NSA

An Android Hack Intentionally Creates False Data on Your Cell Phone to Fool Authorities

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Screen Shot 2014-06-17 at 12.07.15 PMAn increasing concern amongst journalists, activists and just about anyone else who values their privacy is that a bad cop, TSA agent or other bully in a costume will commandeer your cell phone and search its contents. This isn’t just a theoretical issue either, it seems to happen quite often, and is an important enough issue that it went before the Supreme Court early last month. I covered this issue in my post: Can Police Search Your Cell Phone Without a Warrant? The Supreme Court is About to Decide.

I haven’t been able to figure out if there’s been a judgement in that case, so if you have any information, please post it in the comment section. Nevertheless, it appears Android hackers have decided to take matters into their own hands and have developed a new technique that purposely reprograms your phone to lie. Scientific American reported on this in the article, A Phone That Lies for You. We learn that:

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The Obama Administration is Forcing Local Cops to Stay Silent on Surveillance

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Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 2.39.47 PMThe criminality of the Obama Administration is at this point almost beyond description. Earlier this week I highlighted a shocking discovery in my post titled: The Obama Administration is Trying to Cover up the VA Scandal by Issuing Subpoenas to Whistle-Blower Sites. In that piece, it was noted that:


Instead, it’s lawyers from the President Barack Obama administration employing the power of the administrative subpoena in a bid to siphon data from POGO’s encrypted submission portal. POGO’s site encourages whistleblowers to use Tor as the gateway and has garnered more than 700 tips about abuse and mismanagement at the US Veterans Administration after less than a month of operation.

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Glenn Greenwald on the 2016 Elections – “They’ll Probably Have a Gay Person After Hillary”

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Glenn Greenwald is not one known for pulling punches, and in this excellent interview with GQ Magazine titled, The Man Who Knows Too Much, he is in particularly rare form. Credit must be given to the interviewer, who asked a wide range of very interesting questions that allowed Greenwald the opportunity to discuss a lot more than merely his Pulitzer Prize winning journalism on the Edward Snowden documents. From the fact that the biggest NSA stories have yet to be published, to thoughts on the 2016 elections, this interview really has it all.

Here are some of what I thought were the most interesting and informative excerpts. From GQ:

How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?

We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

What do you think would happen if Snowden were to fly from, say, Moscow to New York today?

I think it would be a huge media circus, and then he would be instantly arrested and probably rendered incommunicado for the entire duration of his judicial proceeding on the grounds that he has classified information that could damage the United States. The prosecutors would say he would have to be kept away from media. He would just be disappeared. Rendered completely invisible and mute.

When Daniel Ellsberg was on trial [for leaking the Pentagon Papers], he was allowed to speak out and defend himself.Which is why Ellsberg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last July saying Snowden was absolutely right to flee, because America has changed so drastically. Snowden would never be released on bail and would never get a fair trial.

Yeah, like the incident you quote in the book about Bill Keller [former executive editor of The New York Times] on the BBC…

Yeah, where he’s boasting about the fact that they don’t publish things without the government being happy with what they’re doing. And it obviously has resulted in the suppression of all kinds of important stories, which is the most inexcusable thing that can happen in journalism. And that has happened repeatedly at the Times. I think they’ve essentially become this mouthpiece for those in power, perhaps not consciously. When I make this critique, people at The New York Times are offended, because they actually don’t believe that it’s happening. And they’re not lying. It’s a more subtle dynamic than the government marching in and issuing memos to the Timesabout what they should and shouldn’t publish. It’s just a cultural approach to the news that basically says that the parameters of what can be discussed and viewed as reasonable are the ones that are endorsed by the most powerful financial and political factions in New York and Washington. They’re reflecting the mind-set of those elite groups rather than challenging them or confronting them. Obviously there are exceptions. There’s some good journalists there; they do some good journalism; they’ve done some adversarial journalism. It’s not an absolute, pure, constant, all-consuming formula. But in general, that’s become the posture of the Times.

