Phone surveillance usa

Spy agency NSA triples collection of U.S. phone records: official report

After Carr replied that there was a legal framework to protect Australians but that the government would not comment on intelligence matters, Xenophon argued that this was not a specific answer to his question. Taliban spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid said, "We knew about their past efforts to trace our system.

We have used our technical resources to foil their efforts and have been able to stop them from succeeding so far. Reactions of internet users in China were mixed between viewing a loss of freedom worldwide and seeing state surveillance coming out of secrecy. The story broke just before U.

To me, it's abusively using government powers to interfere in individuals' privacy. This is an important moment for international society to reconsider and protect individual rights.

This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people's privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place. Matthew Schofield of the McClatchy Washington Bureau said, "Germans are dismayed at Obama's role in allowing the collection of so much information.

The Italian president of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data, Antonello Soro, said that the surveillance dragnet "would not be legal in Italy" and would be "contrary to the principles of our legislation and would represent a very serious violation. CNIL French data protection watchdog intimates Google to change its privacy policies within three months or it'll risk fines up to , euros. Spanish Agency of data protection AEPD is planning to fine Google between 40k and k euros, if it fails to clear about the past usage of the massive data of the Spanish users.

William Hague , the foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, dismissed accusations that British security agencies had been circumventing British law by using information gathered on British citizens by PRISM [] saying, "Any data obtained by us from the United States involving UK nationals is subject to proper UK statutory controls and safeguards. The ICO has raised this with its European counterparts, and the issue is being considered by the European Commission , who are in discussions with the U. Tim Berners-Lee , the inventor of the World Wide Web , accused western governments of practicing hypocrisy, [] as they conducted spying on the internet while they criticized other countries for spying on the internet.

It is only computer analysis of patterns of calls and emails that are being sent. It is not actually snooping specifically on content of anybody's message or conversation. Some of the information they got out of their scrutiny, they were able to use it to prevent serious terrorist attacks in several countries. Even the external ministry does not have any idea. Khurshid's comments were criticized by the Indian media, [] [] as well as opposition party CPI M who stated, "The UPA government should have strongly protested against such surveillance and bugging.

Instead, it is shocking that Khurshid has sought to justify it. This shameful remark has come at a time when even the close allies of the US like Germany and France have protested against the snooping on their countries. Rajya Sabha MP P. But Khurshid is trying to justify it. And the speed of the government of India to reject the asylum application of Edward Snowden is shameful. On June 8, , the Director of National Intelligence issued a fact sheet stating that PRISM "is not an undisclosed collection or data mining program," but rather "an internal government computer system" used to facilitate the collection of foreign intelligence information "under court supervision, as authorized by Section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA 50 U.

After receiving a FISA Court order or determining that there are emergency circumstances, the Attorney General and Director of National Intelligence can direct an electronic communication service provider to give them access to information or facilities to carry out the targeting and keep the targeting secret. If the provider complies with the directive, it is released from liability to its users for providing the information and is reimbursed for the cost of providing it, [] while if the provider rejects the directive, the Attorney General may request an order from the FISA Court to enforce it.

US Government Confirms Unauthorized Cell Phone Surveillance in Washington - ExtremeTech

Beverly Gage of Slate said, "When they were created, these new mechanisms were supposed to stop the kinds of abuses that men like Hoover had engineered. Instead, it now looks as if they have come to function as rubber stamps for the expansive ambitions of the intelligence community. Edgar Hoover no longer rules Washington, but it turns out we didn't need him anyway.

Woodrow Hartzog, an affiliate at Stanford Law School 's Center for Internet and Society commented that "[The ACLU will] likely have to demonstrate legitimate First Amendment harms such as chilling effects or Fourth Amendment harms perhaps a violation of a reasonable expectation of privacy Is it a harm to merely know with certainty that you are being monitored by the government?

There's certainly an argument that it is. People under surveillance act differently, experience a loss of autonomy, are less likely to engage in self exploration and reflection, and are less willing to engage in core expressive political activities such as dissenting speech and government criticism. Such interests are what First and Fourth Amendment seek to protect.

Many reports and letters of concern written by members of Congress suggest that this section of FAA in particular is legally and constitutionally problematic, such as by targeting U. Besides the information collection program started in , there are two other programs sharing the name PRISM: Parallel programs, known collectively as SIGADs gather data and metadata from other sources, each SIGAD has a set of defined sources, targets, types of data collected, legal authorities, and software associated with it.

