Worth Reading >>>>> Five ways to stop the NSA from spying on you

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Jun 182013

Five ways to stop the NSA from spying on you

The Washington Post
by Timothy B. Lee
June 10, 2013

If recent reports are to be believed, the National Security Agency has broad powers to capture private information about Americans. They know who we’re calling, they have access to our Gmail messages and AOL Instant Messenger chats, and it’s a safe bet that they have other interception capabilities that haven’t been publicly disclosed. Indeed, most mainstream communications technologies are vulnerable to government eavesdropping.

But all is not lost! The NSA’s spying powers are vast, but there are still ways to thwart the agency’s snooping. Here are five of them.

Browse anonymously with Tor

1. Browse anonymously with Tor

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been photographed with a Tor sticker on his laptop. Tor lets you use the Internet without revealing your IP address or other identifying information. The distributed network works by bouncing your traffic among several randomly selected proxy computers before sending it on to its real destination. Web sites will think you’re coming from whichever node your traffic happens to bounce off of last, which might be on the other side of the world.

Tor is easy to use. You can download the Tor Browser Bundle, a version of the Firefox browser that automatically connects to the Tor network for anonymous web browsing.

2. Keep your chats private with OTR

If you use a conventional instant messaging service like those offered by Google, AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft, logs of your chats may be accessible to the NSA through the PRISM program. But a chat extension called OTR (for “off the record”) offers “end-to-end” encryption. The server only sees the encrypted version of your conversations, thwarting eavesdropping.

To use OTR, both you and the person you’re chatting with need to use instant messaging software that supports it. I use a Mac OS X client called Adium, which works with Google, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo’s chat networks, among others. Windows and Linux users can use Pidgin. OTR works as an extension to conventional instant messaging networks, seamlessly adding privacy to the IM networks you already use. You can configure Adium or Pidgin so that if a person you’re chatting with is also running an OTR-capable client, it will automatically encrypt the conversation.

Make secure calls with Silent Circle

3. Make secure calls with Silent Circle

The conventional telephone network is vulnerable to government wiretapping. And many Internet-based telephony applications, including Skype, are thought to be vulnerable to interception as well.

But an Internet telephony application called Silent Circle is believed to be impervious to wiretapping, even by the NSA. Like OTR, it offers “end-to-end” encryption, meaning that the company running the service never has access to your unencrypted calls and can’t turn them over to the feds. The client software is open source, and Chris Soghoian, the chief technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union, says it has been independently audited to ensure that it doesn’t contain any “back doors.”

4. Make secure calls with Redphone

Redphone is another application that makes phone calls with end-to-end encryption. Interestingly, it was developed with financial support from U.S. taxpayers courtesy of the Open Technology Fund.

The government hopes to support dissidents in repressive regimes overseas. But the only way to build a communications application that people will trust is to make it impervious to snooping by any government, including ours. So like Silent Circle, the Redphone client software is open source and has been independently audited to make sure there are no back doors.

Make secure calls with Silent Circle (pic: Uwe Hermann)

5. Remove your cellphone battery to thwart tracking

The NSA phone records program revealed by the Guardian last week not only collects information about what phone numbers we call, it also collects data about the location of the nearest cellphone tower when we make calls. That gives the NSA the ability to determine your location every time you make a phone call — and maybe in between calls too.

Unfortunately, Soghoian says there’s no technical fix for this kind of surveillance. “The laws of physics will not let you hide your location from the phone company,” he says. The phone company needs to know where you are in order to reach you when you receive a phone call.

So if you don’t want the NSA to know where you’ve been, you only have one option: You need to turn off your cell phone. Or if you’re feeling extra paranoid, take out the battery or leave your phone at home.

You probably can’t hide metadata

Soghoian says that a similar point applies to your phone calling records. Encryption technology can prevent the government from intercepting the contents of voice communications. But it’s much harder to hide information about your calling patterns. And information about who you’ve called can be as revealing as the contents of the calls themselves.

“If you’re calling an abortion clinic or a phone sex hotline or a suicide counselor, what you say is basically the same as who you’re saying it to,” Soghoian argues.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy technological fix for this problem. Even obtaining a phone not specifically tied to your identity may not help, as it may be possible to identify you from your calling patterns.

This problem tripped up Paula Broadwell, who was outed last year as having an extra-marital relationship with Gen. David Petraeus. She had been sending e-mails from an anonymous Gmail account, and she had even been smart enough to avoid logging in from home.

