My collection of excerpts from news articles from 2004 to 2007.
This should get you up to speed on phone spying in the USA.
It may help fill in some blanks, if you feel like you don't quite get the picture yet.
Please note: Sections from the originals have been omitted and re-ordered. See the sources for complete original texts as desired.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
2 March, 2004
Following revelations about bugging at the United Nations, is there any way of ensuring that your private conversations stay that way?
News that Kofi Annan and other senior UN figures may have been routinely bugged by US or British security services has caused a huge political row around the world. But it will also have caused alarm among other people in the public eye who deal with sensitive information - or anyone, indeed, who values their privacy.
If the secretary general of the United Nations cannot prevent his private conversations from being listened to by all and sundry, who can?
It seems if someone wants to listen to what you are saying badly enough, there is very little you can do to stop it.
"Technological advances, particularly in the fields of power supply and miniaturisation, mean that its now possible to bug almost anywhere and anything," says Charles Shoebridge, a former counter-terrorism intelligence officer.
But potentially the most powerful tool for the modern spy is the mobile phone.
Mobiles that double as listening devices can be bought over the internet.
Undetectable
But today's spies are also able to convert conventional phones into bugs without the owners' knowledge.
Experts believe this is the most likely method used to gather information in the UN building.
Mobiles communicate with their base station on a frequency separate from the one used for talking. If you have details of the frequencies and encryption codes being used you can listen in to what is being said in the immediate vicinity of any phone in the network.
According to some reports, intelligence services do not even need to obtain permission from the networks to get their hands on the codes.
So provided it is switched on, a mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug.
The technology also exists to convert land line telephones into covert listening devices.
According to one security expert, telephone systems are often fitted with "back doors" enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down.
Telephone conversations are also routinely intercepted by spy satellites. The potency of key word recognition technology is often overstated, but it is still used to scan millions of conversations a day for potentially juicy information.
Another way of making sure you are not being bugged is to use a Faraday cage or shielded tent, which prevents radio waves entering or leaving.
Mobile phone calls are impossible from inside the tent, but no-one will be able to listen to your conversations using bugs or radio wave listening devices.
It will also prevent anyone intercepting radio emissions from computers, preventing them from seeing what you have on screen.
"[A Faraday cage] will stop you doing anything other than having a conversation. It is a very crude, but very secure, way of talking," says Michael Marks.
But the hardest part, according to counter-surveillance consultant William Parsons, is trying to convince diplomats and politicians that there is a threat.
Switching on the shower while you talk in the bathroom - a favoured method of celluloid spies - is also unlikely to work, as constant volume noise can easily be filtered out.
In fact, the only way to truly guarantee privacy, according to most security experts, is to take a walk in the park.
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Source: http://blogs.abcnews.com/...
Can You Hear Me Now?
December 05, 2006
Cell phone users, beware. The FBI can listen to everything you say, even when the cell phone is turned off.
A recent court ruling in a case against the Genovese crime family revealed that the FBI has the ability from a remote location to activate a cell phone and turn its microphone into a listening device that transmits to an FBI listening post, a method known as a "roving bug." Experts say the only way to defeat it is to remove the cell phone battery.
[Faraday shielding will also help. Radio waves have a hard time penetrating metal "tents" which can be big or small. --mrcoder ]
"The FBI can access cell phones and modify them remotely without ever having to physically handle them," James Atkinson, a counterintelligence security consultant, told ABC News. "Any recently manufactured cell phone has a built-in tracking device, which can allow eavesdroppers to pinpoint someone's location to within just a few feet," he added.
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
FBI Secret Probes: 3,501 Targets in the U.S.
According to the recent court ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan, "The device functioned whether the phone was powered on or off, intercepting conversations within its range wherever it happened to be."
The court ruling denied motions by 10 defendants to suppress the conversations obtained by "roving bugs" on the phones of John Ardito, a high-ranking member of the family, and Peter Peluso, an attorney and close associate of Ardito, who later cooperated with the government. The "roving bugs" were approved by a judge after the more conventional bugs planted at specified locations were discovered by members of the crime family, who then started to conduct their business dealings in several additional locations, including more restaurants, cars, a doctor's office and public streets.
