Broken Machine posted:

Sure, here

NYT posted:

Protesters for weeks had suspected that the government was using location data from cellphones near the demonstration to pinpoint people for political profiling, and they received alarming confirmation when a court formally ordered a telephone company to hand over such data.

Earlier this month, protesters at a clash with riot police officers received text messages on their phones saying they had been “registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.”

Then, three cellphone companies — Kyivstar, MTS and Life — denied that they had provided the location data to the government or had sent the text messages. Kyivstar suggested that it was instead the work of a “pirate” cellphone tower set up in the area.

In a ruling made public on Wednesday, a city court ordered Kyivstar to disclose to the police which cellphones were turned on during an antigovernment protest outside the courthouse on Jan. 10.

The order applied only to this one site on one day, and did not cover the area of the main protest, Independence Square, where sometimes more than 100,000 people have shown up, most presumably carrying cellphones whose location there could identify them as political opponents of the government.

mobby_6kl posted:

So is there a leaked copy of his resume somewhere? What kind of skills and work experience gets someone with fake education hired for 120k?


Also, it's apparently now confirmed that the Ukrainian authorities used phone information to target protestors.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/ukrainian-police-use-cellphones-to-track-protestors-court-order-shows/

quote:

New video footage has been released for the first time of the moment Guardian editors destroyed computers used to store top-secret documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

“A lot of people feel at the moment that the ABC instinctively takes everyone’s side but Australia’s,” Abbott declared in an interview on a right-wing “shock jock” radio program. Referring to the revelations of monitoring Indonesian leaders, he stated: “I was very worried and concerned a few months back when the ABC seemed to delight in broadcasting allegations by a traitor. This gentlemen Snowden, or this individual Snowden, who has betrayed his country and in the process has badly, badly damaged other countries that are friends of the United States. And of course the ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said.”

Abbott added that “it dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own” and that he wanted the ABC to have “at least some basic affection for our home team, so to speak.”

Tezzor posted:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq


Video in link.

Reminder that agents of a western democratic government barged into a newspaper and forced them to destroy evidence of that government's lies and wrongdoing in a display that was utterly pointless except as naked intimidation.

quote:

Just after 7pm, Guardian US went ahead and ran the story.

That evening, diggers arrived and tore up the sidewalk immediately in front of the Guardian's US office, a mysterious activity for a Wednesday night. With smooth efficiency, they replaced it. More diggers arrived outside Gibson's home in Brooklyn. Soon, every member of the Snowden team was able to recount similar unusual moments: "taxi drivers" who didn't know the way or the fare; "window cleaners" who lingered next to the editor's office. "Very quickly, we had to get better at spycraft," Gibson says.

Kurt_Cobain posted:

Along those lines

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/01/edward-snowden-intelligence-leak-nsa-contractor-extract

Is this just paranoia or did the NSA actually some how order the destruction and rebuilding of sidewalks? Seems too bizarre.

Tezzor posted:

You know the fact that a federal law enforcement agency is using a terrorism program to engage in a massive conspiracy to commit systemic perjury really isn't getting enough traction in the media, I've never heard it mentioned on television, it's all talk about metadata.

Elotana posted:

It's actually not systemic perjury, the slides are very explicit about the fact that you do not let it get to the point where someone is testifying as to the source of the tips. Like I said, it's all about managing the chain of evidence so that it stays just beyond the reach of the defendant, which usually means keeping it in the upper reaches of LE (who don't normally testify) and out of the field agents (who do testify) and the prosecution (subject to Brady).

hepatizon posted:

Doesn't it become perjury when LE claims it was just a random traffic stop? There's a chain of orders from NSA to whoever's driving the squad car. Someone has to lie.

Paul MaudDib posted:

Not necessarily. The NSA tells the LEO high-ups to find a reason to stop car X at time Y tomorrow. The high-ups pass along the tip and the street-level guys do the bust. They say they had a tip, which is technically correct, and they don't know enough to technically commit perjury since every random officer isn't going to know the complete pedigree of every bit of information they use, and probably doesn't even know they're coordinating with the NSA.