But the FBI identified her anyway. Broadwell logged into the account from several different hotels. The FBI obtained lists of who had checked into those hotels on the relevant dates and looked for common names. Broadwell was the only one who had checked into all of the hotels.

So it’s fairly easy to protect the contents of your communications from government spying. But there’s no easy technological fix to prevent the government from finding out who you’re communicating with.

Direct Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/10/five-ways-to-stop-the-nsa-from-spying-on-you/

SECRET = TRANSPARENT?>>>> Obama calls NSA “SECRET DATA” gathering ‘TRANSPARENT’ in PBS interview

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Jun 182013

Obama calls NSA secret data gathering ‘transparent’ in PBS interview

FOX News
June 18, 2013

Obama calls NSA secret data gathering ‘transparent’ in PBS interview

President Obama says the case of Edward Snowden, the government contract worker who leaked documents about two secret data gathering programs, had been referred to the Department of Justice for “criminal investigation” and Snowden’s “possible extradition.”

In an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose recorded Sunday and broadcast Monday night, Obama said he would not comment on any potential prosecution of Snowden, who is now believed to be in Hong Kong.

Obama also defended the National Security Agency spying programs and called them “transparent.”

“That’s why we set up the FISA court,” he said, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs: one that gathers U.S. phone records and another that is designed to track the use of U.S.-based Internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism.

“We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place … that their phone calls aren’t being listened into; their text messages aren’t being monitored, their emails are not being read by some big brother somewhere,” Obama said.

Obama is in Northern Ireland for a meeting of leaders of allied countries. As Obama arrived, the latest series of Guardian articles drawing on the leaks claims that British eavesdropping agency GCHQ repeatedly hacked into foreign diplomats’ phones and emails with U.S. help, in an effort to get an edge in such high-stakes negotiations.

Obama’s announcement follows an online chat Monday by Edward Snowden, the man who leaked documents revealing the scope of the two programs to The Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers. He accused members of Congress and administration officials of exaggerating their claims about the success of the data gathering programs, including pointing to the arrest of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009.

Snowden said Zazi could have been caught with narrower, targeted surveillance programs — a point Obama conceded in his Monday interview without mentioning Snowden.

“We might have caught him some other way,” Obama said. “We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn’t go off. But at the margins we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” he said.

Obama also told Rose he wanted to encourage a national debate on the balance between privacy and national security — a topic renewed by Snowden’s disclosures.

Obama, who repeated earlier assertions that the programs were a legitimate counterterror tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties, said he has created a privacy and civil liberties oversight board.

“I’ll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities,” he said.

Congressional leaders have said Snowden’s disclosures have led terrorists to change their behavior, which may make them harder to stop — a charge Snowden discounted as an effort to silence him.

“The U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,” he said. He added the government “immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home,” by labeling him a traitor, and indicated he would not return to the U.S. voluntarily.

Congressional leaders have accused Snowden of treason for revealing once-secret surveillance programs two weeks ago in the Guardian and The Washington Post. The National Security Agency programs collect records of millions of Americans’ telephone calls and Internet usage as a counterterror tool. The disclosures revealed the scope of the collections, which surprised many Americans and have sparked debate about how much privacy the government can take away in the name of national security.

“It would be foolish to volunteer yourself to” possible arrest and criminal charges “if you can do more good outside of prison than in it,” he said.

Snowden dismissed being called a traitor by former Vice President Dick Cheney, who made the allegations in an interview this week on Fox News Sunday. Cheney was echoing the comments of both Democrats and Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, including Senate Intelligence committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein … the better off we all are,” Snowden said.

The Guardian announced that its website was hosting an online chat with Snowden, in hiding in Hong Kong, with reporter Glenn Greenwald receiving and posting his questions. The Associated Press couldn’t independently verify that Snowden was the man who posted 19 replies to questions.

In answer to the question of whether he fled to Hong Kong because he was spying for China, Snowden wrote, “Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

He added later, “I have had no contact with the Chinese government.”

Snowden was working as a systems analyst contractor for NSA at the time he had access to the then-secret programs. He defended his actions and said he considered what to reveal and what not to, saying he did not reveal any U.S. operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but instead showed that the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like universities and private businesses.