"The courts have given law enforcement a blank check for surveillance," Richard Rehbock, attorney for defendant John Ardito, told ABC News.
The FBI maintains the methods used in its investigation of the Genovese family are within the law. "The FBI does not discuss sensitive surveillance techniques other than to emphasize that any electronic surveillance is done pursuant to a court order and ongoing judicial scrutiny," Agent Jim Margolin told ABC News.
[Except, that statement is false. Actually NO court orders were provided to Qwest, for the massive amounts of the wiretapping being done on massive numbers of Americans, which is why Qwest resisted the spying requests of the executive branch. --mrcoder]
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11
By Ryan Singel October 12, 2007
Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio's defense documents alleging the National Security Agency began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren't the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11.
According to court documents unveiled this week, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio clearly wanted to argue in court that the NSA retaliated against his company after he turned down a NSA request on February 27, 2001 that he thought was illegal. Nacchio's attorney issued a carefully worded statement in 2006, saying that Nacchio had turned down the NSA's repeated requests for customer call records. The statement says that Nacchio was asked for the records in the fall of 2001, but doesn't say he was "first asked" then.
The allegations in that case come from unnamed AT&T insiders, who have never stepped forward or provided any documentation to the courts. But Carl Mayer, one of the attorneys in the case, stands by the allegations in the lawsuit.
"All we can say is, we told you so," Mayer told THREAT LEVEL.
Mayer says the issue of when the call records program started - a program that unlike the admitted warrantless wiretapping, the administration has never confirmed nor denied - should play a role in the upcoming confirmation hearings of Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey.
Mukasey will have to "come clean on when this program started," Mayer said. "The entire rationale was that it was necessitated by 9/11."
All of the cases pending against the nation's telecoms for allegedly violating the nation's surveillance and privacy laws could be mooted if Congress gives immunity to the companies, as the Administration and the telcos powerful lobbyists are arguing for.
Immunity isn't what Mayer wants.
"The real obligation is upon the Democrats to demand turnover of these documents," Mayer said.
But Mayer and Nacchio may not even be the only two arguing that the NSA started a program of collecting Americans' phone records before 9/11.
(See USA Today article of 5/10/2006.)
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Source: http://www.eff.org/...
October 17th, 2007
Qwest CEO: NSA Punished Qwest for Refusing to Participate in Illegal Surveillance--Pre-9/11!
Related Issues
NSA Spying issue overview, blog postsPosted by Hugh DAndrade
When Qwest refused the NSA’s illegal request that it hand over its customers’ data without a warrant, the NSA wasn’t happy. According to former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, the government hit back for the telecom’s refusal by denying them lucrative contracts (log-in required) worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
That claim, backed up by documents, was made during Nacchio’s appeal of his conviction for insider trading. Whether or not Nacchio’s appeal goes through, his case has brought forward some interesting facts that deserve to be highlighted.
First, the most fascinating detail to emerge is that it appears the NSA was talking to the giant telecoms about handing over customer data a full seven months before 9/11. Documents show that Nacchio met with the NSA on February 27, 2001, at which time Nacchio refused a request that he deemed illegal. If true, this would seem to contradict the Bush administration claim that any laws broken by the telecoms were hasty mistakes made in the confusion following the terrorist attacks.
Equally disturbing is the picture that is emerging of what goes on in the backrooms of the nation’s telecoms. It appears that the NSA’s requests for cooperation came with an implied quid pro quo — give us your customer’s calling records and we will reward you with generous contracts worth millions. It is beginning to look like the telecoms were motivated by something other than "patriotism" after all.
As Salon’s Glenn Greenwald puts it, the telecoms and the government "meet and plan and agree so frequently, and at such high levels, that they practically form a consortium."
The Federal Government has its hands dug deeply into the entire ostensibly "private" telecommunications infrastructure and, in return, the nation's telecoms are recipients of enormous amounts of revenues by virtue of turning themselves into branches of the Federal Government.
The details emerging from the backrooms where telecoms and the government conspire together make it increasingly clear that now is the time for Congress to act. Investigations into what the telecoms knew and when they knew it should be continued, and no wiretapping legislation should be passed until Congress and the public have the full story of what has happened in the last six years.
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Source: http://www.sec.gov/...