Some SIGADs have the same name as the umbrella under which they sit, BLARNEY's the SIGAD summary, set down in the slides alongside a cartoon insignia of a shamrock and a leprechaun hat, describes it as "an ongoing collection program that leverages IC [intelligence community] and commercial partnerships to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks. This type of collection is known as "upstream". Data that is integrated into a SIGAD can be gathered in other ways besides upstream, and from the service providers, for instance it can be collected from passive sensors around embassies, or even stolen from an individual computer network in a hacking attack.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Slide showing that much of the world's communications flow through the U. Mass surveillance in the United Kingdom. List of government mass surveillance projects. Law Enforcement Information Exchange Lawful interception Mass surveillance Muscular surveillance program NSA call database , contains call detail information for hundreds of billions of telephone calls made through the largest U.

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The government reportedly does not target internet usage by U. Do you think the Obama administration was right or wrong in gathering and analyzing that internet data? Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program". Retrieved June 15, Even Bigger Data Seizures". Retrieved June 18, Retrieved October 31, The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved August 21, Wonkblog blog of The Washington Post. Retrieved July 4, Washington Snoopers Are Criminals". Retrieved June 30, Retrieved August 27, The New York Times.

Retrieved June 6, Associated Press via The Washington Post. Official Releases Details of Prism Program". Archived from the original on June 26, The Christian Science Monitor via Yahoo! Retrieved June 29, Retrieved October 22, Retrieved March 19, Retrieved January 4, Bush as the New Richard M. Retrieved June 12, Retrieved July 11, Retrieved July 12, Retrieved July 30, NSA program collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet ' ". Retrieved January 27, Director of National Intelligence. Archived from the original on June 7, Retrieved June 7, Archived from the original on September 8, Retrieved June 8, Archived from the original on June 11, Retrieved July 2, Retrieved July 1, Office of Ron Wyden.

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Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick J. Retrieved August 25, Retrieved June 11, Retrieved January 13, Retrieved March 20, Retrieved October 20, Retrieved October 21, Der Spiegel in German. Retrieved October 24, Spying on friends 'never acceptable ' ". Retrieved June 10, Retrieved February 19, The New Zealand Herald.

Retrieved October 29, Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. Retrieved December 17, Retrieved June 13, What We Know So Far". Associated Press via Yahoo! Microsoft on the Issues blog of Microsoft. Bits blog of The New York Times. Court Findings from Our Case". Retrieved September 12, Retrieved July 9, Archived from the original on July 11, Retrieved June 14, They have done a great service to the American people by exposing the truth about what our government is doing in secret. We need to know more about what the government is doing.

Retrieved July 17, Retrieved June 20, Retrieved July 6, Privacy concerns rise after NSA leaks". Retrieved July 25, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Retrieved August 11, Retrieved August 8, The government has also granted retroactive immunity to ISPs and telecoms participating in domestic surveillance. The US district court judge for the District of Columbia, Richard Leon, declared [85] [86] [87] [88] [89] [90] on December 16, that the mass collection of metadata of Americans' telephone records by the National Security Agency probably violates the fourth amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Given the limited record before me at this point in the litigation — most notably, the utter lack of evidence that a terrorist attack has ever been prevented because searching the NSA database was faster than other investigative tactics — I have serious doubts about the efficacy of the metadata collection program as a means of conducting time-sensitive investigations in cases involving imminent threats of terrorism. I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.

Surely such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. Indeed I have little doubt that the author of our Constitution, James Madison , who cautioned us to beware 'the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power,' would be aghast. Leon granted the request for a preliminary injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for two private plaintiffs Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer, and Charles Strange, father of a cryptologist killed in Afghanistan when his helicopter was shot down in [92] and ordered the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered.

But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his page opinion the "significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues. On 20 May , U. Representative for Michigan's 8th congressional district Republican congressman Mike Rogers introduced Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year with the goal of authorizing appropriations for fiscal years and for intelligence and intelligence-related activities of the United States Government, the Community Management Account, and the Central Intelligence Agency CIA Retirement and Disability System, and for other purposes.

Some of its measures cover the limitation on retention. On 10 December , Republican U. Representative for Michigan's 3rd congressional district member of Congress Justin Amash criticized the act on his Facebook as being "one of the most egregious sections of law I've encountered during my time as a representative" and "It grants the executive branch virtually unlimited access to the communications of every American".

