Not all surveillance tools were lost to the FBI after the expiration of several Patriot Act powers on Sunday.

The national law enforcement agency still operates an air force of low-flying planes that can identify individuals thousands of feet below by the cellphones they carry, and all without a judge’s approval.

The spy planes capture video, and at times, are equipped with cellphone surveillance technology, but none bear the FBI’s insignia, instead are hidden behind names of fictitious companies used as a front for the FBI. The surveillance is captured without a judges approval and used in ongoing investigations, the FBI said.

The spy planes are one tool in the FBI’s arsenal to track down suspected terrorists not included in the Patriot Act debate. On Sunday, lawmakers let the Patriot Act expire, and with it the FBI’s use of roving wiretaps, which allow agents to follow suspects as they switch phones, and the “lone wolf” provision which allowed the agency to spy on non-U.S. persons, even if they had no established connection with a terrorist group.

But the FBI still has its spy planes.

The spy planes are sometimes used to collect evidence and, at other times, to ensure the safety of those police officers who have been sent to disrupt a criminal operation in a remote area, said Jon Adler, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association.

The full story is available here

by Virgil Vaduva

You may not know it yet, but there is a reason why the NSA was in favor of the USA Freedom Act, which was successfully passed in the U.S. Senate with a final vote of 67-32.  This was preceded by a tumultuous weekend of Rand Paul throwing sticks into the wheels of other senators willing to renew an un-ammended version of the original Patriot Act which allegedly was the only document allowing for the NSA and other federal agencies to perform mass-surveillance on millions of unsuspecting Americans.

Consequently, the newly shaped and misnamed “Freedom Act” (which has nothing to do with freedom) is turning out to be just another joke pulled on the Americans who are now too busy debating the sexual exploits of Bruce Jenner to pay too much attention to how their freedom is slowly being strangled by the sadists in Washington DC.  The scene is nothing short of a comedy put on full display in front of a public unaware of the fact they are in fact watching a snuff film where Liberty will pay the final price.

Mainstream media outlets are excitedly describing the passage of this bill as a win for the American people, outlining how the NSA is now facing an uphill battle in collecting bulk digital data about all of us. Even Reason Magazine, who should be a beacon for common sense and “reason” is describing the bill as a “win” that does not end mass surveillance (a bit of a bipolar conclusion if you ask me):

No, it does not end mass metadata collection entirely, but it does require more selective search terms for records, collecting them from the telecom and Internet companies using these terms, not just trying to collect all records and then searching through them for the ones they want.

I’m quite confused as to how a few additional search attributes makes it more difficult to spy on us, but I am sorry to be the one to inform you that this bill will not increase your freedom as an American, nor will it end mass surveillance by the federal government.  Not only does the Freedom Act not increase freedom, but it is actually making it easier for the NSA and other federal agencies to monitor Americans without oversight.

It is a well-known fact among Information Security Professionals that the NSA has been in bed with telecommunication companies for decades, even well before 9/11.  For example the existence of Room 641A at 611 Folsom St. in San Francisco was exposed well before Edward Snowden’s revelations, but nothing could be done about the existence of this surveillance facility as it was the result of a voluntary relationship between AT&T and the National Security Agency.

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006

Worse, the information about the blatant partnership between the NSA and AT&T was made public in graphic details by Mark Klein, an AT&T employee who blew the whistle on the existence of the surveillance facility.  Klein even swore under oath the following:

While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled “Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco” dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the “splitter” cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.

In 2006 the story fizzled out into a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, with the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case in 2011 after it was dismissed by the Ninth Circuit Court based on the retroactive grant of immunity the Congress used to protect telecommunication companies who were willing to partner up with the NSA voluntarily.

The revelation of Room 641A is just the tip of the iceberg. The NSA has hundreds, if not thousands of commercial agreements with corporations who are voluntarily assisting them with surveillance activities. The “beauty” of these agreements is that they do not require warrants and they are not subject to congressional oversight. The money is what speaks loudest here, and when 70% of the U.S. intelligence budget goes to private corporate NSA partners, the picture becomes very clear: everyone is in bed with the NSA, and the passage of the U.S.A. Freedom Act is just masturbation to please the masses.

The FISA court which was handling surveillance requests under the Patriot Act has no authority to dictate the extent of the private and voluntary agreement between telcos like AT&T and Verizon and the NSA.  The metadata or bulk data that these telcos are collecting and turned over to the NSA voluntarily is also not subject to any warrants or permissions given by the FISA court.