SEC Charges Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio and Eight Others with Massive Financial Disclosure Fraud
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
2005-36
Washington, D.C., March 15, 2005 - The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Joseph P. Nacchio, former co-chairman and chief executive officer of Qwest Communications International Inc., and eight other former Qwest officers and employees with fraud and other violations of the federal securities laws. In three separate but related civil actions, the Commission alleges that, between 1999 and 2002, the Qwest defendants engaged in a multi-faceted fraudulent scheme designed to mislead the investing public about the company's revenue and growth.
According to the SEC's complaints filed in the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, Nacchio and others made numerous false and misleading statements about Qwest's financial condition in annual, quarterly, and current reports, in registration statements that incorporated Qwest's financial statements, and in other public statements, including earnings releases and investor calls,. As a result of that scheme, Qwest fraudulently recognized over $3 billion of revenue and excluded $71.3 million in expenses. The Commission, in October 2004, sued Qwest in a settled injunctive action in which the company agreed to pay a $250 million penalty for its misconduct.
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Source: http://www.usatoday.com/...
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.
In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."
As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.
Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.
AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.
The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.
Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.
Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database.
In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named "Shamrock," led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.
Ma Bell's bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. "No court order, no customer information — period. That's how it was for decades," he said.
The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.
The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation.
The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.
Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.
The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.
The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.
Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.
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Source: http://rawstory.com/...
Qwest CEO's 'classified defense' raises question on NSA surveillance Nick Juliano
October 12, 2007
A former CEO who stood up to the Bush administration's demands that he assist in the warrantless surveillance of Americans suggests in court documents that the National Security Agency withdrew a lucrative contract in retaliation for his refusal.
Nacchio is appealing his conviction on 19 accounts of insider trading for $52 million of stock sales in April and May 2001. He was sentenced last spring to six years in prison, but he is free pending appeal. Prosecutors argued that the CEO did not warn investors before he sold his stock that Qwest was unlikely to meet its revenue goals, but his defense team argued that he acted in good faith with investors because he expected that the secret contracts would come through.
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Oct 23, 2007
But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends in technology.
So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.
But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer’s. Helio, a mobile phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some small-business owners use it to track employees.
Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.
"There is a Big Brother component," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless analyst at Forrester Research. "The thinking goes that if my friends can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time, too."
Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such services could cause.
If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T’s wireless unit, "that is a negative for us." Loopt and similar services say they do not keep electronic records of people’s whereabouts.
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Source: http://www.sptimes.com/...
9/17/2005
Cell tower records can pinpoint a phone owner's location for police, whether the phone is used or not.
But if a murderer makes calls on a cell phone around the time of the crime (and they often do), they leave behind a trail of records that show not only who they called and at what time, but where they were when the call was made.
The cell phone records, which document what tower a caller was nearest when he dialed, can put a suspect at the scene of the crime with as much accuracy as an eyewitness. In urban areas crowded with cell towers, the records can pinpoint someone's location within a few blocks.
Should a suspect tell detectives he was in another part of town the night of the murder, records from cell phone towers can smash his alibi, giving detectives leverage in an interview.
"It's a very good tool," said Pinellas sheriff's Detective Michael Bailey, who used cell phone tower records to link four men to a murder in Seminole two years ago. "We got them within half a block. I couldn't believe how on-the-money it was."
Investigators increasingly rely on the cell tower records. The Pinellas Sheriff's Office's homicide unit - like many murder squads nationwide - seeks them in virtually every case.
"It's a sure bet that almost everybody is going to be carrying a cell phone," said Bruce Bartlett, the chief assistant in the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office. "It's just incredible, the information that it gives you."
Nationwide, more than 182-million people have cell phones, more than five times as many as 10 years ago. There are about 175,000 cell sites or towers nationwide, nearly eight times as many as in 1995.
"The more law enforcement has understood this information exists, the more they ask for it," said Al Gidari, a Seattle lawyer who represents wireless companies in complying with court orders.
In 1994, Congress enacted a law requiring police to get subpoenas or court orders for wireless information, and ordering cell phone companies to comply with the court orders.
Gidari said the nation's top five wireless companies receive up to 4,500 requests per month from law enforcement. They receive so many requests that they each have departments with as many as 40 employees to comply with all the requests.
