New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks.

I wonder what their MySpace account is. I wonder if they want to be my friend...

New Scientist Technology - Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability. While there was little or nothing at the conference worth keeping secret, the sense of paranoia was constant. The uniformed guard posted to the entrance was there to intimidate, not to protect. The restrictions on civilians attending the law enforcement agency sessions were, I gather, a cheap marketing gesture to justify their $6,500-per-head entrance fee with suggestions of secret information that the average network-savvy geek wouldn't have known.

It poses a tremendous threat to human rights and dignity in countries without adequate legal safeguards, and still invites occasional abuses in countries with them. Its costs are paid by citizens who are deliberately kept in the dark about how much they're paying for it, how effective it is in fighting crime and how susceptible it is to abuse. And that's the way the entire cast of characters involved wants to keep it.

Wired News: Crashing the Wiretapper's Ball

Below, Noteworthy ties together a slew of earlier datapoints that hinted at this program, but I must underline this quotation that particularly pisses me off:

White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino denied that the administration was misleading when it described the NSA program as narrowly drawn.

"It is narrow," she said. "The president has been very specific and very accurate in all of his comments. He said that the government is not trolling through personal information and that the privacy of Americans is fiercely guarded."

When they say "the privacy of Americans is fiercely guarded" what they mean is that they have a team of lawyers who have fiercely produced arguements that what they are doing is legal. Covering your ass is not the same thing as guarding my privacy, god damnit! There is a time when press interview management and spin control is no longer funny, and this is that time. This nation is not made up of little children. The administration has serious questions to answer and they ought to be answering those questions in a serious way.

Going back to Orin Kerr's legal analysis, I'm troubled by how easily the 4th amendment is dismissed here. If the 4th amendment doesn't prevent wholesale data mining of phone call information then what the hell does it prevent!? Even if we find it reasonable that phone users might expect the phone company to share dialed numbers with the government, but not share call content, an arguement I find questionable to begin with, I think we might still expect that the phone company would only do this in special circumstances, and wouldn't be doing it with every single call.

Noteworthy's post is everything below this line:

As illustrated by Negroponte's remarks last week, administration officials have been punctilious in discussing the NSA program over the past five months, parsing their words with care and limiting comments to the portion of the program that had been confirmed by the president in December.

In doing so, the administration rarely offered any hint that a much broader operation, involving millions of domestic calls, was underway. Even yesterday -- after days of congressional furor and extensive media reports -- administration officials declined to confirm or deny the existence of the telephone-call program, in part because of court challenges that the government is attempting to derail.

I continue to be surprised that no one else has recommended Black Arts, by Thomas Powers, more than a year after its publication and appearance on MemeStreams. For this reason, I will reiterate his closing statement for you:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Very few people have really paid attention to the banking surveillance. All kinds of transactions are carefully monitored by the feds.

Big Brother: Whats in your wallet?

We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration's National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in The New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department's December 22, 2005, letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration's defense of the program.

This letter is a bit repetitive due to its structure, but the legal explanation offered here is relatively clear and concise.

On [Domestic] NSA Spying: A Letter To Congress

noteworthy wrote:

Cell Phone Call Record $110

Give us the cell phone number and we will send you the calls made from the cell phone number.

I like this part:

This report is for informational purposes only. This is not for use in court. If you need the records for court, you will need to subpoena the records directly from the carrier.

The whois records are pretty opaque:

Registrant:
Ist Source Information
ATTN: LOCATECELL.COM
c/o Network Solutions
P.O. Box 447
Herndon, VA 20172-0447

The site appears to be fairly new; the record was created on September 26 of last year.

UPDATE: You can read a recent Chicago Sun-Times article, "Your phone records are for sale", about Locatecell. This article was posted to the cryptography mailing list, which is probably what prompted the MemeStreams thread.

This was covered in the Washington Post more than six months ago, "Online Data Gets Personal: Cell Phone Records for Sale."

"This is a person's associations," said Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University Law School professor who specializes in privacy issues. "... It's a real wealth of data to find out the people that a person interacts with."

The company that operates Locatecell is Data Find Solutions, and they are located in Knoxville, TN.

I like this part of the Locatecell order form:

Phone searches are provided by third party, independent search experts. These experts are independent researchers and Data Find Solutions Inc does not know how they do the research or what databases they access.

