I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that’s why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.

Forgetting the question of legality, I hope that we can collectively look at this changing dynamic and perhaps re-evaluate what we culturally reward. I’d much rather think about the question of exploit sales in terms of who we welcome to our conferences, who we choose to associate with, and who we choose to exclude, than in terms of legal regulations. I think the contextual shift we’ve seen over the past few years requires that we think critically about what’s still cool and what’s not.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion and the bulk of the community is totally fine with how things have gone (after all, it is profitable). There are even explicitly patriotic hackers who suggest that their exploit sales are necessary for the good of the nation, seeing themselves as protagonists in a global struggle for the defense of freedom, but having nothing to do with these ugly situations in Saudi Arabia. Once exploits are sold to US defense contractors, however, it’s very possible they could end up delivered directly to the Saudis (eg, eg, eg), where it would take some even more substantial handwaving to think that they’ll serve in some liberatory way.

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

GCSB director Ian Fletcher said in February that his agency did not illegally spy on anyone else on behalf of law enforcement agencies.

But the Kitteridge report contradicts this - questioning the lawfulness of GCSB surveillance involving 85 New Zealanders. The agency is forbidden from spying on anyone with citizenship or permanent residence here.

The illegal spying was conducted between April 2003 and September last year and done on behalf of the Security Intelligence Service, the domestic spy agency.

Last summer, in an effort to strike the right balance between government transparency and the protection of critical intelligence activities, the government declassified four statements concerning its activities pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) Amendments Act of 2008. Not content with that disclosure, Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF” or “Plaintiff”) submitted a Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) request seeking additional information related to two of the declassified statements, specifically, that on at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”) “held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment” and that “on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached th[e ] conclusion” that “the government’s implementation of Section 702 of FISA has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law.”

The government has determined that disclosure of the information withheld from Plaintiff could result in exceptionally grave and serious damage to the national security. Plaintiff obviously cannot contend otherwise. The Court accordingly should defer to the government’s determination in this case, uphold the Department’s withholdings, and grant this motion.

Yet, as the amicus brief points out, the OLC’s opinions aren’t some intermediary step toward establishing the final legal interpretations for the executive branch. In general, they are the final legal interpretations for the executive branch. The FBI could choose to exercise the authority that the OLC said it had — or not — but Congress, the judiciary and the public at large all deserve to know what the executive branch thinks it can do, once it issues a conclusive opinion.

"There's misconceptions on what fusion centers are," he says. "The misconceptions are that we are conducting spying operations on US citizens, which is of course not the fact. That is absolutely not what we do."

Davis says Arkansas hasn't collected much information about international plots, but they do focus on groups closer to home.

"We focus a little more on that, domestic terrorism and certain groups that are anti-government," he says. "We want to kind of take a look at that and receive that information."

"I do what I do because of what happened on 9/11," Davis says. "There's this urge and this feeling inside that you want to do something, and this is a perfect opportunity for me."

Two key memos outlining the Justice Department's views about when Americans can be surreptitiously tracked with GPS technology are being kept secret by the department despite a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU to force their release. The FBI’s general counsel discussed the existence of the two memos publicly last year, yet the Justice Department is refusing to release them without huge redactions. 

The word "see" is obviously some sort of joke because there's absolutely nothing to "see" here, unless you consider To, From and Subject fields to be the "smoking gun." Oh, and this one paragraph that leads into 56 straight pages of black ink.

In United States v. Jones, 132 S. Ct. 945 (2012), the Supreme Court affirmed the suppression of location data generated by a GPS tracking device surreptitiously affixed to a car without court authorization and monitored continuously over a 28-day period.

The Justice Department's unfortunate decision leaves Americans with no clear understanding of when we will be subjected to tracking — possibly for months at a time — or whether the government will first get a warrant. This is yet another example of secret surveillance policies — like the Justice Department's secret opinions about the Patriot Act's Section 215 — that simply should not exist in a democratic society.

[The] second memoranda [sic] is going to be about guidance about what this means for other types of techniques, beyond GPS, because there's no reason to think that this is going to just end with GPS and some of that is going to be very much a judgment call.

