New York magistrate judge Gary Brown decided in favor of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents who were seeking his approval over a warrant on a doctor who they suspected was being paid for issuing thousands of prescriptions. The warrant would have compelled the physician’s phone company to provide real-time tracking data from his cell. Brown, certainly to the delight of police, issued a 30-page brief outlining his opinion that, by carrying a cell phone, someone is essentially waiving their Fourth Amendment right to due process. “Given the ubiquity and celebrity of geolocation technologies, an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in the prospective of a cellular telephone where that individual has failed to protect his privacy by taking the simple expedient of powering it off,” Brown wrote. “As to control by the user, all of the known tracking technologies may be defeated by merely turning off the phone. Indeed – excluding apathy or inattention – the only reason that users leave cell phones turned on is so that the device can be located to receive calls. Conversely, individuals who do not want to be disturbed by unwanted telephone calls at a particular time or place simply turn their phones off, knowing that they cannot be located.” He goes on to suggest that because there are smartphone applications available that allow users to locate people in their area with similar interests, cell phone customers should not expect their inherent right to privacy to be observed. “Given the notoriety surrounding the disclosure of geolocation data to retailers purveying soap powder and blue jeans to mall shoppers, the police searching for David Pogue’s iPhone and, most alarmingly, the creators and users of the Girls Around You app, cell phone users cannot realistically entertain the notion that such information would (or should) be withheld from federal law enforcement agents searching for a fugitive.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long been a voice for the American people against governmental overreach and technological surveillance. Chris Soghoian, a principal technologist and senior policy analyst at the ACLU, wrote that Brown’s opinion was “ridiculous.” “There is a big difference between location information you knowingly share with a select group of friends (or, in fact, the world) and information collected about you without your knowledge or consent,” he wrote. Exactly how common this practice is throughout the law enforcement community is unclear but it has widely been reported that a Michigan police force tried to gain information about every single cell phone within the proximity of a labor protest. Congressional leaders are currently considering two laws that would address how freely police are able to bug citizens. During an April hearing on Capitol Hill one detective told Senators that warrantless geolocation tracking is “essential to obtain in the early stages of investigations when probable cause has not yet been established.” That attitude, and the wide potential for abuse this kind of law creates, has the ACLU alarmed. “Someone might be happy to share their location with a few friends by ‘checking in’ using Foursquare while at a music festival, but not want law enforcement to access that same information,” Soghoian continued. “And, they would still reasonably expect that their location a week later at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or abortion clinic should remain private. Sharing location data isn’t and shouldn’t be all or nothing.” … Read More
Microsoft launches YouTube app, Google demands it taken down
Google yesterday issued a cease-and-desist letter to Microsoft, demanding Redmond pull its YouTube app from the Windows Phone Store. The app has been available for over a week; however, it violates YouTube's API usage terms. Google says Microsoft has until May 22 to withdraw or change the app before deeper… … Read More
Windows Phone shipments surpassed BlackBerry last quarter
When people think of smartphones, iOS and Android are the first operating systems that generally come to mind. The two have a stranglehold on the market, but there are still smaller battles occurring on the lower end of the sales spectrum between Windows Phone, Blackberry, Linux, and Symbian. … Read More
Strongbox: An Anonymous Inbox
http://www.youtube.com/v/c_HEOoX3AZY?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Visit site: Strongbox: An Anonymous Inbox
‘US seeks to curtail civil liberties’
http://www.youtube.com/v/iomY4jPcDfU?version=3&f=videos&app=youtube_gdata Source: ‘US seeks to curtail civil liberties’
FSB releases tapes of ‘CIA agent’ talking to officer he wanted to recruit (VIDEO)
“We should meet today. It’ll be impossible to do it tomorrow, we can meet only today,” Fogle told the ‘recruitee’ FSB officer minutes before the arranged meeting in Moscow’s Vorontsovsky park.The FSB recorded two phone calls of the alleged spy, with the first one being of particular interest to the counterintelligence agency. In it, the alleged CIA spy promises a million dollar reward in return for the officer’s services.“You can earn up to 1 million dollars per year and I’ll give 100 thousand up front – but only if we meet right now. Yes or No?” the US diplomat can be heard saying on the tape.According to the FSB, the conversation was recorded close to midnight Moscow time, as Fogle was walking towards the park through the city’s southern dormitory district.The agents had reportedly been given orders not to arrest Fogle until he met with ‘the subject’ at the agreed spot. Right before the arrest, he allegedly made another call, describing the place the FSB officer should be waiting.“There’s got to be a staircase in front of you, at the park entrance. Wait, I can see you, I’ll be right there,” the diplomat says on the recording of the brief second call.‘The subject’ that Fogle was allegedly meeting to recruit, took a direct role in the suspected spy’s arrest, the FSB later said. … Read More