On 11 December , a petition was created on We the People section of the whitehouse. It mandated an end to bulk collection of phone call metadata by the NSA within days, but allowed continued mandatory retention of metadata by phone companies with access by the government with case-by-case approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Postal Service photographs the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about billion pieces in Postmaster General stated that the system is primarily used for mail sorting, but the images are available for possible use by law enforcement agencies. Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency gives to telephone calls, e-mail, and other forms of electronic communication. Mail cover surveillance requests are granted for about 30 days, and can be extended for up to days. Images captured under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program are retained for a week to 30 days and then destroyed.

Criminal activity requests average 15, to 20, per year, while the number of requests for national security mail covers has not been made public. Neither the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program nor the mail cover program require prior approval by a judge. For both programs the information gathered is metadata from the outside of the envelope or package for which courts have said there is no expectation of privacy.

Opening the mail to view its contents would require a warrant approved by a judge. Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office , National Security Agency , and the Federal Bureau of Investigation , to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore , ECHELON , and NarusInsight to intercept and analyze the immense amount of data that traverses the Internet and telephone system every day. Examples include advanced speech-to-text programs so that phone conversations can be monitored en-masse by a computer, instead of requiring human operators to listen to them , social network analysis software to monitor groups of people and their interactions with each other, and "Human identification at a distance" software which allows computers to identify people on surveillance cameras by their facial features and gait the way they walk.

The program was later renamed " Terrorism Information Awareness ", after a negative public reaction. In two models of mandatory data retention were suggested for the US. The first model would record the IP address assigned to a customer at a specific time. In the second model, "which is closer to what Europe adopted", telephone numbers dialed, contents of Web pages visited, and recipients of e-mail messages must be retained by the ISP for an unspecified amount of time.

Department of Justice announced in that criminal investigations "are being frustrated" because no law currently exists to force Internet providers to keep track of what their customers are doing. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an ongoing lawsuit Hepting v. It has managed thus far to keep the proceedings open. The NSA has been gathering information on financial records, internet surfing habits, and monitoring e-mails. It has also performed extensive surveillance on social networks such as Facebook.

It allows bi-directional exploitation of Denied networks using standard on-net tools. RADON is designed to enable us to infect customer systems in a safe and controllable manner. Safe means that every strand is built with an expiration date that, when reached, results in RADON performing an automatic and clean self-removal. Since the September 11, terrorist attacks , a vast domestic intelligence apparatus has been built to collect information using FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.

The intelligence apparatus collects, analyzes and stores information about millions of if not all American citizens, most of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Every state and local law enforcement agency is to feed information to federal authorities to support the work of the FBI. In early , USA Today reported that several major telephone companies were cooperating illegally with the National Security Agency to monitor the phone records of U.

How the NSA is tracking people right now Documents obtained by The Washington Post indicate that the National Security Agency iscollecting billions of records a day to track the location of mobile phone users around the world. SOURCE: The National Security Agency, OpenSignal and. PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency .. reactions the previous day to allegations that the government had been conducting surveillance of United States citizens' telephone records.

This report came on the heels of allegations that the U. Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones in order to listen to conversations that take place nearby the person who holds the phone. The geographical location of a mobile phone and thus the person carrying it can be determined easily whether it is being used or not , using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone.

As worldwide sales of smartphones began exceeding those of feature phones , the NSA decided to take advantage of the smartphone boom. This is particularly advantageous because the smartphone combines a myriad of data that would interest an intelligence agency, such as social contacts, user behavior, interests, location, photos and credit card numbers and passwords.

An internal NSA report from stated that the spread of the smartphone has been occurring "extremely rapidly"—developments that "certainly complicate traditional target analysis. Under the heading "iPhone capability", the document notes that there are smaller NSA programs, known as "scripts", that can perform surveillance on 38 different features of the iPhone 3 and iPhone 4 operating systems.

These include the mapping feature, voicemail and photos, as well as Google Earth , Facebook and Yahoo! The FBI collected nearly all hotel, airline, rental car, gift shop, and casino records in Las Vegas during the last two weeks of The FBI requested all electronic data of hundreds of thousands of people based on a very general lead for the Las Vegas New Year's celebration.

Mass surveillance in the United States

Wide Area Persistent Surveillance also Wide Area Motion Imaging is a form of airborne surveillance system that collects pattern-of-life data by recording motion images of an area larger than a city — in sub-meter resolution. This video allows for anyone within the field of regard to be tracked — both live and retroactively, for forensic analysis.

