Shadow Government

[Mark]

Your Apps Not Only Know Everything About You, Some Of Them Are Actually “Listening In” On Your Conversations Via The Microphones In Your Smart Phone & Tablets

As you’ll see from our chart, running down the left side, we’ve listed 25 of some of the most popular apps in the Google Play store, including Skype, Facebook and WhatsApp. There are actually about 60 permissions that these apps can ask for—everything from making your phone vibrate to accessing your camera. For practical reasons, we asked Hong to highlight four permissions that he thought were potentially the most alarming. Across the top, we list those four: contacts, text messages, call log and microphone. All of these are pretty straightforward, but the microphone permission is especially eerie. Imagine all the audio around you being recorded by some app, without your knowledge. According to the developers, they say they won't activate your microphone until you tell them to (e.g. you make a phone call on the Skype app), but in the future, that may change. Facebook freaked out users in May when it announced a new feature that would let the microphone listen in on your conversations.

REST: http://www.vocativ.com/tech/internet/mobile-apps-privacy-settings/?page=all

 

[Mark]

New police radars can 'see' inside homes

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies quietly deployed radars that let them effectively see inside homes, with little notice to the courts or the public.

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person's house without first obtaining a search warrant.

The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

Current and former federal officials say the information is critical for keeping officers safe if they need to storm buildings or rescue hostages. But privacy advocates and judges have nonetheless expressed concern about the circumstances in which law enforcement agencies may be using the radars — and the fact that they have so far done so without public scrutiny.

"The idea that the government can send signals through the wall of your house to figure out what's inside is problematic," said Christopher Soghoian, the American Civil Liberties Union's principal technologist. "Technologies that allow the police to look inside of a home are among the intrusive tools that police have."

Agents' use of the radars was largely unknown until December, when a federal appeals court in Denver said officers had used one before they entered a house to arrest a man wanted for violating his parole. The judges expressed alarm that agents had used the new technology without a search warrant, warning that "the government's warrantless use of such a powerful tool to search inside homes poses grave Fourth Amendment questions."

By then, however, the technology was hardly new. Federal contract records show the Marshals Service began buying the radars in 2012, and has so far spent at least $180,000 on them.

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush said officials are reviewing the court's decision. He said the Marshals Service "routinely pursues and arrests violent offenders based on pre-established probable cause in arrest warrants" for serious crimes.

The device the Marshals Service and others are using, known as the Range-R, looks like a sophisticated stud-finder. Its display shows whether it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and, if so, how far away it is — but it does not show a picture of what's happening inside. The Range-R's maker, L-3 Communications, estimates it has sold about 200 devices to 50 law enforcement agencies at a cost of about $6,000 each.



Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them.

The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it.

Those concerns are especially thorny when it comes to technology that lets the police determine what's happening inside someone's home. The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the Constitution generally bars police from scanning the outside of a house with a thermal camera unless they have a warrant, and specifically noted that the rule would apply to radar-based systems that were then being developed.

In 2013, the court limited police's ability to have a drug dog sniff the outside of homes. The core of the Fourth Amendment, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, is "the right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion."

Still, the radars appear to have drawn little scrutiny from state or federal courts. The federal appeals court's decision published last month was apparently the first by an appellate court to reference the technology or its implications.

That case began when a fugitive-hunting task force headed by the U.S. Marshals Service tracked a man named Steven Denson, wanted for violating his parole, to a house in Wichita. Before they forced the door open, Deputy U.S. Marshal Josh Moff testified, he used a Range-R to detect that someone was inside.

Moff's report made no mention of the radar; it said only that officers "developed reasonable suspicion that Denson was in the residence."

Agents arrested Denson for the parole violation and charged him with illegally possessing two firearms they found inside. The agents had a warrant for Denson's arrest but did not have a search warrant. Denson's lawyer sought to have the guns charge thrown out, in part because the search began with the warrantless use of the radar device.

Three judges on the federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the search, and Denson's conviction, on other grounds. Still, the judges wrote, they had "little doubt that the radar device deployed here will soon generate many questions for this court."

But privacy advocates said they see more immediate questions, including how judges could be surprised by technology that has been in agents' hands for at least two years. "The problem isn't that the police have this. The issue isn't the technology; the issue is always about how you use it and what the safeguards are," said Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The Marshals Service has faced criticism for concealing other surveillance tools. Last year, the ACLU obtained an e-mail from a Sarasota, Fla., police sergeant asking officers from another department not to reveal that they had received information from a cellphone-monitoring tool known as a stingray. "In the past, and at the request of the U.S. Marshals, the investigative means utilized to locate the suspect have not been revealed," he wrote, suggesting that officers instead say they had received help from "a confidential source."

