Saturday, July 6, 2013

Busy month of July

So everyone knows about Snowden and the annoucnement of NSA spying on everything. The big news today is that the nsa is also scanning physical mail at the post office as well.  I knew their rates where to good to be true!  You may be asking how much info can they really gather from my phone records so check out scary site.
  http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/








The National Security Agency’s collection of data regarding telephone conversations is a far greater threat to privacy than many of us believe. A lawsuit filed by a German politician proves just how much you can learn about a person’s life by monitoring and tracking their phone usage.
Malte Spitz, a member of Germany’s Green Party, sued his cellphone company, T-Mobile, in 2010 in an attempt to determine how much the carrier knew about him. Malte won the suit and received a CD that showed how easy it is to track a person via their phone.

35,890 RECORDS ABOUT HIS MOVEMENT

When he won his lawsuit, Spitz received a CD containing 35,830 records, each documenting his movements. Spitz learned that T-Mobile could pinpoint exactly where he was at a given time. By combining GPS with the data, Spitz could track his own movements around Germany.
T-Mobile knew exactly how many telephone calls Spitz received in a day, how many calls he made, how many Twitter messages he sent out, and how many he received. By examining the data, T-Mobile could figure out that Spitz was attending a political demonstration on Sept. 5, 2009. Spitz shared the data with the German magazine ZEIT, which had an easy time creating a simple interative graphic that tracked Spitz’s movements based on the metadata. The graphic, of which you can see a still of below, highlights what the NSA and mobile phone companies can find out about you from phone records alone (click here for the interactive version):
nsa-mobile-tracking
Those with access to such data could determine what church you go to, what people you visit, and where you shop. It could be used to make criminal cases or to orchestrate surveillance of a person.
Anthony Gucciardi: How to Avoid Being Spied On By The NSA
Spitz’s lawsuit proves that telecom providers gather a vast amount of metadata about their customers. This is the kind of data that Edward Snowden revealed the NSA collects about Americans and shares with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

TELECOM GESTAPO

In a New York Times op-ed pieceSpitz compared such data collection efforts to the work of the Nazi secret police or Gestapo and the Communist East German police or Stasi. He noted that Wolfgang Schauble, a former German Interior Minister (the nation’s chief law enforcement official), who lobbied for a data retention law to enable government to collect such data, was nicknamed Stasi 2.0 by German civil rights activists.
It appears that everybody who uses a mobile device is being constantly tracked by large companies like T-Mobile and Google. Spitz has shown us that these companies now possess tracking capabilities that the Gestapo and Stasi only dreamed of. Those capabilities are now being shared with agencies like the NSA and FBI.
We need to rein in such companies and such agencies now before privacy becomes a thing of the past. Malte Spitz is to be congratulated for exposing this metadata tracking; our media is to be condemned for ignoring Spitz’s revelations until Snowden’s revelations.


Read more: http://www.storyleak.com/graphic-what-the-nsa-knows-about-you-phone-usage/#ixzz2YJ9BGgbb





US Postal Service photographing 160 billion letters annually

Published time: July 05, 2013 14:32
Reuters / John Sommers II
Reuters / John Sommers II
As Washington officials continue to grapple with the fallout from the NSA scandal, it has been revealed that the US Postal Service photographs the outside of every piece of mail it processes each year - around 160 billion pieces annually.
At the request of law enforcement agencies, postal workers take pictures of the  letters and packages before they are delivered, the New York Times reported. 
The information is then stored for an indefinite period of time in the event a law enforcement official requests it. Each year, tens of thousands of pieces of mail are subjected to further scrutiny.

Reading the contents of a letter requires a court-ordered warrant, but in the case of ‘mail cover’ requests, law enforcement agencies submit a letter to the Postal Service, which “rarely denies a request.”

Although the ‘mail covers’ program has been around for nearly a century, its updated successor, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking (MICT) program, was created in the aftermath of the anthrax attacks in late 2001 that killed five people, including two postal workers.

MICT requests are separated into two categories: those related to possible criminal activity and those that are meant to protect national security. Requests based on suspected criminal activity average 15,000 to 20,000 per year, unnamed law enforcement officials told the Times.  

The number of requests for mail covers related to the fight against terrorism has not been made public.

Although law enforcement officials must have warrants to open private correspondence, former President George W. Bush signed off on a document in 2007 that gave the federal government the authority to open mail without warrants in “emergencies or in foreign intelligence cases.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigations revealed the existence of MICT last month in the course of an investigation over ricin-laced letters mailed to President Barack Obama and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

News of the US Postal Service’s surveillance program comes as Washington is facing heated criticism over a formerly covert surveillance program that gave the National Security Agency (NSA), in cooperation with nine of the world’s largest internet companies, sweeping powers to collect data on telephone calls and internet habits of billions of people both at home and abroad.  

The information was made public after former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, blew the whistle on the activities.

Officials in the Obama administration, meanwhile, are attempting to justify the NSA’s surveillance programs, saying the electronic monitoring amounts to the same thing as examining the outside of a letter. At the very least, the program shows that traditional mail is held up to the same kind of scrutiny that the NSA has given to phone calls, e-mail and internet services.

“It’s a treasure trove of information,” James J. Wedick, a former FBI agent told The New York Times.“Looking at just the outside of letters and other mail, I can see who you bank with, who you communicate with — all kinds of useful information that gives investigators leads that they can then follow up on with a subpoena.”

But, he added: “It can be easily abused because it’s so easy to use and you don’t have to go through a judge to get the information. You just fill out a form.”

Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and an author, called the program an invasion of privacy.

“Basically they are doing the same thing as the other programs, collecting the information on the outside of your mail, the metadata, if you will, of names, addresses, return addresses and postmark locations, which gives the government a pretty good map of your contacts, even if they aren’t reading the contents,” he told the US newspaper.

The surveillance requests on mail covers are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to 120 days.