Beginning in 2011, a series of investigative articles by the Associated Press ("AP") revealed that the New York Police Department ("NYPD") conducted extensive surveillance of Muslims and persons of Arab descent in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere. The NYPD’s activities included photographing members of the Muslim community as they entered mosques, infiltrating Muslim student groups, and monitoring Muslim stores and businesses. According to the AP, the “police subjected entire neighborhoods to surveillance and scrutiny, often because of the ethnicity of the residents, not because of any accusations of crimes.” The AP also reported, “many of these operations were built with help from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit after 9/11.”

In December 2011 the Associated Press described an investigation by the CIA Inspector General regarding the agency’s collaboration with NYPD. CIA spokesman Preston Golson acknowledged the existence of this investigation and stated that the agency's Inspector General concluded that no laws were broken and there was “no evidence that any part of the agency's support to the NYPD constituted 'domestic spying.”

According to USA Today, “The revelations troubled some members of Congress and even prompted the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, to remark that it did not look good for the CIA to be involved in any city police department. Thirty-four lawmakers have asked for the Justice Department to investigate but so far that request has gone nowhere.” At a March 2012 hearing, Attorney General Holder told Congress “he's disturbed by what he's read about the New York Police Department conducting surveillance of mosques and Islamic student organizations in New Jersey.”

On March 28, 2012, EPIC submitted a FOIA request to CIA asking for:

• All documents related to the CIA Inspector General’s investigation regarding the agency’s collaboration with NYPD;
• All legal analyses conducted by the CIA Inspector General’s office regarding the CIA’s collaboration with the NYPD;
• All final reports issued as a result of the CIA Inspector General’s investigation;
• Any communications between the CIA Inspector General’s office and the NYPD regarding the agency’s collaboration with the NYPD.

In an e-mail exchange with Security Ledger, the Malta-based firm said that the previously unknown ("zero day") hole affects Samsung Smart TVs running the latest version of the company's Linux-based firmware. It could give an attacker the ability to access any file available on the remote device, as well as external devices (such as USB drives) connected to the TV. And, in a Orwellian twist, the hole could be used to access cameras and microphones attached to the Smart TVs, giving remote attacker the ability to spy on those viewing a compromised set.

Currently, the Smart TVs offer no native security features, such as a firewall, user authentication or application whitelisting. More critically: there is no independent software update capability, meaning that, barring a firmware update from Samsung, the exploitable hole can't be patched without "voiding the device's warranty and using other exploits," ReVuln said.

The company posted a video of an attack on a Samsung TV LED 3D Smart TV online. It shows an attacker gaining shell access to the TV, copying the contents of its hard drive to an external device and mounting them on a local drive, providing access to photos, documents and other content. ReVuln said an attacker would also be able to lift credentials from any social networks or other online services accessed from the device.

By mid-September, just under three months after my initial request went in, I was informed that they’d identified the reports I was looking for and forwarded them to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for a declassification review, which they expected would be completed by early November. Joy! Would we actually get information about an intelligence program out of the government without a lawsuit? Maybe even in time to have a semi-informed public debate?

Well, no. ODNI informed me earlier this month that they were wrapping up their review and redaction Any Day Now, at which point… their redacted version would be forwarded, one at a time, to every other intelligence agency whose activities were referenced in the report. At each agency, it would go to the back of the line of FOIA requests, exactly as though it had just been submitted for the first time. Estimated time before a heavily censored version of these reports see the light of day: Another six months. At least. By which time, it won’t matter much what these reports say about NSA’s use of its sweeping powers, because Congress will have already given them another five years of spying authority.

Notice what this means in practice: Even though a court has already established, thanks to an ACLU lawsuit, that they are legally required to release redacted versions of these reports to the public on request, a cumbersome bureaucratic process effectively guarantees that it takes a solid year to get this information out, which means at best you’re working with what the assessment found two reports ago, allowing the government to assert that they’ve fixed whatever problems were found. In this case, the timing of the review process conveniently guarantees that whatever we learn will come far too late to influence this year’s vote on FAA powers, but be old news by the time Congress takes up the question again. It’s a little hard to swallow the claim that all this delay is remotely necessary: Are we really supposed to believe that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will be so slipshod about letting sensitive classified information through that their work has to be independently double checked by every other intelligence agency? And that this process has to take six months or longer, even after ODNI has done their initial review and redaction? Of course it doesn’t: This is a bureaucratic procedure designed, not to protect national security, but to allow stalling on the release of politically inconvenient information that the courts won’t allow to be completely hidden from the public.

