DEA Spying Since 2008 – 2015 ACLU Report


“The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using license-plate reader technology to photograph motorists and passengers in the US as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives. According to DEA documents published on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency is capturing images of occupants in the front and rear seats of vehicles in a programme that monitors Americans’ travel patterns on a wider scale than previously thought. The disclosure follows the ACLU’s revelation last week about the potential scale of a DEA database containing the data of millions of drivers, which kindled renewed concern about government surveillance..... A document from 2009 said the programme could provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle”. A document from 2011 said the DEA’s system had the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos”. The documents confirmed that license plate scanners did not always focus just on license plates, the ACLU said on Thursday: “Occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated.... The 2009 document was not previously known, the ACLU said. It included the 2011 document in last week’s disclosures. The Wall Street Journal noted that visual images of vehicle occupants were “sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities” but other aspects of the DEA surveillance – such as a proposal to monitor public meetings – largely overshadowed the detail about photographing vehicle occupants....According to DEA documents, the buildup of a vehicle surveillance database stemmed from the agency’s appetite for asset forfeiture, a controversial practice of seizing possessions at traffic stops and vehicle pullovers if agents suspect they are criminal proceeds. Last month, outgoing US attorney general Eric Holder opened a review into federal asset forfeiture. DEA plan to track drivers went much wider, new documents reveal. Loretta Lynch, Holder’s would-be replacement, told a Senate confirmation hearing last month that a number of people had questions about the practice. In a letter to Holder, senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy wrote that they “remain concerned that government programs that track citizens’ movements, see inside homes and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns”. Privacy watchers were quick to condemn the DEA’s surveillance programme. Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, called it “deeply concerning and creepy”.

Monitoring public meetings? Monitoring the travel of private citizens? This is obscene and of absolutely no use to drug enforcement which is worth the loss of public freedom which this involves. The practice of confiscating property should be illegal, too, because the right to property is one of our guaranteed rights, I thought. Apparently it isn't, however, as both local police departments and “the feds” use it to punish perpetrators. The last time I looked up one of these police oversteps it was legalized under the USAPATRIOT Act.

This particular program started in 2008 according to one of these articles, so I wonder if it was Bush or Obama who was president at the time? The subsequent updates and extensions were instituted since Obama was inaugurated, however, so I blame him for it. Is something going to be done about this? Grassley and Leahy are concerned about it, so hopefully the Senate will open up an investigation and write a law to stop all three of these practices. The involvement of the UK with this program is also discouraging. The need to watch terrorists will undoubtedly be mentioned to justify mass surveillance of totally innocent citizens. See all the collected articles below.





http://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2014/dec/05/the-logan-symposium-surveillance-censorship
Live from The Logan Symposium: secrecy, surveillance and censorship:

The UK's "large crackdown on press freedoms"

The last speaker at The Logan Symposium is WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who is also acting director of the Courage Foundation, which raises money for the legal and public defence of journalistic sources. She’s now based in Berlin, and like Laura Poitras has been advised not to travel to the UK for legal reasons, so is Skypeing in her session.

“The UK is having what I think is a large crackdown on press freedoms. It’s under the Terrorism Act that the intelligence services went into the Guardian’s offices... it’s what they used to detain David Miranda, and it’s the reason my lawyers have advised me not to go home,” she says, calling for a campaign in the UK to demand that journalists not be muzzled by legislation intended for terrorists.




http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/dec/01/edward-snowden-honoured-swedish-human-rights-award-video

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden received several standing ovations in the Swedish parliament after being given the Right Livelihood award for his revelations of the scale of state surveillance. Snowden, speaking by video from Moscow, said: 'All the prices we've paid, all the sacrifices we made, I believe we would do again - I know I would.'
Source: Reuters
Monday 1 December 2014 16.59 EST





http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/26/mass-surveillance-threat-human-rights-council-europe

Mass surveillance is fundamental threat to human rights, says European report
Europe’s top rights body says scale of NSA spying is ‘stunning’ and suggests UK powers may be at odds with rights convention
Luke Harding
Monday 26 January 2015

Europe’s top rights body has said mass surveillance practices are a fundamental threat to human rights and violate the right to privacy enshrined in European law.

The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe says in a report that it is “deeply concerned” by the “far-reaching, technologically advanced systems” used by the US and UK to collect, store and analyse the data of private citizens. It describes the scale of spying by the US National Security Agency, revealed by Edward Snowden, as “stunning”.





http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/05/aclu-dea-documents-spy-program-millions-drivers-passengers

DEA using license-plate readers to take photos of US drivers, documents reveal
By Rory Carroll
February 5, 2015

ACLU publishes DEA documents that show license plate-scanners also record humans, as face recognition helps government be ‘even more sure of exactly who they are surveilling.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using license-plate reader technology to photograph motorists and passengers in the US as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives.

According to DEA documents published on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency is capturing images of occupants in the front and rear seats of vehicles in a programme that monitors Americans’ travel patterns on a wider scale than previously thought.

The disclosure follows the ACLU’s revelation last week about the potential scale of a DEA database containing the data of millions of drivers, which kindled renewed concern about government surveillance.

Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time DEA spy program

The latest published internal DEA communications, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that automated license plate scanners, known as ALPRs, record images of human beings as well as license plates.

A document from 2009 said the programme could provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle”.

A document from 2011 said the DEA’s system had the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos”.

The documents confirmed that license plate scanners did not always focus just on license plates, the ACLU said on Thursday: “Occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated.”

Photographing people inside cars was especially concerning in an age of face-recognition analytics since federal agencies would be “even more sure of exactly who they are surveilling”, the advocacy group said.

The DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, did not immediately respond to a Guardian request for comment.

The 2009 document was not previously known, the ACLU said. It included the 2011 document in last week’s disclosures. The Wall Street Journal noted that visual images of vehicle occupants were “sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities” but other aspects of the DEA surveillance – such as a proposal to monitor public meetings – largely overshadowed the detail about photographing vehicle occupants.

Using the technology in this way undermined law enforcement agencies’ claims that license plate images could not be used to identify individuals and did not violate individual privacy, said the ACLU. “This argument is thin already, but it certainly doesn’t fly with regards to photographs of the driver or passengers inside of a vehicle.”

Some local law enforcement agencies protected privacy by using the technology to photograph only the rear of vehicles, so occupants would not be recognised, but there was no evidence to suggest most agencies took such precautions, said the advocacy group.

Vigilant Solutions, a California company, which is one of the main providers of ALPR technology, announced last October that it had developed an app that integrated facial recognition technology into automated license-plate readers. The company did not immediately respond to a Guardian request for elaboration.

According to DEA documents, the buildup of a vehicle surveillance database stemmed from the agency’s appetite for asset forfeiture, a controversial practice of seizing possessions at traffic stops and vehicle pullovers if agents suspect they are criminal proceeds.

Last month, outgoing US attorney general Eric Holder opened a review into federal asset forfeiture.

DEA plan to track drivers went much wider, new documents reveal

Loretta Lynch, Holder’s would-be replacement, told a Senate confirmation hearing last month that a number of people had questions about the practice.

In a letter to Holder, senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy wrote that they “remain concerned that government programs that track citizens’ movements, see inside homes and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns”.

Privacy watchers were quick to condemn the DEA’s surveillance programme. Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, called it “deeply concerning and creepy”.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is using license-plate reader technology to photograph motorists and passengers in the US as part of an official exercise to build a database on people’s lives.

According to DEA documents published on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the agency is capturing images of occupants in the front and rear seats of vehicles in a programme that monitors Americans’ travel patterns on a wider scale than previously thought.

The disclosure follows the ACLU’s revelation last week about the potential scale of a DEA database containing the data of millions of drivers, which kindled renewed concern about government surveillance.

Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time DEA spy program

The latest published internal DEA communications, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show that automated license plate scanners, known as ALPRs, record images of human beings as well as license plates.

A document from 2009 said the programme could provide “the requester” with images that “may include vehicle license plate numbers (front and/or rear), photos of visible vehicle occupants [redacted] and a front and rear overall view of the vehicle”.

A document from 2011 said the DEA’s system had the ability to store “up to 10 photos per vehicle transaction including 4 occupant photos”.

The documents confirmed that license plate scanners did not always focus just on license plates, the ACLU said on Thursday: “Occupant photos are not an occasional, accidental byproduct of the technology, but one that is intentionally being cultivated.”

Photographing people inside cars was especially concerning in an age of face-recognition analytics since federal agencies would be “even more sure of exactly who they are surveilling”, the advocacy group said.

The DEA, which is part of the Justice Department, did not immediately respond to a Guardian request for comment.

The 2009 document was not previously known, the ACLU said. It included the 2011 document in last week’s disclosures. The Wall Street Journal noted that visual images of vehicle occupants were “sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities” but other aspects of the DEA surveillance – such as a proposal to monitor public meetings – largely overshadowed the detail about photographing vehicle occupants.

Using the technology in this way undermined law enforcement agencies’ claims that license plate images could not be used to identify individuals and did not violate individual privacy, said the ACLU. “This argument is thin already, but it certainly doesn’t fly with regards to photographs of the driver or passengers inside of a vehicle.”
Some local law enforcement agencies protected privacy by using the technology to photograph only the rear of vehicles, so occupants would not be recognised, but there was no evidence to suggest most agencies took such precautions, said the advocacy group.
Vigilant Solutions, a California company, which is one of the main providers of ALPR technology, announced last October that it had developed an app that integrated facial recognition technology into automated license-plate readers. The company did not immediately respond to a Guardian request for elaboration.

According to DEA documents, the buildup of a vehicle surveillance database stemmed from the agency’s appetite for asset forfeiture, a controversial practice of seizing possessions at traffic stops and vehicle pullovers if agents suspect they are criminal proceeds.

Last month, outgoing US attorney general Eric Holder opened a review into federal asset forfeiture.

DEA plan to track drivers went much wider, new documents reveal

Loretta Lynch, Holder’s would-be replacement, told a Senate confirmation hearing last month that a number of people had questions about the practice.

In a letter to Holder, senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy wrote that they “remain concerned that government programs that track citizens’ movements, see inside homes and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns”.

