department terrorist watch list are sometimes denying services to innocent people, according to a report released Tuesday by civil rights lawyers.

The 250-page list, posted publicly on a Treasury Department Web site, is being used by credit bureaus, health insurers and car dealerships, as well as employers and landlords, according to the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

The list includes some of the world’s most common names, such as Gonzalez, Lopez, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Lucas and Gibson, and companies are often unsure how to root out mismatches. Some turn consumers away rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison for doing business with someone on the list, the group said.

“We have found that an increasing number of everyday consumers are being flagged as potential terrorists by private businesses merely because they have a name that’s similar to someone on this government watch list,” said the report’s author, Shirin Sinnar, an attorney with the Asian Law Caucus.

Many companies who encounter even a partial match are unsure how to root out mistakes, and prefer to turn away someone trying to get a loan or rent an apartment rather than risk penalties of up to $10 million and 30 years in prison, the lawyers said.

How long before commercial data mining companies, with their increasingly sophisticated strategies for finding out what we’re thinking, doing and planning from our online presence, are compelled to do something similar under pain of penalty?

Big questions from one small irritating bit of code, but the answers are crucial to the future of the relationship between the governors and the governed.