Homeland Security Encourages Americans to Spy and Report on Their Neighbors

The federal government's new anti-terrorism program promotes spying and incites fear among ordinary citizens.
By G.W. Schulz, Center for Investigative Reporting
January 10, 2011

Urging everyday Americans to report suspicious activity they believe could be linked to terrorism remains a leading priority for Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano. Bridge workers, shopping retailers, hoteliers, garbage collectors, patrol officers and your next-door neighbor have all been encouraged to notify authorities if they witness something out of the ordinary.

The program is rolling out state by state, and local police as well as private businesses like Minnesota’s Mall of America are joining in the campaign to help officials compile evidence of possible terrorism in databases and analyze it as intelligence for leads.

An earnest-looking Napolitano appeared in a “see something, say something” public-service announcement at the height of the holiday season that aired near checkout stands for Walmart shoppers as they waited to ring up cartloads of plastic goodness. Some Internet commentators jeered, calling Napolitano “Big Sister” and Walmart shoppers something worse. The video may have done more to spark a debate about suspicious activity than anything else so far.

One issue is that “out of the ordinary” remains elusive. As the program grows, it’s difficult to imagine citizen surveillance won’t suffer from the same disapproval that befell similar Bush-era plans, like the now-defunct Operation TIPS, which enlisted utility employees, long-haul truckers and postal workers to keep an eye out for bad guys.

CNN’s Candy Crowley offered a typical response to the resurrected initiative last month while interviewing Napolitano: “It just sounds very Big Brother to me, turning in the next-door neighbor.” Americans may believe they’re already responsible enough to report conduct that seems truly out of the ordinary, and arguably, few would neglect to speak up if their neighbor was burying C4 in the front yard.

On the other hand, security experts told Congressional Quarterly recently that the Homeland Security Department is simply doing its job by conditioning Americans in an age of peril to both be aware of threatening behavior and report it. Americans are freedom-loving enough not to spy needlessly, one of them said. Added Rich Cooper of the security consulting firm Catalyst Partners:

The department will always be in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation when it comes to information. People need to get a life and take a look at the proactive piece of this. They’re looking for a conspiracy where none exists.

Two new documents required for some government intel systems became publicly available just in recent weeks and provide fresh though slim details about what actually happens after police and civilians alert the government to suspicious activity. According to the first, a desk officer at the DHS National Operations Center receives a tip that, say, someone was observed snapping photographs or drawing sketches of a government building or chemical manufacturing facility.

The officer then determines if it’s “credible” and “possibly linked to terrorism and/or criminal behavior” before writing up what’s called a “patriot report.” These patriot reports can contain rich details about an individual “engaged in and/or connected to the suspicious activity” – name, gender, age, race, ethnicity, Social Security number, driver’s license number, birth date and distinguishing features. Anything’s conceivable, even a “reliability rating of the informational source,” presumably for indicating the trustworthiness of your neighbor or local beat officer who reported the suspicious activity.

From there, patriot reports flow outward to other DHS personnel, the FBI’s own 24-hour counterterrorism center and the dozens of state and local fusion centers constructed since Sept. 11 for swapping and analyzing terrorism data.

But what happens if authorities discover there is no credible threat? A second document says the government could hold at least some records anyway:

There is a privacy risk that records containing [personally identifiable information, e.g. birthdates] collected under the SAR initiative will be deemed to not qualify as suspicious activities after further investigation and analysis but will be retained in the system.

Much of the contact police have with the public is governed by legal concepts like “probable cause” and “reasonable suspicion” that require evidence of a crime. Suspicious activity isn’t a new legal phenomenon, but it has created a new, potentially vast stream of intelligence and sensitive personal information for the government to collect without absolute clarity about what should be considered genuinely suspicious.

By Jan. 3, Congressional Quarterly had decided that “unexpected opposition” was growing due to criticism that the federal government’s suspicious activity program “promotes spying and incites fear.” “Backlash,” as the headline described it, is probably an overstatement. Few Americans are even aware of the program’s breadth to begin with, but the Washington news service did point to online reaction over Napolitano’s video appearance at hundreds of Walmart stores.

