Verizon updated its transparency report Monday to include orders issued by the nation’s spy court.
During the first six months of 2013, the nation’s spy court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, ordered Verizon between zero to 999 times to hand over content for 4,000 to 4,999 customer selectors.
During that same time, the court issued the company between zero to 999 “non-content” orders to hand over information affecting zero to 999 customer selectors. (WTF? Now that’s enlightening. Gov’t. transparency what a joke!)
Verizon notes in its report the government uses the term “selector” to refer to account identifiers, such as phone numbers.
Because several selectors belong to a single account, the company said, the number of selectors requested is “generally greater than” the number of accounts directly affected by the court order.
The federal government allows companies to report its requests two ways — in bands of 1,000 requests, or more accurate numbers up to 250 requests, and then in bands of 250 requests.
Companies are required to delay public reports on national security requests six months.
Randal Milch, Verizon’s general counsel and executive vice president for Public Policy, Law and Security, stated on the company’s public policy blog that Verizon updated the report because the Department of Justice recently began allowing telecommunications and Internet company’s to publish more information after Verizon’s initial report was published.
“We note that while we now are able to provide more information about national security orders that directly relate to our customers, reporting on other matters, such as any orders we may have received related to the bulk collection of non-content information, remains prohibited,” Milch said. (So really you can’t tell the public anything!)
“We welcome greater transparency in this area by telecommunications and internet companies, in the absence of broader information by the government collecting the data,” he said.
“We once again call on all governments to make public the number of demands they make for customer data from such companies, because that is the only way to provide the public with an accurate data set.”
http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/updates-to-our-2013-transparency-report
http://reason.com/archives/2014/03/04/verizon-reveals-more-federal-spying-on-c
http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/78575371688/department-of-justice-releases-documents-on-pen
EPIC obtains secret reports on illegal data collection of phone records:
In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, EPIC has obtained reports that detail the number of times the Surveillance Court authorized the use of techniques that gather the telephone numbers and metadata of phone customers and Internet users.
Click here, here & here to read more documents released by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Court (FISC).
The reports cover the period between 2000 and 2013.
The reports reveal a dramatic increase in the use of these techniques in 2004 and then a significant reduction in 2008, likely the consequence of a shift to other investigative techniques.
The documents show that nearly all applications to the Surveillance Court were approved without modifications.
http://epic.org/2014/03/in-foia-lawsuit-epic-obtains-s.html
Police in California reveal their new SURVEILLANCE truck:
Police in Modesto, California unveiled a newly acquired surveillance vehicle this week which will video and audio record local residents throughout the city.
The Armadillo, a refurbished armored truck, is equipped with four high definition cameras, four wide-angle lens cameras and advanced audio recording capabilities.
“We want this to serve as a deterrent or extra eyes out there for us,” police spokeswoman Heather Graves told Fox 40 News. “We are focusing on public areas, we’re not trying to impede anyone’s privacy.”
The vehicle’s surveillance features can also be accessed remotely, allowing officers to park the vehicle in any area of the city and control the cameras’ zooming abilities from a separate location.
“Smile, you’re on camera,” a bold message on the side of the truck reads.
While the vehicle itself was donated by a nearby precinct, Fox 40 notes that the surveillance equipment was purchased with “grant money,” likely from DHS.
In a press release Tuesday the Modesto Police Department briefly mentioned the vehicle’s rollout, giving no specifics on how long obtained footage would be kept.
Despite Fox 40′s decision to only interview a supporter of the new armored truck, the news group’s Facebook page painted a much different picture.
“Suddenly all the dystopian books I read in high school make sense. I guess they were trying to prepare us for our future,” one commenter noted.
Several other departments across the country including a precinct in Fort Lauderdale have implemented the use of surveillance vehicles as well, with real-time video footage feeding directly into police headquarters.
http://www.storyleak.com/california-police-unveil-new-armored-surveillance-vehicle/
The LAPD spies on millions of innocent civilians:
Los Angeles and Southern California police, by contrast, are expanding their use of surveillance technology such as intelligent video analytics, digital biometric identification and military-pedigree software for analyzing and predicting crime. Information on the identity and movements of millions of Southern California residents is being collected and tracked.
In fact, Los Angeles is emerging as a major laboratory for testing and scaling up new police surveillance technologies. The use of military-grade surveillance tools is migrating from places like Fallujah to neighborhoods including Watts and even low-crime areas of the San Fernando Valley, where surveillance cameras are proliferating like California poppies in spring.
The use of militarized surveillance technology appears to be spreading beyond its initial applications during the mid-2000s in high-crime areas to now target narrow, specific crimes such as auto theft.
Now, LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff are monitoring the whereabouts of residents whether they have committed a crime or not. The biggest surveillance net is license plate reading technology that records your car’s plate number as you pass police cruisers equipped with a rooftop camera, or as you drive past street locations where such cameras are mounted.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California are suing LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department, demanding to see a sample week’s worth of that data in order to get some idea of what cops are storing in a vast and growing, regionally shared database. (See our story “License Plate Recognition Logs Our Lives Long Before We Sin,” June 21, 2012.)
Two dozen police agencies have gathered more than 160 million data points showing the exact whereabouts of L.A.-area drivers on given dates.
Despite growing concerns among privacy-rights groups, LAPD hopes to greatly expand its mass surveillance: The city traffic-camera system — 460 cameras set above major roads and intersections by the Department of Transportation — which now are used to monitor traffic jams, could be folded into LAPD’s surveillance network.
Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander wants to convert the system’s video feeds to a digital format used by automated license-plate readers. Despite L.A. crime levels being at historic lows, Englander insists, “It is vital that the LAPD have instant split-feed access to the 460 traffic cameras … and be able to review this data to catch suspected criminals and protect our community.”
This month, LAPD sent a team to Israel, the Jewish Journal reports, to visit drone manufacturers and Nice Systems, a cyber-intelligence firm that can “intercept and instantly analyze video, audio and text-based communications.” Reporter Simone Wilson quoted Horace Frank, commander of LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau, as telling an Israeli conference of data intelligence experts: “Let’s be honest … We’re here to steal some of your great ideas.”
Ana Muniz, an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based Youth Justice Coalition, says, “Any time that a society’s military and domestic police force become more and more similar, where the lines have become blurred, it’s not a good story.”
The military is supposed to “defend the territory from so-called external enemies,” Muniz says. “That’s not the mission of the police force — they’re not supposed to look at the population as an external enemy.”
http://www.laweekly.com/los-angeles/forget-the-nsa-la-cops-spy-on-millions-of-innocent-folks/Content?oid=4473467
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/03/verizons-transparency-report-reveals.html