William Sorukas, a former supervisor of the Marshals Service's domestic investigations arm, said deputies are not instructed to conceal the agency's high-tech tools, but they also know not to advertise them. "If you disclose a technology or a method or a source, you're telling the bad guys along with everyone else," he said.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-see-through-walls/22007615/

[Mark]

 

Put CCTV in EVERY home: Householders should help us trap burglars, says Scotland Yard chief

    Bernard Hogan Howe said people installed their CCTV cameras too high
    This meant only the tops of the criminals' heads were caught on film
    Families should install their own cameras to help catch burglars, he said
    The Met chief said Britain needed more cameras to help fight crime

Homeowners should consider fitting CCTV to trap burglars, the country's most senior police officer declared yesterday.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe said police forces needed more crime scene footage to match against their 12million images of suspects and offenders.

And he called on families and businesses to install cameras at eye level – to exploit advances in facial recognition technology.

But privacy campaigners condemned the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's suggestion.

'The proposals on increasing the amount of privately owned CCTV cameras are quite frankly Orwellian and risk turning members of the public into an extension of the police,' said Renate Samson of Big Brother Watch.

'Private CCTV is completely unregulated. Recommending greater use of CCTV to gather more images of people's faces – often innocent people's faces – undermines the security of each and every one of us.'

She pointed out that a House of Commons committee had on Saturday released a report on the problems with facial recognition.

Labour MP Andrew Miller said: 'We were alarmed to discover that the police have begun uploading custody photographs of people to the police national database and using facial recognition software without any regulatory oversight. Some of the people had not even been charged.'

Sir Bernard said most cameras were mounted high to keep them out of harm's way and to give an overview of a crime area.

He was speaking after Beverley Turner, wife of Olympic rower James Cracknell, challenged him on LBC Radio on whether CCTV could be used to catch burglars.

Her house was burgled while she and her children were sleeping and footage from a neighbour's CCTV camera was too grainy to identify the thieves.

When Miss Turner asked if more cameras were needed in homes and businesses, Sir Bernard replied: 'Yes. We've got a strategy to encourage people to move their cameras down to eye level.

'Facial recognition software has got better, and we can now apply it to images of burglaries, and then compare them with images we take when we arrest people.

'What we need to be able to do is to be able to compare that photograph with the images we have of people committing a crime.

'Taking the tops of their heads is not that helpful for facial recognition which relies on the eyes and the configuration of the area around the nose and the mouth. So we're trying to get people to, ideally, add a camera at face level.

'If anyone listening has a business, think about installing a new one – they're relatively cheap. If you can't buy one, could you think about moving it?' Covert cameras disguised as clocks, clothes hooks, mirrors and even thermometers can be bought for as little as £40.

They have been responsible for an avalanche of 'peeping Tom' prosecutions involving footage taken in changing rooms, offices and toilets.

Many bookmakers use them to identify robbers or fraudsters.The Green peer Baroness Jones said it was wrong to encourage householders to follow suit. 'It threatens to undermine people's confidence and inject fear in the place where they should feel most secure,' she said.

'I'm not sure it will make anyone feel any safer and the use of facial recognition technology remains largely untested and unproven.'

Research from the College of Policing last week revealed CCTV only modestly cuts crimes such as vandalism and car theft and is useless in stopping violence.

Experts said better street lighting and neighbourhood watch schemes were more valuable.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2985202/Scotland-Yard-chief-Hogan-Howe-calls-DIY-surveillance-help-police.html#ixzz3TsrcC75p

[Mark]

NSA Doesn’t Need to Spy on Your Calls to Learn Your Secrets

Governments and corporations gather, store, and analyze the tremendous amount of data we chuff out as we move through our digitized lives. Often this is without our knowledge, and typically without our consent. Based on this data, they draw conclusions about us that we might disagree with or object to, and that can impact our lives in profound ways. We may not like to admit it, but we are under mass surveillance.

Much of what we know about the NSA’s surveillance comes from Edward Snowden, although people both before and after him also leaked agency secrets. As an NSA contractor, Snowden collected tens of thousands of documents describing many of the NSA’s surveillance activities. Then in 2013 he fled to Hong Kong and gave them to select reporters.

REST: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/data-and-goliath-nsa-metadata-spying-your-secrets/

[Mark]

Feds Financing System to ‘Automatically Detect’ Cyberbullying
$117,102 National Science Foundation project

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is financing the creation of a system for the “automatic detection” of cyberbullying.

The project was awarded this month to Rutgers University, which has received $117,102 so far. The real-time, automatic detection of hurtful online speech is necessary, according to the NSF grant, because cyberbullying is a “critical social problem.” The grant said 40 percent of American teenagers have reported being cyberbullied.

“This project aims to define new approaches for automatic detection of cyberbullying by integrating the relevant research in social sciences and computer science,” the grant said.

