By Barry Steinhart, director of the ACLU Technology & Liberty Project.

A lot of Americans have gotten pretty steamed as we’ve learned more and more (though not as much as we should be learning) about how our government is engaging in illegal, mass eavesdropping on our communications.

But we’re not the only ones who have reason to be steamed about the spying centered at the National Security Agency.

The banking industry can have little love for Governor, formerly Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer.  It would seem that the U.S. prosecutor investigation of Spitzer was triggered by several banks ratting on him:

.... investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor of New York, several officials said....

http://www.nytimes.com/...

By Barry Steinhardt, director the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project.

Yesterday’s report in The Wall Street Journal about the NSA’s domestic spy dragnets should be major, major news. It is nothing less than the return of TIA: "Total Information Awareness." Yet there has been barely any followup coverage of the story in the mainstream media. I know the media thinks the sexual behavior of the governor of New York is earth-shatteringly important for American life – but this NSA report actually is.

EPILOGUE:  All things considered I think this diary raises a more important point.

Is it me or could it be more than a coincidence these stories broke the same day?

WSJ: NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records.

ABC: It Wasn't the Sex; Suspicious $$ Transfers Led to Spitzer

The federal investigation of a New York prostitution ring was triggered by Gov. Eliot Spitzer's suspicious money transfers, initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.

I guess it depend when a suspicious transfer constitutes probable cause, and who reported it to the FBI or IRS.  Anyone know the legal issues here?

Crossposted to Green Mountain Daily

As part of a comprehensive package to control the costs of prescription drugs and regulate inappropriate marketing tactics, Vermont recently passed legislation that provides strong privacy protections by limiting the use of personally identifiable prescription information for marketing purposes unless doctors and other health care providers explicitly agree to waive the protections. The law, S.115, includes a physician opt-in provision at the time of licensure or renewal. This provision, managed by the state’s professional licensing board, allows a prescriber to choose to have his or her identifying information used for marketing and promotion of prescription drugs. The Vermont Medical Society supports the measure.

Taken from a fact sheet from the Prescription Project (link to pdf file)

That legislation's just been pushed back.  

The reason why?  

Read on.

I've written before about the potential dangers of datamining in business, politics, and surveillance.  Nicole Brodeur, in today's Seattle Times, writes about its use in the marketing of prescription drugs.

The short of it:  If you think your doctor's drug recommendations are based on science:  think again.

The weirdest stuff shows up @ my day job, Politics In Minnesota. The design of transportation systems carries its own ideology: the routes, exit placement, the eminent domain actions, the financing, carpool or toll road lanes; all these issues loom large in Minnesota, especially since no one can agree how to pay for needed work. St. Paul's Rondo neighborhood, the heart of the black community, got split in half by I-94, and many people today fear similar effects from massive new roads. Recently, people on the 'fringes' of the left and right who might be considered hostile to corporate globalization have talked about a 'NAFTA Superhighway' project which would link Mexico, Canada, and the United States, but little hard evidence illustrates how this plan could work.

This article in Vanity Fair will scare hell out of you and then enrage you. The idea that any detail of our lives is available to any politician, or person, willing to pay for it is scary as hell, and an invasion of privacy guaranteed to put you in the hypertension range in blood pressure.

Hello?? Has anyone seen the Constitution lately?? ANYONE??

Why bother with the Bill of Rights, who needs warrants, when you can just buy the info from your jolly local data miner!! HO HO HO!!

We know Rove got his start as a geeky numbers cruncher, a pioneer in direct mailing and other GOTV tactics even back in the 1980s.

We also know that since Bush came to power--and even before 9-11--his Administration was eager to undermine and even flout FISA laws and judges by doing what was called "modernizing" surveillance techniques.  This "modernization" included data mining, and we are only now beginning to realize how much it has undermined our privacy.

For background, on this story, I've tagged all the related stories at Green Mountain Daily (GMD), so they can all be accessed via this link.

The short summary: VT state police went to at least three pharmacies in the state, and asked them for large scale data dumps of patient records.  Green Mountain Daily found out, and a team effort brought this whole thing out into the open.

That said, I will once again quote the fourth amendment, but marked up the way I think that it's seen by some individuals:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

On Tuesday, I blogged about a breaking story in Vermont: Kiss your 4th amendment goodbye: VT State Police collect medical data.  Since then, a couple things have happened:

1. the press finally hit this, and it's broken big in Vermont's Rutland Herald;
2. we've done some research of our own, and have learned a bit more;

After the fold, I'll summarize some of what we at GMD (Green Mountain Daily) have learned, and what we learned from the Herald article as well.

It's always good to start with the constitution, this time from Amendment IV:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Yesterday, Green Mountain Daily scooped all the Vermont news outlets by publishing a story about state police collecting pharmacy records across the state.  You can find the original piece here on Kos or over at Green Mountain Daily.

A summary, after the jump

Are you sitting down for this?

A few weeks back, Caoimhin wrote a fantastic diary expressing concerns over proposed implementation of 2005's legislation creating the Vermont Prescription Monitoring System. At the time, he wrote:

The Department of Health is in the process of seeking legislative approval of administrative rules the Department drafted to govern VPMS. The proposed rules will monitor your physician's provision, and your access to, hundreds of treatments for thousands of conditions. The purpose of the law is intended to identify substance abusers and to facilitate their treatment -- nothing inherently wrong with that and in fact it is a laudable goal.  However, the proposed regulations by the Department of Health do not accomplish the goal set out by the legislature, violate the laws governing the VPMS and present too many dangers for disclosure, misuse, mishandling of sensitive patient medical information.

