Verizon Scandal: Intel Director Testified in March that Gov. Does Not Collect Data on Americans

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MUST READ: A Warning For All Verizon Customers! Obama Regime Secretly Seizing Your Phone Records

Fox Nation

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Read more at The Guardian

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WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is secretly carrying out a domestic surveillance program under which it is collecting business communications records involving Americans under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act, according to a highly classified court order disclosed on Wednesday night.

The order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April, directs a Verizon Communications subsidiary, Verizon Business Network Services, to turn over “on an ongoing daily basis” to the National Security Agency all call logs “between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.”

Read more at The New York Times

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration on Thursday defended the National Security Agency's need to collect telephone records of U.S. citizens, calling such information "a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats."

While defending the practice, a senior administration official did not confirm a newspaper report that the NSA has been collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top secret court order.

The order was granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and is good until July 19, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported Wednesday. The order requires Verizon, one of the nation's largest telecommunications companies, on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

The newspaper said the document, a copy of which it had obtained, shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of U.S. citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing.

The Associated Press could not authenticate the order because documents from the court are classified.

The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly discuss classified matters.

Verizon spokesman Ed McFadden said Wednesday the company had no comment. The NSA had no immediate comment.

Verizon Communications Inc. listed 121 million customers in its first-quarter earnings report this April — 98.9 million wireless customers, 11.7 million residential phone lines and about 10 million commercial lines. The court order didn't specify which type of phone customers' records were being tracked.

Under the terms of the order, the phone numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as are location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered, The Guardian said.

The administration official said, "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls."

The broad, unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is unusual. FISA court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets. NSA warrantless wiretapping during the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks was very controversial.

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the USA Patriot Act.

More at The Associated Press

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ACLU STATEMENT:

Massive NSA Phone Data-Mining Operation Revealed
ACLU Calls for End to Program, Disclosure of Program’s Scope, Congressional Investigation
NEW YORK – Using the Patriot Act, the U.S. government has been secretly tracking the calls of every Verizon Business Network Services customer – whom they talked to, from where, and for how long – for the past 41 days, according to a report published by The Guardian.
“From a civil liberties perspective, the program could hardly be any more alarming. It’s a program in which some untold number of innocent people have been put under the constant surveillance of government agents,” said Jameel Jaffer, American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director. “It is beyond Orwellian, and it provides further evidence of the extent to which basic democratic rights are being surrendered in secret to the demands of unaccountable intelligence agencies.”
The program was put in place under the Patriot Act’s Section 215, a controversial provision that authorizes the government to seek secret court orders for the production of “any tangible thing” relevant to a foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. Recipients of Section 215 orders, such as telecommunications companies, are prohibited from disclosing that they gave the government their customers’ records.
“Now that this unconstitutional surveillance effort has been revealed, the government should end it and disclose its full scope, and Congress should initiate a full investigation,” said Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel with the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This disclosure also highlights the growing gap between the public’s and the government’s understandings of the many sweeping surveillance authorities enacted by Congress. Since 9/11, the government has increasingly classified and concealed not just facts, but the law itself. Such extreme secrecy is inconsistent with our democratic values of open government and accountability.”
The first information about the government’s use of Section 215 was made public in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation filed by the ACLU 10 years ago. More recently, members of Congress have warned that the government has secretly interpreted Section 215 in a way that would shock Americans. In 2012, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) wrote, “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
In May 2011, shortly before Section 215 was scheduled to expire, the ACLU filed a new FOIA request in an effort to learn more about the “secret interpretation” to which Sens. Wyden and Udall had referred. Congress reauthorized Section 215 without amendment until 2015, and for the last two years, the government has refused to describe its secret interpretation. Whether or not the program described by The Guardian reflects that “secret interpretation,” today’s disclosure confirms that the government has interpreted Section 215 extraordinarily broadly.
This disclosure is likely to have significant implications for the ACLU’s pending FOIA lawsuit. The Department of Justice is scheduled to file a brief in that case on June 13; the ACLU’s response is due on June 28, and oral argument is scheduled for July 11 in the Southern District of New York.
Click here for more information on the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit requesting information on Patriot Act Section 21

Supreme Court Rule: DNA Now Gov't Property!