The project will involve searching for keywords and studying the relationships between teenagers who send and receive mean online messages.

“Specifically, this research will advance the state of the art in cyberbullying detection beyond textual analysis by also giving due attention to the social relationships in which these bullying messages are exchanged,” the grant said.

“A higher accuracy at detection would allow for better mitigation of the cyberbullying phenomenon and may help improve the lives of thousands of victims who are cyberbullied each year,” it said.

The project hopes to employ “social intervention mechanisms” to prevent cyberbullying. Data on cyberbullying will also “be made available to the larger research community.”

The project begins in July and is set to last through June 2017.

The goal of the project is to create “better cyberbullying detectors.”

“By analyzing the social relationship graph between users and deriving features such as number of friends, network embeddedness, and relationship centrality, the project will validate (and potentially refine) multiple theories in social science literature and assimilate those findings to create better cyberbullying detectors,” the grant said. “The project will yield new, comprehensive models and algorithms that can be used for cyberbullying detection in automated settings.”

The grant added that “text mining” of cyber conversations is not enough, as the project also seeks to conduct data analysis on a “much bigger scale.”

Vivek K. Singh, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University, is leading the project.

“I have worked on multiple projects including designing a novel media sharing application, detecting patterns in large scale Twitter feeds, and analyzing community behavior in social media to design mechanisms to ‘nudge’ people into suitable behaviors,” he writes on his website.

Singh previously studied Twitter hashtags, arguing that people, “make a conscious decision to hash-tag their post, because they want to relate it to an event which is relevant to others in the same spatio-temporal volume.”

Singh did not respond to a request for comment.

The Obama administration has placed a priority on preventing cyberbullying. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) runs a website to stop cyberbullying that encourages Americans to report mean online behavior to law enforcement and schools.

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the first ever White House conference on the subject in 2011.

“If there is one goal of this conference, it is to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up,” President Obama said.

Other measures to counter cyberbullying have raised concerns about privacy and government overreach.

A new law in Illinois to combat cyberbullying allows school administrators to demand the passwords of student’s social media accounts. Schools only need a “reasonable cause to believe that a student’s account on a social network contains evidence that a student has violated a school’s disciplinary rule of policy,” FOX 2 in St. Louis reported.

Australia is seeking to establish an “Office of the Children’s e-Safety Commissioner,” who can fine social media networks AU$17,000 a day for not taking down a post that the government has deemed cyberbullying. A bill working its way through the Australian senate defines cyberbullying as “seriously threatening, seriously intimidating, seriously harassing, or seriously humiliating.”

Liberal Australian senator Cory Bernardi warned that the legislation might go too far.

“Ultimately, children need to be taught a bit of resilience in some ways,” he said. “There is not always going to be someone there to pick up the hurt feelings.”

http://freebeacon.com/issues/feds-financing-system-to-automatically-detect-cyberbullying/

[Mark]

Court mulls revealing secret government plan to cut cell phone service
Feds: SOP 303 mobile-phone kill-switch policy would endanger public if disclosed.

A federal appeals court is asking the Obama administration to explain why the government should be allowed to keep secret its plan to shutter mobile phone service during "critical emergencies."

The Department of Homeland Security came up with the plan—known as Standing Operating Procedure 303—after cellular phones were used to detonate explosives targeting a London public transportation system.

SOP 303 is a powerful tool in the digital age, and it spells out a "unified voluntary process for the orderly shut-down and restoration of wireless services during critical emergencies such as the threat of radio-activated improvised explosive devices."

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in February sided (PDF) with the government and ruled that the policy did not need to be disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act request from the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The court agreed with the government's citation of a FOIA exemption that precludes disclosure if doing so "could reasonably be expected to endanger the life or physical safety of any individual."

EPIC asked the court to revisit its ruling, arguing that the decision, "if left in place, would create an untethered 'national security' exemption'" in FOIA law. On Friday, the court ordered (PDF) the government to respond—a move that suggests the appellate court might rehear the case.

EPIC originally asked for the document in 2011 in the wake of the shut down of mobile phone service in the San Francisco Bay Area subway system during a protest. The government withheld the information, EPIC sued and won, but the government then appealed and prevailed.

In its petition for rehearing, EPIC argued that the appellate court's decision "created a catch-all provision that would allow federal agencies to routinely withhold records subject to disclosure where the agency merely asserts a speculative security risk."

Under the direction of the so-called National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, SOP 303 allows for the shutting down of wireless networks "within a localized area, such as a tunnel or bridge, and within an entire metropolitan area."

There have been no publicly disclosed instances when SOP 303 has been invoked, but the telecoms have agreed to shutter service when SOP 303 is invoked.