As CL stated, the law mandates collecting the minimum necessary information to achieve it's stated goals.

But instead of the Department of Health, we apparently needed to be watching out for the State Police.

Washington Post Staff Writer Ellen Nakashima reports that the US Government is not just listening to your phone calls, they are watching everywhere you go, who you sit next to and what you are reading.

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

I don't know how many dKos readers have heard about the Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse scandal, or the similar but not-connected Quechup/iDate scandal, but for those who have and those who haven't, here is something interesting which may tie into Granny Doc's recent post, "Big Brother IS Watching You" and also the documented efforts by the PTB to protect their civilian corporate subcontractors of unconstitutionality.

Auren Hoffman, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has been playing the wide-eyed ingenue ever since his Rapleaf/Upscoop/Trustfuse project blew up in a cloud of flying spam mails, is an old Young Republican.

What is Rapleaf, and why should you worry about it? I'll tell you - it begins with an email I got last week that I first marked as "spam" and ignored, until I ran across a blog post warning against this outfit.

Why am I not shocked? Because I've been shocked so many times, I can barely "feel" the news anymore.

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau breaks the unsurprising but nonetheless galling news:

[D]ocuments indicate that the F.B.I. used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on the person it was targeting but also details on his or her "community of interest" -- the network of people that the target in turn was in contact with.

But rest assured... The F.B.I. says they're no longer doing this. Do you feel better?

This just in:

From the New York Times:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.

Essentially, we are now being told that so-called "communities of interest," of a terror suspect's network of people with whom contact is made, are also the subjects of telecommunications analysis by the FBI, though the project has allegedly been halted while the Bureau is currently under scrutiny for abuses of process as it relates to the national security letters.

Don't be so sure.

One of the most valuable but least mourned traditions destroyed by the George W. Bush administration is the quaint notion that the government won't do stuff that's against the law. It used to be the case that Congress could outlaw something, and by virtue of it being outlawed, it could safely be assumed that -- for the most part, at least -- government and political actors wouldn't do that thing. Because it was against the law. And this country was governed by the rule of law. The stain of criminality would be too much for publicly elected officials to withstand.

Well, here's a sampling from just this week of things that we used to assume would never happen -- least of all to what used to be our most cherished civil liberties -- but happened anyway, and for which there's really no particular punishment, and for which the current political climate promises no particular remedy:

• The ADVISE system, announced as scrapped this week by the Department of Homeland Security. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was:

  one of the broadest of 12 data-mining projects in the agency... able to ingest 1 billion pieces per hour of structured information, such as databases of cargo shippers, and 1 million pieces per hour from unstructured text, such as government intelligence reports.

  Why was it scrapped?

  Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism."

  Oh, really? Then do you think this was a good way to test the system?

  Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements.

  Of course not! Even Joementum agrees:

  Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said DHS "must follow federal privacy laws — in this case the E-Government Act which requires privacy impact assessments before personal information can be used — in order to maintain public support for these new technologies."

  Must follow federal privacy laws. Unless it doesn't. In which case Senator Lieberman will do... what, exactly?

  Right.

• National Security Letters, struck down as unconstitutional in federal court yesterday. The same National Security Letters that you may recall were found back in March to have been wildly abused by the FBI.

Unchecked, rampant abuse. Unconstitutional abuse of power. And even the nation's top law enforcement official lying to Congress about it.

The inspector general's report prompted an uproar in Congress because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had testified that there had not been a reported instance of Patriot Act powers being abused. Later, it turned out Gonzales had been aware of the problems with the National Security Letters.

The penalty? A tidy retirement package for Abu Gonzales, secured while Congress twiddled its thumbs and maybe, sorta, kinda considered forcing him out instead of holding the door for him.

• The Federal Records Act and the Presidential Records Act, which both require that the White House preserve records of its official e-mail traffic. You remember, right? The e-mails that the Congress has been seeking with its "subpoena power," but which the "administration" says it lost? Five million times over? Turns out they just, you know, didn't feel like complying with that law, either. And what's the remedy? The National Security Archive is suing the White House.

  In the meantime, Henry Waxman is investigating, but guess what? The White House says it's not it's fault, because the archiving required by law was contracted out. To whom? They won't tell!

  The law requires that these things be preserved. But what's the penalty for just not doing it? Nobody knows. In Iran-Contra, we found out that there were no particular penalties described in the Presidential Records Act. And nobody's changed that. It's just... against the law.

And that's just a sampling of this week's action. I didn't even get to the "administration's" continued intransigence over its application of various "national security" and "state secrets" pleadings, which took a hit in court this week too, in connection with the ACLU's FOIA suit over the other domestic spying programs.

All of this must, unfortunately, also be considered in the context of Congressional maneuvering on Iraq as well. Why? Because next week Congress is set to hear testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker which many observers believe will be misleading at best, and full of outright lies at worst. And this is Congressionally mandated testimony. A report required by law in the last Iraq supplemental. To be delivered, in fact, under the signature of the president. Full of benchmarks and requirements, but no benchmarks or requirements that the reports and testimony be truthful or empirically sound. Because we still take that stuff for granted, even though this "administration" has made a mockery of that assumption too many times to count, and certainly too many times for the Congress to have forgotten. And yet, there it is.

And there's more coming, too. With another $200 billion supplemental on the table, Congress will shortly consider still more guidelines, reporting requirements, and anything-but-timetables.

Given the record, dare we even hope that this time, they'll be viewed as obligations and not merely annoyances that can safely be disposed of with yet another cloud of obfuscation, stonewalling, and outright bullshit?