In light of this, let’s not forget what the ACLU recently received from the U.S. government when they filed a Freedom of Information Act request about text message surveillance policy.  They got 15 pages of blacked out, redacted text.  Now, from the Wall Street Journal we discover:

Big phone companies have begun to sell the vast troves of data they gather about their subscribers’ locations, travels and Web-browsing habits.

The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

The new offerings are also evidence of a shift in the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc.

When a Verizon Wireless customer navigates to a website on her smartphone today, information about that website, her location and her demographic background may end up as a data point in a product called Precision Market Insights. The product, which Verizon launched in October 2012 after trial runs, offers businesses like malls, stadiums and billboard owners statistics about the activities and backgrounds of cellphone users in particular locations.

Carriers acknowledge the sensitivity of the data. But as advertisers and marketers seek more detailed information about potential customers and the telecom industry seeks new streams of revenue amid a maturing cellphone market, big phone companies have started to tiptoe in.

So they clearly understand the negative privacy implications, but after careful consideration (of the bottom line) they decided to sell the information anyway.  How thoughtful.

The carrier also says that it will sell only broad information about groups of customers, and that the program won’t include information from Verizon’s government or corporate clients. Most other individuals’ data will be used by default, but people can opt out on Verizon’s website.

Government and corporations excluded!  This special program where your data is sold without compensation is for the serfs only, as usual.

SAP hasn’t said which carriers it’s working with, but it described the process. When a smartphone user clicks on a Web link, the action will generate a data point, including basic information about the website the user is visiting along with the user’s location as precisely as within 30 feet and demographic data.

Ah, the sweet taste of freedom.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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Phone Companies are Now Selling Your Personal Information originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 22, 2013.

- Glenn Greenwald from his recent article:  Washington Gets Explicit: Its “War on Terror” is Permanent 

So last Thursday at a hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, we found out what many of us already knew.  That the “war on terror” is never going to end.  Indeed, it was never supposed to end.  This never-ending “war” on a fantastical enemy provides the American oligarch class with too much money and too much power to ever make it worthwhile for the establishment to shut down.  It matters not to them that this civil liberties destroying fraud has been going on for my entire post-college life and, if they have their way, for the remainder of it.  It matters not to them that the “war on terror” itself has done more to destroy the Constitution and vital essence of this nation than any terrorist act ever could.  No, it matters very little indeed.  What matters to them is money and power, and the “war on terror” provides them with boatloads of both.

My favorite excerpts from Glenn’s article are below:

On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether the statutory basis for this “war” – the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) – should be revised (meaning: expanded). This is how Wired’s Spencer Ackerman (soon to be the Guardian US’s national security editor) described the most significant exchange:

“Asked at a Senate hearing today how long the war on terrorism will last, Michael Sheehan, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, answered, ’At least 10 to 20 years.’ . . . A spokeswoman, Army Col. Anne Edgecomb, clarified that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today – atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted. Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War.”

That the Obama administration is now repeatedly declaring that the “war on terror” will last at least another decade (or two) is vastly more significant than all three of this week’s big media controversies (Benghazi, IRS, and AP/DOJ) combined. The military historian Andrew Bacevich has spent years warning that US policy planners have adopted an explicit doctrine of “endless war”. Obama officials, despite repeatedly boasting that they have delivered permanently crippling blows to al-Qaida, are now, as clearly as the English language permits, openly declaring this to be so.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this war has no purpose other than its own eternal perpetuation. This war is not a means to any end but rather is the end in itself. Not only is it the end itself, but it is also its own fuel: it is precisely this endless war – justified in the name of stopping the threat of terrorism – that is the single greatest cause of that threat.

In response, I wrote that the “war on terror” cannot and will not end on its own for two reasons: (1) it is designed by its very terms to be permanent, incapable of ending, since the war itself ironically ensures that there will never come a time when people stop wanting to bring violence back to the US (the operational definition of “terrorism”), and (2) the nation’s most powerful political and economic factions reap a bonanza of benefits from its continuation. Whatever else is true, it is now beyond doubt that ending this war is the last thing on the mind of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner and those who work at the highest levels of his administration. Is there any way they can make that clearer beyond declaring that it will continue for “at least” another 10-20 years?