Privacy watchers were quick to condemn the DEA’s surveillance programme. Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, called it “deeply concerning and creepy”.





https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-criminal-law-reform/dea-recording-americans-movements-highways-creating

DEA Recording Americans’ Movements on Highways, Creating Central Repository of Plate Data
By Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project
05/18/2012

The DEA wants to capture the license plates of all vehicles traveling along Interstate 15 in Utah, and store that data for two years at their facility in Northern Virginia. And, as a DEA official told Utah legislators at a hearing this week (attended by ACLU of Utah staff and covered in local media), these scanners are already in place on “drug trafficking corridors” in California and Texas and are being considered for Arizona as well. The agency is also collecting plate data from unspecified other sources and sharing it with over ten thousand law enforcement agencies around the nation.

We know that automated license plate scanning (ALPR) technology is rapidlybeing deployed by local police around the country. However, its use by a federal agency raises new issues and questions. To begin with, the federal government is in more of a position to create a centralized repository of drivers’ movements, so federal deployment of the technology is even more serious a matter than widespread local deployment.

In addition, a federal agency is required by law (the Privacy Act of 1974) to disclose to the American people how it is collecting, using, and sharing data about them. However, we were not able to find a Privacy Act notice anywhere in the Federal Register in which the DEA describes any collection of license plate data. (The two recent DEA Privacy Act notices we found do not mention the practice.)

The DEA official claimed to the Utah legislators that “we’re not trying to capture any personal information—all that this captures is the tag, regardless of who the driver is.” The idea that a license plate number is not personally identifiable information is laughable. It is true that different people can drive one vehicle, but they are usually closely related to the registered owner and their identities are rarely difficult to ascertain after the fact.

We have received reports from ACLU affiliates along what the government calls the “SWB” (southwest border) that ALPR technology appeared to be in use at border checkpoints. And we did find mention of ALPR in DEA written testimony to Congress. In May 2009, DEA and Justice Dept. officials mentioned the agency’s use of the technology along the border. They wrote:

Within the United States, DEA has worked with DHS to implement its “License Plate Reader Initiative” (LPR) in the Southwest border region to gather intelligence, particularly on movements of weapons and cash into Mexico. The system uses optical character recognition technology to read license plates on vehicles in the United States traveling southbound towards the border. The system also takes photographs of drivers and records statistical information such as the date, time, and traffic lane of the record. This information can be compared with DEA and CBP databases to help identify and interdict vehicles that are carrying large quantities of cash, weapons, and other illegal contraband toward Mexico.

The word “particularly” in that statement is particularly ominous. In March 2011 written testimony, a top DEA official updated the picture:

DEA components have the ability to query and input alerts on license plates via an existing DEA database, and other law enforcement agencies can do the same via EPIC [the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center]. DEA and CBP are currently working together in order to merge existing CBP LPRs at the points of entry with DEA’s LPR Initiative. In addition, the FY2010 SWB supplemental provided $1.5 million to expand the LPR initiative by purchasing additional devices and barrels and support maintenance to allow DEA to monitor traffic and provide intelligence on bulk currency transiting toward Mexico.

Note that “the border” as described by the government is not what most people might think it is; the government’s “border” extends 100 miles inward, along with some of the extraordinary powers the government possesses at the true border. We have complained vociferously about this “Constitution-Free Zone,” which, according to our study, actually contains two-thirds of the entire U.S. Population.

I note, however, that no part of Utah lies within 100 miles of the real border, so this latest initiative is something more than the one described in the Congressional testimony.

Utah state legislators are rightly skeptical. The law enforcement officials defended the program in part by describing it as an extension of already existing ALPR deployments in the rest of the state. But rather than mollifying the legislators, this answer prompted them to resolve to hold hearings on those local uses of the technology.

As usual, the authorities also tried to package their proposal with all kinds of soothing promises: the data would not be used except to catch drug traffickers and to investigate “serious crimes.” The data would not be cross-referenced with other databases containing driver’s names (and therefore presumably to the vast realms of other information that that would be available). The data would not be used to locate people with outstanding traffic tickets and misdemeanor warrants.

This is what you call sugaring a pill so that people will swallow it. Anyone who thinks all of the above will never happen doesn’t know much about history. We’ve seen this dynamic many times—a new surveillance technique is unveiled supposedly for use only against the most extreme criminals and is quickly expanded to much broader use. (To take just one example: DNA testing was first applied only to convicted murderers, then to all convicts, then to certain arrestees who haven’t even been convicted of a crime.)

The DEA official in charge of this program, Gary Newcomb, made it clear that this program is already envisioned as expanding dramatically. He told the Utah legislators that:

Back in 2008 the DEA started a program called the DEA National License Plate Reader Program. It’s going to be deployed in three parts. Part one is, we’re currently deploying all along the southwest border. We’re deployed in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the eastern part of California....

We’re also receiving additional LPR data from other sources who collect and store LPR data but who also provide additional LPR data into our national repository....

It is not clear what the “other sources” are that are feeding their ALPR data to the DEA. We do know of state efforts to centralize data. Worst case, it’s a preponderance of the rapidly growing list of law enforcement agencies around the country that are deploying this technology.