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The use of sophisticated tracking algorithms applied to the WAMI dataset also enables mass automated geo-location tracking of every vehicle and pedestrian. This allows investigators to rewind and playback the movements of anyone within this 68 square mile area for hours, days or even months at a time depending on the airframe the WAMI sensors are mounted on. While a resistance to the domestic deployment of WAMI has emerged in areas where the public has learned of the technologies use, the deployments have been intentionally hidden from the public, as in Compton California, where the mayor learned about the surveillance [] from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, [] Teame Zazzu [] and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

NSA collected Americans' phone records despite law change: report

Traffic cameras , which were meant to help enforce traffic laws at intersections, have also sparked some controversy, due to their use by law enforcement agencies for purposes unrelated to traffic violations. The Department of Homeland Security is funding networks of surveillance cameras in cities and towns as part of its efforts to combat terrorism. Under the bill, the FAA is required to provide military and commercial drones with expanded access to U.

In February , a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department explained that these drones would initially be deployed in large public gatherings, including major protests. Over time, tiny drones would be used to fly inside buildings to track down suspects and assist in investigations. They can be modified to carry high-resolution video cameras, infrared sensors , license plate readers , listening devices, and be disguised as sea gulls or other birds to mask themselves.

By , about 30, unmanned drones are expected to be deployed in the United States for the purpose of surveillance and law enforcement. In , consent decrees against surveillance around the country were lifted, with the assistance of the Justice Department. The New York City Police Department infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups before the Republican National Convention , leading to over 1, arrests and subsequent fingerprinting. In , Maryland State Police infiltrated local peace groups. In , a Washington, D. The full text of the agreement was released to the public on 25 June Although the treaty was later revised to include other countries such as Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Turkey, and the Philippines, [] most of the information sharing is performed by the so-called "Five Eyes", [] a term referring to the following English-speaking western democracies and their respective intelligence agencies:.

In , media disclosures revealed how other government agencies have cooperated extensively with the " Five Eyes ":. Aside from the "Five Eyes", most other Western countries are also participating in the NSA surveillance system and sharing information with each other. Examples of members of the " Five Eyes " spying for each other:.

Most of the NSA's collected data which was seen by human eyes i. Other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs have been employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries. According to reports by Brazil's O Globo newspaper, the collected data was also used to target "commercial secrets". We're number one in it". Hayden also added that "We steal stuff to make you safe, not to make you rich".

According to documents seen by the news agency Reuters , information obtained in this way is subsequently funnelled to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Were the true origins known, the evidence and resulting case might be invalidated as " fruit of the poisonous tree ", a legal doctrine designed to deter abuse of power that prevents evidence or subsequent events being used in a case if they resulted from a search or other process that does not conform to legal requirements.

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For a broader coverage of this topic, see Mass surveillance.

Retrieved 13 July Retrieved 9 September Archived from the original PDF on Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI as part of a secret government campaign that aimed to link him with a Soviet espionage ring in order to first discredit him, and then deport him unsuccessfully from the United States. Retrieved February 19, On June 7, U.

Some of the greatest historical figures of the 20th century, including several U. NSA warrantless surveillance — Excerpt from Wired magazine's article originally published on 15 March [75]. Mail Isolation Control and Tracking. Data mining , Information extraction , and Predictive analytics. Retrieved 14 October Leakers, Hackers and Activists". NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet ' ".

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Retrieved 18 September The Man and the Secrets". NY; Norton and Co. Edgar Hoover — , the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, considered Eleanor Roosevelt's liberal views dangerous and believed she might be involved in communist activities. He ordered his agents to monitor Roosevelt and keep what became an extensive file on her. The FBI and the Beatle". Archived from the original on October 4, The Christian Science Monitor. Because of his controversial political beliefs-his support for socialism, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament, for example-many anti-Communist crusaders believed that Einstein was a dangerous subversive.

Some, like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, even thought he was a spy. For 22 years, Hoover's agents tapped Einstein's phones, opened his mail, rifled through his trash and even bugged his secretary's nephew's house, all to prove that he was more radical as his 1,page FBI dossier noted than "even Stalin himself. Among other things, Nixon loyalists burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The White House "plumbers" unit — named for their orders to plug leaks in the administration — burglarizes a psychiatrist's office to find files on Daniel Ellsberg, the former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

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