Local governments, however, have the power to shutter wireless service regardless of SOP 303.

The last known time mobile phone service was cut by a government agency was the San Francisco example from 2011. That's when the Bay Area Rapid Transit System took heat for disabling service to quell a protest in four downtown San Francisco stations. The three-hour outage was done after BART cut service without the assistance of the telcos.

In the aftermath, BART produced a new policy that said service could only be cut off when "there is strong evidence of imminent unlawful activity that threatens the safety of district passengers, employees, and other members of the public."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/court-mulls-revealing-secret-government-plan-to-cut-cell-phone-service/

[Mark]

Government Software Calculates Your ‘Threat Score’ And Categorizes Citizens As Red, Yellow Or Green

Do you know what your “threat score” is? Today, more than 90 percent of all local police departments and nearly all government agencies employ some sort of technological surveillance. One of the most common applications is called “Beware”, and it scans billions of “arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches” and social media postings to give authorities an idea of who they are dealing with. So the next time that police pull up in front of your home, it is likely that what you have posted on Facebook will be searched. If you have said things that could be construed as “anti-government” or “anti-police”, there is a very good chance that you will have a very high “threat score” and you will be on “the red list”.

I understand that this sounds like something that comes directly out of a science fiction movie, but I assure you that it is very real. In fact, the Washington Post reported on this just the other day…

    While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

    The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

“Beware” was created by a corporation known as “Intrado”, and police departments around the nation began using it back in 2012. When police officers using this software roll up to your home, they will instantly know which residents are on the “green list”, which are on the “yellow list”, and which are on the “red list”. Here is more from the Washington Post…

    As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.

    Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.

    In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media.

Everything that you have ever done on the Internet could potentially be used to calculate your “threat score”. So if you made some ill-advised comments on Facebook or in an Internet forum five years ago, there is still probably a record of that somewhere, and “Beware” will probably find it.

The next time you get pulled over or a police officer comes to your home, things that you may have completely forgotten that you ever said may come back to haunt you. With that in mind, I would like you to read the following excerpt from an article by Matt Agorist…

    Imagine the following scenario: You are on your way home from work, driving down the road when you notice police lights in your rearview mirror. You are being pulled over.

    As you sit there, on the shoulder, adrenaline rushing, simultaneously angry and nervous, the police officer, in his patrol car behind you, is sizing you up based on an algorithm that determines your “threat rating.”

    The officer enters your license plate into a mobile application on his laptop. In a matter of seconds, this application crawls over billions of records in commercial and public databases, including all available social media engagement, recent purchases and “any comments that could be construed as offensive.” The application then determines if your “threat rating” is green, yellow, or red.

    Imagine that you are one of our informed and frequent readers and understand the importance of police accountability and are unafraid to voice your entirely peaceful, yet strong opinion about police misconduct. Imagine that you left a comment on Facebook this morning about a particular officer’s misconduct; imagine that it is this particular officer who just pulled you over.

We live in a society that has become absolutely obsessed with surveillance.

A “Big Brother police state control grid” is being systematically constructed all around us, and we are being watched, tracked, monitored and controlled in hundreds of different ways.

So what can we do about this?

Is there any hope for change?

Well, John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute believes that the key is grassroots activism and non-violent resistance…

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there is only one feasible solution left to us short of fleeing the country for parts unknown: grassroots activism that strives to reform the government locally and trickles up.

    Unfortunately, such a solution requires activism, engagement, vigilance, sacrifice, individualism, community-building, nullification and a communal willingness to reject the federal government’s handouts and, when needed, respond with what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as “militant nonviolent resistance.”

    That means forgoing Monday night football in order to actively voice your concerns at city council meetings, turning off the television and spending an hour reading your local newspaper (if you still have one that reports local news) from front to back, showing your displeasure by picketing in front of government offices, risking your reputation by speaking up and disagreeing with the majority when necessary, refusing to meekly accept whatever the government dictates, reminding government officials—including law enforcement—that they work for you, and working together with your neighbors to present a united front against an overreaching government.

So what do you think?

Will we ever be able to get our privacy back, or has government surveillance become too entrenched?

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/government-software-calculates-your-threat-score-and-categorizes-citizens-as-red-yellow-or-green

[Mark]

NSA Chief Says Gov’t Will Use Smart Home Devices To Track People

“In the future, intelligence services might use the Internet of things for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper said.

The US intelligence chief has acknowledged for the first time that spy agencies might use a new generation of smart household devices in the Internet of things to increase their surveillance capabilities.

As increasing numbers of devices connect to the internet and to one another, the so-called internet of things promises consumers increased convenience – the remotely operated thermostat from Google-owned Nest is a leading example. But as home computing migrates away from the laptop, the tablet and the smartphone, experts warn that the security features on the coming wave of automobiles, dishwashers and alarm systems lag far behind.