Newcomb continued:

We actually have data feeds coming from portable trailers all throughout the southern border, from fixed sites as well as from covert barrel cams too [i.e., cameras hidden in traffic barrels]. That is done on a strategic operational level. So that that data is then stored within our back-end. The feds have the ability to query it directly, and we also have the ability where we provided over ten thousand state, local, and tribal law enforcement the ability to access this through the Internet….

The final part is, we’re hoping to start with Phase II, phase II is where we want to deploy along the hub cities and the high-traffic corridors, to include this state, as well as phase III being the northern border. We hope to have this completed within about two to three years max.

Two-thirds of the American population already lives within the “border” as defined by the federal government; when you add in “hub cities” (whatever they are) and “high-traffic corridors,” most Americans’ movements are likely to be recorded by the federal government under this scheme, it would seem.

Audio of the Utah hearing is online; discussion of ALPRs begins at 1:47:40.





http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/29/us-plan-track-car-drivers-documents

Obama administration
DEA plan to track drivers went much wider, new documents reveal
Oliver Laughland in New York and Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
Thursday 29 January 2015

Federal agencies tried to use vehicle license-plate readers to track the travel patterns of Americans on a much wider scale than previously thought, with new documents showing the technology was proposed for use to monitor public meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union released more documents this week revealing for the first time the potential scale of a massive database containing the data of millions of drivers, logged from automatic license plate readers around the US.

As President Obama’s nominee for attorney general prepared for a second day of confirmation hearings in Washington, senior lawmakers also called on the US Justice Department to show “greater transparency and oversight”.

Further documents released by the ACLU on Wednesday show that Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials in Phoenix planned on “working closely” with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to monitor public gun shows with the automatic technology in 2009.

Although the DEA has said the proposal was not acted upon, the revelations raise questions about how much further the secret vehicle surveillance extends, which other federal bodies are involved and which other groups may have been targeted.

“The broad thrust of the DEA is to spread its program broadly and catch data and travel patterns on a massive scale,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with ACLU, told the Guardian. “This could be a really amazing level of surveillance that we’ve not seen before in this country.”

The ACLU warned that the buildup of a vehicle surveillance database, the existence of which first surfaced on Monday, stemmed from the DEA’s appetite for asset forfeiture, a controversial practice of seizing possessions at traffic stops and vehicle pullovers if agents suspect they are criminal proceeds.

Outgoing US attorney general Eric Holder opened a review into federal asset forfeiture earlier this month. Critics said the proposed reform merely“nibbled” at the problem.

“I think that a number of people would have questions about how the Department of Justice manages its asset forfeiture program,” Loretta Lynch, Holder’s would-be replacement, said before a Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

In a letter to Holder on Wednesday, senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy wrote that they “remain concerned that government programs that track citizens’ movements, see inside homes and collect data from the phones of innocent Americans raise serious privacy concerns.”

Citing the ACLU’s first batch of documents, which were first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the senators referred to the attorney general’s flagging of the forfeiture problem. “Any program that is dedicated to expanding the Justice Department’s forfeiture efforts requires similar oversight and accountability,” they wrote.

Senator Leahy’s office did not respond to multiple requests for clarification from the Guardian on Wednesday and Thursday, but privacy advocates said the revelations raised serious questions that demanded answers from Washington.

Clark Neily, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian law firm, said Americans would be disturbed to know that law enforcement’s quest for revenue impelled mass surveillance.

“It’s deeply concerning and creepy,” Neily said. “We’re Americans. We drive a lot.”

The ACLU followed up Monday’s tranche of DEA documents, which were obtained under Freedom of Information Act (Foia) requests, with the further documents revealing that federal agents planned to use automatic license plate readers to monitor attendees at gun shows in April 2009. The group said it did not know whether the car surveillance was still going on, or how wide it ever spread.

The heavily redacted documents show that DEA officers in Phoenix planned on “working closely” with ATF officials “in attacking the guns going to [redacted] and the gun shows, to include programs/operation with LPRs [license plate readers] at the gun shows.”

DEA administrator Michele Leonhart later told the Wall Street Journal that the plan was never implemented and was “only a suggestion”.

The Department of Justice, which encompasses the DEA, did not respond to a further request for clarification from the Guardian.

The perception that an average citizen’s car could be monitored upon entering or leaving a gun show – or any other lawful assembly – infringed upon civil rights, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

“It would be chilling,” Olson said. “You could think twice about exercising that right.”

The latest redacted responses left many questions unanswered, said Stanley, the ACLU analyst. “We just happened to get that tidbit about the gun shows. Whether they targeted other groups we just don’t know. That’s the problem. We’re like archaeologists trying to read a scrap of bone and build a picture of the whole organism.”

The license-plate readers have fed hundreds of millions of records about motorists into a national database, the first round of ACLU documents show. If license plate readers, also known as LPRs, continued to proliferate without restriction, and the DEA held ldata for extended periods, the agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people’s lives, the ACLU has warned.

Officials have publicly acknowledged they track vehicles near the Mexican border to combat drug trafficking.

According to DEA documents, the primary goal of the program was to seize cars, cash and other assets belonging to criminals. However, the database’s expansion “throughout the United States”, as one email put it, also widened law enforcers’ capacity for asset forfeiture.
The revelation that asset forfeiture was linked to mass surveillance could unite progressives and conservatives, Olson said. “At some point left and right come together.”