AP probe to have ‘horrific chilling effect on journalism’
RT: It’s thought that American investigators were looking for a potentially dangerous government leak – so wasn’t this justified in terms of national security?Tony Gosling: Due to the timing of these two months of telephone information that they’ve taken [from] over twenty phone lines, [it looks as if it was connected with] what is effectively war crimes by the CIA over in Yemen. The CIA’s view and the American military’s view is that there are all sorts of crimes going on by the Yemenis and the Associated Press had been exposing them. Actually, what’s been going on here in reality is that the Associated Press were exposing war crimes by people in their own country.What we’ve got here squaring up is the American military industrial complex, led in this case by the US attorney general Eric Holder. He is some kind of devil’s advocate; if you remember the film, he is that kind of a lawyer. He’s the first ever in American history to be held in contempt of Congress, so he has certainly not got his hands clean. On the other side is the tradition of a free press, and the effect of this massive trawl, effectively a fishing operation of months of AP telephone lines, is it has a horrific chilling effect on journalism. It also means that individuals, whistleblowers and people with stories can no longer trust the journalists. If they go with confidential information to those journalists and have confidential phone conversations, they are no longer guaranteed that those journalists can keep those conversations secret because the Justice Department is coming in with a massive trawl over a two-month period. One can understand if it’s a small investigation over a couple of days or a particular phone line possibly, but this is a fishing operation and an appalling attack on the freedom of the press in America by a government that is out of control.RT: Can journalists really be trusted – doesn’t the phone hacking scandal in the UK suggest otherwise?TG: I don’t think that the situation in Britain is quiet as difficult as it is over in the US at the moment. They are going to the line it seems with operations like this. What is effectively going on is that Eric Holder, who is a puppy-dog; he’s not really sticking up for the American people, he’s not doing his job. What he is doing is the job of the American military industrial complex, which is very frightened about actually being exposed by people like the Associated Press for the things that they are doing. We do have problems here in Britain, but it’s not quite as bad as in the US. Journalists and lawyers have to really watch out for governments that snoop on their information and have to stop it, stone dead.RT: AP has managed to put the Obama administration in a very embarrassing situation by exposing this surveillance web – so is this case ultimately a victory for the press?TG: Of course this does have to be exposed, but like I say, there is nothing that is going to stop this chilling effect, which is making it very difficult for journalists to keep their sources private. In this kind of situation, where the Justice Departments gets its hands on all those phone calls, that’s almost impossible. And of course, this is all is driven by the military industrial complex who have their eyes on the Middle East oil and the Yemini oil. This has nothing to do with trying to stop terrorism or anything like that. These are just those that are trying to stop the US from taking over oil deposits in the Middle East and effectively covering up for what is actually illegal activity.RT: If governments are worried about information being leaked by journalists, shouldn’t they be focusing on finding the source of that leak within their own ranks – rather than targeting the messenger?TG: You should never be targeting the messenger. The messengers are coming up with bad news and those in authority in the US don’t like it. It’s a similar situation in the UK. We have secret courts being brought in here in Britain. And ultimately this is the rise of a kind of police state where government thinks it can do what it wants. What we’re seeing is the erosion of some of the basic civil liberties that we’ve said for the last 30-40 years: ‘this is what we hold dear.’ We’re saying that ‘oh, these terrible Al-Qaeda and etc. are trying to take those civil liberties away’. But Al-Qaeda aren’t taking them away, our own governments are taking them away. Christopher Chambers, journalism professor from Georgetown University in the US, believes the reason behind the Justice Department investigation of AP is the government’s desire to have control over the flow of information covering it up by public safety concerns.“Especially when they perceive, rightly or wrongly that they are protecting the public from terrorism or some external threat or perhaps some internal threat. The problem is that that threat has not been articulated, has not been put out there as something that overrides this unprecedented intrusion,” he told RT.“The attorney general will have to explain a lot in the coming weeks. Otherwise it is further erosion of the trust that people have in their government, not only to protect them from outside threats but to protect them from the government itself.”The active intrusion into the press is unprecedented, Chamber maintains. “It’s an extension of some of the intrusions into the civil liberties that we saw after 9/11 attacks. The hypocrisy is that Barack Obama came into office decrying and attacking the abuses of the Bush administration, but is continuing them. That will be rather a political then a legal problem for him… Individuals and groups that supported him in the past are abandoning him right now.” … Read More