As the news articles explain, EPIC has asked the FCC to investigate. EPIC offers a compendium of 40 Websites Offering Telephone Calling Records and Other Confidential Information (PDF).

Looking for startup capital -- or a business model? MemeStreams could put the social network information behind a walled garden. But would anyone want in?

Well folks, it looks like you don't need unchecked presidential executive powers to get phone records without a warrant...

Cell Phone Number Research

] Initially, police will place six cameras in the Cleveland
] Park area of east Nashville and also downtown in the
] tourist-heavy Second Avenue and Broadway district.
]
] If the system works out, the department plans to buy more
] cameras and build a more expansive network throughout the
] city.

There were planning to record audio as well, but apparently they couldn't defend that politically. Soon everywhere you go outside the police will be watching you. Better be carefull about loitering in a parking lot. Especially if you look like you might be young or not sufficiently white or otherwise undesirable. I wonder if they'll start following people from bars back to their cars and radio dispatch to pull them over?

This isn't going on in Nashville because it is particularly needed in Nashville. Its going on in Nashville because people in Nashville aren't willing to resist it.

Nashville Police to install city wide video surveillance system.

] When Robert Moran drove back to his law offices in Rome,
] N.Y., after a plane trip to Arizona in July 2003, he had
] no idea that a silent stowaway was aboard his vehicle: a
] secret GPS bug implanted without a court order by state
] police.
]
] A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police
] did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from
] afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a
] visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the
] public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote.
] "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts
] of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Comments from Decius:

Yowzer... The police "could have" visually observed the vehicle, but they didn't. They attached a tracking device to it. A tracking device it a wholly different animal and has wholly different privacy implications. The expense require to visually track an individual car's every movement, without being observed, is extremely high. An individual might have no expectation of privacy with regard to the specific location of his car at a specific time, but there is a reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the specific location of his car at every time.

One might also inquire as to whether this tracking device stopped working the minute this individual pulled off of a public road and onto private property? Its doubtful.

This ruling implies that as one tracking device has no privacy implications, then presumably 1000 tracking devices have no privacy implications, as 1000*0=0. Moving from the idea that the police have every right to tail your car on a public road to the idea that the police can electronically track the location of every car at every time is a massive leap of logic that has little basis in common sense.

Furthermore, one would think that the process of attaching a tracking device would have some private property concerns. Is it legal for me to attach anything I want to your car? Can I put a audio recording device on your car? (Apparently so, according to one of the rulings in this article!)

Anothing article linked in here discusses a very very tenuous barrier that the courts established to prevent the FBI from wiretapping cars using their on-star systems. Apparently its only illegal if it might interfere with emergency road side services!

We're rapidly approaching a period of time when technologies like these will allow the police to monitor your every movement and record your daily conversations. If we will not properly apply the 4th amendment to this domain the results will be terrible.

No court order required for GPS bugs! (More dumb judges.)

] Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first
] one is obvious. Profiling's intent is to divide people
] into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need
] to be screened more carefully, and people who are less
] likely to be evildoers and can be screened less
] carefully.
]
] But any such system will create a third, and very
] dangerous, category: evildoers who don't fit the profile.
] Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Washington-area
] sniper John Allen Muhammed and many of the Sept. 11
] terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The
] Unabomber taught mathematics at UC Berkeley. The
] Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit
] suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli
] activities. Even the Sept. 11 hijackers went out of their
] way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier
] numbers, a history of first-class travel and so on.
] Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal
] the identity -- and profile -- of an honest person.
] Profiling can result in less security by giving certain
] people an easy way to skirt security.

Bruce Schneier, trying to spread the clue around.

How We Are Fighting the War on Terrorism / IDs and the illusion of security

] The FBI demanded Las Vegas hotels turn over their guest
] lists leading up to New Year's Eve to check against a
] U.S. master list of suspected terrorists, a law
] enforcement official said on Sunday.
]
] The demand for "patron information" went to all major
] hotels in the Nevada casino and entertainment city, said
] the official who declined to be named.

What was the money line in all the recent Vegas advertising? "What happens here, stays here." Well, not this New Years..

] A second U.S. government official said to his knowledge
] only one hotel had balked at providing its bookings list.
] Newsweek, the first to report the FBI demand, said one
] big hotel had refused and was "slapped with a subpoena."

I would really like to know what the hotel was that required the subpoena.

Wired News - FBI obtains ALL Las Vegas Jan 1 room lists with no court auth.