What we should really be asking is why I had to submit this request at all. In his first days in office, after all, President Obama issued a directive not only urging agencies to err on the side of disclosure, but to adopt a policy of proactive release of documents likely to be of public interest. Surely if there were any doubt about the public interest in the use of sweeping surveillance powers, it should have been put to rest after the ACLU won release of the earliest compliance reports. So why didn’t the Justice Department follow President Obama’s directive and draft these reports with an eye toward preparing a declassified public version, knowing full well that civil liberties groups would come asking? Well, because then they wouldn’t be able to obfuscate and delay for months and months. Because then the public might be able to have an informed discussion about the secret surveillance powers we’ve given our spy agencies before we vote to extend them. Heaven forfend.

Here's the latest idea: electronic versions of textbooks that spy on students as they read them:

Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students' behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.

The idea is that faculty members can reach out to students showing low engagement, says Sean Devine, chief executive of CourseSmart. And colleges can evaluate the return they are getting on investments in digital materials.

Similarly, it's easy to imagine colleges starting to put pressure on students to read in certain rigidly-defined ways in order to "maximize" the return on that investment in digital materials -- hardly what education and learning to think for yourself are all about. Maximizing return will doubtless also lead to this reporting feature becoming mandatory -- at the moment students can opt out if they wish -- purely in the name of efficiency, you understand.

What's really tragic is that digital textbooks have the potential to be used in all kinds of truly innovative ways -- for example, allowing a class to share annotations in real time, making the whole reading experience more social; or perhaps editing and combining texts to produce exciting re-workings and re-imaginings. Instead, publishers are obsessed with tracking users and controlling how they use ebooks, largely out of an absurd, underlying fear that somewhere along the line somebody might be doing something without paying for it.

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Discomfort with the government’s capacity, technical or legal, to collect and retain massive amounts of personal information is understandable. But the 2008 FISA amendments sought a compromise between two essential goals: preserving American liberty and robustly defending Americans’ lives and property. We favored the law and believe that it should be extended.

Here's a great example spotted by the annalist blog, which reports on a parliamentary enquiry about expenditures by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, responsible for internal security. What was probably thought to be no more than a few dozen pages of boring and thus safe figures turned out to reveal something quite shocking:

The German ministry for home affairs and thus the German police clearly state that they are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat if deemed necessary. Money is spent on trojan viruses and we can be quite certain which company produces the IMSI catchers [used for "man-in-the-middle" attacks on mobile phones] used by German police.

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In fact, more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade.

The companies captured screenshots of confidential and personal information, logged keystrokes and took webcam pictures of people in their homes. Their aim was to track the computers belonging to costomers who were behind with their payments.

"An agreement to rent a computer doesn’t give a company license to access consumers’ private emails, bank account information, and medical records, or, even worse, webcam photos of people in the privacy of their own homes," says FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz. "The FTC orders today will put an end to their cyber spying."

The rent-to-own companies are Aspen Way Enterprises, Watershed Development, Showplace, JAG Rents, Red Zone, B Stamper Enterprises and CALM Ventures. They've got off lightly, agreeing to stop using the data-collection software and to stop deceiving customers.

Mr Key says the Crown has filed a memorandum in the High Court in the Megaupload case advising the Court and affected parties that the GCSB had acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.

After being informed about the matter by the Director of the GCSB on September 17, the Prime Minister referred the Bureau’s actions to the Inspector-General, Hon Paul Neazor. The Inspector-General is an independent statutory officer with the power to enquire into any matter related to a government intelligence agency’s compliance with the law.

After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t.  Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.  Sen. Ron Wyden—who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA. 