TheAlexJonesChannel

Google's Plan to Track You Like Cattle

TheAlexJonesChannel

Is Privacy Overrated? Cyberattack in the New Digital Age

ForaTv

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, authors of the book "The New Digital Age," explain why it might be time to have  "the talk" about cyber security, at home, at work, all over the country. 

How to tell if the IRS is eyeing you

nbcnews

Kelley Holland CNBC

You consider yourself a law abiding citizen, and you are not starting a nonprofit organization with conservative ties.

Even so, you may be a candidate for a tax audit—and you may have no clue what you have done to warrant the attention of the IRS.

The nation's tax collectors have long made it a practice to look for discrepancies, omissions and suspicious activity to uncover tax evasion and fraud. And lately, the IRS has expanded its monitoring to include social media.

The agency now keeps an eye out for online discussions about nonpayment or underpayment of taxes, and even sale prices of goods on sites like eBay that don't match what taxpayers report.

In a world where companies like Amazon can keep tabs on consumers' online activities, the shift by the IRS is reasonable, says Edward Zelinsky, a law professor at Cardozo Law School. "This was always known to people in the tax community that the IRS, like everybody else in the 21st century, was monitoring online."

But Zelinsky is just one expert concerned about the lack of transparency around the IRS' practices. The agency "is so secretive about what is going on that that really erodes public confidence," he said.

(Read More: IRS Mess Could Yield Tax Reform: Baucus)

The American Civil Liberties Union has also expressed qualms about IRS secrecy. That group filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents explaining whether the IRS always obtains search warrants to read email and other electronic communications. "Unfortunately, while the documents we have obtained do not answer this question point blank, they suggest otherwise," wrote Nathan Freed Wessler, a staff attorney at the ACLU.

So how can you know if you are under scrutiny? You can't know exactly, but some moves are more likely than others to attract attention.

Noncash deductions are a prime example, according to several tax experts. If you donate a car to the American Lung Association, or a large quantity of clothing to the Salvation Army, make sure that the deduction you take is reasonable, and that you can document how you came to that amount.

(Read More: Obama: Miller Out as Acting Commissioner of IRS)

Taxpayers who are self employed often appear to face more scrutiny as well. "If you are in business for yourself, or you work for someone who is, know that the IRS is watching," Frederick W. Dailey III, a tax lawyer and the author of "Stand Up to the IRS," said on his website.

The IRS also keeps an eye out for cash-based businesses, and for mismatches between what others file about you and what you file. For example, if you neglect to include a payment for some freelance work during the year, and the payer reports that as a business expense, you are likely to get some scrutiny. This would also hold true if you neglect to report gains from an investment account, and the investment firm reports them.

Wealthier taxpayers seem to be more likely to get chosen for audit, perhaps because that gives the IRS a greater chance to recover significant sums. (Every year the government collects only about 83 percent of what it is owed, a gap of several hundred billion dollars at a time when the budget deficit is a flashpoint.)

According to IRS data, taxpayers making $1 million or more are more than 12 times more likely than the rest of the population to be examined. In 2010, about one in 100 Americans were audited. The IRS audited 3.8 percent of returns for those making $200,000 or higher, versus 12.5 percent of returns for those making $1 million or more.

As for the online monitoring, Zelinsky says it may be simply the application of new tools to old agency search standards. So while he is deeply frustrated by the IRS' lack of transparency, he added, "If they are using social media to find cash based businesses, or looking for phony medical deductions or the other hot buttons, then I would applaud that."

There is no surefire way to prevent an audit. But experts say one practice definitely improves your odds: Don't do what the IRS does. Be open. About everything.

The agency declined to comment about this story.

 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Drone Shield:Tiny Device Will Detect Domestic Drones

Pat Dollard

Excerpted from US NEWS
By Jason Koebler

Worried about drones spying on you? Soon, a device might be able to send you text and email alerts that let you know when a drone is nearby.A Washington, D.C.-based engineer is working on the “Drone Shield,” a small, Wi-Fi-connected device that uses a microphone to detect a drone’s “acoustic signatures” (sound frequency and spectrum) when it’s within range.

The company’s founder, John Franklin, who has been working in aerospace engineering for seven years, says he hopes to start selling the device sometime this year. He is using the Kickstarter-like IndieGoGo to finance the project.

The device will cost $69 and will be about the size of a USB thumb drive. It will use Raspberry Pi – a tiny, $25 computer – and commercially available microphones to detect drones. He says he imagines that people will attach the Drone Shield to their fences or roofs to protect their home from surveillance.