Law enforcement's use of the records isn't something cell phone companies particularly like to discuss. Nor do police, who say suspects sometimes unknowingly set a trap for themselves by using cell phones when they commit a crime.
Gidari said cell phone companies want their customers to know their privacy is important to them and that it's safeguarded. But the companies also realize they must follow court orders.
"There are pressures from both sides, protecting their customers' privacy and meeting court orders and legal processes," Gidari said. "I would describe their feelings as ambivalent. They follow the law."
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Source: http://www.schneier.com/...
[The following are comments from many different people who are members of a security forum. --mrcoder]
This is not "new". In San Diego a few years ago a trial for the murder of Danielle van Dam used records from Verizon to track the location of David Westerfield for the weekend when Danielle was first missing.
I listened to the trial on the radio and I believe it was helpful in the conviction of David Westerfield since it showed the freeways and highways he drove and the correlation to where witnesses claimed to have seen him and his RV. His odd travels from the beach to the dessert that weekend strenghten the idea that he was nevious and was trying to find a place where he could abuse and dump the body.
"Greg Sheets, a Verizon Wireless employee, details calls made to and from Westerfield's cell phone from Feb. 1 to Feb. 6"
http://www.signonsandiego.com/...
"Westerfield told police he returned to the Silver Strand between 7:10 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday night. Sheets read jurors records showing that a call from his phone at 7:33 p.m. traveled through a cell tower in Mira Mesa, 22 miles from the beach. According to Sheets, calls are routed through the tower closest to the caller's location. If there is congestion, the calls are bounced to the next closest tower."
http://www.courttv.com/...
I'm not sure it's even required that the suspect makes a call. At least on the GSM system, just having the phone switched on is enough, because it regularly "checks in" with the base station.
In the UK recently, Ian Huntley was convicted of the murder of two schoolgirls, partially on the evidence of mobile phone logs that placed him at the scene of the crime. He did not make or receive any calls.
The cell phone provider I work for can use signal strength analysis from multiple towers at once to triangulate a position on a given handset. This requires handset activity, which can be generated by the network operator. This technique is more accurate when there is a higher density of stations around the handset. This occurs in higher population density areas.
Belarusian police is using mobile phones tracking in their investigations since ~1996-98. But they are most advanced in this field in Eastern Europe, IMHO. Currently, they are able to build list of phones that were around place of crime in 30-40 mins, list of phones that where switched on/off around time of crime with locations and so on.
According to this article on the BBC website, the microphone in any mobile phone can be remotely activated so it starts silently transmitting nearby conversation to the network:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
"But today's spies are also able to convert conventional phones into
bugs without the owners' knowledge.
So provided it is switched on, a mobile sitting on the desk of a
politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug. The technology also exists to convert land line telephones into covert
listening devices."
This is from the BBC, not a nutty conspiracy website...
Yes, it's possible! In Italy, where i live, police just use tracking cells ops to monitoring suspects. Consider that we have 1 cell x person, and...bye privacy!
Don't forget enhanced 911 enabled handsets with GPS. My LG VX6000 has as GPS receiver in it. It gives me the option to leave it on all the time (the factory configuration) or have it on only when 911 calls are made. Do I beleive that it is really off when I'm not calling 911... Not really.
You are sort of wrong, but not completely. GPS can be built in to a phone, but mostly isn't. More likely is "triangulation" based on the need of the network to know your exact distance for syncronisation reasons. This is better than signal strength based triangulation. Even better is a combined system, especially one which uses measurements sent by the mobile.
The other thing to add is that in any mobile network there needs to be information about where the subscriber is so that they can be paged. Your phone will actively contact the network whenever it moves from area to area.
Finally, due to the needs of "location based services", it's possible to actively contact the mobile to get it to send appropriate information. This may well be invisible to the user.
I know of a publishing house around here which uses these functions to track their sales staff (with their "written consent" (or else)). They require staff to keep their phone on at all times.
Some basic general coverage of the background is in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Almost full details for GSM and WCDMA systems are online at
http://www.3gpp.org
In general American systems will have at least as advanced systems since user location for "emergency services" has long been a much higher priority there.
Seems to work both ways. Wanted CIA agents were easily trailed by the Italians because of careless cell-phone habits:
http://www.cnn.com/...
