How National Security Letters facilitate full electronic proctological exams, without warrants:
Over a decade ago, the founder of an Internet company received a letter from the federal government, ordering him to not only provide information about one of his clients but also banning him from telling anyone about it…
According to a U.S. District Court judge’s order and decision document, an NSL can be issued by the FBI to an electronic service provider for “subscriber information and toll billing records information, or electronic communication transactional records” under the then USA Patriot Act and now the USA Freedom Act. These administrative subpoenas do not require a judge’s prior approval…
… the FBI believes it can force online companies to turn over the following information simply by sending an NSL demanding it: an individual’s complete web browsing history; the IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with; and records of all online purchases. The FBI also claims authority to obtain cell-site location information with an NSL, which effectively turns a cell phone into a location tracking device. In court filings, the FBI said that at some point it stopped gathering location data as a matter of policy, but that it could secretly choose to resume the practice under existing authority…
“The notion that the government can collect cellphone location information — to turn your cellphone into a tracking device, just by signing a letter — is extremely troubling,” Merrill said.
Bear in mind, they don’t petition a court for this. This is one bureaucrat deciding to hit print on his computer screen. How many government agents are like Lois Lerner? How many were installed by the likes of Valerie Jarrett in key positions specifically so they could issue these letters on Valerie’s orders? One letter is mailed, and they know everything you bought online, everywhere you (and your cell phone) have been the last five or ten years, everyone you’ve talked to online, and more.
Even crazier, Fedguv actually has the power now to divert package shipments from vendors to a government technical service center, for installation of technical monitoring equipment, at which point it is put back onto the tracking system and delivered to you. So when you get that new coffee machine from Amazon, you want to be sure to talk clearly into the little pinhole at the top.
It is madness to think that at some point the big money political power players won’t find a way for this to be used for corporate espionage against their enemies. Imagine knowing you could have a bug placed in all 150 telephones that your leading competitor just bought. Imagine being a hedge fund manager, knowing that you could have an asset that you have blackmail material on at the FBI pull all of the travel and communication records for CEOs of companies you are investing in, to see if they may be planning a merger or not. Not only did it not require anyone else know – the internet companies you get the information from can’t even let anyone know your FBI asset acquired it, and they just assume the individual targeted was a terrorist.
This stuff is great when you picture it being applied to terrorists or serial killers. But as we see an establishment so panicked by the will of the people that they are talking about the GOPe replacing Trump at the convention with Mitt Romney, and an Obama administration which views the laws as ignorable impediments to super-double-plus-socialist-goodness, you realize Bush was perhaps the single greatest disaster for freedom. As the chaos approaches this is not a power you want in the hands of panicked bureaucrats and their political masters.
In a way, we deserve it for having trusted the GOP Establishment.
Apocalypse cometh™
[…] Bush, The Patriot Act, and Government Surveillance […]
You may find it interesting to know that a board member of the ACLU in Colorado just asked for Trump voters to be shot/murdered before they can vote.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/10/colorado-aclu-board-member-shoot-trump-voters-before-election-day/
A threatened “r” flipping to “K”??
The problem with viewing him as K is that he won’t get a gun and pull the trigger himself, nor will he seek to ally with anyone in some broader war against that which he opposes. His goal is some mass-shooter fairy flies in and kills all of Trump’s voters, so his amygdala can just enjoy effortless relief from the threatened reality of a Trump landslide. He is still a rabbit.
The irony is, if he turned K he would support Trump.
But good catch on the article.
I’m more than a little dubious about whether the ISP’s actually can provide the sort of info you describe there.
Go to an Internet cafe and pay cash over the counter for half-an-hour of surfing. Who are you? They don’t know. What sites did you go to? They don’t care. They just took your money.
True, except that the surveillance state knows that is a weakness, which makes me wonder if they haven’t found some way to track people who use them. We know there were counterfeit Cisco Routers a while back made by the Chinese which gave backdoor access, and some thought they were trying to sell them to government contractors at a loss to get them installed, and the resultant access to fedguv systems. Those were the Chinese, who don’t control the matrix, and they almost got inside the most secure areas. Imagine what Fedguv can do.
Maybe if you hit an internet café or public WiFi, the router logs a Unique ID in your OS, and bangs it out to fedguv, whose central database keeps tabs on everywhere WiFi-using machines go. Not that you can’t overcome it with a sterile machine, but then you’d better keep that machine sterile, because if it pops a flag for being used ten times, exclusively at anonymous wifi’s, and doesn’t pop on a tracable IP, a little window pops up on some NSA dude’s desktop, and he then decides to pull everything it has done online to see if there is anything interesting there. If it is interesting enough they can pull surveillance tape from the period (some from mobile vehicles driving around, some from hidden pole cams, maybe even some from roving foot surveillance in the area if you are in a major city, etc) and find you. If it si mildly interesting, they can follow you online during each visit to see what you are doing online, and if it isn’t interesting at all, they will hit ignore, and only monitor activity periodically every few months.
As for finding you, maybe they can hack the WiFi spot remotely, from a desk in DC, to pull the store surveillance from the DVR through the store’s network Most all HD DVRs today have remote access. Now they have your face, and facial recognition vs DMV. Maybe they have WiFi tracking like in Portland, where a hidden network throughout the city pings every WiFi device it touches, allowing them to positionally track each WiFi device by location as it moves from spot to spot, back to an apartment. Did you access the internet from three cafes at specific times, while your phone was pinging towers, allowing them to cross reference the three access times with cell phones present at each location? Now your phone had better be sterile too, and not used for anything personal or trackable. Do you use a prepaid toll pass? Maybe they have ghost readers around the WiFi access points like in NYC, which scanned and registered your toll pass near each spot, allowing a cross reference to get your billing address for the pass. Did they have a new remote credit card reader embedded in the light pole outside, which pulled ID’s off of chips that pass by all day long? Now they can check credit cards that were in the area against the access times. Does your car have WiFi or Onstar? It’s trackable. It is a very connected world, to the point that if you try to stay off the radar you may attract attention and trigger a flag simply by not popping up in places the system expects to see everyone show up.
The bottom line is there are a lot of smart people out there who know where the holes are, can figure out ways to plug them, and they don’t like holes. Never think the leviathan is easy to evade. They literally have nearly limitless resources.
Plus tradecraft is hard to follow 100%, all the time, even when you know what to do. People leave batteries in phones when they shouldn’t, they check voicemail from burners accidently, etc. All it takes is one thread.
Your columns on limitless surveillance by government agents each reinforces my view that ours is a system entirely based on blackmail. When the SCOTUS produces “opinions” that a 7-year-old would read as irrational, the very definition of Newspeak, we know there’s leverage involved.
Look at the utter scum rising to the top in politics. (Hayek, of course, pointed out that this is an axiom of democracy, but wow. Just wow.) As we’ve known for decades, only those with vices (or crimes) large enough to form blackmail fodder are ever allowed to “win” elections or be “appointed” to the federal (or possibly even state) judiciary.
The crisis in Western Civilization is profound, and beyond the scope imaginable by even the deepest cynic. Our society is riven by a metastatic cancer, compounded by sepsis of every imaginable civic pathogen.
I remain a religious agnostic, but the handiwork of Satan covers the land and circles the globe. Our close-knit families are but oases in a vast conflagration.
PS: I opine that the selection for criminality has grown so pervasive that H.R. Clinton’s undoubted history of outright murder is actually making the process into Black Comedy. It’s a problem when the crimes of the powerful are so overarching that they’re no longer useable as blackmail because their revelation would threaten the legitimacy of the entire structure, a structure that left them in place for decades despite their demonic history.