Neily, the Institute for Justice attorney, said government assurances about surveillance safeguards “varied tremendously from reality”.

The ACLU noted that other law enforcement bodies have used license plate readers to monitor public events in the past. In 2009 the Virginia state police collaborated with the US secret service to monitor license plates at President Obama’s inauguration and campaign rallies for then vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The ACLU also questioned why documents proving the gun show proposal’s cancellation were not returned in the Foia request.

The revelations highlight the risks federal agencies endure as they implement widespread scale surveillance technology to fight crime.

Further documents included in the most recent publication, show the DEA believe elements of the national LPR database has “verified defendant statements, tracked fugitives, solved a gang related homicide, identified vehicles involved in vehicular homicide and used to injure CBP [Customs and Border Protection] checkpoint officers” as well as identified routes used by criminals in drugs and weapons smuggling.





http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/millions-of-cars-tracked-across-us-in-massive-real-time-spying-program

Millions of cars tracked across US in 'massive' real-time DEA spy program
American Civil Liberties Union warns scanning of license plates by Drug Enforcement Agency is building a repository of all drivers’ movements
Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
Tuesday 27 January 2015 

The United States government is tracking the movement of vehicles around the country in a clandestine intelligence-gathering programme that has been condemned as a further official exercise to build a database on people’s lives.

The Drug Enforcement Administration was monitoring license plates on a “massive” scale, giving rise to “major civil liberties concerns”, the American Civil Liberties Union said on Monday night, citing DEA documents obtained under freedom of information.

“This story highlights yet another way government security agencies are seeking to quietly amplify their powers using new technologies,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with ACLU, told the Guardian.

UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’

“On this as on so many surveillance issues, we can take action, put in place some common sense limits or sit back and let our society be transformed into a place we won’t recognize – or probably much like.”

The advocacy group said the DEA records it obtained from the justice department were heavily redacted and incomplete.

“These records do, however, offer documentation that this program is a major DEA initiative that has the potential to track our movements around the country. With its jurisdiction and its finances, the federal government is uniquely positioned to create a centralized repository of all drivers’ movements across the country — and the DEA seems to be moving toward doing just that.”

If license plate readers continued to proliferate without restriction and the DEA held license plate reader data for extended periods the agency would soon possess a detailed and invasive depiction of people’s lives, the ACLU said, especially if combined with other surveillance data such as bulk phone records or information gleaned by the US Marshals Service using aircraft that mimic cellphone towers.

“Data-mining the information, an unproven law enforcement technique that the DEA has begun to use here, only exacerbates these concerns, potentially tagging people as criminals without due process,” the ACLU warned.

The Wall Street Journal, citing official documents and anonymous officials, reported that the programme built a national database to track vehicles in real time and stored hundreds of millions of records about motorists.

The primary goal was to seize cars, cash and other assets to combat drug trafficking but the database expanded to monitor vehicles associated with other potential crimes, it said.

Officials have publicly acknowledged they track vehicles near the Mexican border to combat drug trafficking.

But the database’s expansion “thoughout the United States”, as one DEA email put it, worried Senator Patrick Leahy, who sits on the Senate judiciary committee.

“The fact that this intrusive technology is potentially being used to expand the reach of the government’s asset forfeiture efforts is of even greater concern,’’ he told the Wall Street Journal.

Leahy called for additional accountability and said Americans should not have to fear that “their locations and movements are constantly being tracked and stored in a massive government database”.

A spokesman for the justice department, which includes the DEA, said the program complied with federal law. “It is not new that the DEA uses the license-plate reader program to arrest criminals and stop the flow of drugs in areas of high trafficking intensity,’’ the spokesman said.

According to the ACLU, the government-run national license plate tracking program dates from 2008. Information had trickled out over the years but far too little was known about the program, the ACLU said.





http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/06/gchq-mass-internet-surveillance-unlawful-court-nsa

UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’
Regulations governing access to intercepted information obtained by NSA breached human rights laws, according to Investigatory Powers Tribunal
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent
Friday 6 February 2015

Photograph – Snowden: ‘If I end up in chains in Guantánamo I can live with that’

The regime that governs the sharing between Britain and the US of electronic communications intercepted in bulk was unlawful until last year, a secretive UK tribunal has ruled.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) declared on Friday that regulations covering access by Britain’s GCHQ to emails and phone records intercepted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) breached human rights law.

Advocacy groups said the decision raised questions about the legality of intelligence-sharing operations between the UK and the US. The ruling appears to suggest that aspects of the operations were illegal for at least seven years – between 2007, when the Prism intercept programme was introduced, and 2014.

The critical judgment marks the first time since the IPT was established in 2000 that it has upheld a complaint relating to any of the UK’s intelligence agencies. It said that the government’s regulations were illegal because the public were unaware of safeguards that were in place. Details of those safeguards were only revealed during the legal challenge at the IPT.

An “order” posted on the IPT’s website early on Friday declared: “The regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK, which have been obtained by US authorities … contravened Articles 8 or 10” of the European convention on human rights.

Article 8 relates to the right to private and family life; article 10 refers to freedom of expression.