"It wasn't their lavish spending in luxury hotels, their use of credit cards or even frequent-flier miles that drew attention. Instead it was a trail of casual cellphone use that tripped up the 19 purported CIA operatives wanted by Italian authorities in the alleged kidnapping of a radical Muslim cleric."
When in Rome...
Wait a minute! All of a sudden we ignore that as with digital signatures not being equal to signatures, cell phones are not equal to their owners? It is easy enough to "borrow" the phone, or given physical access for a short amount of time even to copy the SIM card. Furthermore, it is more than easy to register a phone in someone else´s name.
If we start to rely on such shaky evidence, we better start to be very afraid.
Hmm...seems easy to game though. Professionals will realize this and just loan their mobile to an accomplice to make calls from another location, thereby setting up relatively strong alibi.
Note: You wouldn't even have to place a call. While your phone is turned on it maintains connectivity to the network even if no calls are placed or received.
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Source: http://www.schneier.com/...
The UK Financial Times of the 2nd August 2005 [page 4 of the UK edition] reported that the UK police can ask mobile phone operators to download special software to a mobile telephone without the user’s knowledge or permission.
When this has been done the authorities can turn on the microphone of a mobile telephone and listen to any conversations in its vicinity. This capability only exists for mobile telephones which can accept downloaded software.
The telephone must be turned on for the microphone to be activated, but the user does not have to be making a call.
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
Senator Dodd Announces He Will Stop Telecom Immunity Bill - Updated
October 18, 2007
Connecticut Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd has vowed to put a hold on a Senate bill that reportedly would grant retroactive legal protection to any phone or internet company that helped with the president's secret, warrantless wiretapping program, Dodd announced via email and on his presidential campaign website Thursday.
Senator Dodd:
The Military Commissions Act. Warrantless wiretapping. Shredding of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Extraordinary Rendition. Secret Prisons.
No more.
I have decided to place a "hold" on the latest FISA bill that would have included amnesty for telecommunications companies that enabled the President's assault on the Constitution by illegally providing personal information on their customers without judicial authorization.
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Source: http://www.salon.com/...
AT&T's customers sued them for violating their privacy in violation of long-standing federal laws and for violating their Fourth Amendment rights. Even with the most expensive armies of lawyers possible, AT&T and other telecoms are losing in a court of law. The federal judge presiding over the case ruled against them -- ruled that the law is so clear they could not possibly have believed that what they did was legal -- and most observers, having heard the Oral Argument on appeal, predicted that they will lose in the Court of Appeals, too.
So AT&T and other telecoms went to Washington and -- led by Bush 41 Attorney General (and now Verizon General Counsel) William Barr, and in cooperation with their former colleague, Mike McConnell -- began paying former government officials such as Dan Coats and Jamie Gorelick to convince political officials to whom they give money, such as Jay Rockefeller, to pass a law declaring them the victors in these lawsuits and be relieved of all liability -- all based on assertions that a court of law has already rejected. They are literally buying a judicial victory in Congress -- just like Carothers warned that third-world countries must avoid if they want to become functioning democracies under the "rule of law" ("Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making").
And in the process -- for good measure -- they have ensured that there will never be any judicial ruling as to whether our Government and the telecom industry broke the law in how they spied on us for years without warrants. They have placed what they did literally beyond the reach of any law or judicial determination..
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Source: Official Senate Website of Senator Feingold
Senator Feingold:
I am deeply disappointed in the Intelligence Committee's FISA bill. The bill, which I voted against, does nothing to protect the rights of innocent Americans communicating with people overseas and it includes unjustified retroactive immunity for those alleged to have cooperated with the Administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program. I was pleased, however, that two of the amendments offered by Senator Wyden and myself prevailed. One requires a FISA court order to target an American overseas. The other would ensure more meaningful oversight of the new authorities by Congress and the Inspector General. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Intelligence Committee, I will continue to fight for the rights of Americans and to protect the Constitution and the rule of law.
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
The nation's telecoms have been quietly lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would immunize them from any liability for violating the nation's privacy laws for the helping the Administration spy on Americans without warrants, according to Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. The Administration is pushing for the provisions as well, telling Congress it's simply a matter of "fairness."