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Big Brother is Coming…To Your Brokerage Account

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In the midst of the financial crisis, our “leaders” had a choice. They could’ve done what most Americans wanted, which was allow failing firms to fail and permit the chips to fall where they may. In contrast, our “leaders” settled on trillion dollar bailouts with zero strings attached for the criminals who destroyed the nation’s economy. At that point, the American people would’ve been at least somewhat satisfied if the rule of law was applied to the banksters, and those who deserved to go to jail were locked up. As we all know by now, the Justice Department decided to create a special “Too Big To Jail” untouchable class, and nobody was held accountable for anything. Once again, our “leadership” could’ve look at the situation honestly and responded appropriately. Rather, they doubled down on corruption and criminality and now nobody trusts anything. We don’t trust the Presidency, the Congress, the intelligence agencies, the banks, the financial system, the courts, the Federal Reserve, or any institutions at all. We certainly don’t trust Democrats and Republicans. In fact, millennials in particular have given up all trust in everything. They don’t even trust Jay-z anymore, which I suppose is what happens when you prance around with Warren Buffett and flash illuminati signs 24/7. This is how society breaks down.

Moving along, with confidence in “the system” already in the gutter by summer 2013, Edward Snowden released a bombshell of information on illegal government spying. It confirmed what so many of us had been saying for years, but had been dismissed pejoratively by the mainstream as “conspiracy theorists.” Once again, our “leaders” had a choice. Take the difficult steps and offer real reform, or merely pretend nothing really happened and defend the practices at all costs. Once again, they chose the latter. Just as no bankers were jailed for the financial crisis, no intelligence operatives were jailed for illegal spying. In fact, nothing at all has happened to James Clapper for perjuring himself in front of Congress.

Even more worrisome, we are now seeing a counter-attack consisting of expanded efforts to further remove privacy from the lives of Americans. Once again, rather than reforming the system, the status quo is doubling down. I have recently highlighted several such efforts with regard to the internet, which can be read below:

Say Goodbye to “Net Neutrality” – New FCC Proposal Will Permit Discrimination of Web Content

Obama Administration Launches Plan to Make an “Internet ID” a Reality

It now appears the status quo is moving to destroy any last semblance of privacy with regard to your personal brokerage accounts. Yep, in the name of “stopping fraud” and the practices of unscrupulous brokers, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) wants to launch a program called Cards, or the Comprehensive Automated Risk Data System. This electronic system sounds a lot like the so-called metadata the NSA is collecting on everyone’s internet usage. This “robocop” would collect a weekly “record of activity at all of the more than 4,100 brokerage firms nationwide.”

For your own good of course. Oh, and yeah, to stop terrorists or something…

From the Wall Street Journal:

In December, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees how investments are sold, proposed what it calls Cards, an electronic system that would regularly collect data on balances and transactions in brokerage accounts.

If adopted, Cards would revolutionize how regulators do their jobs and could make it harder for unscrupulous brokers to bilk customers.

Give me a fucking break. The last thing the establishment cares about is stopping fraud. Fraud is the number one driver of American GDP at the moment. It is institutionalized, protected and endorsed. This is about nothing more than destroying your financial privacy.

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James Clapper Embarks on Propaganda College Speaking Tour After Droves of Students Name Snowden “Personal Hero”

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Kevin Gosztola over at Firedoglake does some excellent work, and his latest story about the recent activities of perjuring Director of National Intelligence for the U.S., James Clapper, is no exception. To provide a little context, the Washington Post recently reported that:

Freitag skimmed the extracurriculars, read the first essay, rated it good. GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.”This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations.

Freitag is an admissions officer at George Washington University, and apparently this trend of college students accurately identifying Edward Snowden as a hero haS given James Clapper a panic attack. So much so, that he is taking time away from protecting us from “terrorists” (a term that now apparently includes folks at the Bundy Ranch according to Harry Reid) to embark upon a propaganda speaking tour of U.S. college campuses to demonstrate to those silly young kids that Snowden is no hero, but actually a traitorous villain.

This whole thing is eerily similar to Banana Ben Bernanke’s college propaganda tour back in 2012, which demonstrates that the status quo simply has one playbook that it sticks to aggressively. The only question I have is how long before Clapper realizes he can earn $250,000 a speech once he leaves his current role, as Benny Bernanke is currently raking in.

From Firedoglake:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is touring universities and colleges in the United States in an attempt to persuade students that they should not consider former NSA contractor Edward Snowden a whistleblower or a hero.

