Time to Make Warrantless Home Video Surveillance Extinct

EFF - It seems that the government's thirst for high tech surveillance can't be quenched. First, came the NSA's warrantless wiretap program. Then it was CISPA. Now, its warrantless video surveillance in the home. And just like we stood up against the NSA and CISPA, yesterday we told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that invasive warrantless home video surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment.

Ricky Wahchumwah, a tribal member of the Yakima Nation, was suspected of selling bald and gold eagle feathers, as well as the feathers and pelts of other migratory birds, in violation of federal law. As part of its investigation, a undercover agent from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service went to Wahchumwah's house, pretending to be interested in buying feathers and pelts. Wahchumwah let him in his house, not knowing that the agent was secretly recording everything with a tiny video camera hidden in his clothes. The agent proceeded to capture two hours of video of Wachumwah's home, including interactions between Wachumwah and his partner and children, and was even left alone by Wachumwah for periods of time, who did not suspect he was being recorded.

Charged with violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Lacey Act, Wahchumwah moved to suppress the video evidence as an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. The trial judge denied his motion, ruling that since Wahchumwah let the agent into his house, and the agent could testify to everything he saw in the house, Wahchumwah had no expectation of privacy. Wahchumwah appealed this decision to the Ninth Circuit, and we filed an amicus brief supporting him.            More

Government Surveillance Self-Defense

The SSD Project

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

After an introductory discussion of how you should think about making security decisions — it’s all about risk management — we’ll be answering those two questions for three types of data:
First, we’re going to talk about the threat to the data stored on your computer posed by searches and seizures by law enforcement, as well as subpoenas demanding your records.

Second, we’re going to talk about the threat to your data on the wire — that is, your data as it’s being transmitted — posed by wiretapping and other real-time surveillance of your telephone and Internet communications by law enforcement.

Third, we’re going to describe the information about you that is stored by third parties like your phone company and your Internet service provider, and how law enforcement officials can get it.

In each of these three sections, we’re going to give you practical advice about how to protect your private data against law enforcement agents.

In a fourth section, we’ll also provide some basic information about the U.S. government’s expanded legal authority when it comes to foreign intelligence and terrorism investigations.

Finally, we’ve collected several articles about specific defensive technologies that you can use to protect your privacy, which are linked to from the other sections or can be accessed individually. So, for example, if you’re only looking for information about how to securely delete your files, or how to use encryption to protect the privacy of your emails or instant messages, you can just directly visit that article.

Legal disclaimer: This guide is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. EFF’s aim is to provide a general description of the legal and technical issues surrounding you or your organization’s computer and communications security, and different factual situations and different legal jurisdictions will result in different answers to a number of questions. Therefore, please do not act on this legal information alone; if you have any specific legal problems, issues, or questions, seek a complete review of your situation with a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.                         More

The Facts Speak For Themselves – Big Brother is watching

The FBI's Digital Collection System connects FBI offices 

and telecom providers around the country to coordinate 

collection of phone taps for investigations of all sorts.

Wired has put together a list of reasons why U. S. citizens 
need to fight for their rights from government surveillance:

Warrantless Wiretapping

 

The government refuses to acknowledge whether the National Security Agency is secretly siphoning the nation’s electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges. The lawsuit was based on evidence provided by a former AT&T technician Mark Klein that showed that AT&T had installed a secret spying room in an internet hub in San Francisco. The spying got so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft threatened to resign over it.

When a federal judge said a lawsuit on that issue could go forward, Congress passed legislation stopping the case in its tracks. Two American lawyers for an Islamic charity did, however, prevail in their suit that they were wiretapped without warrants, but the Administration is appealing. Much of the program was legalized in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.
The FBI has also built a nationwide computer system called the Digital Collection System, connected by fiber optic cables, to collect and analyze wiretaps of all types, including ones used in ultra-secret terrorism investigations.

Warrantless GPS Tracking

 

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen’s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices’ cars without a warrant.

The invasive technology allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked. The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

Tracking Devices in Your Pocket

 

That mobile phone in your pocket chronicles almost everything. Once-secret software developed by a private company pretty much chronicles all you do on your smartphone and sends it to the carriers. The carriers themselves keep a wealth of information, such as text messages, call-location data, and PINs — though none of them disclose to their customers what data they store or how long they keep the data.

Law enforcement can get at much of that historical data — and often get real-time tracking information without proving probable cause to a judge.

Fake Cell Phone Towers

 

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower. While the technology sounds ultra-new, the feds have had this in their arsenal for at least 15 years, and used a stingray to bust the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1995.                     More

Internet Belatedly Notices How Much Spying Government Can Do Without a Warrant

Cato Institute - I’m seeing a lot of technology news sites reporting,  in tones of shock and horror, on a recent court ruling holding that people generally waive their Fourth Amendment “expectation of privacy” in data collected on them by Internet sites, at least when the sites give some kind of notice (however buried in legalese) that they do collect that data.  That means, in this instance, that the government can obtain detailed connection records from Twitter about users associated with Wikileaks without a full-blown Fourth Amendment warrant based on probable cause: A subpoena or a court order based on a far weaker claim of “relevance” to an investigation will suffice.

But this isn’t some shocking new precedent. It’s been the status quo since 1986, when our increasingly outdated electronic privacy laws were written, and arguably for longer than that.

There are plenty of problems with this most recent decision, to be sure. For one, as security researcher Chris Soghoian notes, the court based its opinion on the current Twitter privacy policy, even though the policy in effect at the time the targets of the investigation signed up for the site was significantly more protective. In a way, though, this seems unnecessary: Under the misguided Supreme Court decisions that established our modern “third party doctrine,” contractual promises of privacy don’t matter.

In other words, users are held to “assume the risk” that any third party might turn their information over to the government, effectively waiving their Fourth Amendment rights over that data, even if the third party explicitly promises not to do this. The one reason the privacy policy might be relevant here is that the “third party doctrine” covers information knowingly conveyed to third parties, and while it’s obvious that you “convey” a dialed phone number to the phone company when you make a call (for instance), it might not be as obvious that Web sites you visit are logging your Internet Protocol address.    More