It's also conveniently a matter of providing immunity to government officials involved in getting telecoms to install spy rooms and turn over phone and email records to the government.
C]ongressional staffers said this week that some version of the proposal is likely to pass—in part because of a high-pressure lobbying campaign warning of dire consequences if the lawsuits proceed. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell seemed to raise the stakes recently when he contended in an interview with the El Paso Times that the private lawsuits could "bankrupt these companies."
Among those coordinating the industry’s effort are two well-connected capital players who both worked for President George H.W. Bush: Verizon general counsel William Barr, who served as attorney general under 41, and AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi, who was the elder Bush's deputy chief of staff.
Working with them are a battery of major D.C. lobbyists and lawyers who are providing "strategic advice" to the companies on the issue, according to sources familiar with the campaign who asked not to be identified talking about it. Among the players, these sources said: powerhouse Republican lobbyists Charlie Black and Wayne Berman (who represent AT&T and Verizon, respectively), former GOP senator and U.S. ambassador to Germany Dan Coats (a lawyer at King & Spaulding who is representing Sprint), former Democratic Party strategist and one-time assistant secretary of State Tom Donilon (who represents Verizon), former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick (whose law firm also represents Verizon) and Brad Berenson, a former assistant White House counsel under President George W. Bush who now represents AT&T.
The legislative language in the Administration's proposed language from April makes clear that the immunity provision applies to anyone - Administration employees included - involved in the program and would even prevent any state or federal regulatory body or even Congress from imposing any penalty for anything related to the program.
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Source: http://www.salon.com/...
[R]etroactive immunity turns the "rule of law" into an even greater mockery than it has been for the last six years. The central premise in granting immunity is that telecom companies did nothing wrong -- even if they violated the law -- because they cooperated with warrantless spying at the behest of the President.
But we don't actually live in a country where private actors are permitted to commit crimes and violate laws provided that the President tells them that they should. The President has no greater power to authorize others to break the law than he does to break the law himself. Quite the contrary, Article II of the Constitution imposes the opposite obligation: "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Lawbreaking is still illegal even if George Bush says it should be done. Does that principle really need to be explained?
Remember that when the Administration asked Qwest to help with the program, the then-CEO Joseph Nacchio turned down the request on the grounds it would be illegal. He asked the Administration to come back with a lawful order. None was ever produced.
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Source: http://www.baltimoresun.com/...
NSA to Become America's Firewall
By Ryan Singel September 20, 2007 | 1:52:24 PMCategories: Cybarmageddon!
The National Security Agency is preparing to take over the job of monitoring the Internet and other domestic communication networks, a massive expansion of the agency's defense duties into networks used routinely by American citizens, according to a story by Siobhan Gorman of the Baltimore Sun.
The NSA's new domestic role would require a revision of the agency's charter, the senior intelligence official said. Up to now, the NSA's cyberdefense arsenal has been used to guard the government's classified networks -- not the unclassified networks that now are the responsibility of other federal agencies.
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Source: http://ap.google.com/...
China Censors Ratchet Up Web Monitoring
By ALEXA OLESEN – Oct 12, 2007
BEIJING (AP) — At first, Liu Xiaoyuan just fumed when his online journal postings disappeared with no explanation. Then he decided to do something few if any of China's censored bloggers had tried. He sued his service provider.
"Each time I would see one of my entries blocked, I'd feel so furious and indignant," said Liu, a 43-year-old Beijing lawyer. "It was just so disrespectful."
Blog entries like Liu's, which mused on sensitive topics such as the death penalty, corruption and legal reform, are often automatically rejected if they trigger a keyword filter. Sometimes, they're deleted by human censors employed by Internet companies.
In the lead-up to the sensitive Communist Party Congress, which convenes Monday to approve top leaders who will serve under President Hu Jintao through 2012, authorities have been casting an even wider net than usual in their search for Web content they deem to be politically threatening or potentially destabilizing.
"What you see now is unprecedented," said Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley. "They are forcing most of the interactive sites to simply close down and have unplugged Internet data centers. These are things they haven't done before."
Thousands of sites suddenly went offline in August and September when Internet data centers, which host Web servers, were shut down. In three cities, some services were temporarily cut off, while some interactive Web sites remain unplugged — until after the congress.