“These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash,” he said, though he gave no examples of what systems have crashed or in which countries.

“Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries — the majority of them are our allies — but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people,” he said. “And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting?”

Snowden was referring to Prism, one of the programs he disclosed. The program sweeps up Internet usage data from all over the world that goes through nine major U.S.-based Internet providers. The NSA can look at foreign usage without any warrants, and says the program doesn’t target Americans.

U.S. officials say the data-gathering programs are legal and operated under secret court supervision.

Snowden explained his claim that from his desk, he could “wiretap” any phone call or email — a claim top intelligence officials have denied. “If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT (signals intelligence) databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want,” he wrote in the answer posted on the Guardian site. “Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on — it’s all the same.”

The NSA did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that the kind of data that can be accessed and who can access it is severely limited.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Direct Link: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/18/obama-calls-nsa-secret-data-gathering-transparent-in-pbs-interview/

Desecration of the flag of the United States!: Lil Wayne defends trampling American flag while shooting new video

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Jun 182013

Lil Wayne defends trampling American flag while shooting new video

FOX News
by Hollie McKay
June 18, 2013

Lil Wayne defends trampling American flag while shooting new video

LOS ANGELES –

Rap star Lil Wayne was filmed trampling all over the American flag while shooting a new music video for the song “God Bless Amerika” in New Orleans this past weekend, but the rap star says anyone offended may want to change their tune.

In footage obtained by TMZ, Lil Wayne, 30, is doing his rap thing in front of the American flag, which is then dropped to the ground as he continues to perform the song, which includes lyrics like “My country ‘his of thee / Sweet land of kill ‘em all and let ‘em die / God bless Amerika / This ole’ godless Amerika.”

Wayne went on Facebook attempting to explain the video, and his song.

“It was never my intention to desecrate the flag of the United States of America. I was shooting a video for a song off my album entitled ‘God Bless Amerika’. The clip that surfaced on the Internet was a camera trick clip that revealed that behind the American Flag was the Hoods of America,” he said. “In the final edit of the video you will see the flag fall to reveal what is behind it but will never see it on the ground.”

Wayne also went on to explain his lyrics critical of his country.

“In most people eyes including my own who were raised in that environment, the Hood is the only America they know and the only America I knew growing up,” he said. “I was fortunate from my God giving talents to escape the Hood and see the other beautiful places this country has to offer but most people who are born in that environment don’t get that chance. That’s their view of their America. That was Dwayne M Carter from Hollygrove New Orleans view of America. That’s who I’m speaking for in this song.”

But many were less than impressed.

“Lil Wayne’s exploits are an atrocity to every soldier whose ever fought to protect this great country. His lack of maturity and respect for this country and our flag will without a doubt cost him in album sales,” publicist Angie Meyer Olszewski told FOX411′s Pop Tarts column. “This video has gone too far. Lil Wayne’s actions are just plain dumb. What more can be said?”

Plenty more, according to the Twitterverse.

“That’s disrespectful to the extreme,” one tweeted on Monday, some called the multiple Grammy winner an “idiot” who should be “locked up,” and several others urged a “boycott” of this ‘ignorant POS.”

Media critic and author of the “Death of Free Speech,” John Ziegler, said that as a free speech advocate, he supports the right to protest against America in this fashion, but also believes Americans offended by such acts should also express their free speech rights by not commercially supporting anything that Lil Wayne does.

“A boycott here would be perfectly appropriate,” Ziegler said. “But unlikely to be effective because his fan base will not see any negative coverage of this act from the news sources they are likely to consume.”

Others don’t see the performance as anything to be too upset about.

“Lil Wayne is an artist and a rock star. Musicians have been using the American flag in album art, photo shoots and music videos to stir up controversy and make a socio-political statements for decades now,” said entertainment reporter Jenn Hoffman. “This shouldn’t be a surprise or a big deal. It’s rock and roll.”

(Just don’t tell Elvis.)
_________________

NOW THE FACTS: DESECRATION OF THE U.S. FLAG IS A CRIME!

USC › Title 18 › Part I › Chapter 33 › § 700

18 USC § 700 – Desecration of the flag of the United States; penalties

(a)

(1) Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

(2) This subsection does not prohibit any conduct consisting of the disposal of a flag when it has become worn or soiled.

(b) As used in this section, the term “flag of the United States” means any flag of the United States, or any part thereof, made of any substance, of any size, in a form that is commonly displayed.