The decision, in effect, refines an earlier judgment issued by the tribunal in December, when it ruled that Britain’s current legal regime governing data collection through the internet by intelligence agencies – which has been recently updated to ensure compliance – did not violate the human rights of people in the UK.

The challenges were brought by Liberty, PrivacyInternational and other civil liberties groups who claimed that GCHQ’s receipt of private communications intercepted by the NSA through its “mass surveillance” programmes Prism and Upstream was illegal.

The existence of Prism and Upstream was revealed by the Guardian from documents provided by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The case brought by Liberty and Privacy International was the first in the UK to challenge GCHQ’s participation in these programmes. Lawyers argued that receiving information about people in Britain from the NSA sidestepped protections provided by the UK legal system.

Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: “For far too long, intelligence agencies like GCHQ and NSA have acted like they are above the law. Today’s decision confirms to the public what many have said all along – over the past decade, GCHQ and the NSA have been engaged in an illegal mass surveillance sharing programme that has affected millions of people around the world.

“We must not allow agencies to continue justifying mass surveillance programmes using secret interpretations of secret laws. The world owes Edward Snowden a great debt for blowing the whistle, and today’s decision is a vindication of his actions.

“But more work needs to be done. The only reason why the NSA-GCHQ sharing relationship is still legal today is because of a last-minute clean-up effort by the government to release previously secret ‘arrangements’. That is plainly not enough to fix what remains a massive loophole in the law, and we hope that the European court decides to rule in favour of privacy rather than unchecked state power.”

James Welch, legal director for Liberty, said: “We now know that, by keeping the public in the dark about their secret dealings with the NSA, GCHQ acted unlawfully and violated our rights. That their activities are now deemed lawful is thanks only to the degree of disclosure Liberty and the other claimants were able to force from our secrecy-obsessed government.
“But the intelligence services retain a largely unfettered power to rifle through millions of people’s private communications – and the tribunal believes the limited safeguards revealed during last year’s legal proceedings are an adequate protection of our privacy. We disagree, and will be taking our fight to the European court of human rights.”

However, a GCHQ spokesperson contested the significance of the latest ruling, saying: “We are pleased that the court has once again ruled that the UK’s bulk interception regime is fully lawful. It follows the court’s clear rejection of accusations of ‘mass surveillance’ in their December judgment.”

The agencies make a distinction between intrusive “mass surveillance”, which they insist they do not undertake, and “bulk interception” of electronic communciations, which they say is necessary in order to carry out targeted searches of data in pursuit of terrorist or criminal activity.

The GCHQ statement continued: “Today’s IPT ruling reaffirms that the processes and safeguards within the intelligence-sharing regime were fully adequate at all times – it is simply about the amount of detail about those processes and safeguards that needed to be in the public domain. We welcome the important role the IPT has played in ensuring that the public regime is sufficiently detailed.

“By its nature, much of GCHQ’s work must remain secret. But we are working with the rest of government to improve public understanding about what we do and the strong legal and policy framework that underpins all our work. We continue to do what we can to place information safely into the public domain that can help to achieve this.”

The UK government issued a robust defence of GCHQ on Friday and said the judgment would not alter in any way the work of the monitoring agency. The prime minister’s spokeswoman said: “Overall, the judgment this morning is that the UK’s interception regime is fully lawful. That follows on from the courts clear rejection of accusations of mass surveillance in their December judgment and we welcome that.

“Because of the nature of their work, we are unable to express gratitude to them [the security services] and we should make sure they continue to have the powers they need to keep us safe.

“What they [the tribunal] said was that there should be more about the rules [governing surveillance] that should be disclosed publicly … They are not questioning in this judgment that the safeguarding of privacy was in any way jeopardised and the judgment will not require GCHQ to change in anyway what it does,” she said.

During hearings at the IPT last year, Matthew Ryder QC, for Liberty, had alleged that the intelligence services were constructing vast databases out of accumulated interceptions of emails.

Ben Jaffey, for Privacy International, had claimed that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) was no longer providing the significant safeguards it once guaranteed against interception of communications without an individual warrant.

The legal challenge was the first of dozens of GCHQ-related claims to be examined in detail by the IPT, which hears complaints against British intelligence agencies and government bodies that carry out surveillance under Ripa. Some of the most sensitive evidence about interceptions was heard in private sessions from which the rights groups were excluded.

In defence documents that were released, the government’s most senior security official, Charles Farr, explained how searches on Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as emails to or from non-British citizens abroad, could be monitored legally by the security services without obtaining an individual warrant because they were deemed to be external communications.

Farr said he could neither confirm nor deny the existence of Tempora, another interception programme revealed by the Guardian from the Snowden documents, although he did acknowledge that Prism exists “because it has been expressly avowed by the executive branch of the US government”.

Much of the tribunal’s deliberations therefore proceeded on the basis of agreed hypothetical facts, such as the assumption that Tempora exists. Lawyers for the government refused again, during a short hearing after the judgment, to say whether Tempora exists.





http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa

GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications

Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal

Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball
Friday 21 June 2013

Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history".

"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."

However, on Friday a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.

Britain's technical capacity to tap into the cables that carry the world's communications – referred to in the documents as special source exploitation – has made GCHQ an intelligence superpower.

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)

By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".

When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".

The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.