In an appearance at a Washington think-tank last month, the director of the National Security Agency, Adm Michael Rogers, said that it was time to consider making the home devices “more defensible”, but did not address the opportunities that increased numbers and even categories of connected devices provide to his surveillance agency.

However, James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, was more direct in testimony submitted to the Senate on Tuesday as part of an assessment of threats facing the United States.

    “In the future, intelligence services might use the Internet of things for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials,” Clapper said.

Clapper did not specifically name any intelligence agency as involved in household-device surveillance. But security experts examining the internet of things take as a given that the US and other surveillance services will intercept the signals the newly networked devices emit, much as they do with those from cellphones. Amateurs are already interested in easily compromised hardware; computer programmer John Matherly’s search engine Shodan indexes thousands of completely unsecured web-connected devices.

source: http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/nsa-chief-says-govt-will-use-smart-home-devices-to-track-people/

[Mark]

A New York judge just ruled that the FBI can't force Apple to unlock iPhones

A federal judge in Brooklyn has ruled that the government can't force Apple to help break an iPhone's passcode security. No, it's not the San Bernardino shooting case, a similar situation where the FBI is seeking to compel Apple to provide custom software to help it access data on a criminal's iPhone. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-judge-rules-fbi-cant-force-apple-to-unlock-iphones-in-major-win-for-apple-2016-2

[Mark]

FBI INSTRUCTS HIGH SCHOOLS TO INFORM ON “ANTI-GOVERNMENT” STUDENTS
Constitutionalists figure prominently on the target list

A new FBI initiative based on Britain’s “anti-terror” mass surveillance program instructs high schools across America to inform on students who express “anti-government” and “anarchist” political beliefs.

“High school students are ideal targets for recruitment by violent extremists seeking support for their radical ideologies, foreign fighter networks, or conducting acts of targeted violence within our borders. High schools must remain vigilant in educating their students about catalysts that drive violent extremism and the potential consequences of embracing extremist belief,” states an unclassified document released in January by the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement, the agency’s primary liaison for the law enforcement community.

The document claims public school educators “are in a unique position to affect change, impart affirmative messaging, or facilitate intervention activities,” including informing on students. It calls for “observing and assessing concerning behaviors and communications” of students “embracing extremist ideologies.”

In addition to “designated foreign terrorist organizations,” the FBI program targets “domestic violent extremism movements,” including anti-government groups.

 


According to the FBI “some adults embrace domestic violent extremist ideologies [and] their beliefs can permeate family norms, oftentimes influencing their children. This dynamic fosters biases leading to hatred and intolerance, and drives the need for action.”

Conflating Sovereign Citizens and Constitutionalists

The FBI and federal and local law enforcement groups categorize many libertarian, constitutionalist and other groups and individuals as “sovereign citizens.”

According to an FBI counterterrorism analysis, sovereign citizens “may refer to themselves as ‘constitutionalists’ or ‘freemen,’ which is not necessarily a connection to a specific group, but, rather, an indication that they are free from government control.”

The FBI considers the Redemption Theory (the abandonment of the gold standard in favor of fiat currency), emancipation “from the responsibilities of being a U.S. citizen, including paying taxes,” and “conspiracy theories,” including the formation of global government and a police state, as  indicators of extremist or sovereign citizen ideology.

A National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) report produced by the Office of University Programs, Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Homeland Security in 2014 lists sovereign citizens as the primary domestic terror threat in the United States, followed by Islamic jihadists, “militia/patriot” and “extreme anti-tax” groups.

The document attempts to persuade law enforcement that sovereign citizens are a direct threat to them. “Such changing perceptions about what is a serious terrorist threat is an important finding because identifying and prioritizing a threat is akin to hitting a moving target and evolves as new intelligence, data, and events develop,” the START report argues.

The FBI high school informer network initiative is part of a larger effort “identifying and prioritizing” supposed threats.

Informant Culture

The FBI initiative—the latest manifestation of the “see something, say something” surveillance matrix—further engenders a government informant culture that shares a parallel with East Germany’s “Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter” or informal collaborator culture.

This Stasi network served as a primary instrument of repression in communist East Germany. The government forged partnerships with business, state institutions and social organizations. It is estimated that the Stasi had an informal collaborator or informant network exceeding 624,000 people (in 1989, at the height of Stasi power, the population of East Germany was 16.5 million).

Former intelligence professionals are well aware the United States is on its way to becoming a totalitarian high-tech surveillance state that will soon rival the East German variant.

In January 2015 a delegation of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence—which included ex-officers from the NSA, CIA and British MI5—visited the Stasi museum in Berlin.