And then there’s the most intangible yet most significant cost: each year of endless war that passes further normalizes the endless rights erosions justified in its name. The second term of the Bush administration and first five years of the Obama presidency have been devoted to codifying and institutionalizing the vast and unchecked powers that are typically vested in leaders in the name of war. Those powers of secrecy, indefinite detention, mass surveillance, and due-process-free assassination are not going anywhere. They are now permanent fixtures not only in the US political system but, worse, in American political culture.

Each year that passes, millions of young Americans come of age having spent their entire lives, literally, with these powers and this climate fixed in place: to them, there is nothing radical or aberrational about any of it. The post-9/11 era is all they have been trained to know. That is how a state of permanent war not only devastates its foreign targets but also degrades the population of the nation that prosecutes it.

This war will end only once Americans realize the vast and multi-faceted costs they are bearing so that the nation’s political elites can be empowered and its oligarchs can further prosper. But Washington clearly has no fear that such realizations are imminent. They are moving in the other direction: aggressively planning how to further entrench and expand this war.

Newly elected independent Sen. Angus King of Maine said after listening to how the Obama administration interprets its war powers under the AUMF:

This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” 

Former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith, who testified at the hearing,summarized what was said after it was over: Obama officials argued that “they had domestic authority to use force in Mali, Syria, Libya, and Congo, against Islamist terrorist threats there”; that “they were actively considering emerging threats and stated that it was possible they would need to return to Congress for new authorities against those threats but did not at present need new authorities”; that “the conflict authorized by the AUMF was not nearly over”; and that “several members of the Committee were surprised by the breadth of DOD’s interpretation of the AUMF.” Conveying the dark irony of America’s war machine, seemingly lifted right out of the Cold War era film Dr. Strangelove, Goldsmith added:

Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

Nobody really even knows with whom the US is at war, or where. Everyone just knows that it is vital that it continue in unlimited form indefinitely.

1984 really was an instruction manual for the people in power.  Terrifying.

In Liberty,
Mike

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The Pentagon Admits: The “War on Terror” Will Never End originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 21, 2013.

After all, how pathetically pedestrian would it be to have to wait on long lines with the unwashed 99% just to ride in the tea cups for a couple of minutes.  No thanks.  For those that wonder how the 1%, (actually more like the 0.01%) in Manhattan do Disney World, look no further.  For a mere $130 an hour you can purchase a disabled person to help you jump ahead of your monetary challenged neighbors on rides throughout the park.  From the New York Post:

Some wealthy Manhattan moms have figured out a way to cut the long lines at Disney World — by hiring disabled people to pose as family members so they and their kids can jump to the front, The Post has learned.

The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

The woman said she hired a Dream Tours guide to escort her, her husband and their 1-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter through the park in a motorized scooter with a “handicapped” sign on it. The group was sent straight to an auxiliary entrance at the front of each attraction.

Disney allows each guest who needs a wheelchair or motorized scooter to bring up to six guests to a “more convenient entrance.”

The Florida entertainment mecca warns that there “may be a waiting period before boarding.” But the consensus among upper-crust moms who have used the illicit handicap tactic is that the trick is well worth the cost.

Not only is their “black-market tour guide” more efficient than Disney World’s VIP Tours, it’s cheaper, too.

Disney Tours offers a VIP guide and fast passes for $310 to $380 per hour.

Not only do these folks want to cut the lines, but they want to get the best deal possible while doing it!  Classy.

Passing around the rogue guide service’s phone number recently became a shameless ritual among Manhattan’s private-school set during spring break. The service asks who referred you before they even take your call.

“It’s insider knowledge that very few have and share carefully,” said social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, who caught wind of the underground network while doing research for her upcoming book “Primates of Park Avenue.”

This seems like a good time to reread my 2010 article, Goodbye Disneyland, which is the first article I wrote after resigning from Bernstein that went viral on the web.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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How the 1% Does Disney World originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 20, 2013.

The head of Saudi Arabia’s religious police has warned citizens against using Twitter, which is rising in popularity among Saudis.

Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said anyone using social media sites – and especially Twitter – “has lost this world and his afterlife”.

Twitter was the platform for those who did not have any platform, he said.

If that’s the case, then why are you so scared of it?