There are other nagging questions in the meantime. Florida generated thousands of suspicious activity reports for a pilot program, but how many of them could confidently be linked to terrorism or crime? A Los Angeles police commander told Congress in 2009 that of 1,400 reports there, four led to arrests with no indication of whether they were connected to terror. Will data systems and intelligence analysts become overwhelmed by the deluge of new and not-always-reliable information? For now, Uncle Sam and his sister want you to keep an eye out.

Covert Government

Spooky, Snoopy Spies Run Amuck
By TOM TURNIPSEED

Since 9/11, a collection of secret intelligence groups called the United States Intelligence Community (IC) has become a monstrous, overlapping hodge-podge of spooks with some 850,000 people having top secret clearances, according to the Washington Post. The clandestine tangle of CIA spooks and related “national security” groups like military intelligence, civilian contractors and mercenaries has grown so much that its actual cost, or size, is unknowable and out-of-control according to the Post’s series of articles. The mainstream media icon is publishing Top Secret America after a two year investigation of the huge US intelligence complex. The expose paints a troubling picture of turf wars in a disconnected spy network that can’t “connect the dots”. It is especially disturbing because the Post is an establishment and neo-liberal oriented paper. It is usually supportive of a rather hawkish foreign policy and expenditures for the military industrial complex. The articles reveal a vast and unmanageable assortment of spooky, snoopy spies.

According to their websites the United States Intelligence Community (IC) is a cooperative federation of 16 separate US government agencies that work separately and together to conduct intelligence activities they consider necessary for the conduct of foreign relations and the protection of the national security of the United States. Member organizations of the IC include military intelligence, civilian intelligence and analysis offices in federal executive departments. The IC is headed by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) who is said to be subject to the authority, direction and control of the President and is responsible for overseeing and directing national security by serving as the head of the sixteen-member IC.

The DNI website says the Washington Post’s series of articles “do not reflect the Intelligence Community we know. We accept that we operate in an environment that limits the amount of information we can share. However, the fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day.” Actually, the fact is, spooky infighting at enormous expense.

Obama’s first intelligence chief was Admiral Dennis Blair who had friction with the White House and turf fights with CIA Director Leon Panetta. According to media reports, one of Blair’s senior aides said they were frustrated with a lack of guidance from the White House and likened their situation to an invisible dog fence. The aide and Blair joked with each other that they never knew where the no-go lines were “until we got zapped.”

I don’t know much about spooks thwarting attacks, or their turf fights, but I did stand in a line of anti-war protestors and got zapped for it by the spooks in 2004. Dick Cheney came to my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina in 2004 to a fund-raiser for the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign at the home of an insurance company bigwig. Along with about 30 other peace activists I stood in a line across the street from the event holding a hand painted sign proclaiming “Dick Cheney is a War Criminal.” Local police on duty at the event who knew me were friendly, but I was photographed and asked to identify myself by a grim-faced spook with Cheney’s entourage.

About three months later my wife and I were waiting to board a flight at the Columbia airport when one of the security officers who was my friend told me he was required to meticulously search through my baggage. I asked him why and he said, “You are on the search list”.

Retired Air Force General James Clapper has been nominated by Obama to be the fourth chief spook since the DNI was established. Pledging to increase trust with Congress, Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee he would be candid with lawmakers, if confirmed as the next director of national intelligence.

Senators at Clapper's confirmation hearing voiced skepticism about the ability of the next overseer of the nation's 16 spy agencies to manage the sprawling intelligence community which the last three directors struggled with, mainly because of turf fights between the National Security Council and the CIA.

Clapper insisted he would be able to exercise the necessary authority using the powers the DNI already has, rather than "going through the trauma," of another reorganization and “would not agree to take the position if I was going to be a titular figure or hood ornament."

During his confirmation hearing he also said his 46 years' experience working in the intelligence field makes him uniquely qualified for the job

Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California praised Clapper after the hearing. Feinstein is the committee chairwoman and said she thought Clapper would be "a strong DNI...whose will was going to prevail." She also said Clapper's friendship with CIA Director Leon Panetta meant clashes between the two were less likely. I reckon we should clap for Clapper, a spook for 46 years who learned how to lie with a straight face a long time ago.