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
August 15, 2007
Spectators lined up outside the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco starting at noon to guarantee a seat at a much-anticipated legal showdown over the government's secret wiretapping program.
The hearing involves two cases: one aimed at AT&T for allegedly helping the government with a widespread datamining program allegedly involving domestic and international phone calls and internet use; the other a direct challenge to the government's admitted warrantless wiretapping of overseas phone calls.
The EFF's Fram's attempt to argue that the existence of the secret AT&T room is enough to prove dragnet internet surveillance doesn't seem totally convincing to Judge McKeown.
"There's a Las Vegas quality to your argument," McKeown tells Fram, alluding to the "What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas" commercials.
Fram argues that Congress broadly defined surveillance in the 1978 FISA law, which was spurred by revelations in the 1970s of widespread government surveillance of American citizens.
"What Congress did is it established a protective perimeter for our privacy," Fram says. "Congress wanted to have some set of rights that could be clearly enforced."
Those rules, Fram argues, means that you were part of a mass dragnet surveillance if one of your e-mail went into the room on Folsom Street, even if the government wasn't targeting you specifically.
On rebuttal, government attorney Gregory Garre derides the EFF's case.
"Plaintiffs acknowledge that the room is central to their case and that they don't know what is going on in that room," says Garre. "Something else could be going on in that room. Just to pick one, it could be FISA court surveillance in that room."
Not that he's saying that there is FISA court surveillance conducted in the secret room. Just that there could be. Who knows? Presumably, Garre does. But he's not saying.
Whether the foundation's lawyers were spied upon, which is the subject of the case, "Is itself a state secret," Bondy argues.
Judge Hawkins (left, file photo) wonders if the document is really that secret?
"Every ampersand, every comma is Top Secret?," Hawkins asks.
"This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable and cannot even be meaningfully described," Bondy answers.
Judge McKeown: "I feel like I'm in Alice and Wonderland."
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
AT&T and Verizon executives who had donated only a pittance to Rockefeller over the past 6 years donated more than $40,000 to Rockefeller in 2007, even as they were having private meetings with him to plead for his help in escaping from federal court.
The companies are facing surprisingly effective lawsuits against them for allegedly helping the government data-mine trillions of Americans' phone records, wiretap the internet and listen in on Americans' overseas conversations without a warrant as required by federal law.
AT&T and Verizon executives didn't just mail checks to Rockefeller's campaign; they threw fund-raising parties - a Verizon shindig in New York in March and an AT&T gala in San Antonio, Texas in May, according to the New York Times.
That would explain the otherwise inexplicably high number of contributions to Rockefeller from Texans other than AT&T executives (especially from Texas real estate interests) that came in at the same time frame as the AT&T contributions.
I spent the day poring over spreadsheets of the contributions to Senator Rockefeller's re-election campaign.
And I have to tell you that, with a few exceptions of some small contributions from West Virginia citizens,the people who the Senator has been hanging out with and collecting $2300 checks from in his 170 or so campaign fund raisers look nothing like 99 percent of America.
They are Comcast executives, commercial real estate developers, Bass oil money, the Blackstone group, Delta and United Airline executives and self-employed equity investors living on ranches in Montana. (And, of course, Norman Hsu.) A handful are so rich, it's hard to imagine them even bothering with asking the Senator for a favor.
With the exception of those who list their occupations as self-employed philanthropists or volunteers at the MOMA, most of Rockefeller's donors appear to be the merely very rich, who want to become even more so, hopefully with the help of a friendly legislator.
And for the record, neither Verizon nor Rockefeller's spokesperson has yet replied to requests for comment. The Times, however, was kind enough to credit Wired News for breaking this story.
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
White House Spy Docs Show Surveillance Was Illegal, Senator Feingold Charges
October 18, 2007
Senator Russell Feingold, (D-Wisconsin), who cast the only Senate vote against the Patriot Act and now sits on the Select Intelligence committee, seems to have looked at secret spying documents given by the White House to that committee and found that they do not exonerate the government's secret spying programs or the phone and internet companies that secretly aided them.
The White House seemingly provided the documents in exchange for legislation that would free its telecom partners from being sued by Americans for violating their privacy. The Senate Intelligence Committee is holding a closed meeting on the bill today.
