Washington District Court Judge Landmark Ruling: You Are Not Your IP Address

by Nomad

A Washington judge's ruling in a copyright infringement case may have profound implications on the ability to prosecute cybercrime and to issue surveillance warrants by the NSA.

According to Judge Robert Lasnik, a United States federal judge, on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, evidence made up purely of IP addresses does not meet the legal requirements of pleading standards for pursuing the case against online pirates. He has ruled that IP address alone do not provide a sufficient means of identification.  

According one source:

The fact of the matter and the law is that it is almost impossible to associate piracy based on the IP address and the IP address alone. The actual culprit might have been a family member, guest, or even a hacker. At the very least, the subscriber with that IP address can be scolded for not safeguarding his or her home computer.

In other words, the evidence may show that a particular IP was used but that doesn't mean that the accused in the courtroom is the one who used that IP address. 

That's really not news. The big law firms who have made a fortune bounty hunting for large media giants, have been successful using this prosecutorial method for years. 

Courts have been not questioned it. But they are starting to wake up, it seems.

Why Rand Paul's Lawsuit against Obama Administration on Spying Could Backfire on the GOP

by Nomad

Exclusive: Rand Paul's latest gimmick about suing the Obama administration over NSA surveillance operations, like PRISM might just backfire.  A thorough review of the legislation of Congress during the Bush era and the mixed messages from the Republican conservatives ever since 2001 could be a major humiliation in the 2014 election year.  But only if American citizens genuinely care about the truth.

The other day Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky announced that he was planning to open a class-action lawsuit against the Obama Administration over the NSA data-collection policies. Never one to miss an opportunity to make an issue into a spectacle, Rand told reporters that people needed to tell the government that it can't have access to emails and phone records without permission or without a specific warrant.  The folks at Brietbart.com and Fox News went all starry-eyed at the news:

This allows the American people to join together in a grassroots manner against President Obama’s NSA for the first time in the legal system, as all other lawsuits have been individuals suing against the agency.

The irony about it is that a quick glance at history will show us that Rand really needs to turn his attention to his own party -even to his own state. The answer to who relaxed the existing (though inadequate) oversight over the NSA is right under Rand's nose.

The Patriot Act and FISA

In the hysteria that followed the terror attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, Americans were more than ready to accept radical measures to thwart further attacks. What resulted was The Patriot Act. How this constitutionally-questionable legislation was ever passed into law reveals so much about how the Bush administration was able to achieve its goals. The techniques used would be used time and time again, right up until the end with the emergency Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout.

On October 23, 2001, just over a month after the September 11th attacks, (actually only 25 working days) Republican Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner introduced H.R. 3162 (later to be known as The Patriot Act ) on the House floor. 
In just two days, the bill passed both the House (357 to 66) and the Senate (98 to 1) and was signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001.  Thus, one of the most controversial pieces of legislation, one that gave unheard of powers to the executive branch and one that effectively shredded long cherished rights in the Constitution, was passed into law in just three days. 

Before PRISM: The Curious History of the US World-Wide Surveillance Network- Part Two

by Nomad

In Part One of this three-part series we examined one small aspect of the long history of illegal surveillance conducted by the US government on its own citizens.

Started back in 1945, Project SHAMROCK which involved the collecting of all telegraphic communication coming in and out of the US was by no means a small operation. It could never have existed without the kind assistance of the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT.

Back in the 1970s, the Church Committee- which had investigated illegal snooping activity by the CIA and NSA- concluded that in its 30-year life, Shamrock constituted “the largest government interception program affecting Americans ever undertaken."

Like PRISM, Project SHAMROCK laid the groundwork for the same kind of shady collaboration between government and corporations to the cost of everybody's privacy.  

Findings by the Congressional committees would lead to the creation of new legislation called Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which sought to provide some kind of accountability, some kind of formal process.

As we shall see, by the end of the millennium, with the coming of technological advances like the Internet, those laws were becoming less and less effective.

The Temptations

Being able to listen to private conversations is, of course, a great temptation even under normal conditions. For a president faced with immense challenges any one of which hold the potential for catastrophic errors, the lust of more and more information must be addictive. During wartime or during a national or international emergency, that temptation becomes quite irresistible.

Author Bob Woodward in the book, Veil-The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, recounts one instance in which timely surveillance (not of an enemy but of a key regional ally) provided key information that led to one of the America’s most astounding victories against terrorism.

Before PRISM: The Curious History of the US World-Wide Surveillance Network- Part One

by Nomad
Recently many people seemed altogether mortified, shocked and angry when whistle-blower Edward Snowden, former contract employee of the National Security Agency (NSA) supplied both the Washington Post and The Guardian details about two top- secret surveillance operations.

The Snowden evidence describes one operation which was an effort to collect data from Verizon about millions of phone calls. The other operation was called PRISM. In that operation, metadata was harvested from millions of Internet sites. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple were all apparently involved in the PRISM operation. 

Although both programs seem to have been overseen by Congress and a top-secret court, the extent of the operations came as a shock to a lot of people. 

One source describes PRISM like this:

“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.”

What PRISM does is to allow the NSA and the FBI to tap 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.”

Who, the reporters and public asked, could have imagined that the United States government- for whatever reason- would engage in such violations of personal privacy? Conservative voters feel as though their worst fears about Big Government and about Barack Obama have been confirmed. Many stunned liberals are asking:Why would President Obama launch such an attack on our freedoms?

Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. People who have been paying attention should have known the extent of this type of surveillance.

Perhaps the only truly shocking aspect of the recent whistle-blowing revelations is the fact that anybody should be shocked at all. Everybody -those who were not sleeping-  should have known the extent of this type of surveillance. 

Much- but naturally not all- of the information about these operations had been made public a long ago. The American people (at those who were awake) were warned and chose to ignore the challenge to their civil liberties.. until now. 

The present anger – much of it unfairly directed at the Obama administration- comes a little late in the day. The evidence of these (and even more extensive and intrusive) electronic spying operations has been right under everybody's noses for over a decade. As we shall see in this report it is especially disingenuous for Republicans to bluster now.

The problem of the government’s covert spying on its own citizens began long before Obama, before Bush, Reagan or even before Nixon.