Looks like the surveillance state has put its foot in it again.
The New York Times has revealed that since “early 2012”, the National Counterterrorism Center now has access to all data, not minimized for privacy in any way, that was authorized for collection via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That includes the phone metadata dragnet on all US calls, and much else besides. NCTC’s job is to streamline data sharing between federal and local agencies, via so-called “fusion centers” – 85 domestic spying centers that now exist all over the US. The spy centers act as clearinghouses where federal and local law enforcement data meet; Massachusetts’ ones are run out of the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston PD. So, local police forces across America, without a warrant, subpoena or reasonable suspicion of any kind, are now able to access what the NSA has on you and generate “Suspicious Activity Reports.”
Fourth Amendment, schmourth Amendment. This is the Age Of Terror (TM). No warrants or probable cause required!
So, predictably enough, when these “Suspicious Activity Reports” get leaked, they turn out to be mostly collected on people of color, and to be filled with unverified and often racially motivated gossip. The policies of our own fusion centers only forbid investigations solely motivated by race – so, if you are black and also Muslim, the policy is not violated.
We’re rallying today at 2pm at the Boston fusion center at 1201 Tremont St., Boston (by Ruggles) to protest these kinds of unconstitutional and unjust shenanigans by law enforcement. At the same time, we’re releasing a new report reviewing the unconstitutional policies of the Commonwealth Fusion Center in Maynard, MA, and filing FOIA requests to dislodge more information about how the fusion centers share and use data on all of us. Simultaneously, there will be rallies in LA, Oakland, Dallas, Charlotte, DC and elsewhere. Though it started with Digital Fourth here in MA and with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, we now have a rack of supporters in this, including (here in Boston) the ACLU of Massachusetts, the Defend the Fourth Coalition, #MassOps, the Massachusetts Pirates Party, and (nationally) the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, CodePINK, Critical Resistance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and Restore the Fourth.
Unless we act, this is the future of law enforcement. It won’t be what you’ve done. It will be what an algorithm suggests you may do, based on your friends, interests and expressive acts on social media. It’s already all too easy for local people who aren’t planning any crime, like Cameron D’Ambrosio in Methuen or Travis Corcoran in Arlington, to get swept up in this net. It’s time for it to stop.
For more on fusion centers, check out EFF’s new FAQ on why they are such a problem.
The current narrative is that the now-infamous “Heartbleed” exploit is a result of an “accidental” bug introduced into an open-source security package two years ago.
My prediction is that sooner or later we will learn that this was not accidental. If I was working on behalf of the NSA (and there are a large number of very talented software developers doing so), taking advantage of the “open” part of “open source” software that so much of today’s net depends on would be right at the top of my list of ways to approach the problem.
A well-organized and funded group of programmers can do pretty much whatever they want in today’s approach to computing. I encourage those who suspect me of being overly paranoid to read Ken Thompson’s 1983 Turing Award Lecture.
From his “MORAL” (emphasis mine):
We already know that the NSA has been installing “microcode bugs”. We already know that those have been in place for years and have not been detected (their existence is known solely because of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures).
The Linux systems that most of today’s web relies on (and their MS IIS counterparts) are based on the widespread use of “untrusted code”. The vulnerability is created by our universal use of “Turing machine” stored-program architectures, where computing is done by executing stored programs, and where each of those stored programs is itself manipulable by the same architecture.
The very nature of today’s internet makes it vulnerable to NSA invasions of privacy. There is no, and can be no, technological solution to this problem without replacing today’s net/cloud with a fundamentally different computing paradigm (such as some of the genetic algorithms explored by John Holland and colleagues).
We must find therefore find a political solutions. Those will not be easy. I suggest that a key question we must confront is whether or not it is possible to impose those political solutions on ANY government (including ours) without bloodshed.
I’m pretty sure the government IS in fact listening. Isn’t that exactly what has provoked this activism?:)
Surely, real terrorists know enough to hide their operations with vpn, Tor, encryption. Nor is it to catch J Q Public; heck, they could have caught thousands buying child porn at the Pentagon and ignored that. (There are software and hardware appliances that may be installed on servers that block porn and other unauthorized sites then tattle to security. A simple solution the government folks do not seem interested in.)
Wouldn’t the real purpose be to gather together information of persons, businesses, governments that may be used to blackmail, extort and control markets and politics? Subjects with power themselves…
What power there is in knowledge and the ability to funnel out pertinent facts. When we watch the politicians condemn or praise the system, who cannot help but wonder about those that praise such a system?
Fifty years ago, I thought The Outer Limits to be nonsense…
“Police in Washington D.C. are now using cameras to catch drivers who go through red lights. Many congressmen this week opposed the use of the red light cameras incorrectly assuming they were being used for surveillance at local brothels.” –Dennis Miller
..What we need is a Snowden at FISA, because we still don’t know what these courts decided, nine months after NSA surveillance was exposed.
Why have these secret court decisions not been revealed? What’s the big secret?
My suspicion is this has little to do with investigations, and all to do with jobs security in the security apparatus.
Aren’t court proceedings supposed to be public? Don’t defendants have the right to see and challenge evidence brough against them? The words “secret” and “court” should never be seen together.