(c) Nothing in this section shall be construed as indicating an intent on the part of Congress to deprive any State, territory, possession, or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico of jurisdiction over any offense over which it would have jurisdiction in the absence of this section.

(d)

(1) An appeal may be taken directly to the Supreme Court of the United States from any interlocutory or final judgment, decree, or order issued by a United States district court ruling upon the constitutionality of subsection (a).

(2) The Supreme Court shall, if it has not previously ruled on the question, accept jurisdiction over the appeal and advance on the docket and expedite to the greatest extent possible.

______________________

Direct Link: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/06/18/lil-wayne-tramples-on-american-flag-in-video-raps-this-is-sweet-land-kill-em/?intcmp=trending

HIGHLY ADVANCED FACIAL RECOGNITION: State photo-ID databases become troves for police

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Jun 172013

State photo-ID databases become troves for police

The Washington Post
by Craig Timberg
by Ellen Nakashima
June 16, 2013

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida has built one of the country’s most advanced facial-recognition programs. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

The faces of more than 120 million people are in searchable photo databases that state officials assembled to prevent driver’s-license fraud but that increasingly are used by police to identify suspects, accomplices and even innocent bystanders in a wide range of criminal investigations.

The facial databases have grown rapidly in recent years and generally operate with few legal safeguards beyond the requirement that searches are conducted for “law enforcement purposes.” Amid rising concern about the National Security Agency’s high-tech surveillance aimed at foreigners, it is these state-level facial-recognition programs that more typically involve American citizens.

The most widely used systems were honed on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as soldiers sought to identify insurgents. The increasingly widespread deployment of the technology in the United States has helped police find murderers, bank robbers and drug dealers, many of whom leave behind images on surveillance videos or social-media sites that can be compared against official photo databases.

But law enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities.

VIDEO: Faceprints make it hard for criminals, and non-criminals, to hide

Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face.

“Where is government going to go with that years from now?” said Louisiana state Rep. Brett Geymann, a conservative Republican who has fought the creation of such systems there. “Here your driver’s license essentially becomes a national ID card.”

Facial-recognition technology is part of a new generation of biometric tools that once were the stuff of science fiction but are increasingly used by authorities around the nation and the world. Though not yet as reliable as fingerprints, these technologies can help determine identity through individual variations in irises, skin textures, vein patterns, palm prints and a person’s gait while walking.

The Supreme Court’s approval this month of DNA collection during arrests coincides with rising use of that technology as well, with suspects in some cases submitting to tests that put their genetic details in official databases, even if they are never convicted of a crime.

Facial-recognition systems are more pervasive and can be deployed remotely, without subjects knowing that their faces have been captured. Today’s driver’s-
license databases, which also include millions of images of people who get non-driver ID cards to open bank accounts or board airplanes, typically were made available for police searches with little public notice.

Where police can search driver’s license photos

Have facial-recognition systems, let police search or request searches. 26 states

Have facial-recognition systems, generally do not allow law enforcement searches. 11 states and D.C.

Do not have facial-recognition systems for driver’s license photos. 13 states

SOURCE: State drivers’ license registries. The Washington Post

Thirty-seven states now use facial-recognition technology in their driver’s-license registries, a Washington Post review found. At least 26 of those allow state, local or federal law enforcement agencies to search — or request searches — of photo databases in an attempt to learn the identities of people considered relevant to investigations.

“This is a tool to benefit law enforcement, not to violate your privacy rights,” said Scott McCallum, head of the facial-recognition unit in Pinellas County, Fla., which has built one of the nation’s most advanced systems.

The technology produces investigative leads, not definitive identifications. But research efforts are focused on pushing the software to the point where it can reliably produce the names of people in the time it takes them to walk by a video camera. This already works in controlled, well-lit settings when the database of potential matches is relatively small. Most experts expect those limitations to be surmounted over the next few years.

That prospect has sparked fears that the databases authorities are building could someday be used for monitoring political rallies, sporting events or even busy downtown areas. Whatever the security benefits — especially at a time when terrorism remains a serious threat — the mass accumulation of location data on individuals could chill free speech or the right to assemble, civil libertarians say.

“As a society, do we want to have total surveillance? Do we want to give the government the ability to identify individuals wherever they are . . . without any immediate probable cause?” asked Laura Donohue, a Georgetown University law professor who has studied government facial databases. “A police state is exactly what this turns into if everybody who drives has to lodge their information with the police.”