“As the former intelligence officers-turned-whistleblowers walked among the well-preserved offices and conference rooms of a former totalitarian state’s internal spy apparatus,” writes Elizabeth Murray, who served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East in the National Intelligence Council, “the sense of deja vu and irony of what the United States of America has become was clearly not lost on any of them.”


http://www.infowars.com/fbi-instructs-high-schools-to-inform-on-anti-government-students/

[Mark]

Obama: Let Big Brother In If You Want Online Protection

President Obama urged students to open up their digital life to the federal government, if they wanted to be protected by the government, calling the current privacy expectations from Americans unrealistic.

“People have a whole new set of privacy expectations that are understandable. They also expect though that since their lives are all digitized, that the digital world is safe, which creates a contradictory demand on government,” he said.

Obama discussed the issue during a conversation about the Supreme Court at the University of Chicago, where he used to teach Constitutional law.

He pointed out that citizens expected the government to protect them from hackers and terrorists, but refused to allow the government to have some sort of access to their information.

He characterized the problematic attitude as “protect me from hackers, protect me for terrorists, protect me from et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but I don’t want you to know any of your business and I don’t even want you to have the ability to investigate some of that business when it happens because of its broader implications and we’re worried about Big Brother.”

Obama asserted that privacy issues would be paramount in the future of the Supreme Court, which was why he urged Congress to confirm his nomination to the court.

“There’s going to be a whole series of issues around that, that I think will be coming up,” he said.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/04/07/obama-let-big-brother-want-online-protection/

[Mark]

A lot of us out there use prepaid non traceable phones...

This Is Beyond Bizarre - Phone Outages Concentrated Heavily In The Same Pockets Of America By All These Providers - Command, Control And Communication Test?

Late last night ANP received an interesting email informing us that Verizon was down in no less than 17 states and that a Verizon tech had told the reader it was pre-paid phones only, but what we found when we started to research these outages is beyond bizarre.

We found that it was not just Verizon, nor just pre-paid cell phones, but AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile also received significant amounts of reports, and in looking at the outage maps over at Down Detector, each service provider suffered outages which were heavily concentrated in the exact same pockets of America, from coast to coast.

Screen shots of the four outage maps shown below were taken this morning at approximately 9AM ET - Note the similarity and patterns in all four maps in the North East, Florida, Texas, Washington State, and California.

It instantly struck me that the areas suffering the most concentration of widespread communication outages, seemed to be near water, so I pulled up a satellite image of ports in the U.S., and  as seen in the map below, those same areas of heavily concentrated outages from all four of these huge providers, are also the same locations where the U.S. has medium (blue), large (green) and extra large (purple) ports.

he majority of complaints were of no phone service, and to a lesser extent no mobile Internet data, but we also see a significant percent at T-Mobile and AT&T where there was no service, no network or reception.

The first thing I did was check space weather, but found nothing of note that would be significant enough to cause outages this widespread along coastal areas, nor disrupt satellites that would cause this type of widepsread communications failure.

The second thing I did was contact a trusted ANP source who informed me his prepaid phone also went down, this could only be done at a central location, and it is his belief that this was a test to cause people not to be able to communicate, stating "This is the first thing taken out in any operation - Command, Control, Communication."

BOTTOM LINE

Had this happened only to Verizon this article wouldn't have been written because a variety of issues could cause a company, even as large as Verizon, to suffer outages even in multiple states, but when we see four of the largest communications providers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon all having failures around the same time, heavily concentrated in the same locations, all along both coasts and the Gulf of Mexico where we just happened to have large amounts of ports...... we find it too much to chalk up to simple coincidences.


ALL MAPS AND PICS: http://allnewspipeline.com/Very_Strange_The_Big_Four.php

[Mark]

Americans Now Realize Their Paranoid Fantasies About Government Surveillance Are True 

For more than a decade now, Americans have made peace with the uneasy knowledge that someone — government, business or both — might be watching. Now, though, paranoid fantasies have come face to face with modern reality: The government IS collecting our phone records. The technological marvels of our age have opened the door to the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans’ calls.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/08/americans-starting-to-realize-their-paranoid-fantasies-about-government-surveillance-have-come-true/?utm

US: No plans to end broad surveillance program...
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20130611/DA6RDBKO2.html

Internet's big names in battle to salvage reputations after NSA revelations...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/10/apple-google-giants-nsa-revelations

Sales of '1984' rocket up 69% on AMAZON...
http://washingtonexaminer.com/sales-of-orwells-1984-up-69-percent-on-amazon-list/article/2531503

   lets see about that last one now...Remember this?

Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

Amazon CEO apologizes for deleting Orwell books
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.e5c73c285871b4ae01c48f87ff89af64.3a1&show_article=1

[Mark]

Hidden Microphones Exposed As Part of Government Surveillance Program In The Bay Area

Hidden microphones that are part of a clandestine government surveillance program that has been operating around the Bay Area has been exposed.