The documents reveal that by last year GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.





http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/06/investigative-journalists-mass-surveillance-nsa-edward-snowden

How have journalists responded to revelations of mass surveillance?
Edward Snowden’s NSA whistleblowing has led more journalists to protect their data and sources, but they’re not giving up on stories
Stuart Dredge
Friday 6 February 2015

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by government agencies has made a big impact on investigative journalists, according to a new study.

The survey of 671 journalists, conducted by the US-based Pew Research Center and Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, found that 64% believe that the US government has probably collected data about their communications.

49% said that they have changed the way they store and share potentially sensitive documents in the last year as a result, while 29% have altered the way they communicate with fellow journalists.

However, only 3% have opted not to pursue a particular story due to concerns about electronic surveillance and hacking, although 13% have not reached out to a particular source for those reasons. Just 2% have considered abandoning investigative journalism.

The study quizzed members of trade body Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) on their concerns and professional habits in December 2014, using an online survey.

It found that meeting in person rather than communicating by phone or email remains the most popular way journalists try to protect sources: 48% said they have been doing this for more than a year, while a further 11% have started in the last 12 months.

7% of journalists surveyed said they’d been using encryption for email and instant messaging for more than a year, while 8% had started in the last 12 months. Only 3% in total use voice encryption when communicating by phone.

When it comes to protecting their own data, 91% of journalists surveyed now use different passwords for different online accounts, including 15% who have started doing so in the last year.

64% regularly clear their browser history; 72% use enhanced privacy settings on social networks; and 66% turn off the geolocation features in mobile devices, apps and social networks.

Other findings included a lack of confidence in internet service providers, with just 2% of journalists saying they have a lot of confidence that their ISP can protect their data, compared to 27% who had some confidence, and 71% who had “not much or no confidence at all”.

90% said they believed that their ISP would share their data with the US government as part of standard data gathering by the National Security Agency (NSA), while 97% said they believed it would if subpoenaed by the government as part of a criminal investigation.

There was more confidence in the ability of their own news organisations to protect them: 47% said their company was doing enough to protect them and their sources, although 50% said it was not.

To a separate question on whether their organisation had taken new steps to protect them against surveillance and hacking in the last year, 36% said it had not, while 21% said it had. 41% said they had received training from outside sources about ways to protect themselves and their sources.

“In a world of diminishing newsroom resources, some respondents say the issue has not risen to a level where it can be treated as a budgetary priority,” explained the report’s authors Jesse Holcomb, Amy Mitchell and Kristen Purcell.

“Comments also show that while some journalists view these issues as being the responsibility of the IT department and something they do not pay much attention to, others are actively encouraging their organisations to improve.”

That played into a wider finding in the report: that budget cuts are a bigger headache for most investigative journalists than the threat of electronic surveillance.

88% said decreasing newsroom resources was their biggest challenge today, compared to 5% saying legal action against journalists, and 4% saying electronic surveillance. 56% chose legal action as the second biggest challenge, while 28% chose electronic surveillance.

“Overall, these data paint a complex picture in which investigative journalists on the whole feel vulnerable to surveillance and hacking, but not to the degree that most are changing their journalistic practices dramatically or investing energy into figuring out how to do so,” claims the report.

“And nearly all of those surveyed (97%) say that for today’s journalists, the benefits of digital communication like email and cellphones outweigh the risks. Just 3% say the risks outweigh the benefits.”





http://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2014/dec/05/the-logan-symposium-surveillance-censorship

Live from The Logan Symposium: secrecy, surveillance and censorship
From Wikileaks and Edward Snowden to investigative journalism and the future of hacking, London event gets underway
Stuart Dredge
Friday 5 December 2014

Finally, a roll call of “persecuted journalists and hackers” read by actor Francis Magee to finish off the day, and remind the audience that some of the people who couldn’t attend this event are facing the greatest risks.

Apologies, a Vine is just a six-second snapshot from a long, long list. But it’s a fitting way to bring the day to a close.

Harrison is asked about getting these messages across to the general public. “Just education, and keeping on that. I’ve had conversations with some people, it was actually a revelation that the internet is physically carried by cables across the world! In this age of Wi-Fi, people just think the internet is something magically in the air.” she says.

“It’s interesting being in Germany whilst these revelations are coming out, there’s still in living memory the history of surveillance here that was in a much more physical way. There’s a bit more of an understanding here that even if you can’t see it, the concept of this surveillance, the taking away of our rights, is hugely problematic... It’s important not to give up.”

Harrison says one good outcome from the NSA revelations has been more journalists understanding encryption technology – or if not understanding it yet, being open for the need for it – which she says makes it easier forWikiLeaks to work with them. “Now it’s quite easy when I say we’ll have to train you in some encryption methods, most journalists are actually quite pleased to have that training,” she says.

“The NSA revelations haven’t necessarily made a large impact on how we’ve had to work ourselves,” she adds. “People do get now that people like Julian and Jake [Jacob Appelbaum] are not actually paranoid, they’re just correct, which is nice.”

Could things get worse on the surveillance front? “It doesn’t mean that all is necessarily lost. Encryption does work. People do need to be trained to understand the technologies so they can protect themselves... It really is up to the technical community to help all members of the public find ways to protect themselves.”