The problem is that police officers get an extremely heavy presumption of good-faith behavior, and even when they're not operating in good faith if the case is strong enough there will be enough "good" bits to put you away regardless. There's plenty of other "tips" that are also crooked police informants, other suspects they're blackmailing into plea deals, overblown, or just crooked cops making poo poo up.

hepatizon posted:

Claiming it's an anonymous tip would be perjury, right? Do random officers get so much benefit of the doubt that "I don't know where the tip came from" is enough to stop the defense attorney? Assuming the defense attorney has heard of parallel construction.

hepatizon posted:

Claiming it's an anonymous tip would be perjury, right? Do random officers get so much benefit of the doubt that "I don't know where the tip came from" is enough to stop the defense attorney? Assuming the defense attorney has heard of parallel construction.

Paul MaudDib posted:

It would be perjury if the street cop knew that the tip originated with the NSA. However, it would not be perjury for a high-up to lie that it was an anonymous/properly sourced tip to the agent, and allow the agent to testify as such to the court, since the high-up is not under oath and the street cop did not know his information was wrong.

Paul MaudDib posted:

Furthermore, most Federal court cases don't get to the point where they're digging hard into evidence, they throw down a charge of 70 years in Federal prison and force you to plea-bargain. If you decide to fight it, (a) you'll lose and (b) you'll go away for twice as long.

hepatizon posted:

Isn't that hearsay, though?

quote:

US v Leon (1984)

Facts of the Case

The exclusionary rule requires that evidence illegally seized must be excluded from criminal trials. Leon was the target of police surveillance based on an anonymous informant's tip. The police applied to a judge for a search warrant of Leon's home based on the evidence from their surveillance. A judge issued the warrant and the police recovered large quantities of illegal drugs. Leon was indicted for violating federal drug laws. A judge concluded that the affadavit for the search warrant was insufficient; it did not establish the probable cause necessary to issue the warrant. Thus, the evidence obtained under the warrant could not be introduced at Leon's trial.

Question
Is there a "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule?

Conclusion
Decision: 6 votes for United States, 3 vote(s) against
Legal provision: Exclusionary Rule (admissibility of evidence allegedly in violation of the Fourth Amendment)

Yes, there is such an exception. The justices held that evidence seized on the basis of a mistakenly issued search warrant could be introduced at trial. The exclusionary rule, argued the majority, is not a right but a remedy justified by its ability to deter illegal police conduct. In Leon, the costs of the exclusionary rule outweighed the benefits. The exclusionary rule is costly to society: Guilty defendants go unpunished and people lose respect for the law. The benefits of the exclusionary rule are uncertain: The rule cannot deter police in a case like Leon, where they act in good faith on a warrant issued by a judge.

quote:

4 methods Americans will accept (so far...) to combine IC & LEA collection efforts and trial of the defendant
This is a place-holder slide to announce the remainder of the class: we will discuss four methods that allow the combination of IC and LEA collection efforts in a given criminal case WITHOUT NECESSARILY EXPOSING IC SOURCES AND METHODS.

1. [REDACTED]
2. Use CIPA.
3. Use FISA.
4. Use Parallel Construction.

Main Paineframe posted:

So for parallel construction, they redacted pretty much everything besides the name and halfhearted legal justifications...but what the hell is that first thing that's so classified they won't even reveal the name? Maybe I could find some hints if I scroll up a hundred-odd pages and read through again, but they're being pretty thorough about redacting any hint that they might be hiding things without the knowledge of a judge.

quote:

The only details on this mysteriously legal tactic come from a handful of Supreme Court case references. Legal justifications include Whren v. United States, which established that the actual aim of officers in making a traffic stop is of no consequence so long as they have independent justification to pull a motorist over.
...
The oldest reference is to a 1938 Supreme Court decision, Scher v. United States.
...
Beyond these case law references, there are no details of how this "primary methodology" of shielding classified programs integrates into DEA investigations.

Elotana posted:

Having skimmed the case, let me reverse engineer the redacted part for you: "All of the caveats we listed above, however, don't matter if you can catch the perp in the act. Then you don't have to reveal poo poo. Therefore, when handling parallel construction cases, timing your bust is everything." The sheer number of B7E redactions on the traffic stop slide decks tends to confirm the anonymous testimony in the original Reuters story about how parallel construction actually works in practice the vast majority of the time. A local K9 unit gets told "search this car at this time" and nothing else, and no one involved with the case will ever be the wiser unless someone fucks up.

quote:

A secret British spy unit created to mount cyber attacks on Britain’s enemies has waged war on the hacktivists of Anonymous and LulzSec, according to documents taken from the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden and obtained by NBC News.

The blunt instrument the spy unit used to target hackers, however, also interrupted the web communications of political dissidents who did not engage in any illegal hacking. It may also have shut down websites with no connection to Anonymous.