“People will get the alert and then close their blinds,” Franklin says.He is currently working on an open-source database of drone sounds that the detector will check what it’s hearing against. Other devices with motors, such as lawn mowers and weed-whackers, will also be included to reduce false positives. Drone owners will be asked to record the sound of their drones to be included in the database. When the Drone Shield identifies a drone, it’ll flash and send an email and text message alert to a homeowner.

Franklin says that most commercially available drones have to come relatively close to a home in order to spy. More sophisticated drones, such as Predators, would fly too high to detect.

He got the idea for the device after getting into a bit of hot water with his neighbor, which Franklin says alerted him to the reality of people’s concerns about drones.”I bought a [drone] from Amazon and was going to use it to look at my roof. The wind took it and I crashed it into my neighbor’s yard. It freaked him out once he noticed it had a camera on it,” Franklin says. “It sort of dawned on me that it’s so easy to invade someone’s privacy with a couple hundred dollar drone.”

FBI sued over facial-recognition technology

wnd

Bob Unruh

A team of privacy advocates and experts is launching a lawsuit against the FBI for refusing to provide information to the public about its new Next Generation Identification system, which the federal agency says is in demand for its biometric database of Americans.

The lawsuit filed against the FBI in Washington by the Electronic Privacy Information Center is asking for a court order that information about the program’s contracts with private companies and its technical specifications be made available.

EPIC said that the NGI system upon completion “will be the largest biometric database in the world” and will include files of fingerprints, DNA profiles, iris scans, palm prints, voice identification profiles, photographs and other identifying information already collected by states, counties and even schools.

“The FBI will use facial recognition to match images in the database against facial images obtained from CCTV and elsewhere,” the organization said, noting there already are an estimated 30 million spy cameras across the United States.

The complaint explains that the FBI announced in 2009 the NGI system was being created to record, analyze and use biometrics of U.S. citizens – whether they know that their details have been recorded or not.

EPIC followed up shortly later with Freedom of Information Act requests for details about the program’s contracts with private companies. The group wanted to know who would get access to Americans’ biometrics and why.

The database was expected to include millions of photographs, fingerprints, voiceprints and other identifiers of people who are not criminals and are not even suspects in crimes, EPIC said. In fact, they are individuals who probably “are unaware that their images and biometric identifiers were captured.”

Some law enforcement officers now are using handheld devices that allow them to “scan irises and faces of individuals and match them against biometric databases.”

Also, some “school districts now are requiring children to provide biometric identifiers, such as palm prints.”

The complaint said the danger was made clear when a private company was found trying to sell its biometric database of American consumers after its parent company, Verified Identity Pass, collapsed into bankruptcy,

“Personally identifiable information could be lost or misused as a result” of the new program, the complaint said.

Among the private companies thought to be involved are Lockheed Martin, IBM, Accenture, BAE Systems Information Technology, Global Science & Technology, Innovative Management and Technology Services and Platinum Solutions.

States already thought to be providing biometric details to the NGI include Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Although the FBI admitted that it had more than 7,300 pages of documentation that responded to the requests, EPIC has yet to see any, the complaint alleged.

The FBI explained that it launched the biometric database of Americans because of “customer requirements.”

The FBI said it is expected to replace its existing fingerprint ID system and expand the agency’s capabilities into “multimodal functionality.”

“The NGI Program Office mission is to reduce terrorist and criminal activities by improving and expanding biometric identification and criminal history information services through research, evaluation, and implementation of advanced technology,” the FBI explained.

The system specifically calls for iris records and search capabilities, palm prints, facial recognition capabilities and other components of a “unimodel” system.

“The framework will be expandable, scalable, and flexible to accommodate new technologies and biometric standards, and will be interoperable with existing systems. Once developed and implemented, the NGI initiatives and multimodal functionality will promote a high level of information sharing, support interoperability, and provide a foundation for using multiple biometrics for positive identification,” the FBI said.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/04/fbi-sued-over-facial-recognition-technology/#Uyg1kfJeRToEuoXv.99

«Facebook Home destruye cualquier noción de privacidad»

microsiervos

mexico.cnn.com

Om Malik, Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy,

El GPS del teléfono puede enviar información constante a los servidores de Facebook [«infractor reincidente en cuestiones de privacidad»], indicando tu paradero en todo momento.