In essence, the passage of the Freedom Act is actually making things worse for Americans from a state surveillance perspective as it is now forcing the NSA to use unscrutinized side-channels to collect data.

The NSA has the money and the motivation to bribe and pay their way into your phone, home or bedroom, regardless of the laws passed by Congress. The $10 million paid to RSA to insert a backdoor into their encryption products is a drop in the bucket.  Billions of dollars flow to companies like Microsoft, Booze Allen, Orange, Stratfor and Vodafone that allow for the backdooring of products or outright tapping into the lives of unsuspecting Americans.  The CIA has even retained In-Q-Tel in order to place investments into high-tech startups in order to retain their technologies or place backdoors into their products in exchange for money.

And when the NSA cannot legally spy on Americans, they retain the services of companies like Palantir Technologies, which will spy on us on their behalf.  Wikileaks provided documents showing that Palantir employees, together with consultants from the defunct HB Gary Federal will provide software able to collect, analyze and correlate information from the general public while also being able to create public streams of misinformation aimed at discrediting critics of the federal government, such as Glenn Greenwald.

It is not necessary for me to continue explaining why America has yet again been suckered into supporting the illusion of freedom while in fact losing freedom on every single front. This is my desperate attempt to throw a little bit of light and cold water on the spectacle that continues to unfold before our eyes, the both sadistic and masochistic relationship between the American people and their government. It’s a bizarre, pseudo-religious display of flag worship and patriotism which is repaid by the State with more pain, tyranny, taxation and war.

The scandalous display will continue unabated until principled whistle blowers and technology, not Congress, will save us from the ever-present eyes of the NSA.

Virgil Vaduva is a Libertarian security professional, journalist, photographer and overall liberty freak. He spent most of his life in Communist Romania and participated in the 1989 street protests which led to the collapse of the Ceausescu regime. He can be reached at vvaduva at truthvoice.com.

“Don’t worry, bro, this is totally legal!”

While we’ve been busy watching the court drama and congressional debate over the PATRIOT Act, another important issue has been making its way to the Supreme Court.  At issue is whether or not the government has the authority to tell a raisin farmer how many grapes he can grow.

Perhaps stranger than classifying someone as a “raisin farmer” is the fact that there is a National Raisin Reserve established by the United States Department of Agriculture.  Strange too that this cartel seized $65 million worth of raisins in a single year, and managed to spend ALL of the money from their sale operating the reserve, leaving nothing (let alone “just compensation”) for all of those farmers whose property was taken.

Horne v. Department of Agriculture centers around a farmer and his wife who decided to disobey the edict of the USDA and not give his justly-grown raisins to the Reserve.  Since first refusing over a decade ago, they have been assessed taxes and penalties totaling approximately 1.2 million pounds of raisins (not grapes) and $650,000.

“Guarding this poppy field is pretty cool, I guess, but I’d rather be stealing raisins.”

One might wonder how this all came to be.  As part of the New Deal, the Federal government had already logged quite a history of meddling with specific aspects of the economy.  After all, central planning was being used by other major economies at the time (Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, for example), so it seemed prudent for the United States to follow suit.  By 1937, the government had already exerted control over most other crops and turned its attention to raisins.

The Raisin Administrative Committee (rightly called a cartel, since it is run by industry representatives) was formed in response to the fear that farmers might grow too many grapes.  If that happened, central planners reasoned, prices would drop and farmers would go out of business.  When those farmers quit buying things in their communities, other businesses on frail economic footing would collapse in an ever-widening economic wake.  Thus would the country fall into permanent depression because the government failed to protect raisin farmers against themselves.

Aside from the fact that central planners never bothered to study history, they apparently did not bother to question whether or not it was right.  The seizure of these raisins is without compensation to the farmers.  In the United States, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution prevents taking of private property “for public use, without just compensation.”  Horne’s argument hinges on the argument that the government is taking the raisins for public use.  Specifically, the RAC exports large amounts of raisins for free to other countries.  Presumably at least this food aid constitutes public use.  Whether or not the raisin cartel constitutes public use is an interesting question; It’s certainly not in the public interest to have food cost more.

It will be interesting to see how the case turns out for Horne, since his alleged debts amount to 4 years’ total production.  Coincidentally, the Raisin Administrative Committee has not maintained a reserve pool for years 2010 through 2014.  Horne’s defiance has stirred quite a bit of controversy in the raisin industry.  Is it possible the RAC’s moratorium is related to his legal challenge?

