Tag: warrantless surveillance

San Francisco wants real-time access to private surveillance cameras

Lawmakers in San Francisco are deliberating on a law that would give the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) real-time access to private security cameras, like those in retail shops and even residential doorbells. The city’s Rules Committee is set to vote on the ordinance on July 18.

The draft ordinance is an amendment to the city’s 2019 surveillance ordinance, which requires the SFPD to get permission from elected officials and the general public before launching or using surveillance systems. Without the law, the SFPD could conduct surveillance without the knowledge of the public.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

The law also prevents SFPD’s real-time access to surveillance videos from CCTVs and other cameras. Currently, the police are only allowed to get historical surveillance videos from privately-owned cameras for specific cases.

The proposed amendment was promoted by Mayor London Breed following a weekend of theft and burglaries last November in the Bay Area.

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The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Admit They Are Spying on Canadians by Turning on Their Cell Phone Cameras and Mics

Despite having the technology for years, this is the first time the Royal Canadian Mounted Police admitted that they are spying on their citizens by logging into their phone cameras and phones. 

After watching the trucker protests in Canada last year, it comes as no surprise that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are spying on Canadians.

The RCMP admitted this for the first time:

This is the first time RCMP has even acknowledged that it has this ability, which uses malware to intrude on phones and devices, despite having had the technology for years…

…The RCMP says those tools were only used in serious cases when other, unintrusive measures were not successful.

We saw this past winter what the RCMP did to the truckers who protested the insane mandates coming down from PM Trudeau and his government.

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Supreme Court Refuses to Limit Warrantless Surveillance

According to the Supreme Court, the legality of NSA mass surveillance can’t even be legally challenged.

This was the message the Court sent when it refused to take up Jewel v. NSA, allowing an appellate court decision to stand.

The high court’s decision further underscores the futility of depending on federal courts to challenge federal surveillance power. Tenth Amendment Center executive director Micheal Boldin called it “a really bad strategy.”

“We don’t expect it to ever get the job done.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the NSA in 2008 on behalf of Carolyn Jewel and several other AT&T customers in an effort to end dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary people. The EFF based its case on declarations from three NSA whistleblowers, along with other evidence that included documents published by the Washington Post and the Guardian. The evidence showed that the NSA collected communication directly from fiber optic cables. It also revealed a domestic telephone record collection program that the government confirmed in 2013.  Mark Klein worked as an AT&T tech who claimed the communications giant routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White denied the plaintiffs’ challenge saying that it would require “impermissible disclosure of state secret information” The Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the district court opinion, affirming that “state secret privilege” blocked the plaintiff’s efforts to tp prove that their data was intercepted. Unable to prove that, they had no standing to sue.

As EFF put it, the Supreme Court allowed the case to be dismissed because the surveillance program that everybody has known about since Edward Snowden released a trove of documents in 2013 is a “secret.”

 “Yes, you read that right: something we all know is a still officially a “secret” and so cannot be the subject to litigation.”

As the EFF explains, the U.S. government contends that “even if all of the allegations of serious law-breaking and Constitutional violations are true, surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans is exempt from judicial review.”

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FBI using low-flying spy planes over U.S.

The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the U.S. carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology – all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned.

The planes’ surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge’s approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. The FBI said it uses front companies to protect the safety of the pilots and aircraft. It also shields the identity of the aircraft so that suspects on the ground don’t know they’re being watched by the FBI.

In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found.

Aerial surveillance represents a changing frontier for law enforcement, providing what the government maintains is an important tool in criminal, terrorism or intelligence probes. But the program raises questions about whether there should be updated policies protecting civil liberties as new technologies pose intrusive opportunities for government spying.

U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services.

Even basic aspects of the program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The FBI also has been careful not to reveal its surveillance flights in court documents.

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Report Shows FBI Spied on 3.3 Million Americans Without a Warrant, GOP Demands Answers

Top House Republicans are demanding answers from the FBI after court-ordered information came to light showing that the federal agency had collected the information of over 3 million Americans without a warrant.

In a May 25 letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mike Turner (R-Ohio) asked Wray to explain why his agency had wiretapped and gathered personal information on over 3.3 million Americans without a warrant (pdf).