De modo que si tu teléfono no se mueve de un mismo lugar entre las 22h y las 6h durante, digamos, una semana, Facebook puede deducir que esa ubicación es tu hogar. Facebook será capaz de localizar en un mapa dónde está tu casa aunque nunca hayas indicado tu dirección personal en Facebook.

Así Facebook puede comenzar a construir un perfil de ti mejor y más completo. Puede correlacionar todas tus relaciones, las tiendas en las que compras, los restaurantes en los que comes y otros muchos datos. El acelerómetro del teléfono le dirá a Facebook si estás caminando, corriendo o conduciendo.

El problema es que Facebook va a utilizar todos esos datos —no para mejorar tu vida— sino para mejorar sus campañas de publicidad.

Gay? Conservative? High IQ? Your Facebook ’likes’ can reveal traits

cosmiclog

David Stillwell / Cambridge

A graphic from the "You Are What You Like" Facebook app illustrates how the pages you click on can tell others about your personal traits, even if you don't mean to do so.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.
The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.
OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.
The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.
"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."
Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.
"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.
"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.
Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge.
"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.
"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

Invasion Of Privacy: Just Because Government Can, Doesn't Mean They Should

Freedom Outpost

By Cheryl Pass

Technology is moving into the culture at such a fast pace that Joe and Jane Citizen can’t even wrap their minds around it. And, no, I am not suggesting paranoia is the best response to it. But when government uses Joe’s and Jane’s money to use technology to take away their privacy and their freedoms, I think it’s time to take a hard look at what this “Brave New World” is foisting upon us. Science fiction has become reality. This is why we are looking at drone strikes on American citizens and why Rand Paul’s filibuster was such a dramatic and seminal moment.

My readers know I have been on the rabbit trail, chasing down the power grab of Councils of Governments and trying to warn our elected officials. To that end, I am going to share a few details with you from the grant application and grant that our Centralina Council of Governments took from the Federal government. The grant is based on United Nations global governance. But to hide that fact, our Federal government has obfuscated the jargon in an attempt to snooker the American public. And a good job they’ve done so far.

How do you like the idea that an unelected bureaucracy has given itself the power to assess and collect data on your personal belongings and your lifestyle? (Worse that your elected officials are letting them do it.) We know the Federal government is implementing data collection through the healthcare bill and through the public school system. So why no do it through unelected planning agencies as well? They are!

This may be too much “getting into the weeds” for some, but here is an example of what I mean:

Under the heading of “Energy Conservation” the HUD grant application sets out the budget to be spent on data collection on your home, your assets, and your activities. This bureaucratic cabal of self-important controllers. is using your tax dollars to pay people with infra-red thermal imaging equipment to come to your house and assess the greenhouse gases your house may be emitting. Is your house leaking heat or cooling emissions? Remember this CCOG has captured 14 counties and all of the towns and cities within that area….four of the counties are not even in this state.

This project provides comparable analyses of energy-savings potentials for a cross-section of neighborhood houses in the CCOG/Catawba COG represented county region. Deliverables for this project include: (1) a compilation of neighborhood housing sampling per county for the Neighborhood Energy Profile Database; (2) assessments will be made as to which neighborhoods collectively have the best potential for realizing cost-effective energy savings; (3) targeting those identified neighborhoods with messages on how households can realize these savings through proven, affordable, achievable and accessible measures.

Read more: http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/03/invasion-of-privacy-just-because-government-can-doesnt-mean-they-should/#ixzz2N5jJVD7d

Canadian Feds' privacy measures outdated: expert

GlobalToronto

Does Obama's gun plan ignore doctor-patient confidentiality?

Obama Wants Doctors Interrogating Patients About Guns

responsebeacon

A week ago, Breitbart had reported that Obamacare actually prohibited the Department of Health and Human Services from collecting information on gun owners. Awr Hawkins wrote:

It seems that in their haste to cram socialized medicine down the throats of the American people, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Barack Obama overlooked Senate amendment 3276, Sec. 2716, part c. According to reports, that amendment says the government cannot use doctors to collect ‘any information relating to the lawful ownership or possession of a firearm or ammunition.’

Obama has now clarified with his recent executive actions that Obamacare does not actually prohibit doctors from interrogating their patients about guns. In fact, the Obama administration is encouraging doctors to do just that.