Speaking at the GEOINT conference in Tampa, Florida, on April 15, Clapper addressed attendees and told university students at Georgetown University and the University of Georgia about a recent article in The Washington Post on college admissions.

“An admissions officer from George Washington University told The Post that for the admissions’ essay question, ‘Who’s your personal hero?’ the admissions officer observed that she was seeing a lot more of Edward Snowden citations. And the idea that young people see Edward Snowden as a hero really bothers me. So I thought I needed to talk about Snowden at Georgetown and Georgia and I am going to do the same elsewhere at colleges and universities.”

Seems like a great way to spend your time and taxpayer dollars.

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Is Major Censorship Happening on Reddit? How Glenn Greenwald’s Blockbuster Article Was Banned Over and Over

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I’m not a regular Reddit user. I signed up to try it last year because I noticed my site traffic exploded whenever one of my posts got upvoted on the forum. Since I never actually crossed over into a consistent user, I’m still trying to get my head around how the community operates. Headlines in recent days about the fact that Glenn Greenwald’s blockbuster article on the Intercept detailing how spy agencies work to intentionally ruin a person’s reputation using lies and false stories, was consistently being banned on the subreddit “r/news” have been making the rounds.

For those unaware, r/news is a default subreddit which all users are automatically subscribed to, thus it generates a huge amount of traffic. It’s basically the front page news section of the 64th most popular website in the world (according to Alexa data). That’s a big freakin’ deal.

Like other subreddits, r/news has rules and those rules are enforced by a group of people known as moderators. The categories r/news aims to avoid are:

Opinion/Analysis. This section includes domains such as Alternet, DemandProgress, and OpposingViews – basically any domain which predominantly purports misleading or analytic content, or opinionated content (such as op-eds), or content which intends to promote one cause over another. /r/news is for strictly factual news reporting, and as such opinion posts and analysis posts are removed.

Not news. This section includes domains such as change.org, facebook.com and kickstarter.com. While these may be mostly self-evident, the section is added to filter out any non-news stories, something which to an extent goes hand in hand with our limitation on opinion and advocacy posts as described above.

Satire. The reasoning behind the filtering of these domains is pretty self-evident.

Unreliable source. Basically any source which has proven to be highly unreliable or misleading. Included are a few conspiracy domains, as well as any other unreliable outlet – like self-reporting services or personal blogs.

Rebloggers. Basically any domain which engages heavily/solely in the copying and pasting of other journalists’ work in an attempt to pass it off as their own.

Spam. Almost entirely consisting of domains which are submitted by the spammers which you’ll sometimes see plaguing the ‘new’ queue at night in the United States, with titles like “bus service Delhi” or “best SEO marketing”.

Basically, if you fall into the categories above, you can get banned from r/news. The reason that people are all up in arms about this is that Glenn’s breaking story is undoubtably news. Yet, due to the fact Greenwald is an outspoken critic against NSA abuses, the Reddit moderators of r/news deemed it not to be news.

These moderators appear to be taking the bullshit statist line that if you have an opinion you are an “activist” and not a “journalist.” Obviously this is nonsense, as you can clearly be both an activist and a journalist. These are not, and never have been, mutually exclusive. Furthermore, what about the fact that so many of the so-called “experts” being called on mainstream T.V. news to give their opinions are actually on the payroll of major corporations and these conflicts of interest are never clearly disclosed to the audience. Is that legitimate news?

With all that in mind, let’s turn to the Daily Dot’s excellent coverage of the story. They explain that:

Mt. Gox’s imminent demise has particularly gripped Reddit communities like r/Bitcoin and r/news following rumors of a $300 million hack that crippled the Japan-based business. Redditors from r/news have also obsessed over Greenwald’s latest Edward Snowden leak—only his story has been banned from the default subreddit.

All links to Greenwald’s piece on the Intercept, a publication founded by First Look Media and home to Snowden’s leaked materials, titled “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations,” has been removed more than six different times from r/news and at least once from r/worldnews. 

