LONDON — It’s May and the sun is finally out after a long British winter. For many that means one thing: festival season.
It’s a good occasion to disconnect from technology, go off the grid and enjoy a few days of carefree excitement. Or not.
Along with booze, music and mud — a lot of mud — British festivals may have another feature: mass surveillance.
Last year, Leicestershire police scanned the faces of 90,000 festival-goers at Download Festival, checking them against a list of wanted criminals across the country. It was the first time anywhere in the UK that facial recognition technology — NeoFace — was used at a public outdoor event.
Privacy campaigners — and Muse frontman Matt Bellamy — expressed their fury at authorities after they casually mentioned the use of the surveillance project on Police Oracle, a police news and information website. Police didn’t use any other method to warn festival-goers about the controversial initiative.
A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency has begun winding down its collection and storage of American phone records after the Senate failed to agree on a path forward to change or extend the once-secret program ahead of its expiration at the end of the month.
Barring an 11th hour compromise when the Senate returns to session May 31, a much-debated provision of the Patriot Act — and some other lesser known surveillance tools — will sunset at midnight that day. The change also would have a major impact on the FBI, which uses the Patriot Act and the other provisions to gather records in investigations of suspected spies and terrorists.
In a chaotic scene during the wee hours of Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill known as the USA Freedom Act, which would have ended the NSA’s bulk collection but preserved its ability to search the records held by the phone companies on a case-by-case basis. The bill was backed by President Barack Obama, House Republicans and the nation’s top law enforcement and intelligence officials.
It fell just three votes short of the 60 needed for passage. All the “no” votes but one were cast by Republicans, some of whom said they thought the USA Freedom Act didn’t go far enough to help the NSA maintain its capabilities.
A stalemate in the Senate would leave the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) without powers they have used to track terrorists for years, say supporters of the Patriot Act.
Without action by the end of the month, key provisions of the Patriot Act will expire, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) argues would put the United States at a pre September 11, 2001-footing.
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Yet McConnell has no definite path to extend those provisions.
He and other hawkish senators are pressing for an extension of the key Patriot Act measures, but they are opposed by other senators, the White House and a majority of House lawmakers in both parties.
The House voted last week to approve reforms to the NSA provisions in an overwhelming 338-88 vote.
McConnell filed a short-term extension of existing law just 24 hours later, signaling his determination to move in a different direction.
Observers say it’s increasingly looking like the standoff could result in no action by Congress, which would mean the Patriot Act provisions would lapse.
That would be a worst-case scenario for the NSA, but a pipe dream for ardent civil libertarians who have been rooting for such a result.
“Right now that we’re down to the wire… it’s just not clear to me how you get authorization through the Senate and the House,” said Neema Singh Guliani, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union and critic of the law.
Defenders of the NSA say that would be disastrous for national security.
“Congress must act to reauthorize” the provisions, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) — two hawkish members of their respective Intelligence Committees — warned in an op-ed for Fox News on Friday. “The alternative is too dangerous.”
At issue is Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the federal government to collect “any tangible things” that are “relevant” to an investigation into terrorist or foreign intelligence activity.
The NSA has used that to collect millions of people’s phone call “metadata” — which include information about the numbers involved in a call and when the call occurred, but not people’s actual conversations — without a warrant. Supporters say that’s a crucial tool that has allowed the government to connect the dots between possible terrorist suspects.
If Congress doesn’t act, the program would end, the White House has said. The NSA would simply stop collecting the records.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. Scott Garrett (NJ-05), Chairman of the Congressional Constitution Caucus, issued the following statement after voting against the USA Freedom Act, H.R. 2048, today because it did not do enough to protect the privacy of innocent Americans:
“The American people demand transparency from their government, and they demand that their basic Constitutional right to privacy is upheld with every vote we take in Congress. I fully support our country’s anti-terrorist capabilities, but today’s bill does not do enough to protect the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of millions of innocent Americans. In particular, we need to ensure the destruction of information collected about people who have no ties to terrorism, fully stop bulk data collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, and put an end to warrantless searches that government officials have used as justification for a mass collection of emails and phone calls. The only thing this bill does is further codify the ability of the government to trample our Constitutional rights.”
The USA Freedom Act does NOT:
Prohibit bulk data collection Require the destruction of records not connected to terrorist investigations Prohibit the government from conducting warrantless searches of communications of U.S. persons
Public wants ‘right to be forgotten’ online
by Mario Trujillo – 03/19/15 09:12 AM EDT
Nearly nine in 10 U.S. voters want “the right to be forgotten” on the Internet, according to a new poll.
Eighty-eight percent support a U.S. law that would let them petition companies like Google, Yahoo and Bing to remove certain personal information that appears in search results, according to the survey conducted by Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker.
While 52 percent strongly support a U.S. law, another 36 percent somewhat support it.
That proposal is similar to the European policy known as the “right to be forgotten,” which has divided those advocating for increased privacy and others who argue it could curtail free expression.
Since last year, Europeans have been able to petition search engines like Google or Yahoo to remove links about them when the link contains inaccurate, irrelevant or excessive information about people.
How much phone data does NSA collect?
February 08, 2014, 12:08 pm
By Megan R. Wilson
The National Security Agency collects less than 30 percent of U.S. phone records due to “technical challenges” involved with the influx of cellphone data, according to media reports.
The agency’s phone data collection has dropped significantly since 2006 as it struggles to keep pace with consumers’ shift away from landlines.
It has faced issues in customizing its system to handle the increase of cell data while not sweeping in cell tower and location-based information, which the agency is not legally authorized to obtain. The records include numbers called and call duration.
Eight years ago, the NSA was collecting “almost 100” percent of bulk call data, an anonymous senior U.S. official told the Washington Post Saturday.
While officials told the Post that collection stands at under 30 percent, the Wall Street Journal pegs the telephone metadata collection levels at fewer than 20 percent – spurring questions about the legitimacy of the program.
Congressmen Scott Garrett is looking for your views on the NSA’s collection of meta-data?
January 23, 2014
Ridgewood NJ, As founder and Chairman of the Congressional Constitution Caucus, I am committed to preserving and protecting your rights as outlined by the Constitution of the United States. Like you, I believe it is critical to keep Americans safe, particularly without jeopardizing the protection of their civil liberties. But, recently, news came out that Americans’ civil liberties might be in jeopardy.
Over the summer, it was revealed that the Obama Administration’s National Security Agency (NSA) was engaged in a bulk collection of data, including phone call and text message information, for all Americans.
Though the NSA is apparently not collecting the contents of these calls and text messages, this bulk collection is troubling. This data can readily be used to establish important facts about citizens, including the patterns of their behavior, their preferences, and who they call and why. This reveals, beyond the mere collection of the data, information about which citizens typically have a reasonable expectation of privacy. I have serious concerns that various NSA programs that collect information about American citizens do—in principle and in effect—violate both the spirit and letter of the constitutional protections of our civil liberties.
I write to inquire about your views regarding the Obama Administration’s NSA meta-data collection.
Do you think the NSA meta-data collection is constitutional?
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] Undecided
Are you comfortable with the NSA’s meta-data collection program?
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
[ ] Undecided
Would you like to see the NSA’s meta-data collection program change?
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