His remarks reflect Riyadh’s concern that Saudis use Twitter to discuss sensitive political and other issues.

The conservative kingdom is believed to have seen the world’s fastest increase in the uptake of Twitter, says the BBC’s Sebastian Usher.

The sheikh’s comments echo those of the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in April who used his sermon – seen by millions on TV – to warn that Twitter was a threat to national unity, our correspondent says.

Earlier, Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti, the kingdom’s most senior Muslim cleric, had dismissed Twitter users as “fools”.

Again, if they are such fools, what are you so afraid of?

These rhetorical attacks are part of a concerted offensive by the Saudi establishment on the social network site, our correspondent says.

Sorry guys, but if you think twitter is a threat to “national unity,” there is no national unity.  With allies like this…

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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Saudi Religious Police Chief Goes on the Attack…Against Twitter originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 19, 2013.

The New Yorker has announced a new anonymous document sharing system called Strongbox, that will allow people to anonymously and securely submit documents to reporters from the New Yorker. Other publications have tried to set up something like this — often inspired by Wikileaks — but for the most part, they’ve been full of security holes, sometimes big and serious ones. What may be more interesting than the fact that this system is being set up is the story behind it. It’s based on DeadDrop, an open source system that was put together by Aaron Swartz and Kevin Poulsen. 

Poulsen has the backstory of DeadDrop here, which is well worth reading. Basically, he and Aaron worked on this project on and off for quite some time, and it was only just completed a few weeks before Aaron’s death.

Of course, Poulsen leaves out his own history here as well. As (perhaps?) many of you know, Poulsen was a somewhat infamous hacker back in the day who eventually (after avoiding law enforcement for quite some time) went to prison for some of his hacks. Since then, he’s become one of my favorite journalists, writing for SecurityFocus and then Wired (and writing a wonderful book, Kingpin about some more recent hackers). While Poulsen and Swartz met long before Swartz was indicted — and Swartz and Poulsen were indicted for very different types of activities — having the two of them work together on a project like this is really quite fascinating. 

Here’s how it works.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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Introducing Strongbox: Aaron Swartz’s Last Project originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 19, 2013.

Antony Breeze, 36, died after setting himself alight, telling passers-by who tried to extinguish the flames: ‘I’ve had enough.’

In the hours before the tragedy Mr Breeze, who owed around £1,600, was bombarded with text messages about his arrears, an inquest heard.

Police investigating his death found he owed money to several lenders, including Keyes Whitlock and Co, Mobile Money Ltd, 247 Moneybox.com, Cash Genie and Valour Loans.

The inquest in Bolton heard that loan firms then wrote to his father asking for his debts to be repaid.

His sister, Caroline Hedley, said: ‘He worked very hard. He worked six days a week.’

But she added that he would often borrow money when he struggled to make ends meet.

The payday loan industry is extremely dirty.  As we also found out from the article:

I suppose if you can’t sit in front of a terminal, borrow at 0% and then front-run central banks for a living, tough luck.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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Welcome to the UK Recovery: Indebted British Man Sets Himself on Fire originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 17, 2013.

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

USA! USA!

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

Her successor, Joseph Grant, is taking the fall for misdeeds at the scandal-plagued unit between 2010 and 2012. During at least part of that time, Grant served as deputy commissioner of the tax-exempt unit.

Grant announced today that he would retire June 3, despite being appointed as commissioner of the tax-exempt office May 8, a week ago.

“Obamacare empowers the agency that just violated the public’s trust by secretly targeting conservative groups,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., added. “Even by Washington’s standards, that’s unacceptable.”

Sen. John Cornyn even introduced a bill, the “Keep the IRS Off Your Health Care Act of 2013,” which would prohibit the Secretary of the Treasury, or any delegate, including the IRS, from enforcing the Affordable Care Act.

“Now more than ever, we need to prevent the IRS from having any role in Americans’ health care,” Cornyn, R-Texas, stated. “I do not support Obamacare, and after the events of last week, I cannot support giving the IRS any more responsibility or taxpayer dollars to implement a broken law.”

Pure 100% unadulterated Banana Republic.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 17, 2013.

Eric Holder Just “Doesn’t Know”…Video of the Day! originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 17, 2013.