According to the documents, a division of Government Communications Headquarters Communications (GCHQ), the British counterpart of the NSA, shut down communications among Anonymous hacktivists by launching a “denial of service” (DDOS) attack – the same technique hackers use to take down bank, retail and government websites – making the British government the first Western government known to have conducted such an attack.

The documents, from a PowerPoint presentation prepared for a 2012 NSA conference called SIGDEV, show that the unit known as the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, or JTRIG, boasted of using the DDOS attack – which it dubbed Rolling Thunder -- and other techniques to scare away 80 percent of the users of Anonymous internet chat rooms.

The existence of JTRIG has never been previously disclosed publicly.

The documents also show that JTRIG infiltrated chat rooms known as IRCs and identified individual hackers who had taken confidential information from websites. In one case JTRIG helped send a hacktivist to prison for stealing data from PayPal, and in another it helped identify hacktivists who attacked government websites.

In connection with this report, NBC is publishing documents that Edward Snowden took from the NSA before fleeing the U.S. The documents are being published with minimal redactions.

Intelligence sources familiar with the operation say that the British directed the DDOS attack against IRC chat rooms where they believed criminal hackers were concentrated. Other intelligence sources also noted that in 2011, authorities were alarmed by a rash of attacks on government and corporate websites and were scrambling for means to respond.

“While there must of course be limitations,” said Michael Leiter, the former head of the U.S. government’s National Counterterrorism Center and now an NBC News analyst, “law enforcement and intelligence officials must be able to pursue individuals who are going far beyond speech and into the realm of breaking the law: defacing and stealing private property that happens to be online.”

“No one should be targeted for speech or thoughts, but there is no reason law enforcement officials should unilaterally declare law breakers safe in the online environment,” said Leiter.

But critics charge the British government with overkill, noting that many of the individuals targeted were teenagers, and that the agency’s assault on communications among hacktivists means the agency infringed the free speech of people never charged with any crime.

“Targeting Anonymous and hacktivists amounts to targeting citizens for expressing their political beliefs,” said Gabriella Coleman, an anthropology professor at McGill University and author of an upcoming book about Anonymous. “Some have rallied around the name to engage in digital civil disobedience, but nothing remotely resembling terrorism. The majority of those embrace the idea primarily for ordinary political expression.” Coleman estimated that the number of “Anons” engaged in illegal activity was in the dozens, out of a community of thousands.

In addition, according to cyber experts, a DDOS attack against the servers hosting Anonymous chat rooms would also have shut down any other websites hosted by the same servers, and any other servers operated by the same Internet Service Provider (ISP), whether or not they had any connection to Anonymous. It is not known whether any of the servers attacked also hosted other websites, or whether other servers were operated by the same ISPs.

Elotana posted:

Sure, but those kinds of low-level reasonable suspicion / probable cause lies go on all the time. A K9 unit itself is pretty much a legal fiction. The point is they're not lying about the tips; parallel construction is about putting them in a position where it's unnecessary to testify about them in the first place.

SedanChair posted:

It would be really funny if the U of Liverpool mailed Snowden a master's degree. It's not like he hasn't earned it.

quote:

DAYTON, Ohio — Shooter and victim were just a pair of pixels, dark specks on a gray streetscape. Hair color, bullet wounds, even the weapon were not visible in the series of pictures taken from an airplane flying two miles above.

But what the images revealed — to a degree impossible just a few years ago — was location, mapped over time. Second by second, they showed a gang assembling, blocking off access points, sending the shooter to meet his target and taking flight after the body hit the pavement. When the report reached police, it included a picture of the blue stucco building into which the killer ultimately retreated, at last beyond the view of the powerful camera overhead.

“I’ve witnessed 34 of these,” said Ross McNutt, the genial president of Persistent Surveillance Systems, which collected the images of the killing in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, from a specially outfitted Cessna. “It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle, and you need to figure out what happened before and after.”

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. Although these cameras can’t read license plates or see faces, they provide such a wealth of data that police, businesses and even private individuals can use them to help identify people and track their movements.

Already, the cameras have been flown above major public events such as the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, McNutt said. They’ve been flown above Baltimore; Philadelphia; Compton, Calif.; and Dayton in demonstrations for police. They’ve also been used for traffic impact studies, for security at NASCAR races and at the request of a Mexican politician, who commissioned the flights over Ciudad Juárez.