A facial ‘template’

Facial-recognition systems analyze a person’s features — such as the shape of eyes, the curl of earlobes, the width of noses — to produce a digital “template” that can be quickly compared with other faces in a database.

The images must be reasonably clear, though newer software allows technicians to sharpen blurry images, bolster faint lighting or make a three-dimensional model of a face that can be rotated to ease comparisons against pictures taken from odd angles.

For the state officials issuing driver’s licenses, the technology has been effective at detecting fraud. As millions of images are compared, the software typically reveals the identities of hundreds or thousands of people who may have more than one driver’s license.

When searches are made for criminal investigations, typically a photo called a “probe” is compared against existing images in a database. The analytical software returns a selection of potential matches, though their accuracy can vary dramatically. A probe image of a middle-aged white man, for example, could produce a possible match with a 20-something African American woman with similarly shaped eyes and lips. Many systems include filters that allow searchers to specify race, sex and a range of possible ages for a suspect.

“It’s a fine line where you need to protect the rights of the citizens, but you also are protecting the right of citizens when you ferret out crime,” said Anthony J. Silva, administrator of Rhode Island’s Division of Motor Vehicles and a former town police chief.

Establishing identity, Silva said, is essential to effective police work: “I can’t tell you how many times I was handed fraudulent documents. And when you are on the street at 3 a.m., who do you call?”

Pennsylvania’s Justice Network, which has allowed police anywhere in the state to compare a facial image with mug-shot databases, has become a key investigative tool, officials said, and last month it added access to 34 million driver’s-license photos. (Some residents have several images, taken over years.)

A detective in Carlisle, Pa., attempting to learn the real name of a suspect known on the street as “Buddha the Shoota” compared a Facebook page picturing the man with the mug-shot database and got a promising lead.

“Facebook is a great source for us,” said Detective Daniel Freedman, who can do facial searches from his department-issued smartphone. “He was surprised when we walked in and said, ‘How you doin’, Buddha?’ ”

He said the suspect responded, “How you know that?” — to which Freedman replied simply, “We’re the police.”

Safeguards and trends

There typically is little concern when facial-recognition systems relying on criminal databases help identify suspects in narrowly targeted investigations. But searches against images of citizens from driver’s licenses or passports, as opposed to mug shots of prisoners, raise more complex legal questions.

Police typically need only to assert a law enforcement purpose for facial searches, whether they be of suspects or potential witnesses to crimes. Civil libertarians worry that this can lead to broadly defined identity sweeps. Already many common but technically illegal activities — blocking a sidewalk, cycling at night without a light or walking a dog without a leash — can trigger police stops and requests for identification, they say.

“The potential for abuse of this technology is such that we have to make sure we put in place the right safeguards to prevent misuse,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) said in a statement. “We also need to make sure the government is as transparent as possible in order to give the American people confidence it’s using this technology appropriately.”

A few states, including Washington, Oregon and Minnesota, have legal barriers to police accessing facial-recognition technology in driver’s-license registries. New Hampshire’s legislature passed a law prohibiting motor vehicle officials from collecting any biometric data.

But the broader trend is toward more sophisticated databases with more expansive access. The current version of the Senate’s immigration bill would dramatically expand an electronic photo-verification system, probably relying on access to driver’s-license registries.

Montana has a facial-recognition system to help prevent fraud in its driver’s-license registry, but officials are still debating whether to allow police any kind of access.

“I can see it’s an amazingly powerful tool. It has a lot of possibilities,” said Brenda Nordlund, the administrator of the Motor Vehicle Division there. “I don’t know if that’s what citizens expect when they come in and get their driver’s-license pictures taken.”

There are substantial variations in how states allow police searches of their driver’s-license databases. Some allow only licensing-agency officials to conduct the actual searches. Others let police do searches themselves, but only from a headquarters office. And still others have made the technology available to almost any officer willing to get trained.

The District of Columbia has facial-recognition technology for its driver’s-license registry but does not permit law enforcement searches, spokeswoman Vanessa Newton said. Virginia motor vehicle officials have run a pilot program experimenting with facial-recognition technology but have not made a decision on whether police will have access to such a system if it is eventually installed, spokeswoman Sunni Brown said. Maryland does not use such technology in its driver’s-license registry.

