Tag: privacy

Killing the Constitution

In the last days of East Germany, when government officials detected that their power was unraveling, they ratcheted up enforcement of the nation’s reporting laws. The reporting laws made it a felony to know of a crime and fail to report it. It was also a crime to tell the person of whose crime you learned that you had done so. There was no right to privacy and there was no freedom of speech.

This Orwellian tangle resulted, of course, in many false reports of crimes. It also resulted in many prosecutions for failing to report crimes or for warning others that they were being spied upon. As of this past weekend, we in America are headed to the same authoritarian place. Thanks to legislation that fell one vote short of demise in each house of Congress last weekend, America in 2024 will soon resemble East Germany in the late 1980s, where nearly everyone was a spy and no one could talk about it.

Here is the backstory.

The quintessential American right is the right to be left alone. Justice Louis Brandeis called it the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized persons. It presumes that you can think as you wish and say what you think and read what you want and publish what you say, that you can exclude whomever you wish – including the government – from your property and from your thoughts; and that you can do all this without a government permission slip or fear of government reprisal.

This natural right is also protected in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which requires a warrant issued by a judge based upon probable cause of crime before the government can invade your property or spy on you.

The warrant requirement serves three purposes.

The first is to force the government to stay in the lane of crime solving, rather than crime predicting.

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Judge Challenges Appeals Court Over Computer Monitoring Ban in January 6 Parole

A US federal judge – who imposed draconian surveillance measures against a man charged and later convicted and paroled in connection with the January 6 events – is clearly unimpressed by the ruling of a US Court of Appeals, that recently overturned his decision.

Senior District Judge Reggie Walton now wants the controversy officially revisited, so he scheduled a new hearing date for June 4 in a bid to make his original order for Daniel Goodwyn’s computer to be surveilled for “mis/disinformation” stick.

Early in April, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia announced that the order to monitor and “inspect” Goodwyn’s computer for “mis/disinformation” was the result of the district court having “plainly erred.”

Goodwyn (described in reports as a citizen journalist) was convicted on a single trespassing misdemeanor count based on him spending 36 seconds inside the Capitol on the day.

Goodwyn was subsequently arrested and sentenced by Judge Walton to two months in prison, but that was not all – his computer was to be “monitored and inspected” during his parole.

This last bit of the ruling was too much for the circuit court, which overturned it earlier in the month. The ruling said Walton “plainly erred in imposing the computer-monitoring condition without considering whether it was ‘reasonably related’ to the relevant sentencing factors and involved ‘no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary’ to achieve the purposes behind sentencing.”

But now Walton is trying to once again impose surveillance of Goodwyn’s computer, ordering him to “show cause” as to why that should not be happening.

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Privacy Under Siege: Europol and the UK Crime Agency Target Encryption, Call For Backdoors

What is best known as the “politicization of institutions” in authoritarian societies is these days making a creeping but steady progress in some countries/blocs one would not have suspected of such things until relatively recently.

Here we have Europol (EU’s law enforcement agency) and the supposedly “divested” from the EU shenanigans via Brexit UK – but is it really? – and that country’s National Crime Agency (NCA), teaming up to attack Meta for dozens and dozens of reasonable reasons, but for the one thing the company is apparently trying to do right.

Read the joint declaration here.

And that’s implementing in its products end-to-end encryption (E2EE), the very, necessary, irreplaceable software backbone of a safe and secure internet for everybody. Yet that is what many governments, and here we see the EU via Europol, and the UK, keep attempting to damage.

But mass surveillance is a hard sell, so the established pitch is to link the global and overall internet problem, to that of the safety of children online, and justify it that way.

The Europol executive director, Catherine De Bolle, compared E2EE to “sending your child into a room full of strangers and locking the door.”

And yet, the technological truth and reality of the situation is that undermining E2EE is akin to giving the key to your front door and access to everybody in it, children included, to somebody you “trust” (say, governments and organizations who like you to take their trustworthiness for granted).

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Down with Big Brother: Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution

“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”—George Orwell, 1984

The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

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Biden Opposes Bill That Would Keep Cops and Feds From Buying Your Data

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is once again trying to keep the government from performing an end run around the Fourth Amendment by buying people’s personal data. This week, President Joe Biden indicated that he opposed the bill.