Defense contractors are developing similar technology for the military, but its potential for civilian use is raising novel civil liberties concerns. In Dayton, where Persistent Surveillance Systems is based, city officials balked last year when police considered paying for 200 hours of flights, in part because of privacy complaints.

“There are an infinite number of surveillance technologies that would help solve crimes . . . but there are reasons that we don’t do those things, or shouldn’t be doing those things,” said Joel Pruce, a University of Dayton postdoctoral fellow in human rights who opposed the plan. “You know where there’s a lot less crime? There’s a lot less crime in China.”

The Supreme Court generally has given wide latitude to police using aerial surveillance as long as the photography captures images visible to the naked eye.

McNutt, a retired Air Force officer who once helped design a similar system for the skies above Fallujah, a battleground city in Iraq, hopes to win over officials in Dayton and elsewhere by convincing them that cameras mounted on fixed-wing aircraft can provide far more useful intelligence than police helicopters do, for less money.

A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall. He said regular flights over the most dangerous parts of Washington — combined with publicity about how much police could see — would make a significant dent in the number of burglaries, robberies and murders. His 192-megapixel cameras would spot as many as 50 crimes per six-hour flight, he estimated, providing police with a continuous stream of images covering more than a third of the city.

“We watch 25 square miles, so you see lots of crimes,” he said. “And by the way, after people commit crimes, they drive like idiots.”

What McNutt is trying to sell is not merely the latest techno-wizardry for police. He envisions such steep drops in crime that they will bring substantial side effects, including rising property values, better schools, increased development and, eventually, lower incarceration rates as the reality of long-term overhead surveillance deters those tempted to commit crimes.

Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl, a supporter of McNutt’s efforts, has proposed inviting the public to visit the operations center to get a glimpse of the technology in action.

“I want them to be worried that we’re watching,” Biehl said. “I want them to be worried that they never know when we’re overhead.”
...
The military’s most advanced experimental research lab is developing a system that uses hundreds of cellphone cameras to watch 36-square-mile areas. McNutt offers his system — which uses 12 commercially available Canon cameras mounted in an array — as an effective alternative that’s cheap enough for local police departments to afford. He typically charges between $1,500 and $2,000 per hour for his services, including flight time, operation of the command center and the time that analysts spend assisting investigations.

Dayton police were enticed by McNutt’s offer to fly 200 hours over the city for a home-town discount price of $120,000. The city, with about 140,000 people, saw its police force dwindle from more than 400 officers to about 350 in recent years, and there is little hope of reinforcements.

“We’re not going to get those officers back,” Biehl, the police chief, said. “We have had to use technology as force multipliers.”

Still, the proposed contract, coming during Dayton’s campaign season and amid a wave of revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, sparked resistance. Biehl is looking for a chance to revive the matter. But the new mayor, Nan Whaley, has reservations, both because of the cost and the potential loss of privacy.

“Since 2001, we haven’t had really healthy conversations about personal liberty. It’s starting to bloom about a decade too late,” Whaley said. “I think the conversation needs to continue.”

To that end, the mayor has another idea: She’s encouraging the businesses that own Dayton’s tallest buildings to mount rooftop surveillance cameras capable of continuously monitoring the downtown and nearby neighborhoods. Whaley hopes the businesses would provide the video feeds to the police.

McNutt, it turns out, has cameras for those situations, too, capable of spotting individual people from seven miles away.

Paul MaudDib posted:

A while back we had the drone thread where certain people argued vehemently that the ARGUS-IS drone-based tracking systems (or similar) would be utterly impractical for use in urban areas. Turns out, not so.

Tezzor posted:

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/war-anonymous-british-spies-attacked-hackers-snowden-docs-show-n21361

Sucrose posted:

Am I the only one not particularly bothered by this leak? I'm concerned about mass surveillance, I'm a lot less surprised that government agencies (of any government) would be monitoring and disrupting the activities of hacker groups that are targeting the government. Obviously this could be taken too far, and if it lead to surveillance and disruption of groups that aren't doing anything illegal, that would be a big loving problem, but as it is I don't see what the big deal is. I would expect the government to be doing something like this in response to LolzSec, the entire point of the group was to hack into government websites.

hepatizon posted:

Surprise, engineers are, as a rule, full of poo poo about feasibility.

konna posted:

As a rule, you are a loving idiot. While we're at it maybe we should gang up on philosophers as well and see if it helps.

Tezzor posted:

How about the fact that they were committing criminal actions against their own citizens?