Yet the House ambles on, ready to rubber stamp another five years of expansive surveillance that can pick up American communications without meaningful judicial oversight and without probable cause or any finding of wrongdoing.  Instead of blind faith in the executive branch, every member of the House should demand that the administration publicly disclose the following before proceeding with reauthorization:

Copies of FISA court opinions interpreting our Fourth Amendment rights under the FAA, with redactions to protect sensitive information (the Department of Justice can write summaries of law if necessary);

A rough estimate of how many Americans are surveilled under the FAA every year;

A description of the rules that govern how American information picked up by FAA surveillance is protected.

Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information?

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the "little program" that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., "got twisted," and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: "I should apologize to the American people. It's violated everyone's rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world."

I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.

What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter’s ideas except for two: an application that would “anonymize” data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans’ communications were getting caught in a digital net.

The N.S.A. came up with more dead ends than viable leads and put a premium on collecting information rather than making sense of it.

“If FISA’s reference to ‘common carrier’ were interpreted in accord with the Communications Act,” Kris and Wilson explain, explicitly citing the Brand X decision, “information (such as e-mail) being carried on a cable owned and offered by a cable modem service provider would not be a ‘wire communication’ under FISA, and acquisition of such information would not be ‘electronic surveillance’ under” the definition that applies to traditional phone calls.

So the FISA Amendments Act allows the government to target foreigners and capture conversations with Americans — with no warrant required, so long as they aren’t actually trying to wiretap the American via a technical loophole.

But if the government’s problem is an inability to reliably determine the location of parties to a communication, it’s not clear why we should be confident that interception under this broad new authority can reliably avoid acquiring many purely domestic communications. Even if it can, blanket authority to acquire the international communications of Americans — with no requirement that the foreign side of the conversation be suspected of any connection to terrorism or espionage‹seems like an incredibly broad way of addressing the issue.

Perhaps Kris and Wilson are correct that a narrower solution to the problem would have been unworkable. On the other hand, perhaps legislators would have tried a bit harder to craft a viable narrow solution if they, and the general public, had clearly understood exactly what the problem was.

The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they'd know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.

In a motion filed today, the three former intelligence analysts confirm that the NSA has, or is in the process of obtaining, the capability to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the "secret room" at the AT&T facility in San Francisco first disclosed by retired AT&T technician Mark Klein in early 2006.

One of the things that we have to have then [in cybersecurity legislation], is if the critical infrastructure community is being attacked by something, we need them to tell us... at network speed. It doesn't require the government to read their mail -- or your mail -- to do that. It requires them -- the internet service provider or that company -- to tell us that that type of event is going on at this time. And it has to be at network speed if you're going to stop it.

It's like a missile, coming in to the United States.... there are two things you can do. We can take the "snail mail" approach and say "I saw a missile going overhead, looks like it's headed your way" and put a letter in the mail and say, "how'd that turn out?" Now, cyber is at the speed of light. I'm just saying that perhaps we ought to go a little faster. We probably don't want to use snail mail. Maybe we could do this in real time. And come up with a construct that you and the American people know that we're not looking at civil liberties and privacy, but we're actually trying to figure out when the nation is under attack and what we need to do about it.

Nice thing about cyber is that everything you do in cyber, you can audit. With 100% reliability. Seems to be there's a great approach there.

The key thing in information sharing that gets, I think, misunderstood, is that when we talk about information sharing, we're not talking about taking our personal emails and giving those to the government.

If we care about the spirit as well as the letter of that constraint being respected, it ought to be a little disturbing that the NSA has admitted it doesn’t have any systematic mechanism for identifying communications with U.S. endpoints. Similar considerations apply to the “minimization procedures” which are supposed to limit the retention and dissemination of information about U.S. persons: How meaningfully can these be applied if there’s no systematic effort to detect when a U.S. person is party to a communication?

More generally, these reports contain a good deal of redacted statistical information that there is simply no plausible excuse for keeping secret. A table of “statistical data relating to compliance incidents,” for example, is included—but entirely blacked out. Are we to believe that the national security of the United States would be imperiled if the public knew the number of times the NSA had difficulty following the law? The reviewers conclude that the “number of compliance incidents remains small, particularly when compared with the total amount of activity”—but is there any legitimate reason for barring the public from knowing what counts as a “small” number, or just how massive the “total amount of activity” truly is?