Limited authority to gather foreign intelligence information is granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Specifically, section 702 of the bill says: “the Attorney General (AG) and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) may jointly authorize the targeting of (i) non-U.S. persons (ii) who are reasonably believed to be outside of the United States (iii) to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

However, this power can grant an expanding circle of possible searches to the FBI and other intel agencies, who can use the same power against American citizens who had any interaction with targeted foreigners.

Historically, insight into how FISA has been used against American citizens has been limited and hidden behind classified reports.

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Americans warned: Police now authorized to track you via cell phone

Police across America now can track citizens through their cell phones – without a warrant – despite the Fourth Amendment’s ban on warrantless searches, according to a team of civil-rights lawyers at the Rutherford Institute.

That’s the result of the U.S. Supreme Court deciding not to intervene in a lower court decision that authorized exactly that.

The institute had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case Hammond v. U.S. that challenged the tracking of people through their cell phones as unconstitutional.

That tracking can tell police a person’s location with great precision, “whether that person is at home, at the library, a political event, a doctor’s office, etc.,” the organization reported.

“Americans are being swept up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.

“Added to that, police are tracking people’s movements by way of license plate toll readers; scouring social media posts; triangulating data from cellphone towers and WiFi signals; layering facial recognition software on top of that; and then cross-referencing footage with public social media posts, all in an effort to identify, track and eventually round us up. This is what it means to live in a suspect society,” he said.

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FBI Conducted Millions of Searches of Americans’ Electronic Data in 2021 without a Warrant

The FBI conducted millions of searches of Americans’ electronic data in 2021 without a warrant, according to a new report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The FBI claims it conducted the searches as they sought to curb cyberattacks.

“In the first half of the year, there were a number of large batch queries related to attempts to compromise U.S. critical infrastructure by foreign cyber actors,” according to the report, Bloomberg reported. “These queries, which included approximately 1.9 million query terms related to potential victims — including U.S. persons — accounted for the vast majority of the increase in U.S. person queries conducted by FBI over the prior year.”

The ACLU called the FBI’s warrantless spying an invasion of privacy ‘on an enormous scale.’

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Homeland Security secretly collected data on Americans without a warrant

Senator Ron Wyden is calling for an investigation after finding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has secretly monitored and collected records on 200 million American money transfers without obtaining a warrant for at least the past 12 years.

After reviewing a letter Wyden wrote to the DHS inspector general, the Wall Street Journal reported that it was the first time Congress learned about the program, the Oregon Democratic senator’s office first learned of it last month.

The Division of Homeland Security was collecting data on domestic and international money transfers of that amount going to or from Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas – as well as money transfers over that amount going to or from Mexico from anywhere in the U.S.

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Supreme Court Sees Nothing Wrong with Prolonged, Warrantless Spying of One’s Home by Police Using Hidden Cameras

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time. In refusing to hear an appeal in Travis Tuggle v. U.S., the Supreme Court left in place a lower court ruling which concluded that no “search” in violation of the Fourth Amendment had occurred because the private activity recorded by the hidden surveillance cameras took place in public view. The Rutherford Institute and the Cato Institute had filed an amicus brief in Tuggle warning that without adequate safeguards in place, there would be no turning back from the kinds of intrusions posed by such expansive, ever-watching surveillance technology capable of revealing intimate details of a person’s life.

Jim Harper with TechLaw at the University of Arizona College of Law assisted The Rutherford Institute and the Cato Institute in advancing the Fourth Amendment privacy arguments in Tuggle.

“Unfortunately, we are steadily approaching a future where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “As the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals recognized, ‘Foreseeable expansion in technological capabilities and the pervasive use of ever-watching surveillance will reduce Americans’ anonymity, transforming what once seemed like science fiction into fact.’”

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Pelosi Doubles Down on IRS Looking Into Bank Transactions

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has doubled down on a provision in the Democrats’ multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill that would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to see information on all Americans’ bank transactions totaling $600 or more. Republicans and banks have raised the alarm about the provision, reporting that their constituents and clients are deeply concerned about the proposal.

Since the introduction of their reconciliation bill, Democrats have insisted that the bill will not add to the debt or the deficit, claiming that all new spending in the bill will be paid for.

Along with significantly increasing marginal tax rates to pay for the bill, Democrats proposed and wrote into the bill a section to allow the IRS to gather Americans’ private information from banks, including information on all transactions totaling more than $600.

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