Has the government’s state secrets privilege been misused from the start? According to the New York Times, it would appear that the Supreme Court was misled, which caused them to basically define the terms under which the privilege can be used.
[D]ocuments from the 1953 case that defined the modern privilege, United States v. Reynolds, have been declassified in recent years and suggest that Air Force officials misled the court.
An accident report on a B-29 bomber crash in 1948 was withheld because the Air Force said it included technical details about sensitive intelligence equipment and missions, but it turned out to contain no such information, said Wilson M. Brown III, a lawyer in Philadelphia who represented survivors of those who died in the crash in recent litigation.
“The facts the Supreme Court was relying on in Reynolds were false,” Mr. Brown said in an interview. “It shows that if the government is not truthful, plaintiffs will lose and there’s very little chance to straighten it out.”
This is a very compelling read, especially when thought of in the context of the NSA eavesdropping case currently being heard. Makes you really wonder what the government is attempting to hide.
The NSA phone call database is nothing short of a privacy nightmare. Not only is it disconcerting that the President authorized such actions, but America is still unsure about the legality of the whole process. The privacy laws in the US are inadequate for issues of this nature.
It will be interesting to see how this data is retained by the NSA, which is one of the remaining unanswered questions. Europe has much more stringent privacy laws and this excellently written essay explains it in exquisite detail.
Why should anyone care that the outcome would have been so different under European privacy law? One reason for the comparison with Europe is that it enables us to understand better current developments in American law. It is striking how similar American and European data privacy law was in the early 1970s, how different it is today. The first European database privacy statutes of the 1970s drew on the U.S. Privacy Act of 1974. Alan Westin’s Privacy and Freedom, published in 1967, was read widely by both American and European policymakers. There are many reasons for the divergent paths of the two systems. This latest example of difference highlights one set of reasons: the President’s new constitutional powers in fighting terrorism, post-September 11. Congress, the courts, and the public might very well accept that the NSA program is legal, based on the President’s inherent authority as commander-in-chief. In Europe, that would not be possible.
After reading the entire article I am left wondering just how this is all going to play out in the United States. Sure makes you wonder who our elected officials truly believe they represent.
In another twist in the ongoing saga that is the NSA eavesdropping lawsuit, it appears that AT&T bungled a legal brief by including sensitive information that was blocked out but which can be easily read by some PDF readers.
AT&T’s attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable.
But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer’s OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.
The information unintentionally released in the brief is not classified nor does it explain anything about the NSA’s eavesdropping program. Another chapter in this odd battle between the EFF and AT&T/USA.
The NSA eavesdropping case just keeps getting more interesting by the day. Today, the judge presiding over the case ordered documents to be released in redacted form.
Much of the wording in the redacted text of Klein’s affidavit (.pdf), which was published in the court docket Thursday afternoon, matches language in the statement published Monday by Wired News.
Technical details in the newly released documents also mesh with the documents published by Wired News. Additionally, both sets of documents refer to an employee who was cleared by the NSA to work in the room, but who was later laid off by AT&T as part of a downsizing. This shared detail, along with others, was not part of Klein’s only previous public statement, which was released by his lawyer in early April and printed in full by Wired News.
It would appear that the information provided by whistle-blower Mark Klein is authentic and that the NSA has been conducting surveillance on American citizens, in direct violation of their charter. But that does not mean the case will continue with a certainty as the judge presiding over the it will review the government and AT&T’s motions to dismiss the case on the grounds of national security.
Sniffing an enterprise network is a pretty easy task to perform, especially with the right tools. However, just because a tool offers the capability to easily capture data does not mean that interpreting that collected information is easy. That is, unless you have access to the ultimate net monitoring tool, the tool that the NSA enlisted in their eavesdropping program that was recently uncovered.
“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”
Narus’ product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It’s renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.
Sounds like a well designed product, especially if it is capable of keeping up with traffic flowing at a rate of 10Gbps. When you get that high you generally see software of this nature start to drop packets because of the amount of data being pumped through the pipes.
If you are truly concerned about the NSA reading your email, and opening up sensitive attachments, then encrypting your email is the best thing you can do. Grab PGP and be on your way to ensuring what you write is only read by the intended recipients, not some NSA lackey.
Using public WiFi, while nice because it is free, is a sandbox for hackers to capture data that you might have otherwise thought was secure. Any black hat can use freely available tools that can sniff the data leaving your computer and capture that information so it can be used with malicious intent at a later date. One of the best ways to combat this security risk is by securing Firefox and IM with PuTTY in a sort of makeshift Virtual Private Network (VPN).
There are times when you want to connect to the Internet through unknown and/or insecure networks such as the local Panera or other WiFi hotspot. If you aren’t careful, you might make it all too easy for someone to sniff your connection using Ettercap.
This HOWTO is an easy to read, well written reference guide for setting up Firefox and GAIM so that it uses PuTTY as a sort of proxy server. The only piece missing is the SSH server that you are going to need access to in order for this to work properly. Look around the internet and you should be able to find something that suits your needs.
Not that this comes as much of a surprise considering how the various governmental agencies are essentially lapdogs for President Bush but the FCC declines to investigate the NSA. The chairman concluded that the FCC would be unable to compel the NSA to produce classified documents related to the program and therefore incapable of conducting a thorough investigation.
In a letter to Rep. Edward J. Markey dated Monday, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission stated that any investigation of the National Security Agency’s alleged domestic wiretapping program would have to be able to force the military agency to produce classified documents–a power the chairman believes the FCC does not have. The refusal did not play well with Rep. Markey, a ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.
“Today the watchdog agency that oversees the country’s telecommunications industry refused to investigate the nation’s largest phone companies’ reported disclosure of phone records to the NSA,” Rep. Markey said. “The FCC, which oversees the protection of consumer privacy under the Communications Act of 1934, has taken a pass at investigating what is estimated to be the nation’s largest violation of consumer privacy ever to occur.”
This is arguably the largest breach of consumer privacy in the history of the United States and the agency tasked with protecting Americans has opted to sit on the sidelines. Is anyone really shocked to hear this?
27B Stroke 6 has an interesting article up today called Making Up Your Own Mind. It recounts some interesting comments made on the whole NSA wiretapping discussion that is currently taking place in various areas throughout the internet.
Today Wired News published a set of documents that originated with AT&T whistle-blower Mark Klein that include portions of wire diagrams that he says shows that AT&T is diverting a copy of the internet traffic that goes over its pipes into a secret room used for NSA wiretapping.
A full explanation of our reasons for publishing the documents is here, but one of the reasons was to let loose open and full debate of the evidence. We tried to start that with our story from last week, but its hard to judge between competing opinions when you can’t see the source documents.
The selected comments are definitely a worthwhile read, especially if you came to the somewhat logical conclusion that illegal wiretapping has taken place. They truly serve to help enlighten some of this mess.
Bruce Schneier has written a wonderful essay about the value of privacy for Americans. If you are worried about the state of affairs, with the lack of privacy these days, then this is a must read.
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
Bruce’s scathing response to the final question in the above quote is what makes this an interesting read. After all, that is the argument that is thrown around in every direction when conversing about privacy related issues, such as the NSA wiretapping and whatnot.
The Stealther Firefox extension allows for web browsing while not leaving a single trace of the browsing session. Specifically, the extension disables the saving of the following information:
- Browsing History (also in Address bar)
- Cookies
- Downloaded Files History
- Disk Cache
- Saved Form Information
- Sending of ReferrerHeader
If you are concerned that others who have access to your computer are snooping around in order to find out where you have been browsing then this might be the perfect privacy accessory.