H.R. 4639, known as the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, “expands prohibited disclosures of stored electronic communications” to include purchases of data by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

First introduced in 2021 by Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), Rand Paul (R–Ky.), Patrick Leahy (D–Vt.), and Mike Lee (R–Utah), the bill has been reintroduced in subsequent sessions. The current version was introduced in the House by Rep. Warren Davidson (R–Ohio) and in the Senate by Wyden and Paul.

On Wednesday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D–N.Y.), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and one of the House bill’s cosponsors, affirmed his support on the House floor. “That anyone should have Americans’ private information is highly troubling to me,” Nadler said. “But that our federal government can obtain it without a warrant should be troubling to all of us.”

On Tuesday, the White House announced that the Biden administration “strongly opposes” the bill. According to a Statement of Administration Policy, the bill “generally would prohibit the Intelligence Community and law enforcement from obtaining certain commercially available information—subject only to narrow, unworkable exceptions.”

The Stored Communications Act forbids technology companies from disclosing certain subscriber information, including to the government. But certain types of data—including search histories, credit reports, employment records, and cellphone geolocation data—is “commercially available” and can be sold by third parties called data brokers. Often this data is purchased by private companies in order to better tailor their ad spending.

Governments typically need a warrant to access any of that type of information—as recently as 2018, the Supreme Court affirmed in Carpenter v. United States that the government cannot access a person’s cellphone location data without a warrant. “Although such records are generated for commercial purposes,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts, that alone did not “negate” the plaintiff’s expectation of privacy. “We decline to grant the state unrestricted access to a wireless carrier’s database of physical location information.”

Put simply: Come back with a warrant.

But instead of honoring that decision, law enforcement and intelligence agencies just started buying the information from data brokers instead: The National Security Agency (NSA) buys people’s internet metadata, and agencies within the Department of Homeland Security—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—purchase cellphone location data.

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Judge Ordered Jan. 6 Defendant’s Computer Monitored for ‘Disinformation’—Appeals Court Overturns

A sentencing requirement that Jan. 6 defendant Daniel Goodwyn have his computer monitored by the government for “disinformation” has been vacated by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The court on March 26 published a mandate sending the case back to U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton to remove the computer monitoring requirement he issued as part of the sentencing judgment in the case on June 15, 2023.

“Judge Walton had no legal basis to issue the special condition,” Carolyn Stewart, Mr. Goodwyn’s attorney, told The Epoch Times in an April 3 email.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the judge “plainly erred” in imposing the computer monitoring. Judges Gregory Katsas, Naomi Rao, and Bradley Garcia issued a per curiam order vacating the monitoring provision.

Judge Walton, when imposing a 60-day jail sentence in June 2023, said Mr. Goodwyn spread “disinformation” during a broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on March 14, 2023. Judge Walton ordered that Mr. Goodwyn’s computer be subject to “monitoring and inspection” by a probation agent to check if he spread Jan. 6 disinformation during the term of his supervised release.

The judge also referred to Mr. Goodwyn spreading alleged “misinformation,” using the term interchangeably with “disinformation.”

Mr. Goodwyn, 35, of Corinth, Texas, pleaded guilty on Jan. 31, 2023, to one misdemeanor count of entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority. The charge could have meant up to a year in prison.

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EU’s Plan To Mass Surveil Private Chats Has Leaked

The latest version of the proposed European Parliament (EP) and EU Council regulation to adopt new rules related to combating child sexual abuse has been made available online.

Despite its declared goal, the proposal, which first saw the light of day in May 2022 and is referred to by opponents as “chat control” is in fact a highly divisive draft of legislation that aims to accomplish the stated objective through mass surveillance of citizens’ private communications.

Now, the French site contexte.com has the full text of the newest version of the proposal – yet another controversial undertaking of the current, 6-month Belgian EU presidency. Judging by the leaked document, the key and most contentious components of “chat control” have not been changed.

German EP member (MEP) Patrick Breyer and long-time vocal critic of the proposal said on his blog that the text would be discussed by a law enforcement working party at the Council on Wednesday, with the target date for adoption being sometime in June.