A spokeswoman for Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, who unsuccessfully tried to subpoena documents about the secret spying programs, says that the White House has not yet promised to share the documents with his committee, but has not yet said no, either.
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Source: http://www.cnn.com/...
10/18/2007
The bill would overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires investigators to get the approval of a special court to intercept calls and e-mail of people in the United States.
After the 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to monitor communications between the United States and people overseas suspected of having links to terrorism. The program, disclosed in 2005, bypassed the secret court established by FISA, which was passed to curb Watergate-era wiretapping abuses.
Bush admitted ordering the program in 2005. Critics say it violates FISA, and that the revisions the Bush administration wants would gut the law.
Administration officials argue the law is outdated, since modern technology sometimes routes calls between people overseas -- who would not be subject to FISA's restrictions -- through switches in the United States.
Congress passed a temporary measure giving the administration the changes it sought, but that legislation is set to expire in February. Bush told reporters Wednesday that the measure House Democrats had been set to vote on "would weaken the reforms they approved just two months ago."
"When it comes to improving FISA, Congress needs to move forward, not backward, so we can ensure intelligence professionals have the tools they need to protect us," he said.
Bush is also demanding that Congress grant retroactive immunity to telephone companies that cooperated with the NSA program -- a feature not included in the House bill. Critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union say the demand is a tacit admission that the surveillance program was illegal.
In May, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told senators that he and a number of top Justice Department officials were prepared to resign in March 2004 after White House officials tried to override his decision not to recertify the surveillance program's legality. He said top Bush aides Alberto Gonzales, later named attorney general, and Andrew Card tried to pressure Attorney General John Ashcroft -- in a hospital bed recovering from gall-bladder surgery -- to overrule Comey.
A former official familiar with the controversy told CNN in July that the hospital-room dispute was over a previously undisclosed data mining effort, not eavesdropping.
Earlier Wednesday, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said the White House will let members review key documents on the legality of the warrantless eavesdropping program after what he called "some loud conversations."
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, threatened to hold up action on a FISA overhaul unless the administration produced the documents.
"There wasn't going to be any FISA bill at all unless they played ball with us, and they finally agreed to do that," Rockefeller said.
Rockefeller said the documents the White House has agreed to turn over will be kept under tight restrictions, stored in a secret location away from NSA headquarters, and senators will be limited to having a single staff member review them. In addition, senators can't talk publicly about what they learn from the documents, and any notes taken must be delivered to Capitol Hill by secure courier.
The Intelligence Committee is scheduled to meet Thursday to vote on an updated bill, Rockefeller said.
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Source: http://blog.wired.com/...
October 19, 2007
The Senate Intelligence Committee approved Thursday by a vote of 13-2 another set of changes to the nation's surveillance laws, including a way for telecoms to escape lawsuits charging them with violating the nation's privacy laws by helping with secret spy programs.
Democratic Senators Russell Feingold (Wisconsin) and Ron Wyden (Oregon) were the two lone votes against the bill, which they successfully modified to include a provision forcing the NSA to get warrants when targeting Americans oversees.
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Cheney's Law
October 20, 2007
Warrantless wiretaps were meant to pass quietly into law by a similar circuit of evasion; but Cheney and Addington were tripped up by one of those accidents that haunt the most cunning of stratagems. A sick man in a hospital bed, who happened to be the attorney general, remembered he had sworn an oath to uphold the laws; and when he took that oath, he had not made a private reservation that the laws he upheld might just as well be laws contrived in secret. Cheney and Addington did not predict the cussedness or the integrity of John Ashcroft. Still, in the assault on FISA, it took the threat of more than thirty resignations from the justice department to convince the president to back down and compromise.
James Comey, the acting attorney general, fought off Cheney and Addington by literally obstructing the path of their agents, Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, beside the bed of the attorney general. We would be living in a different country today if at that critical time, John Yoo, author of the redefinition of torture requested by the vice president, had become, as he aimed to become, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel. But in October 2003, the position went to Jack Goldsmith: a friend of Yoo's, like him an authoritarian conservative and young dogmatist of the Federalist Society, but one whose ideas were complicated by the possession of a conscience.