Democracy dies when government lies. Secrecy sucks. How many of us are on the lists of suspects with so many spooks and spies running amuck?

How your Apple iPhone spies on you

Published on 07-10-2010

As the communications device grows in popularity, technology experts and US law enforcement agencies are devoting increasing efforts to understanding their potential for forensics investigators.

While police have tracked criminals by locating their position via conventional mobile phone towers, iPhones offer far more information, say experts.

"There are a lot of security issues in the design of the iPhone that lend themselves to retaining more personal information than any other device," said Jonathan Zdziarski, a former computer hacker who now teaches US law enforcers how to retrieve data from mobile phones.

"These devices organise people's lives and, if you're doing something criminal, something about it is going to go through that phone." Apple has sold more than 50 million iPhones since the product was launched in 2007.

Mr Zdziarski told The Daily Telegraph he suspected that security had been neglected on the iPhone as it had been intended as a consumer product rather than a business one like rivals such as the Blackberry.

An example was the iPhone's keyboard logging cache, which was designed to correct spelling but meant that an expert could retrieve anything typed on the keyboard over the past three to 12 months, he said.

In addition, every time an iPhone's internal mapping system is closed down, the device snaps a screenshot of the phone's last position and stores it.

Investigators could access "several hundred" such images from the iPhone and so establish its user's whereabouts at certain times, he said.

In a further design feature that can also help detectives, iPhone photos include so-called "geotags" so that, if posted online, they indicate precisely where a picture was taken and the serial number of the phone that took it.

"Very, very few people have any idea how to actually remove data from their phone," Sam Brothers, a mobile phone researcher for US Customs and Border Protection told the Detroit Free Press.

"It may look like everything's gone but for anybody who's got a clue, retrieving that information is easy."

Google's Street View Cars Spied on Wi-Fi Activity

Google Admits its Street View Cars Spied on Wi-Fi Activity
by Mike Harvey

Google's Street View cars have been spying on people's internet use for three years, the search giant admitted last night. It had been scooping up snippets of people's online activities broadcast over unprotected home and business wi-fi networks.

The logo of web giant Google. The California-based Internet firm has said it will end the collection of WiFi network information entirely by its fleet of Street View cars which have been used in over 30 nations after private data was 'mistakenly' collected from unsecure networks.(AFP/File)Google admitted that the cars' radio antennae snooped on e-mails and other bits of information when the vehicles trundled through towns and cities. Google said that the data was collected only in short bursts as the vehicles passed by, and was never used.

The cars, which have cameras on a pole, have covered most of the towns and cities in the UK. Street View, launched in the US in 2007, provides real-world images of streets and roads that the user can manipulate, as part of Google's online mapping products.

Its launch in the UK in April last year provoked a storm of protest, when people claimed that its images would help burglars seek out where to strike and invaded home owners' privacy.

The Information Commissioner's Office this year cleared Street View of any breach of the Data Protection Act but privacy regulators have expressed concern about the service. Yesterday's confession will raise more fears about internet users' privacy and how much personal information Google collects through its search engine and other services. Google admitted: "Maintaining people's trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short."

Google made the admission after German authorities began to examine why Google was using the cars to collect wi-fi data at all. A month ago Google said it was collecting only the name and location of local wi-fi networks - information, it argued, that was publicly available and was useful to help it improve its location services. Its data collection was much more invasive.

Internet activity such as e-mails, photos and which websites a user was looking at could have been collected by the cars. Google said that activity on secure websites, such as banking websites, could not be accessed and any activity on password-protected networks was also safe.

"We will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car wi-fi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second," Alan Eustace, senior vice-president of engineering and research for Google wrote in a blog. "It's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks."

Google said it had contacted some privacy authorities in Europe and wanted to delete data. Street View cars would not collect any more wi-fi data. Experts said passwords, as well as general surfing, could have been caught in Google's dragnet.