A ruling against the cartel would have far-reaching implications, since milk, sugar and other goods and services are also made into a cartel by the United States government.  Either way, this unwanted attention does not appear to be good for the RAC.  They’ve even seen attempts in the U.S. Congress to legislate them out of existence.  Perhaps Marvin Horne will get the last laugh either way.

Andrew Slanker is an engineer, classical liberal, and amateur debater. He is a founding member of the social commentary website Evading Justice.

One of the NSA’s most controversial surveillance programs ended at least temporarily Sunday, after US senators failed to pass a bill that would have reformed Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which is set to expire at midnight.

In a contentious Sunday session, US senators tried to pass the USA Freedom Act, which would take the bulk collection of phone records out of the hands of the NSA. Instead, it would be stored by telecoms. The legislation would force the government to obtain a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act any time it wishes to access such records from telecoms and would limit the access to records that are relevant to a national security investigation. It looks likely that the bill will pass sometime this week.

Last week, the senate failed to pass the same bill, but tonight agreed to scrap that vote and try again. Senator Rand Paul stymied that effort, saying in a speech that the bill still didn’t go far enough to curb surveillance. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had originally opposed the bill, announced that it was “now the only realistic way forward” and urged Republicans to vote yes with him. McConnell mustered enough votes to advance the bill procedurally, meaning debate is over and the bill can now be voted on quickly later. The Senate will meet again tomorrow at noon ET, likely to take up the vote again. But by that time, the relevant section of the Patriot Act will have expired.

“Congress should take advantage of this sunset to pass far reaching surveillance reform, instead of the weak bill currently under consideration,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

The bulk phone records collection program was first uncovered by USA Today in 2006, although US telecoms denied at the time that they were handing over the records of customers to the government. But in 2013 a document leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden confirmed that the government had been collecting all phone detail records from certain US telecoms for years, including calls that are wholly domestic—meaning both parties are located in the US. The records are collected even though the vast majority of people involved in the calls are not suspected of ties to terrorism or criminal activity. The collection doesn’t involve the content of calls, but instead involves so-called metadata—the phone numbers on both sides of a call and the date and duration of the call.

Civil liberties groups have challenged the program on Fourth Amendment grounds, and although one federal judge called it “likely unconstitutional” a three-judge panel in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals did not go that far in its recent judgement about the program. The panel did, however, rule that the program is currently illegal under US law, since legislation the government had been using to justify it—Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act—does not in fact allow for the mass collection of records in this way.

The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board convened by President Obama in the wake of the Snowden revelations recommended that the program be overhauled so that the records would be retained by the telecoms while still being accessible to the NSA with a court order. To do this, however, lawmakers needed to draft a law authorizing it, hence the USA Freedom Act.

Although the House passed its version of the bill by a landslide earlier this month, its path through the Senate has been rocky. Last November, Democratic Senate lawmakers hoped to advance their version during an end-of-year lame-duck session before they lost their majority position to newly elected Republicans who would be taking office in January. But they failed by just two votes to obtain the 60 votes necessary to close down a debate on amendments to the bill and advance the legislation to the Senate floor. That outcome was repeated last week during a second attempt to move the bill forward.

The bill’s initial failure last November was due in part to opposition from Mitch McConnell and others who oppose the USA Freedom Act and instead wanted to re-authorize Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which the government was still maintaining at the time gave it legal authorization to conduct bulk collection of phone records. Section 215 authorizes the government to obtain business records—including medical, credit card and financial records—if they are relevant to an FBI investigation. But it, along with two other sections of the Patriot Act, are set to expire after midnight tonight. This means the bulk collection would have to stop without re-authorization, but so would the collection of other records allowed by Section 215.

The recent 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling made a straight re-authorization difficult, however. Because the three-judge appellate panel ruled that Section 215 as written cannot be used to legally justify the mass collection of US phone records, lawmakers were left with the choice of either revising Section 215 so that it does authorize bulk collection or re-authorizing it as is and leaving the government with no legal coverage for its bulk collection program.

The USA Freedom Act was proffered as a compromise—it would essentially re-authorize Section 215 so that the government could continue to obtain business records relevant to an investigation, but kill the bulk collection of phone records. Under the legislation, the government would have six months of transition to close down its collection program.

McConnell failed last week to get the Patriot Act re-authorized, so he tried to get a temporary extension for the expiring sections to buy time until lawmakers could decide on a permanent solution. But opposition was strong, particularly after a report released last week by the Justice Department’s own inspector general office revealed that between 2007 and 2009, the government had been using Section 215 to also obtain access to large collections of electronic communication transactional information—which likely refers to the “to” and “from” lines of emails and text and instant messages, as well as web addresses visited and internet protocol addresses.

