Archive
Feds to Supreme Court: Allow Warrantless GPS Monitoring
The Obama administration is urging the Supreme Court to allow the government, without a court warrant, to affix GPS devices on suspects’ vehicles to track their every move.
The Justice Department, saying “a person has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements (.pdf) from one place to another,” is demanding the justices undo a lower court decision that reversed the conviction and life sentence of a cocaine dealer whose vehicle was tracked via GPS for a month without a court warrant.
The petition, if accepted by the justices, arguably would make it the biggest Fourth Amendment case in a decade — one weighing the collision of Read more…
How Our Government is Tracking and Databasing Your Every Move
Big Brother is Watching
The war on terror and cybersecurity are excuses that have spurred huge investments into the surveillance industry, which has become a war on “liberty and privacy.”
The Obama administration has moved forward with a Bush regime program to screen state computer traffic on private-sector networks, including those connecting people to the Internet, The Washington Post revealed July 3.
That project, code-name “Einstein,” is related to the much-larger, Read more…
TIME: Everything’s Tracked- Get Over It
In an astounding cover story for the March 21 issue of TIME called ‘Your Data for Sale,’ author Joel Stein tells readers to simply “get over” constant surveillance. The tagline, “Everything about you is being tracked– get over it” puts the issue in your face. Yeah, get over it, and the TSA porno-scanners and grope-downs, too.
Newsweek, like TIME, another Skull and Bones-dominated media organ, similarly published a shocker in 2009 with its cover story, ‘The Case for Killing Granny,’ preparing the masses to simply accept massive shifts in society’s norms as if it were a trifling occurrence. Unauthorized NSA wiretapping and other related surveillance (started long ago) was at least controversial during the Bush Administration, though it has unabashedly continued under Obama. Read more…
Banks spying on your bills, rent payments, paychecks: report
This article was published a few months ago, however, it is worth re-posting!
The age of the plain old credit score is gone, says a report at the Wall Street Journal, and it’s been replaced by ever more intrusive efforts by banks and credit agencies to gauge exactly what you’re worth, and what you can pay.
To that end, financial firms are now tracking their customers’ bank deposits, rent payments or home values, and even utility bills to figure out who may soon become a financial risk, reports WSJ‘s Karen Blumenthal.
So, for example, if your employer pays you through direct deposits and those deposits stop, financial institutions can now have warning that your money situation is likely to tighten, and may deny you credit on that basis.
But the efforts don’t end there. A new area of research, income estimation, “took off earlier this year,” WSJ reports, and involves financial firms collecting information about mortgages, personal loans and credit history to determine how much an individual makes and how much credit they should be given.
In this new era of deep data-mining, even your utility bills and rent Read more…
FBI can obtain phone records without oversight, Justice Dept memo claims
Without court oversight, the nation’s top law enforcement agency can obtain domestic records of telephone conversations made to international receivers, the Justice Department claimed recently.
“[The Office of Legal Counsel] agreed with the FBI that under certain circumstances (word or words redacted) allows the FBI to ask for and obtain these records on a voluntary basis from the providers, without legal process or a qualifying emergency,” the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a recent report by McClatchy Newspapers.
The claim put forth in the document released to McClatchy seemed to indicate that the Obama administration has continued the previous administration’s policies.
The Bush administration maintained that the FBI needed such policing powers in order to stop possible terrorism. Critics of the FBI’s surveillance program stated that the tactic was frequently applied in abusive manners.
Kevin Bankston, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told McClatchy that the OLC’s disclosure that Read more…
Germany deploys contactless national ID
Germany began issuing the new contactless national ID to citizens in November. The program is one of the first contactless-only electronic ID programs. It also employs a unique privacy scheme to protect cardholders.
National ID cards aren’t new in the European Union and many countries use smart card technology to power the credentials. But the contactless German ID is a bit of a departure from what other countries have done and thus necessitated a slightly different take on existing contactless smart cards.
The country expects to issue 60 million cards over the next 10 years to replace existing paper documents, says Rudy Stroh, executive vice president of the ID business and country manager for Germany at NXP Semiconductors. NXP is providing the chip–its 128-kilobyte SmartMX secure contactless microcontroller–for the German e-ID.
“The contactless technology used in the e-ID enables strong privacy protection,” Stroh says.
The first difference between the German ID card and other contactless smart cards is that is can only be read from four centimeters, whereas most other cards can be read from Read more…
Technology of the New World
Google Comes Under Fire for ‘Secret’ Relationship with NSA
Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group largely focused in recent years on Google’s privacy practices, has called on a congressional investigation into the Internet giant’s “cozy” relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration.
In a letter sent Monday, Consumer Watchdog asked Representative Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, to investigate the relationship between Google and several government agencies.
The group asked Issa to investigate contracts at several U.S. agencies for Google technology and services, the “secretive” relationship between Google and the U.S. National Security Agency, and the company’s use of a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration airfield in California.
Federal agencies have also taken “insufficient” action in response to revelations last year that Google Street View cars were collecting data from open Wi-Fi connections they passed, Consumer Watchdog said in the letter.
“We believe Google has inappropriately benefited from close ties to the administration,” the letter said. “Google is most consumers’ gateway to the Internet. Nonetheless, it should not get special treatment and access because of a special relationship with the administration.” Read more…
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