7.06pm14:06

Harrison has some advice for journalists, suggesting that they can follow Glenn Greenwald’s recent career path: “Do the work that you see as correct... and if you feel at any point that you’re being prevented... your pieces are being too editorialised, or you want to publish a piece that the media organisation doesn’t have the guts for, you should not only go it alone, but make some noise about it... make sure the public knows that the information is being filtered.”


7.02pm14:02

Harrison is asked about the crackdown on press freedom being matched by a less-reported “civil rights crackdown” on the Muslim community by one audience member. Is that something she has views on? “I completely see what you’re referring to. One of the biggest issues is this: the government in the UK and the US as well, they like to use the rhetoric of national security, terrorism etc, basically as propaganda tools to give them the cover to operate in all sorts of abusive ways,” she says.

“I don’t think this is questioned enough. If you look at the statements that the US government said about us when we released the Iraq war logs and Afghan war logs, they tried to say we had blood on our hands. Which is quite extraordinary when we’re exposing the tens of thousands of deaths at the hands of the US... This is all done under this guise of national security, and it’s really created problems within the UK and US communities and media on how to deal with Muslim communities, and to understand that it’s not okay for anybody’s rights to be broken... The press in the UK really needs to grow some balls for the most part.”


6.59pm13:59

She talks about the Courage Foundation, which spawned from WikiLeaks’ involvement in helping Edward Snowden travel from Hong Kong to Moscow.

“We saw that there was a need, and hence we started up Courage, which basically is a whistleblower support organisation. The unique part about Courage is it’s not only global, but it’s being set up specifically for these high-risk cases to help in some of the most dangerous circumstances of whistleblowers to get them the help that they need.”

But then it’s questions from the audience. First, John Pilger’s earlier speech about WikiLeaks being airbrushed out of the story of recent leaks in comparison to Snowden and Greenwald. “I think that there has been a lot of, and I don’t really see it as particularly helpful or correct, people like to try and draw these comparisons. Who’s better or who’s achieved more?” she says.

“If you look at the case of Snowden and Assange, they’re completely different beings. Edward Snowden is a whistleblower, Julian Assange is a journalist and a publisher. Snowden did a heroic act, and Julian’s life work – starting of WikiLeaks and also the work he did before then – shows great bravery. People who draw these comparisons, it’s about maybe their own misgivings, or they’re playing into the government rhetoric too much.”





http://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2014/dec/05/the-logan-symposium-surveillance-censorship

Live from The Logan Symposium: secrecy, surveillance and censorship:


The UK's "large crackdown on press freedoms"

The last speaker at The Logan Symposium is WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who is also acting director of the Courage Foundation, which raises money for the legal and public defence of journalistic sources. She’s now based in Berlin, and like Laura Poitras has been advised not to travel to the UK for legal reasons, so is Skypeing in her session.

“The UK is having what I think is a large crackdown on press freedoms. It’s under the Terrorism Act that the intelligence services went into the Guardian’s offices... it’s what they used to detain David Miranda, and it’s the reason my lawyers have advised me not to go home,” she says, calling for a campaign in the UK to demand that journalists not be muzzled by legislation intended for terrorists.


6.41pm13:41

Finally, what has she learned in all her work about the consequences of what the NSA and GCHQ are doing? “I do think that in a strange way, being put on a watch list made me a bit resilient, and ready to handle the story,” she said. “And Snowden learned from other whistleblowers... I think that’s partly the good news. That people are willing to take risks to expose injustice or wrongdoing.”


6.35pm13:35

Another question: the harshest reactions to the Snowden revelations seem to have come from the UK rather than the US – the detainment of Glenn Greenwald’s partner during an airport transfer, for example, and that hard-drive destroying Guardian incident. Why?

“Your analysis is clearly right... certainly the response has been the most anti-free-press, and really attacking the reporting in a way that we haven’t seen on the same level in the US,” she says, but declines to suggest why. “Perhaps someone in the room who is from the UK can answer that one.”

Finally, she’s asked about how she keeps the raw material for her films safe, after it’s been shot. When she flew to Hong Kong she had multiple, encrypted hard drives, and giving them to a local contact so they weren’t stored in her hotel room.

“I was very concerned that we could be raided, and that everything could be taken. I had everything backed up – I’m religious about backing up, it’s essential – and the film I shot there’s one copy in Hong Kong, and I travelled with the other.”


6.30pm13:30

She’s asked about how she conveys “empowerment through technology” to her fellow journalists. “One of the effects of this story is probably a lot more journalists have learned to use encryption, because they care about source protection – which I hope they do! – but also to be prepared if they ever get a knock on the door.”

She admits that it can be difficult to get some of the tools required for her work – video editing, for example – that are free [secure] software. “At some point it becomes a case of what is your threat model versus what you want to accomplish. When it comes to protecting sources, we have an obligation to use technology that we believe to be secure,” she says, before addressing hackers directly:

“The challenge is on you right now to build tools that people like me can use. Although I did figure out how to get Tails running, it wasn’t easy: there was a learning curve. I had enough information to know that it was essential, but not every journalist does. So it’s important that we focus on building tools that are easy to use, and which don’t require such a steep learning curve.” Something Seymour Hersh also talked about earlier in the day.