Police long have had access to some driver’s-license information — including photographs — when they are investigating criminal suspects whose names they know. But facial-recognition technology has allowed police working from a photo of an unknown person to search for a name.

Las Vegas police, for example, called on authorities two states away in Nebraska for help solving a homicide. Based on a tip, investigators had a page from a social-media site featuring the image of an unknown suspect; the tipster said the woman in the photo had lived in Nebraska. The facial-recognition software produced a hit on a driver’s license there, cracking open the case.

“That picture hung on our wall for a long time,” said Betty Johnson, vehicle services administrator in Nebraska. “We are pretty darn proud of that one.”

Who has the databases?

A single private contractor, MorphoTrust USA, which is based in a suburban Boston office park but is owned by French industrial conglomerate Safran, dominates the field of government facial-
recognition technology systems. Its software operates in systems for the State Department, the FBI and the Defense Department. Most facial-recognition systems installed in driver’s-license registries use the company’s technology, it says.

The largest facial database belongs to the State Department and includes about 230 million searchable images, split almost equally between foreigners who apply for visas and U.S. citizens who hold passports. Access for police investigations, though, is more limited than with state driver’s-license databases.

Do they have your photo?

Police often can find out who you are based on your facial image, even if you’ve never been arrested for any crime.

Find out who could have your photo.

Size of existing photo databases

Have facial-recognition systems, let police search or request searches. 26 states

Have facial-recognition systems, generally do not allow law enforcement searches. 11 states and D.C.

Do not have facial-recognition systems for driver’s license photos. 13 states

The State Department has about 230 million photos from passports and visas

The FBI has about 15 million photos of people who have been arrested or convicted of crimes

The Department of Defense has about 6 million photos, mainly of Iraqis and Afghans

At least 107 million photos in 26 states

At least 38 million photos in 11 states and the District of Columbia

At least 65 million photos in 13 states

Federal agencies with facial-recognition systems

States*

*Numbers do not include non-driver ID cards. There are at least 13 million people with non-driver ID cards in the 26 states that allow police access to their facial-recognition systems.

SOURCES: State driver’s-license registries, FBI, State Department and Defense Department.
GRAPHIC: Darla Cameron and Craig Timberg – The Washington Post. Published June 14, 2013.

The FBI’s own facial-recognition database has about 15 million criminal mug shots. Bureau officials are pushing to expand that by tens of millions more by encouraging states to upload their criminal justice photos into the national system. The FBI does not collect driver’s-license images, but the bureau has developed access to state systems that do.

That effort began with“Project Facemask,” which compared images of federal suspects and fugitives against photos in North Carolina’s driver’s-license registry, helping identify a double-homicide suspect who had changed his name and moved to that state from California. The FBI now has agreements giving access to driver’s-license databases in 10 states for investigative purposes. Many motor vehicle officials say they also run searches for federal agents who request them, typically through “fusion centers” that ease the sharing of information among state, local and federal authorities.

Depending on the importance of the case, federal agents can potentially tap facial databases held by driver’s-license registries, state criminal justice systems, the FBI, the State Department and the Defense Department, which has several million searchable faces, mostly Afghans and Iraqi men. Together these amount to an estimated 400 million facial images in government hands, though the rules on access to each database vary. (Often an individual is pictured in more than one database, or even more than once in a single one.)

Federal investigators searched several facial databases in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing in April, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. But the images were not clear enough to produce hits, even though both of the alleged bombers had driver’s licenses in Massachusetts, a state that uses facial-recognition technology.

Yet as facial databases grow and video cameras become more prevalent and powerful, such searches will become more effective, experts say.

“More and more, what you’re going to see is criminals and other people whose images were taken over the years are digitized, [and] put into these databases, and incidents like Boston will be easier to solve,” said James Albers, senior vice president for government operations for MorphoTrust USA.

Pinellas County Sheriff’s Deputy Jeremy Dressback has been using facial-recognition software for more than six years. (Edward Linsmier/For The Washington Post)

Pinellas County

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office says its facial-recognition unit conducts 5,000 searches a month and has assisted in nearly 1,000 arrests since 2004. A bulletin board in the office is lined with success stories: A teenage boy who was sending lewd messages to young girls through multiple Facebook accounts was identified, as was a suicide victim and an alleged bank robber — whose scowling image was captured by the branch’s surveillance camera.

