Tag: mass surveillance

CIA BUSTED Doing The UNTHINKABLE To US CITIZENS … on US Soil!

Big Brother is watching you. He gets your emails, your texts, your phone records, and who knows what else they have. If you don’t think the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ aren’t the most corrupt government agencies of all time I want some of what you are smoking. In June of 2013, it was revealed that the NSA was collecting information from hundreds of millions of US citizens.

Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.)  said:

(The CIA)  “has secretly conducted its own bulk program” and “has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection.”

“This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress. Until the [Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board] report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA’s collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.”

“[W]hat these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law. In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

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IARPA Project Aims to Identify People from Drones by More Than Just Their Face

The intelligence community’s key research arm recently moved to develop biometric software systems that can identify people’s entire bodies from long ranges in challenging conditions.  

Through this newly unveiled multi-year research effort—called the Biometric Recognition & Identification at Altitude and Range or BRIAR program—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity is working with teams from multiple companies and universities to pave the way for next-level recognition technology.

“There’s such a diversity of technical challenges that are trying to be addressed. This is tackling a problem that’s important for the government and for national security—but I think is underrepresented in the academic research because it’s not a topic focus area,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Lars Ericson told Nextgov on Wednesday. “You need to have government involvement to stimulate the data, and the research, and the evaluations in this topic area. So, I think that there’s a lot of potential for broad benefits to biometrics and computer vision, while also driving towards this very important government mission capability.”

Ericson’s background is in physics, as well as biometrics applications and technologies. He oversees IARPA’s biometrics portfolio of research efforts.

As one of the latest programs to kick off, BRIAR’s ultimate aim, according to a broad agency announcement released last year to underpin this work, is to “deliver an end-to-end [whole-body] biometric system capable of accurate and reliable verification, recognition and identification of persons from elevated platforms and at distances out to 1,000 meters, across a range of challenging capture conditions.”

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Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet

As the digital revolution was underway in the mid-nineties, research departments at the CIA and NSA were developing programs to predict the usefulness of the world wide web as a tool for capturing what they dubbed “birds of a feather” formations. That’s when flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in rhythmical patterns.

They were particularly interested in how these principles would influence the way that people would eventually move together on the burgeoning internet: Would groups and communities move together in the same way as ‘birds of a feather, so that they could be tracked in an organised way? And if their movements could be indexed and recorded, could they be identified later by their digital fingerprints?

To answer these questions, the CIA and NSA established a series of initiatives called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) to directly fund tech entrepreneurs through an inter-university disbursement program. Naming their first unclassified briefing for computer scientists ‘birds of a feather,’ which took place in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

Amongst the first grants provided by the MDDS program to capture the ‘birds of a feather’ theory towards building a massive digital library and indexing system – using the internet as its backbone – were dispersed to two Stanford University PHD’s, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were making significant headways in the development of web-page ranking technology that would track user movements online.

Those disbursements, together with $4.5 million in grants from a multi-agency consortium including NASA and DARPA, became the seed funding that was used to establish Google.

Eventually MDDS was integrated into DARPA’s global eavesdropping and data-mining activities that would attempt total information awareness over US citizens. Few understand the extent to which Silicon Valley is the alter-ego of Pentagon-land, even fewer realise the impact this has had on the social sphere.   But the story does not begin with Google, nor the military origins of the internet, it goes back much further in time, to the dawn of counterinsurgency and PSYOPs during the second world war.

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Teacher Spying Is Instilling Surveillance Culture Into Students

For the teachers, it began in October at the California Teachers Association’s 2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference. Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki explained how they identified potential new members of UBU, the school’s club of LGBTQ supporters. “When we were doing our virtual learning—we totally stalked what they were doing on Google, when they weren’t doing schoolwork,” Caldeira said. “One of them was Googling ‘Trans Day of Visibility.’ And we’re like, ‘Check.’ We’re going to invite that kid when we get back on campus.”

Whatever you think of LGBTQ issues, the fact that a teacher can remotely track what students do online should give you pause. This was not a case of a teacher reviewing the browser history on a classroom computer after school. As Caldeira said, albeit with her tongue in cheek, they were stalking the kids. (The title of Caldeira and Baraki’s presentation declared that it was about running such clubs “in conservative communities.” Needless to say, conservative teachers can snoop on kids’ online activities too.)

The Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas, California, where Caldeira is employed (and is currently on leave, following the uproar over the story), uses GoGuardian, a standard software tool for monitoring what students do during Zoom classes. GoGuardian, which promotes itself as powering “digital learning environments where every student can thrive,” is being used in about 30,000 schools.

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6 Things We Know about the CIA’s Secret Mass Surveillance Program

The Central Intelligence Agency has secretly been running mass surveillance operations to collect data on Americans, according to a newly published letter written by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).

Wyden and Henrich, both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote the letter in April 2021, and the letter was partly declassified on Thursday.

In the letter, Wyden and Henrich called on the CIA to inform the public about the data collection program, calling for full transparency.

“This declassification is urgent,” the senators wrote.

The CIA responded to the allegations in a statement published by the Wall Street Journal.

“CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission, and conducts our activities, including collection activities, in compliance with U.S. law, Executive Order 12333, and our Attorney General guidelines,” said Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer. “CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.”

The allegations from Wyden and Heinrich are serious, but the extent of the danger and severity is clouded by several factors, not the least of which is the fact that the letter is highly redacted.

So I’d encourage readers to review the redacted letter themselves, as well as the press release that accompanied its declassification. Nevertheless, here are a few important takeaways.

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Shock Reports Allege CIA ‘Exploiting Loopholes’ to Cast Secret Dragnet on American Citizens

Call it Snowden 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Nine years after National Security Administration whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed that the United States was keeping a massive trove of information on its own citizens obtained via a secret digital dragnet, two Democrat senators are alleging the CIA has assembled a similar clandestine stockpile of our data.

According to The Hill, the late-Friday release of the reports is suddenly grabbing attention, if just because concerns over privacy have become widespread of late — targeting everyday Americans, as well as presidential candidates.

The reports were sent on the same day special counsel John Durham alleged in a court filing that lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign paid techs to “infiltrate” servers in both Trump Tower and the White House to intercept data on Donald Trump during the election and its aftermath.

According to the Associated Press, a heavily redacted letter was sent by Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

They asked intelligence officials to detail a program which allegedly collected bulk data on American citizens in secret and operated “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.”

“There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties,” the AP’s Nomaan Merchant noted.

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CIA Collecting Data on Americans

Two Democrat senators say the CIA has been operating a secret program that collects data on Americans.

Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to intelligence officials looking for additional details about the undisclosed data repository. The letter, sent April 2021, was declassified on Thursday with portions of it blacked out.

Both Wyden and Heinrich are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In the letter, Wyden and Heinrich requested the declassification of a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board [PCLOB] on a CIA bulk collection program.

A statement released on Thursday by the two Senators said: “The letter, which was declassified and made public today reveals that “the CIA has secretly conducted its own bulk program,” authorized under Executive Order 12333, rather than the laws passed by Congress.

“The letter notes that the program was ‘entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.'”

“What these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law. In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context,” Wyden and Heinrich said in the statement.

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