The NY Times has Trump's tax returns

Not surprisingly, this is likely to prove embarrassing to the president. It appears the Times is being intentionally vague on some details, almost certainly to protect their source(s). On which note, somebody, maybe multiple somebodies, have broken some pretty serious Federal laws. Long time readers of this blog will know that I am a fierce critic of this president. But somebody, obviously for political reasons, just violated the rights of an American citizen to basic privacy with respect to their finances. Reasonable people can disagree with a law that allows presidential candidates and persons who occupy high office to shield their finances from public scrutiny. But the law is what it is, until it is changed. In this country, even villainous scoundrels have rights. And Donald Trump's rights have just been violated. This is an outrageous abuse and whoever is responsible needs to be identified and named as the winner of an all expense paid vacation in the Federal cross barred hotel. 

The Times' story can be found here.

British Government Report Slams Facebook as "Digital Gangsters"

Facebook deliberately broke privacy and competition law and should urgently be subject to statutory regulation, according to a devastating parliamentary report denouncing the company and its executives as “digital gangsters”.
The final report of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s 18-month investigation into disinformation and fake news accused Facebook of purposefully obstructing its inquiry and failing to tackle attempts by Russia to manipulate elections.
“Democracy is at risk from the malicious and relentless targeting of citizens with disinformation and personalised ‘dark adverts’ from unidentifiable sources, delivered through the major social media platforms we use every day,” warned the committee’s chairman, Damian Collins.
The report:

• Accuses Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, of contempt for parliament in refusing three separate demands for him to give evidence, instead sending junior employees unable to answer the committee’s questions.
• Warns British electoral law is unfit for purpose and vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors, including agents of the Russian government attempting to discredit democracy.
• Calls on the British government to establish an independent investigation into “foreign influence, disinformation, funding, voter manipulation and the sharing of data” in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the 2016 EU referendum and the 2017 general election.
  
  Read the rest here.

Facebook Allowed Netflix, Other Buisneses to See Your Private Messages

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

The exchange was intended to benefit everyone. Pushing for explosive growth, Facebook got more users, lifting its advertising revenue. Partner companies acquired features to make their products more attractive. Facebook users connected with friends across different devices and websites. But Facebook also assumed extraordinary power over the personal information of its 2.2 billion users — control it has wielded with little transparency or outside oversight.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

Read the rest here.

Tech Alert: AVG is now spyware

Bad news for those of us who use the free version of AVG for computer security. Starting in October they will be selling our  browser history to advertisers. Time to move on...

Judge sides with government in lawsuit over surveillance

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) -- A federal judge on Tuesday sided with the government in a lawsuit alleging the National Security Agency is illegally engaging in the bulk collection of Internet and telephone records in the hunt for potential terrorists.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in Oakland said the plaintiffs in the case - AT&T customers - had not shown that all AT&T customers' Internet communications were currently the subject of a "dragnet seizure and search program, controlled by or at the direction of the Government," and they therefore did not have standing to file a lawsuit under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against warrantless searches and seizures.

Read the rest here.

Feds want to be able to track where your license plate goes

The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.

The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

Read the rest here.

Dear America, I Saw You Naked

And yes, we were laughing. Confessions of an ex-TSA agent.

HT: Bill (aka The Godfather)

A Powerful Rebuke of Mass Surveillance

For the first time since the revelation of the National Security Agency’s vast dragnet of all Americans’ telephone records, a federal court has ruled that such surveillance is “significantly likely” to be unconstitutional.

In a scathing 68-page opinion peppered with exclamations of incredulity, United States District Judge Richard Leon, of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, found that the seven-year-old phone-data collection program — which was established under the Patriot Act and has been repeatedly reauthorized by a secret intelligence court — “almost certainly” violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches.

Reaching into the 18th century from the 21st, the judge wrote that James Madison “would be aghast” at the degree of privacy invasion the data sweep represents.

Read the rest here.

NSA Collects Data From 5 Billion Phones Every Day

The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.

Read the rest here.

The Border: Where Warrantless Searches and Seizures are Allowed

Newly released documents reveal how the government uses border crossings to seize and examine travelers’ electronic devices instead of obtaining a search warrant to gain access to the data.

The documents detail what until now has been a largely secretive process that enables the government to create a travel alert for a person, who may not be a suspect in an investigation, then detain that individual at a border crossing and confiscate or copy any electronic devices that person is carrying.

To critics, the documents show how the government can avert Americans’ constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, but the confiscations have largely been allowed by courts as a tool to battle illegal activities like drug smuggling, child pornography and terrorism.

Read the rest here.

NSA Repeatedly Violated Privacy Laws and Court Orders

The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

Read the rest here.

2 Companies Close and Destroy Data Rather Than Reveal Files to Feds

The shutdown of two small e-mail providers on Thursday illustrates why it is so hard for Internet companies to challenge secret government surveillance: to protect their customers’ data from federal authorities, the two companies essentially committed suicide.

Lavabit, a Texas-based service that was reportedly used by Edward J. Snowden, the leaker who had worked as a National Security Agency contractor, announced the suspension of its service Thursday afternoon. In a blog post, the company’s owner, Ladar Levison, suggested — though did not say explicitly — that he had received a secret search order, and was choosing to shut the service to avoid being “complicit in crimes against the American people.”

Within hours, a fast-growing Maryland-based start-up called Silent Circle also closed its e-mail service and destroyed its e-mail servers. The company said it saw the writing on the wall — while also making it plain that it had not yet received any court orders soliciting user data.

Read the rest here.

I tip my hat to you sirs. It is remotely possible that true patriotism is not dead in corporate America.

Congress Repeals the 4th Amendment

A controversial proposal to restrict how the National Security Agency collects Americans’ telephone records failed to advance in the House by a narrow margin Wednesday, a victory for the Obama administration, which has spent weeks defending the program.

Lawmakers voted 217 to 205 to defeat the proposal from an unlikely coalition of liberal and conservative members. Those lawmakers had joined forces in response to revelations by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, that the agency has collected the phone records of millions of Americans — a practice that critics say goes beyond the kind of collection that has been authorized by Congress.

Read the rest here.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Joe Biden on Government Spying (when Bush was president)

ACLU Sues Over Vast Spying

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the U.S. government’s surveillance program that collects from U.S. phone companies the call records of tens of millions of Americans.

It is the first substantive lawsuit following reports in The Washington Post and the Guardian last week detailing two sweeping surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency under laws authorized by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Read the rest here.

U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Read the rest here.

Obama's Dragnet

Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Read the rest here.

Obama has violated his oath of office and should be impeached.

US Engaging in Massive Domestic Spying

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 the rest here.

Germans are shocked by a private glimpse of their leader

BERLIN — The photos were splashed across the top-circulating tabloid in Germany this week — Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “secret family life” uncovered for all to see.

The secret? That she has a private life.

Unlike their counterparts in the United States, many European leaders keep their personal lives out of sight, and Merkel may be the most intensely private of them all. Her husband, a chemist, skipped her first inauguration in 2005 and rarely appears with her in public. Her political friends have never visited her at home. And she is rarely photographed wearing anything other than a suit.

Merkel’s deep-cover privacy is aided and abetted by a high-minded German mainstream media that rarely deign to report on anything they deems outside the realm of her political decision-making. But with Germany increasingly calling the shots in Europe because of the economic crisis in the 17-nation euro zone, more people are hungry for a glimpse of what makes Merkel tick.

Read the rest here.

I have long thought that our presidents have ceded a bit too much ground to the press in terms of the often intrusive coverage.