Imagine standing at a bus stop, talking to your friend and having your conversation recorded without you knowing.  It happens all the time, and the FBI doesn’t even need a warrant to do it.

Federal agents are planting microphones to secretly record conversations.

Jeff Harp, a KPIX 5 security analyst and former FBI special agent said, “They put microphones under rocks, they put microphones in trees, they plant microphones in equipment. I mean, there’s microphones that are planted in places that people don’t think about, because that’s the intent!”

FBI agents hid microphones inside light fixtures and at a bus stop outside the Oakland Courthouse without a warrant to record conversations, between March 2010 and January 2011.

Federal authorities are trying to prove real estate investors in San Mateo and Alameda counties are guilty of bid rigging and fraud and used these recordings as evidence.

Harp said, “An agent can’t just go out and grab a recording device and plant it somewhere without authorization from a supervisor or special agent in charge.”

The lawyer for one of the accused real estate investors who will ask the judge to throw out the recordings, told KPIX 5 News that, “Speaking in a public place does not mean that the individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy…private communication in a public place qualifies as a protected ‘oral communication’… and therefore may not be intercepted without judicial authorization.”

Harp says that if you’re going to conduct criminal activity, do it in the privacy of your own home. He says that was the original intention of the Fourth Amendment, but it’s up to the judge to interpret it.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/05/13/hidden-microphones-exposed-as-part-of-government-surveillance-program-in-the-bay-area/

[Mark]

[Mark]

FBI says utility pole surveillance cam locations must be kept secret
"Disclosure of even minor details about them may cause jeopardy," bureau says.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has successfully convinced a federal judge to block the disclosure of where the bureau has attached surveillance cams on Seattle utility poles. The decision Monday stopping Seattle City Light from divulging the information was expected, as claims of national security tend to trump the public's right to know.

However, this privacy dispute highlights a powerful and clandestine tool the authorities are employing across the country to snoop on the public—sometimes with warrants, sometimes without. Just last month, for example, this powerful surveillance measure—which sometimes allows the authorities to control the camera's focus point remotely—helped crack a sex trafficking ring in suburban Chicago.

Meanwhile, in stopping the release of the Seattle surveillance cam location information—in a public records act case request brought by activist Phil Mocek—US District Judge Richard Jones agreed (PDF) with the FBI's contention that releasing the data would harm national security.

"If the Protected Information is released, the United States will not be able to obtain its return; the confidentiality of the Protected Information will be destroyed, and the recipients will be free to publish it or post the sensitive information wherever they choose, including on the Internet, where it would harm important federal law enforcement operational interests as well as the personal privacy of innocent third parties," Jones ruled.

Peter Winn, assistant US attorney in Seattle, won the injunction after telling Judge Jones that "the FBI’s use of the pole camera technique is a powerful tool in FBI investigations of criminal violations and national security threats. Disclosure of even minor details about them may cause jeopardy to important federal interests because, much like a jigsaw puzzle, each detail may aid adversaries in piecing together information about the capabilities, limitations, and circumstances of equipment’s use, and would allow law enforcement subjects, or national security adversaries, to accumulate information and draw conclusions about the FBI’s use of this technology, in order to evade effective, lawful investigation by the FBI" (PDF).

The deployment of such video cameras appears to be widespread. What's more, the Seattle authorities aren't saying whether they have obtained court warrants to install the surveillance cams. And the law on the matter is murky at best.

Consider that in February, an Ohio-based federal appeals court upheld the firearms conviction of a Tennessee man whose brother's rural farm was monitored for 10 weeks straight by a remote-controlled camera that the authorities installed on a utility pole 200 yards away without a warrant. That ruling conflicted with one issued by a Washington state federal judge who in 2014 tossed an alleged drug dealer's conviction that was gained under the same circumstances—the warrantless spying on a suspect via a webcam attached to a utility pole near his rural Washington state property. In May, the FBI dropped its appeal of that decision without providing any reason.

Before abandoning its appeal, the government said (PDF) that it had the right to deploy the webcam without a court warrant because the device was on the public's right-of-way and was akin to a cop's observations from the street. The judge in the case, however, said the Fourth Amendment required that the police needed a warrant to spy.

In an e-mail to Ars, Seattle city attorney spokeswoman Kimberly Mills declined to say whether the FBI obtained warrants to install surveillance cams on Seattle City Light utility poles. "The City is in litigation and will have no further comment," she said. Mills suggested we speak with the FBI office in Seattle, and we did.

