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Activists worried about online privacy are sending Congress a message with some old-school technology: They're sending faxes -- more than 6.2 million, they claim -- to express opposition to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).Why faxes? "Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology," according to the campaign Fax Big Brother. The week-long campaign was organized by the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group Access and Fight for the Future, the activist group behind the major Internet protests that helped derail a pair of anti-piracy bills in 2012. It also has the backing of a dozen groups like the ACLU, the American Library Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.

CISA aims to facilitate information sharing regarding cyberthreats between the government and the private sector. The bill gained more attention following the massive hack in which the records of nearly 22 million people were stolen from government computers."The ability to easily and quickly share cyber attack information, along with ways to counter attacks, is a key method to stop them from happening in the first place," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who helped introduce CISA, said in a statement after the hack. Senate leadership had planned to vote on CISA this week before leaving for its August recess. However, the bill may be sidelined for the time being as the Republican-led Senate puts precedent on a legislative effort to defund Planned Parenthood.Even as the bill was put on the backburner, the grassroots campaign to stop it gained steam. Fight for the Future started sending faxes to all 100 Senate offices on Monday, but the campaign really took off after it garnered attention on the website Reddit and on social media. The faxed messages are generated by Internet users who visit faxbigbrother.com or stopcyberspying.com -- or who simply send a message via Twitter with the hashtag #faxbigbrother. To send all those faxes, Fight for the Future set up a dedicated server and a dozen phone lines and modems they say are capable of sending tens of thousands of faxes a day.

Fight for the Future told CBS News that it has so many faxes queued up at this point, that it may take months for Senate offices to receive them all, though the group is working on scaling up its capability to send them faster. They're also limited by the speed at which Senate offices can receive them.

Debkafile, an Israeli website close to the military intelligence, has reported that the Trump administration has decided to take a series of punitive measures against the Palestinian Authority (PA) after its successful campaign on Jerusalem in the UN General Assembly. In a report issued on 23 December, the Israeli website cited its sources in Washington as stating that President Trump had decided to sever contacts and relations with the PA and President Mahmoud Abbas. According to Debkafile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan under preparation in Washington will not be submitted to Ramallah but only to Israel and the relevant Arab governments. These steps were taken after the PA had been warned more than once, and told to drop its campaign against the Trump pronouncement on Jerusalem because of its negative impact on the region, according to the Israeli website. It added that the White House move was communicated to the PA through a third Arab party. The Israeli website further reported that the US will not publicly announce its freeze of aid to the PA. However, the administration will stop support and delay the resumption of economic projects backed by US institutions and re-examine them. President Trump also decided not to invite Palestinian officials to the White House, State Department and US Treasury, and not to receive Palestinians at the US National Security Council where they used to participate in meetings aimed at shaping US strategy in the Middle East. According to the Israeli website: “The US will halt its contributions to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), an estimated one billion dollars per annum” and will order Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar to reduce the amount of aid provided to the Authority. While no official statements were made by the US administration or the PA, the Israeli website confirmed that US officials have informed Saeb Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiator, that there is nothing to discuss with him anymore.

The Information Awareness Office (IAO) was established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in January 2002 to bring together several DARPA projects focused on applying surveillance and information technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to U.S. national security, by achieving Total Information Awareness (TIA). This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources, without any requirement for a search warrant.[1] This information would then be analyzed to look for suspicious activities, connections between individuals, and "threats".[2] Additionally, the program included funding for biometric surveillance technologies that could identify and track individuals using surveillance cameras, and other methods.[2] Following public criticism that the development and deployment of this technology could potentially lead to a mass surveillance system, the IAO was defunded by Congress in 2003. However, several IAO projects continued to be funded, and merely run under different names.[3][4][5][6]

The IAO was established after Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, and SAIC executive Brian Hicks approached the US Department of Defense with the idea for an information awareness program after the attacks of September 11, 2001.[5] Poindexter and Hicks had previously worked together on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA agreed to host the program and appointed Poindexter to run it in 2002. The IAO began funding research and development of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) Program in February 2003 but renamed the program the Terrorism Information Awareness Program in May that year after an adverse media reaction to the program's implications for public surveillance. Although TIA was only one of several IAO projects, many critics and news reports conflated TIA with other related research projects of the IAO, with the result that TIA came in popular usage to stand for an entire subset of IAO programs. The TIA program itself was the "systems-level" program of the IAO that intended to integrate information technologies into a prototype system to provide tools to better detect, classify, and identify potential foreign terrorists with the goal to increase the probability that authorized agencies of the United States could preempt adverse actions. As a systems-level program of programs, TIA's goal was the creation of a "counterterrorism information architecture" that integrated technologies from other IAO programs (and elsewhere, as appropriate). The TIA program was researching, developing, and integrating technologies to virtually aggregate data, to follow subject-oriented link analysis, to develop descriptive and predictive models through data mining or human hypothesis, and to apply such models to additional datasets to identify terrorists and terrorist groups.