The report also called into question the efficacy of the collection programs. The inspectors found that neither the call records collection program—nor any other bulk surveillance conducted under Section 215—had produced significant intelligence or intelligence that they weren’t able to obtain through other means.

“[T]he agents we interviewed did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders, but told us that the material produced pursuant to Section 215 orders was valuable in that it was used to support other investigative requests, develop investigative leads, and corroborate other information,” the inspectors stated.

This provided more fodder for those opposed to the Patriot Act. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) staged a kind of filibuster last week to prevent any re-authorizion or extension of the Patriot Act. With that failing as well as the USA Freedom Act, McConnell convened the special session today, following a week-long holiday recess, to revisit them. The Senate was looking at two motions today—one to advance the USA Freedom Act and the other to pass an extension for the sections of the Patriot Act that are set to expire.

The White House was clear on what it wanted senators to do. During his weekly address to the nation on Saturday, President Obama called on Americans to “join me in speaking with one voice to the Senate. Put the politics aside. Put our national security first. Pass the USA Freedom Act—now.”

Though the senators didn’t heed those words tonight, it appears likely that eventually the bill will pass. The procedural voice vote earlier in the evening agreeing to take up the reform bill passed by 77-17, showing there is likely sufficient support to pass the law soon and put an end to the bulk collection program for good.

Story originally written by Kim Zetter for WIRED

FBI agents can’t point to any major terrorism cases they’ve cracked thanks to the key snooping powers in the Patriot Act, the Justice Department’s inspector general said in a report Thursday that could complicate efforts to keep key parts of the law operating.

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz said that between 2004 and 2009, the FBI tripled its use of bulk collection under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows government agents to compel businesses to turn over records and documents, and increasingly scooped up records of Americans who had no ties to official terrorism investigations.

The FBI did finally come up with procedures to try to minimize the information it was gathering on non-targets, but it took far too long, Mr. Horowitz said in the 77-page report, which comes just as Congress is trying to decide whether to extend, rewrite or entirely nix Section 215.

Backers say the Patriot Act powers are critical and must be kept intact, particularly with the spread of the threat from terrorists. But opponents have doubted the efficacy of Section 215, particularly when it’s used to justify bulk data collection such as in the case of the National Security Agency’s phone metadata program, revealed in leaks from former government contractor Edward Snowden.

The new report adds ammunition to those opponents, with the inspector general concluding that no major cases have been broken by use of the Patriot Act’s records-snooping provisions.

“The agents we interviewed did not identify any major case developments that resulted from use of the records obtained in response to Section 215 orders,” the inspector general concluded — though he said agents did view the material they gathered as “valuable” in developing other leads or corroborating information.”

The report said agents bumped their number of bulk-data requests under Section 215 from seven in 2004 to 21 in 2009 as a result of technological advances and legislative changes that the intelligence community believed expanded the reach of the law.

Increasingly, that meant scooping up information on those who weren’t targets of a terrorism investigation, Mr. Horowitz said. He said that while Section 215 authority allows the government to do that, the FBI needed more checks to make sure it was using the power properly.

“While the expanded scope of these requests can be important uses of Section 215 authority, we believe these expanded uses require continued significant oversight,” he concluded.

The report was an update to a previous study done in 2008 that urged the department to figure out ways to minimize the amount of data it was gathering on ordinary Americans even as it was targeting terrorists.

In Thursday’s report Mr. Horowitz said the administration finally came up with procedures — five years later. He said it never should have taken that long but that he considers that issue solved.

The report was heavily redacted, and key details were deleted. The entire chart showing the number of Section 215 requests made from 2007 through 2009 was blacked out, as was the breakdown of what types of investigations they stemmed from: counterintelligence, counterterrorism, cyber or foreign intelligence investigations.

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is slated to expire at the end of this month. The House, in an overwhelming bipartisan vote, passed a bill to renew it but also to limit it so the government could no longer do bulk collection such as the NSA phone data program. That legislation is known as the USA Freedom Act.

But Senate Republican leaders have balked, insisting the NSA program and Section 215 should be kept intact as is.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is leading the fight to protect the NSA program, is counting on his opponents not being able to muster the 60 votes needed to pass the bill, leaving them with the choice of either extending Section 215 or seeing all of the powers expire — including those that would go after specific terrorist suspects. Mr. McConnell believes that, faced with that choice, enough of his colleagues will vote to extend all of the powers.

Read the full story here.

This article originally reported by Maggie Ybarra at The Washington Times