Post Continues on godfatherpolitics.com >>

New Facebook tool lets you search everything related to friends

Nbcnews

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new "Graph Search" feature during a press event on Tuesday.

Facebook announced a new "Graph Search" feature on Tuesday that will answer all the questions that the social network's Newsfeed and Timeline do not.

"Today we're going to take a little trip to our roots," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in making the announcement.

He described Facebook as a huge database before pointing out that "just like a database, you should be able to query it." The Newsfeed answers the question "What's going on?" and Timeline answers "Who is this person?" But what about everything else? We'll be able to answer other questions using something called "Graph Search."

In addition to launching Graph Search, Facebook is also incorporating Microsoft's Bing search results in Facebook searches. (Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook.)  Doing search on Facebook has often been an exercise in frustration, and Graph Search may help to change that. Will Graph Search challenge Google? No, but it could be a start to making Facebook's nemesis even more nervous, although Zuckerberg emphasized the new tool is "not Web search."

Graph Search is a privacy-aware search, Zuckerberg said. That means that it only searches content which has been shared with you and that your search results will differ from the search results someone else will see ... even if you enter the same exact queries.

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook's new Graph Search allows you to search through photos, places, friends, and interests.

You can initially use Graph Search search through people, photos, places, and interests. 

For example, let's say you want to play matchmaker for a friend who recently moved to New York City from Germany. You could search for all friends-of-friends who happen to reside in New York City, lived in Germany at some point, and are single. Ta da! You'll have a list of the ideal matches for your pal. Or perhaps you need to find a dentist. You can easily search for dentists who are liked by your friends.

There was a lot of emphasis on privacy and Zuckerberg explained that a message will appear on users' Newsfeeds to remind them that they should review their privacy settings. Even though Graph Search is privacy-conscious, some slightly embarrassing content could always come up and haunt you.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search is currently a beta product, meaning that it isn't quite perfect just yet. 

"Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook," he says. If you want to start using the new feature, you can sign up for the beta by heading here.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

 

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El Paciente

Yoani

Enciendo la televisión y veo una mujer pariendo frente a la cámara en algún hospital del interior del país; la voz de una locutora explica las cifras de nacimientos de 2012. Yo me pregunto si le habrán pedido permiso a esa madre para filmarla durante el alumbramiento. La respuesta más probable es que no. Diez minutos después, me visita un amigo que me da a leer un artículo donde el abogado de Alan Gross protesta porque el gobierno cubano ha hecho público el historial médico de su cliente. El tema me hace recordar aquella escena en que una cámara oculta en un hospital captaba a la madre de Orlando Zapata Tamayo conversando con un doctor, sin saber que estaba siendo grabada. La filmación fue transmitida en el horario estelar para que millones de televidentes la vieran, sin contar con la autorización –claro está- de la sufrida señora que acababa de perder a su hijo.
La saga no se queda ahí. En septiembre pasado, la directora de un policlínico explicaba los síntomas de una disidente que se sintió mal mientras realizaba un ayuno. Todos los detalles fueron dichos sin el más mínimo rubor, a pesar de estar vulnerando la privacidad de un paciente y violando así el juramento hipocrático cuando dice “guardaré silencio sobre todo aquello que en mi profesión, o fuera de ella, oiga o vea en la vida de los hombres”. Yo misma resolví hace más de tres años no volver a pisar siquiera un consultorio médico, después de que la atemorizada doctora que me atendió fuera obligada a declarar frente a un lente oficial. Decidí –a cuenta y riesgo- cargar con mi salud y salvaguardar así mi intimidad. Aún hoy, cada vez que pienso en una consulta hospitalaria es como si me viera en un escenario con luces, cámaras… y un nutrido público mirando mis interioridades, mis vísceras.
Ahora, los mismos medios oficiales que han utilizado la intrusión en los archivos médicos como herramienta ideológica, defienden el secretismo sobre el estado de salud de Hugo Chávez. En la televisión, donde hemos visto tantos ataques a la privacidad de los pacientes, por estos días llaman morbosos a quienes exigen información sobre el presidente venezolano. Olvidan que justamente ellos han acostumbrado a la audiencia a fisgonear en los historiales hospitalarios como si fuera algo éticamente aceptable. ¿Y todas esas pequeñas personas vulneradas en su privacidad por la prensa nacional, no merecían ellas también respeto? ¿Y todos esos galenos e instituciones médicas que faltaron a sus principios más sagrados? ¿Los penalizarán ahora que la indiscreción médica ha dejado de ser políticamente correcta?