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is leading a group of investors into funding the merchant services firm BitPay.

BitPay, which offers corporate Bitcoin services, said it had not been looking for funding but the opportunity was too good to turn down.

BitPay founder and CEO Tony Gallippi said: “We raised seed funding in January and February and still had some left so we weren’t looking for money. They approached us, which was a nice surprise because we’d heard that they’d got as far as due diligence with another company in this space. We were really impressed with their experience and energy.”

Full Thiel Bitcoin article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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Peter Thiel Gets the Bitcoin Bug originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 16, 2013.

The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled“Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries.

The most objectionable aspect of the regulatory change is the inclusion of vague language that permits military intervention in the event of “civil disturbances.” According to the rule:

“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”

Bruce Afran, a civil liberties attorney and constitutional law professor at Rutgers University, calls the rule, “a wanton power grab by the military,” and says, “It’s quite shocking actually because it violates the long-standing presumption that the military is under civilian control.”

As it is written, this “commander” has the same power to authorize military force as the president in the event the president is somehow unable to access a telephone. (The rule doesn’t address the statutory chain of authority that already exists in the event a sitting president is unavailable.) In doing so, this commander must exercise judgment in determining what constitutes, “wanton destruction of property,” “adequate protection for Federal property,” “domestic violence,” or “conspiracy that hinders the execution of State or Federal law,” as these are the circumstances that might be considered an “emergency.”

“These phrases don’t have any legal meaning,” says Afran. “It’s no different than the emergency powers clause in the Weimar constitution [of the German Reich]. It’s a grant of emergency power to the military to rule over parts of the country at their own discretion.”

But while outcomes of military interventions have varied, the protocol by which the president works cooperatively with state governments has remained the same. The president is only allowed to deploy troops to a state upon request of its governor. Even then, the military—specifically the National Guard—is there to provide support for local law enforcement and is prohibited from engaging in any activities that are outside of this scope, such as the power to arrest.

Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor from Hofstra University, also calls the ruling “an unauthorized power grab.” According to Freedman, “The Department of Defense does not have the authority to grant itself by regulation any more authority than Congress has granted it by statute.” Yet that’s precisely what it did. This wasn’t, however, the Pentagon’s first attempt to expand its authority domestically in the last decade.

Last year, Bruce Afran and another civil liberties attorney Carl Mayer filed a lawsuit against the Obama Administration on behalf of a group of journalists and activists lead by former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges. They filed suit over the inclusion of a bill in the NDAA 2012 that, according to the plaintiffs, expanded executive authority over domestic affairs by unilaterally granting the executive branch to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without due process. The case has garnered international attention and invited vigorous defense from the Obama Administration. Even Afran goes so far as to say this current rule change is, “another NDAA. It’s even worse, to be honest.”

As far as what might qualify as a civil disturbance, Afran notes, “In the Sixties all of the Vietnam protests would meet this description. We saw Kent State. This would legalize Kent State.” 

The DoD official even referred to the Boston bombing suspects manhunt saying, “Like most major police departments, if you didn’t know they were a police department you would think they were the military.” According to this official there has purposely been a “large transfer of technology so that the military doesn’t have to get involved.” Moreover, he says the military has learned from past events, such as the siege at Waco, where ATF officials mishandled military equipment. “We have transferred the technology so we don’t have to loan it,” he states.

But if the transfer of military training and technology has been so thorough, it boggles the imagination as to what kind of disturbance would be so overwhelming that it would require the suspension of centuries-old law and precedent to grant military complete authority on the ground. The DoD official admits not being able to “envision that happening,” adding, “but I’m not a Hollywood screenwriter.”

Despite protestations from figures such as Afran and O’Brien and past admonitions from groups like the ACLU, for the first time in our history the military has granted itself authority to quell a civil disturbance. Changing this rule now requires congressional or judicial intervention.

“This is where journalism comes in,” says Freedman. “Calling attention to an unauthorized power grab in the hope that it embarrasses the administration.”

So that’s where journalism comes in.  The profession that is being spied on 24/7 by the Department of Justice.  Check please.

Full article here.

In Liberty,
Mike

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The Military is Now Preparing to Take Over for the Police Across the United States originally appeared on A Lightning War for Liberty on May 15, 2013.