Ayn Dietrich-Williams, an FBI spokeswoman in Seattle, said that "given the ongoing litigation, it would not be appropriate for the FBI to comment." She pointed to Winn's filing as a source of possible answers. In Winn's brief, we discovered a link to "The Attorney General's Guidelines For Domestic FBI Operations." Under the "Particular Methods" section, there's this reference:

Use of closed-circuit television, direction finders, and other monitoring devices, subject to legal review by the Chief Division Counsel or the FBI Office of the General Counsel. (The methods described in this paragraph usually do not require court orders or warrants unless they involve physical trespass or non-consensual monitoring of communications, but legal review is necessary to ensure compliance with all applicable legal requirements.)
Mocek told Ars that as part of his utility pole cam investigation, "I have learned nothing of related warrants or of a lack thereof."

Winn, meanwhile, wrote to Judge Jones that the location information about the disguised surveillance cams should be withheld because the public might think they are an "invasion of privacy."

"Because of their close proximity to the subjects of surveillance, unauthorized disclosure of the locations of current or previously installed pole cameras can reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of privacy for those persons under investigation who have not yet been charged. It can also reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of innocent third parties not under investigation but geographically near the current or past location of the camera, who may falsely be assumed to be the subject of an FBI investigation," Winn wrote.

Winn also said that revealing the cameras' locations could threaten the safety of FBI agents.

"Revelation of the subject of an FBI investigation by the unauthorized disclosure of the location of a current or previously installed pole camera can have a devastating impact on an investigation," Winn told Judge Jones. "Armed with such knowledge, a subject would not only be able to evade further investigation by the FBI but would also be able to employ countermeasures to impede further investigation such as destroying, hiding, or otherwise concealing evidence; intimidating or retaliating against cooperating witnesses; or by simply fleeing the jurisdiction. Such disclosure would also allow any individual other than the subject of an investigation who is intent on interfering with or thwarting the investigation to do so. As such, unauthorized disclosure of the location of a pole camera could threaten the safety of the FBI agents involved with the investigation."

And if the cameras become "publicly identifiable," Winn said, "subjects of the criminal investigation and national security adversaries of the United States will know what to look for to discern whether the FBI is conducting surveillance in a particular location."

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/fbi-says-utility-pole-surveillance-cam-locations-must-be-kept-secret/

[Psalm 51:17]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/movies/news/oliver-stone-says-every-studio-turned-down-snowden/ar-BBuCYZn?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
Oliver Stone says every studio turned down 'Snowden'
7/22/16

Despite a good cast, a good budget, and a good script, veteran filmmaker Oliver Stone says every studio turned down the opportunity to make Snowden, the story of Edward Snowden, the famed CIA contract employee who famously leaked classified information about secret global surveillance programs being run by the NSA.

Stone, who made his first-ever appearance at Comic-Con on Thursday, ultimately found his financing from France and Germany, where he shot the majority of the movie (which Open Road Films will debut on Sept. 16). Joining Stone on the first official day of Comic-Con were his film's stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays the titular character, Shailene Woodley, who plays Snowden's girlfriend Lindsay Mills, and Zachary Quinto, who portrays Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald.

Despite the rousing applause for the filmmaker behind such iconic films as Platoon, Wall Street, and The Doors, among many others, the panel conversation turned pretty serious pretty fast with Stone lamenting the fact that today's society is "feeling the 1984 Big Brother vibe" and all the cast members urging the primarily young audience to educate themselves on the level of surveillance currently in their lives.

Stone met Snowden three times in 2014 before eventually deciding to make the movie, and said he was initially reluctant to do so. "I didn't want to do this at the beginning," he said. "You get beat up, current [event movies] get you killed. Protagonists often turn on you, especially in rock movies."

But Stone was compelled by Snowden's personal story and the impact of his actions on both his personal and professional life. "He's going through a painful, personal story," said Stone. "He was only 29 when he did this enormous thing. And in our two years together, he's never wilted in the face of opposition."

Gordon-Levitt, who spent a lot of time with Snowden's voice in his ears to nail his unique speech, was relieved to find the activist didn't carry any ego with him after the pair met. Rather, Gordon-Levitt found Snowden to be humble and polite.

"I was trying to get to know him on a different level," says Gordon-Levitt, who donned a T-shirt with an American flag for Thursday's panel. "He's like an old-fashioned gentleman, really warm and an optimist about the future of technology. I've been dying to ask him if he's cool with [what I've done] with my voice."

Stone also added that Snowden's relationship with Mills provided the soul to the movie and wouldn't have worked without her. "He doesn't have any friends. He's not close to his sister, mother or father. He lives in the computer world. It's one of the main reasons he did this radical action."

Added Woodley, who Stone wanted for his film after seeing her in The Fault in Our Stars, "I felt the opportunity to know him as a human being was crucial. It's easy to forget that people who make these decisions are still human with an emotional life."