Radio DJs impersonate royals, get lowdown on Kate

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Government Surveillance on Citizens Rising

Nic Halverson 

As the inferno of the David Petraeus scandal continues to burn, the latest Google Transparency Report shows government surveillance is starting to heat up.

"This is the sixth time we’ve released this data, and one trend has become clear: Government surveillance is on the rise," Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst, explains on Google's blog.

Between January and June of this year governments from around the world filed 20,939 requests with Google to access data on 34,614 accounts. According to company data, during that same time frame last year, governments made 15,744 requests on 25,342 accounts.  More >>

What Petraeus affair reveals about your emails

WND/ Steve Elwart*

gawker.com

“Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned.” The saying took on a new meaning, with wrath being source of the “Petraeus-gate” that started when a general’s mistress believed he was cheating her.

The fact that Jill Kelley, a friend of the Petraeus family, received what she felt were threatening emails was apparently enough to bring the FBI into the case, prodded along by an agent-friend of the recipient.

The FBI started the investigation under the authority of the 1986 United States Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The act allows for “government entities” to acquire a warrant to access email records less than 180 days old “if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed.” For email older than six months, a federal agency only needs to get a subpoena signed by a federal prosecutor, not a judge, to obtain the messages.

Because of the wording of the law, Americans have fewer privacy protections for their electronic emails than would for those same messages than if they were printed out and stuck in a drawer.

In the eyes of the law, email kept on an individual’s hard drive in their home computer has the same protection as one’s personal papers, which require a search warrant. Emails stored on a remote server “in the cloud” do not have the same protection.

The writers of the law also did not envision the cloud. Email stored in the cloud has the same legal protection as documents in a public warehouse: the government can obtain them with a simple subpoena; no court procedure is required.

To make things really confusing, the government’s interpretation of the ECPA was rejected by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appellate court that covers the western United States, including California, and the home to many online email companies and the servers that host their messages. As a result, the DOJ advises “Agents outside of the Ninth Circuit can therefore obtain such email (and other stored electronic or wire communications in ‘electronic storage’ more than 180 days) using a subpoena…” but reminds agents in the Ninth Circuit to get a warrant.

Cloud email servers use the power of many different servers across the Internet. It does not reside in one place. Mail services such as those offered by Google (gmail) will store email messages (from your inbox, draft, and deleted folders) long after you have forgotten them. FBI and other investigating agencies routinely gain access to electronic inboxes and information about email accounts offered by Google, and other Internet mail providers.

The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal report that Jill Kelley contacted the FBI about “five to ten” anonymous emails that started in May and reportedly warned Kelley to “stay away” from an unnamed man. In the resulting investigation, the FBI discovered electronic paper trail eventually led to an “anonymous” account that was used by Paula Broadwell and her husband.

In examining this and other accounts, agents uncovered sexually explicit emails that Broadwell exchanged with another party who also used what has been reported to be a Gmail account. Eventually, investigators were able to determine that the other party was CIA Director David Petraeus using an assumed name.

While it hasn’t been specified exactly how the FBI were able to track the emails back to Broadwell, anyone with knowledge of how email works can make an intelligent assessment.

Petraeus and Broadwell used anonymous accounts with fake names that they set up for the purpose of their illicit affair. While they knew enough to cover some of their tracks, they weren’t sophisticated enough to take sufficient steps to completely protect their identity.

There are some services, such as Tor Project that can hinder tracing attempts. Other services such as Hotspot Shield and LogMeIn Hamachi can create a virtual private network to help preserve privacy. But this system is not fool-proof. Many of these services still use U.S. based servers that may have logs that can be read by investigating agencies or hackers.

Any email messages that are sent leave a trail. Many email services contain hidden codes called “metadata” that will contain the IP address of the sender’s computer’s internet connection device called a “router.” Other services, such as Gmail, will only include the IP address and Internet name of the servers that pass along the email.

The FBI spent weeks tracing the route these messages took. The FBI cross-referenced the IP addresses of the email’s origins against hotel guest lists, looking for common names. The messages were traced back not only to the Broadwell home, but also to the hotels where she was staying while sending some of the messages. (The travel patterns revealed by the emails coincided with her travel to promote her biography of Petraeus.)