That will happen once any political differences have been smoothed over at the EU’s Committee of Permanent Representatives (“COREPER”).

Commenting on the development, Breyer remarked that the Council’s legal service has also confirmed that the new version “does not change the nature of detection orders.”

“Limiting bulk chat searches to ‘high-risk services’ is meaningless because every communication service is misused also for sharing illegal images and therefore has an imminently high risk of abuse,” the MEP noted of the latest proposal, adding:

“Informing law enforcement only of repeat hits is also meaningless, as falsely flagged beach pictures or consensual sexting rarely involve just a single photo.”

He went on to explain that the upcoming regulation is set up in a way that will result in the end of the privacy of people’s digital communications, since the subject of content searches will be “millions” of chats and photos, including those belonging to persons who have no links to child sexual abuse.

And because the technology proposed to carry out the mass surveillance is unreliable, there are also risks of this content getting leaked.

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Facebook let Netflix see user DMs to help them tailor content as part of a close collaboration between the two tech giants, new court documents claims

Facebook‘s parent company Meta allegedly allowed Netflix to peer at its user DMs ‘for nearly a decade’ to help the streaming giant better tailor content for its own users, an explosive lawsuit has alleged. 

Court documents unsealed on March 23 that were filed last April as part of a major anti-trust lawsuit against Meta appear to have exposed the intricate relationship between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest players. 

The class-action lawsuit, filed by two US citizens, Maximilian Klein and Sarah Grabert, alleged Netflix and Facebook ‘enjoyed a special relationship’, with the social media platform giving the streaming site ‘bespoke access’ to user data. 

The two Silicon Valley players also agreed to ‘custom partnerships and integrations that helped supercharge Facebook’s ad targeting and ranking models’ from at least 2011, thanks to the personal relationship between Netflix’s co-founder Reed Hastings and Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. 

Lawyers alleged that ‘within a month’ of Hastings joining Facebook’s board of directors, the two companies signed an ‘Inbox API’ (Application Programming Interface) agreement that ‘allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s user’s private message inboxes.’

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Kentucky Approves Gun Owner Privacy Protection

In a significant victory for Second Amendment advocates and the right to privacy, Kentucky has taken a bold step forward with the passage of House Bill 357, also known as the Second Amendment Privacy Act. This pioneering legislation, which received robust support from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) marks a crucial milestone in protecting the privacy and financial details of firearm and ammunition purchasers in the Bluegrass State.

Crafted with the dedication and foresight of Kentucky state Representatives Derek Lewis and Michael Meredith, along with state Senator Jason Howell, the Second Amendment Privacy Act ensures that the financial transactions of law-abiding citizens buying firearms and ammunition are shielded from undue scrutiny and politicization. By prohibiting financial institutions from using a specific firearm code to track these purchases, the law stands as a bulwark against discrimination and unwarranted surveillance.

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Is IRS using AI to infringe upon our financial privacy?

The House Judiciary Committee has opened an inquiry to whether the IRS is using artificial intelligence to invade Americans’ financial privacy after an agency employee was captured in an undercover tape suggesting there was a widespread surveillance operation underway that might not be constitutional.

Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., sent a letter last week to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen demanding documents, and answers as to how the agency is currently employing artificial intelligence to comb through bank records to look for possible tax cheats.

The inquiry comes after the same panel has been exploring why the FBI was obtaining Americans’ bank records, including those of Jan. 6 suspects, without using search warrants or subpoenas.

Hageman told Just the News that lawmakers are increasingly concerned that federal law-enforcement agencies are no longer abiding by constitutional protections, including prohibitions against search and seizure without a warrant. 

The congressional inquiry was prompted by a September 2023 announcement that the IRS is using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”

The Treasury Department has since acknowledged it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions’ since late 2022.”

Jordan’s and Hageman’s letter said lawmakers have evidence and reason to believe that the IRS and Department of Justice (DOJ) are actively monitoring millions of Americans’ private transactions, bank accounts, and related financial information—without any legal process—using the AI-powered system.

“This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private financial records raises serious doubts about the IRS’s—and the federal government’s—respect for Americans’ fundamental civil liberties,” the letter said.

You can read the letter here: 2024-03-20 JDJ HH to IRS re AI surveillance.pdf

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