Among the other IAO programs that were intended to provide TIA with component data aggregation and automated analysis technologies were the Genisys, Genisys Privacy Protection, Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, and Scalable Social Network Analysis programs. On August 2, 2002, Dr. Poindexter gave a speech at DARPAtech 2002 entitled "Overview of the Information Awareness Office"[7] in which he described the TIA program. In addition to the program itself, the involvement of Poindexter as director of the IAO also raised concerns among some, since he had been earlier convicted of lying to Congress and altering and destroying documents pertaining to the Iran-Contra Affair, although those convictions were later overturned on the grounds that the testimony used against him was protected.

As U.S. President Donald Trump ramps up his attack on immigration, his executive order to cut federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” protecting immigrants could face a number of legal and logistical loopholes.

The executive order signed on Wednesday orders federal agencies to withhold grant money from around 300 cities and counties that block local law enforcement from targeting undocumented immigrants, or as White House Press Secretary Sean Spice put it, “harbor illegal immigrants.” Spicer said that Trump will look at means to strip funding to cities and counties that “willfully refuse to comply” with his new plan to crack down on immigration, which also included ordering the construction of the infamous border wall between Mexico and the U.S. and increasing immigration authorities' power to deport people from the U.S., often without due process. These measures have sparked outrage among many immigrant rights organizations and caused city mayors to speak out against them. Opponents likely have the law on their side. Politico reported that the White House failed to consult the proper federal agencies and lawmakers before signing the executive orders. This means the orders are likely fraught with contradictions to current laws that can be easily exploited by opponents to dismantle them. The legal fight has already begun. Mayors of targeted cities are teaming up with immigration advocacy groups and attorneys to gear up for a legal battle against the presidential orders. Opponents of Trump’s order say that federal money allocated to cities can only be cut if the funding is directly linked to behavior that opposes the federal government’s plan for immigration.

Trump's plan to make police and other key services exempt from any funding cuts has also sparked legal debate. Trump had previously stated that even if a city was stripped of funding for non-compliance, police departments' funding would not be cut. Opponents also say that making police exempt would make it possible for a judge to deem parts of the order unconstitutional. Richard Doyle, city attorney in San Jose, California, argues that Trump cannot cut a city's funding for healthcare and education while protecting the police force from cuts because its function relates more closely to immigration enforcement, adding that it was uncertain whether only future or existing federal funding would be targeted under the order. Others have argued that there would be significant barriers and a long process for the federal government to cut off funding to sanctuary cities that would first have to go through states and local government where targeted jurisdictions have rights to appeal. Edward Waters from Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell in Washington told Reuters that for the Trump administration, “It’s fair to say that they don't understand the scope and reach of federal grants law.”

The Obama administration's international surveillance crisis deepened on Monday as representatives from a Latin American human rights panel told US diplomats that oversight of the programs was "illusory".Members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, expressed frustration and dissatisfaction with the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of foreign nationals – something the agency argues is both central to its existence and necessary to prevent terrorism. "With a program of this scope, it's obvious that any form of control becomes illusory when there's hundreds of millions of communications that become monitored and surveilled," said Felipe Gonzales, a commissioner and Chilean national."This is of concern to us because maybe the Inter-American Committee on Human Rights may become a target as well of surveillance," said Rodrigo Escobar Gil, a commissioner and Colombian citizen.

Frank La Rue, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, told the commission that the right to privacy was "inextricably linked" to free expression. "What is not permissible from a human rights point of view is that those that hold political power or those that are in security agencies or, even less, those in intelligence agencies decide by themselves, for themselves, what the scope of these surveillance activities are, or who will be targeted, or who will be blank surveilled," La Rue said.While the US sent four representatives to the hearing, they offered no defence, rebuttal or elaboration about bulk surveillance, saying the October government shutdown prevented them from adequate preparation. "We are here to listen," said deputy permanent representative Lawrence Gumbiner, who pledged to submit written responses within 30 days.All 35 North, Central and South American nations are members of the commission. La Rue, originally from Guatemala and an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council, travels the world reporting on human rights concerns – often in countries with poor democratic standards.

The Obama administration has been fielding a week's worth of European outrage following media reports that the NSA had collected a similarly large volume of phone calls from France – which director of national intelligence James Clapper, who recently apologised for misleading the Senate about domestic spying, called "false" – and spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel's own cellphone, which US officials have effectively confessed to. Brazil and Mexico are also demanding answers from US intelligence officials, following reports about intrusive acts of espionage in their territory revealed by documents provided to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The White House has said it will provide some answers after the completion of an external review of its surveillance programs, scheduled to be completed before the end of the year. The Guardian reported on Thursday that the NSA has intercepted the communications of 35 world leaders.