The FBI could also request email data from the email service without the knowledge of the user. In fact, the email service is prohibited by law in notifying the user that the records were accessed.

Google is routinely approached by investigating agencies for email information. In fact, they issue what they call a “Transparency Report” every six months, to provide users with statistics about government requests for data and takedowns. For the period of January to June 2012, Google fulfilled 35,000 government requests for email information, 16,000 from the United States alone. How many of these requests were accompanied by a warrant is never disclosed.

Armed with the metadata and information from the email service, the FBI now had Broadwell’s name and in the course of the investigation uncovered another disturbing element, the possibility that classified information was being sent to Broadwell, who is also a reporter.

Federal prosecutors now had the probable cause they needed to request a warrant to monitor Broadwell’s other email accounts. Through this warrant they were able to determine that Broadwell and another person had set up a private email account to exchange messages.

A little more digging uncovered that fact that anonymous person Broadwell was communicating with was Petraeus.

(In a bizarre twist, another Army general, John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was also caught up in the investigation, being suspected of exchanging 20,000 to 30,000 pages of potentially inappropriate communications with Jill Kelley, the woman who sparked the investigation in the first place.)

The investigators also discovered that Broadwell and Petraeus had used a technique that is common among terrorist organizations and organized crime. They used the oft-neglected draft folder.

In this technique, one person will write a message and rather than send the message, they will save it to their draft folder. The other person will then log into the account, usually through a web browser and read the message in the folder.

Ironically, storing emails in a draft folder, rather than an inbox, may make it easier for the government to intercept their communications. This is because the Department of Justice has argued that emails in the “draft” or “sent mail” folder are not in “electronic storage” (as defined by the Stored Communications Act), and thus not deserving of warrant protection. Instead, the government has argued it should be able to get such messages with just subpoena rather than a warrant.

Some of the techniques the FBI user to track down Broadwell, Gen. Petraeus and later, Gen. Allen can also be utilized by any computer user.

For example, for a Gmail account, a person can see this metadata by doing the following:

1. Log into the Gmail account and open a message.
2. In the upper right corner of the message, next to the “reply” button, click on the “down” button.
3. Then click on the “Show original” selection.
4. A new window will open showing all the data that was hidden in the message.

A guide is available to download that will give instructions for looking at metadata for 19 different type of email accounts.

With this metadata, the IP address of the sender can be determined and then use an IP address locator such as WhatIsMyIPAddress to find out the ISP where the email account is registered as well as its geographic location. This is good information to have if a computer user is getting attacked by multiple spam messages coming from one sender.

It is also interesting to look up your own email address to see what information is available on you.

So far, the results of the investigation are varied: the distinguished military careers of two long-serving servicemen are effectively ended, three marriages damaged, perhaps irreparably, and the insecurity of our electronic communication has been exposed.

Congress is supposed to be looking into the antiquated communications law, but don’t hold your breath. The Justice Department has warned that updating that telephone-modem-era law would have an “adverse impact” on investigations. The White House, for its part, does not seem to be in a hurry to secure an individual’s rights against having their privacy violated.

Interestingly, in congressional testimony, James A. Baker, associate deputy attorney general for the Department of Justice, has suggested that people’s online privacy is enhanced if the government has easier access to private data. “By authorizing law enforcement officers to obtain evidence from communications providers, ECPA enables the government to investigate and prosecute hackers, identity thieves, and other online criminals. Pursuant to ECPA, the government obtains evidence critical to prosecuting these privacy-related crimes.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said, “With the explosion of cloud computing, social networking sites, and other new technologies, determining how best to bring this privacy law into the digital age will be one of Congress’s greatest challenges.”

That email invisibility cloak many Americans think they have is full of holes.

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* Steve Elwart, P.E., Ph.D., is the executive research analyst with the Koinonia Institute and a subject matter expert for the Department of Homeland Security.

When Will Our Email Betray Us? An Email Privacy Primer in Light of the Petraeus Saga

greenberg-art.com

As part of the unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus, the FBI read massive amounts of private email messages that uncovered an affair between Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. We've received a lot of questions about how this works, and what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? Our email privacy laws are hopelessly out of date. If we learn nothing else from the Petraeus scandal, it should be that our private digital lives can become all too public when over-eager federal agents aren't held to rigorous legal standards. More on EFF>>