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Yes the Government is Spying on You Through Your Webcam – Another “Conspiracy Theory” Proven True

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I still remember many years ago in response to becoming aware of the possibility that my computer webcam could be accessed remotely I decided to put a piece of duct tape over the camera. I also remember the look on some of my friends’ faces upon seeing this. They thought I was nuts. It wasn’t even a conversation I was comfortable having since the idea that the government or NSA could or would peep on innocent Americans through their webcams was beyond preposterous for the vast majority of people

This topic is not exactly new, and I addressed it last April in my piece: A Look into the Malware the FBI Uses to Spy Through Webcams.

Now, thanks to Edward Snowden, we know more. Much, much more.

From the Guardian:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

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Apple’s Massive Security Flaw: NSA Exploit or an Honest Mistake?

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If you use Apple products you need to be aware of a very serious bug affecting the operating systems running on their devices. I was first made aware of this on Friday when John Hopkins cryptography professor Matthew Green tweeted the following:

Since I was away for the weekend, I wasn’t able to do any research into this until today. Fortunately, I came across an excellent article from Gizmodo. In a nutshell, it appears that Apple has released fixes for mobile devices (iPhones and iPads), but you need to go ahead and perform a software update to iOS 7.0.6. Unfortunately, there is no fix yet for Macs. This means if you are operating a Mac computer and using public wifi you should not use Safari as your browser. It is suggested you use Firefox or Chrome.

Even more terrifying is that although this flaw only became widely known about in the past several days, it has been there since September 2012. This has resulted in some claims of conspiracy. As Gigazom notes:

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Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”

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Back in June 2013, I was suddenly inspired to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s thoughtful, powerful and provocative “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It struck such a chord with me that I decided to write a post on it, in which I highlighted key excerpts.

Today, January 20th, is Martin Luther King Day for those of us in these United States. With the Republic at such a crossroads, one filled with peril, but also with tremendous opportunity; it would serve us all well to heed the words this great man wrote so many years ago, during another troubled and dynamic time in our history. As such, I am reposting my piece from last summer below.

Martin Luther King: “Everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was Legal”

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Even if you have read Martin Luther King’s celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” I insist you read it again. For those that have never read it, the inspired prose may very well change your life.  The letter’s message is eternal and extraordinarily relevant in the current global struggle of the 99.9% against the criminality, corruption and oppression of a very small, but very powerful 0.01%.  One of the key tactics this tiny minority uses is to claim that their immoral deeds are “legal.”  He spends much of his time in the letter outlining the distinction between “just laws” and an “unjust laws,” and one of the key points he makes that we should all keep close to our hearts and minds in these trying times is:

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.

I also think it’s important to recognize that many of his contemporaries referred to his tactics as “extremist,” very similar to how the term “terrorist” is used currently to demonize public dissent in America.  Below are some of the excepts I found most powerful:

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

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The FBI Admits its Primary Focus is NOT Law Enforcement

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Recently, the FBI made a significant change to its self-proclaimed primary focus in its fact sheet from “law enforcement” to “national security.” This change merely confirms what I and countless others have claimed to be true for quite some time. That the entire regulatory, security and intelligence apparatus of these United States has been redirected away from protecting the Constitution and the rule of law, toward a narrow focus on protecting the economic and social positions of the oligarch class at all costs under the guise of a “war on terror.” We have seen many signs of cronyism at the FBI for decades now, something most accurately pointed out in the priceless image “All My Heroes Have FBI Files.”

While this change to the FBI fact sheet is just confirmation of something we already knew, it’s still mind-boggling to see it shoved right in our faces:

Screen Shot 2014-01-06 at 2.52.09 PM

TechDirt covered this story well. Here are some excerpts:

A couple years ago, it was revealed that the FBI noted in one of its “counterterrorism training manuals” that FBI agents could “bend or suspend the law and impinge upon the freedoms of others,” which seemed kind of odd for a government agency who claimed its “primary function” was “law enforcement.” You’d think that playing by the rules would be kind of important. However, as John Hudson at Foreign Policy has noted, at some point last summer, the FBI quietly changed its fact sheet, so that it no longer says that “law enforcement” is its primary function, replacing it with “national security.”

Of course, I thought we already had a “national security” agency — known as the “National Security Agency.” Of course, while this may seem like a minor change, as the article notes, it is the reality behind the scenes. The FBI massively beefed up resources focused on “counterterrorism” and… then let all sorts of other crimes slide. Including crimes much more likely to impact Americans, like financial/white collar fraud.

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