The other shoe just dropped when it comes to how the federal government illegally spies on Americans. Last summer, the details of the NSA's "backdoor searches" were revealed. This involved big collections of content and metadata (so, no, not "just metadata" as meaningless as that phrase is) that were collected under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). This is part of the program that the infamous PRISM effort operates under, and which allows the NSA to collect all sorts of content, including communications to, from or about a "target" -- where a "target" can be incredibly loosely defined (i.e., it can include groups or machines or just about anything). The "backdoor searches" were a special loophole added in 2011 allowing the NSA to make use of "US person names and identifiers as query terms." In the past, it had been limited (as per the NSA's mandate) to only non-US persons.

This morning, James Clapper finally responded to a request from Senator Ron Wyden concerning the number of such backdoor searches using US identifiers that were done by various government agencies. And, surprisingly, it's redaction free. The big reveal is... that it's not just the NSA doing these searches, but the CIA and FBI as well. This is especially concerning with regards to the FBI. This means that the FBI, who does surveillance on Americans, is spying on Americans communications that were collected by the NSA and that they're doing so without anything resembling a warrant. Oh, and let's make this even worse: the FBI isn't even tracking how often it does this. It's just doing it willy nilly:

Got that? Basically, the FBI often asks the NSA for a big chunk of data that the NSA probably shouldn't have in the first place -- including tons of Americans' communications, and the FBI gets to dump it into the same database that it is free to query. And the FBI tracks none of this, other than to say that it believes that there are a "substantial" number of such queries. This would seem to be a pretty blatant attempt to end run around the 4th Amendment, giving the FBI broad access to searching through the communications of Americans with what appears to be almost no oversight. Yikes! Oh, and it's not just the NSA, but the CIA as well. Remember, the CIA is not supposed to be doing any surveillance on US persons (like the NSA), but that's not what's happening at all. At least the CIA tracks some (but not all) of its abuse of backdoor searches:

April 21, 2015 Dear Chairman Goodlatte, Ranking Member Conyers, Chairman Grassley, and Ranking Member Leahy: We urge you to end mass surveillance of Americans. Among us are civil liberties organizations from across the political spectrum that speak for millions of people, businesses, whistleblowers, and experts. The impending expiration of three USA PATRIOT Act provisions on June 1 is a golden opportunity to end mass surveillance and enact additional reforms. Current surveillance practices are virtually limitless. They are unnecessary, counterproductive, and costly. They undermine our economy and the public’s trust in government. And they undercut the proper functioning of government. Meaningful surveillance reform entails congressional repeal of laws and protocols the Executive secretly interprets to permit current mass surveillance practices. Additionally, it requires Congress to appreciably increase transparency, oversight, and accountability of intelligence agencies, especially those that have acted unconstitutionally.

A majority of the House of Representatives already has voted against mass surveillance. The Massie-Lofgren amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act [i] garnered 293 votes in support of defunding “backdoor searches.” Unfortunately, that amendment was not included in the “CRomnibus"[ii] despite overwhelming support.  We urge you to act once again to vindicate our fundamental liberties.

Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Bill that would have defunded the NSA’s blanket collection of metadata and limited the government’s collection of records to those “relevant to a national security investigation.” It terrified New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who lashed out at those who supported the bill and libertarianism in general.

“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought,” Christie said.

The real question that the American people will have to answer is this: Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

As local law enforcement has deployed martial tactics against those protesting the police killing of an 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, a debate is suddenly raging over how municipal police forces came to resemble military units. A new report suggests the trend may, in part, have to do with campaign contributions to congressional lawmakers. At issue is the federal government’s so-called 1033 Program, which permits the Pentagon to give military hardware to local police departments. 

The group’s new report looked at a June congressional vote on legislation, offered by U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., that would have blocked the Pentagon from spending resources on transferring military hardware to local police agencies. The bill was defeated 62-355.  According to data compiled by Maplight, the lawmakers “voting to continue funding the 1033 Program have received, on average, 73 percent more money from the defense industry than representatives voting to defund it.” In all, the average lawmaker voting against the bill received more than $50,000 in campaign donations from the defense industry in the last two years. The report also found that of the 59 lawmakers who received more than $100,000  from defense contractors in the last two years, only four voted for Grayson’s legislation. Though thought of as a political force primarily in federal policymaking, the defense industry also spends on state politics, which influences law enforcement procurement decisions. According to data compiled by the National Institute for Money in State Politics, more than $8 million of campaign contributions has been dumped into state elections in the last decade by military contractors and their employees.

Police officials say the equipment helps them better secure local communities. By contrast groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have recently launched a national campaign to demilitarize local police departments. That campaign got a boost this week when Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a prospective 2016 presidential candidate, published an editorial in Time magazine echoing the ACLU’s message in the wake of the Ferguson shooting.  “When you couple this militarization of law enforcement with an erosion of civil liberties and due process that allows the police to become judge and jury — national security letters, no-knock searches, broad general warrants, pre-conviction forfeiture — we begin to have a very serious problem on our hands,” he wrote.

Man, at some point Congress is going to have to declare the FBI legally contemptuous and throw them in jail. They continue to refuse to cooperate with DOJ’s Inspector General, as they have been for basically 5 years. But in Michael Horowitz’ latest complaint to Congress, he adds a new spin: FBI is not only obstructing his investigation of the FBI’s management impaired surveillance, now FBI is obstructing his investigation of DEA’s management impaired surveillance. I first reported on DOJ IG’s investigation into DEA’s dragnet databases last April. At that point, the only dragnet we knew about was Hemisphere, which DEA uses to obtain years of phone records as well as location data and other details, before it them parallel constructs that data out of a defendant’s reach.

But since then, we’ve learned of what the government claims to be another database — that used to identify Shantia Hassanshahi in an Iranian sanctions case. After some delay, the government revealed that this was another dragnet, including just international calls. It claims that this database was suspended in September 2013 (around the time Hemisphere became public) and that it is no longer obtaining bulk records for it. According to the latest installment of Michael Horowitz’ complaints about FBI obstruction, he tried to obtain records on the DEA databases on November 20, 2014 (of note, during the period when the government was still refusing to tell even Judge Rudolph Contreras what the database implicating Hassanshahi was). FBI slow-walked production, but promised to provide everything to Horowitz by February 13, 2015. FBI has decided it has to keep reviewing the emails in question to see if there is grand jury, Title III electronic surveillance, and Fair Credit Reporting Act materials, which are the same categories of stuff FBI has refused in the past. So Horowitz is pointing to the language tied to DOJ’s appropriations for FY 2015 which (basically) defunded FBI obstruction. Only FBI continues to obstruct.

There’s one more question about this. As noted, this investigation is supposed to be about DEA’s databases. We’ve already seen that FBI uses Hemisphere (when I asked FBI for comment in advance of this February 4, 2014 article on FBI obstinance, Hemisphere was the one thing they refused all comment on). And obviously, FBI access another DEA database to go after Hassanshahi. So that may be the only reason why Horowitz needs the FBI’s cooperation to investigate the DEA’s dragnets. Plus, assuming FBI is parallel constructing these dragnets just like DEA is, I can understand why they’d want to withhold grand jury information, which would make that clear. Still, I can’t help but wonder — as I have in the past — whether these dragnets are all connected, a constantly moving shell game. That might explain why FBI is so intent on obstructing Horowitz again.

Australia’s criminlisation of dissent: anti-protest law is an ominous sign of the times Share This Tags AustraliaTasmania Brendan Gogarty (TC) : The Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Bill – locally known as the “anti-protest” bill – was passed by Tasmanian parliament late on Tuesday night. The law was introduced as part of the government’s intention to “re-build Tasmania’s forestry industry”. That is a source of controversy and division in Tasmanian society. To achieve its aim, the government has committed itself to a wide legislative agenda. This includes: amending the uniform Defamation Act 2005 to allow large companies to sue protesters; defunding community and conservation organisations; and tearing up a “peace deal” between foresters and conservationists, which had been enacted into law before the 2014 election.

Recognising the potential return to hostilities, the government said it would “not try and appease” protesters, but would rather “toughen the law to deter them”. The anti-protest law is its chosen mechanism of deterrence. While such hard-line policies on political opposition are not new, the severity and breadth of the law to enforce such a policy arguably is. The shift from hard-line policy to hard-line law is worrisome in a constitutional democracy. The spread of state anti-bikie laws in Australia illustrates why this law is not just of concern for Tasmanians.

The new law covers all acts on, or acts inhibiting access to, a business premises (all public and private land, including forestry and mining lands) which are: … in furtherance of, or for the purposes of promoting awareness of or support for an opinion, or belief, in respect of a political, environmental, social, cultural or economic issue. Any such protest is subject to significant penalties if they interrupt “business activity”. While originally such sanctions were mandatory, the government agreed in the upper house to exchange these for discretionary penalties. However, the government agreed to this only on condition that the subsequent maximum penalties would be significantly increased. This was to “send a strong message” to protesters and the courts charged with punishing them. As a consequence, protesters who repeatedly interrupt business face fines of up to A$10,000 and four years in jail.

In the past several months, many of the Syrian rebel groups previously favored by the CIA have had their money and supplies cut off or substantially reduced, even as President Obama touted the strategic importance of American support for the rebels in his State of the Union address. The once-favored fighters are operating under a pall of confusion. In some cases, they were not even informed that money would stop flowing. In others, aid was reduced due to poor battlefield performance, compounding already miserable morale on the ground.