In another case, a man reported a stolen computer but then noticed that an online photo album he long had maintained was automatically uploading new snapshots of a couple he did not recognize. When the sheriff’s office ran a search, the pictures matched faces in both the mug-shot and driver’s-license databases. The couple soon fingered an acquaintance who was arrested for stealing the computer and then selling it to them.

The sheriff’s office, whose jurisdiction includes St. Petersburg and its suburbs, built its facial-recognition system over more than a decade, relying for most of that time on mug shots collected at prisons and police booking centers across the state.

The system now has partnerships with the sheriff’s offices in more than half of Florida’s counties and many other government agencies. This year the unit added the ability to search more than 20 million driver’s-license records, bringing the number of facial images in the database to 30 million, officials say.

The Pinellas County system also has access to 250,000 mug shots — though not driver’s-license images — from the Northern Virginia Regional Identification System, a joint project of Washington area jurisdictions, including some Maryland counties.

Pinellas Deputy Jeremy Dressback, a community policing officer, uses access from the laptop in his patrol car to keep track of the people he encounters on a dingy country stretch notorious for prostitution, drugs and seedy motels.

On a recent patrol, when a scruffy-looking man he did not recognize walked up to one of the motels, Dressback stopped him on suspicion of trespassing and asked for identification. The man did not have a driver’s license but gave his name — James A. Shepherd, age 33, from Kentucky — and said he was staying at the motel with his girlfriend.

Dressback pulled out a digital camera, asked permission to take a picture and then snapped a shot. When the image did not match anyone in the facial-recognition system, Dressback downloaded the picture to his laptop computer and attached it to a field report on Shepherd as a “suspicious person.”

Shepherd, who said he was a roofer returning from work, grumbled at the intrusion, even though he had agreed to have his picture taken. “I’m not a criminal, so there’s really no reason for me to be in a criminal database,” Shepherd said before adding, “But I have been arrested quite a few times.”

When his girlfriend walked by moments later — they were indeed staying at the motel — Shepherd directed her toward their room.

“Get out of here,” he said. “You’ll be in his database in 10 seconds.”

Brook Silva-Braga contributed to this report.

Direct Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/state-photo-id-databases-become-troves-for-police/2013/06/16/6f014bd4-ced5-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?tid=ts_carousel

Metadata reveals the secrets of social position, company hierarchy, terrorist cells

Jun 172013

Metadata reveals the secrets of social position, company hierarchy, terrorist cells

The Washington Post
by Ellen Nakashima
June 15, 2013

MetaData provides a treasure trove of information about you.

The general’s mistress thought she was being clever by using anonymous e-mail accounts and sending messages using hotel WiFi networks. But metadata — in this case the Internet protocol addresses pointing to network locations — gave her away.

The IP addresses of the networks Paula Broadwell logged into this past fall to send threatening messages to a woman she perceived as a rival for the affection of Gen. David H. Petraeus traced back to the hotels. There, records corresponding to the dates the e-mails were sent revealed one common guest: Broadwell.

Petraeus resigned as CIA director over the affair, and the episode has since receded from the public’s attention. But it is instructive as one simple but powerful way in which metadata — or data about communications — can reveal so much about who we are, where we go and whom we associate with.Metadata is so rich with clues that entities from Google and eBay to the world’s largest spy agency, the National Security Agency, are collecting and mining this deceptively innocuous information: e-mail addresses to and from, times of e-mails, phone numbers dialed and received, lengths of calls, unique device serial numbers.

A week and a half ago, U.S. officials acknowledged for the first time that the NSA since 2006 has been amassing a database of metadata on the phone-call records of tens of millions of U.S. customers.

And, according to new documents obtained by The Washington Post, the NSA until 2011 gathered e-mail and other digital metadata from major Internet data links, presumably to detect and thwart terrorist plots.

But the government has resisted explaining its legal justification for gathering such massive amounts of data, which hold the potential to permit vast intrusions into the personal lives of Americans.

“When you can get it all in one place and analyze the patterns, you can learn an enormous amount about the behavior of people,” said Daniel J. Weitzner, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Analysts can gain clues to sleep patterns (when people are asleep, they send no e-mails and make no calls), religion (based on locations of calls made or the absence of communications on the Sabbath) or even social position (based on how often people get calls and e-mails and how quickly they receive responses).

In 2007, researchers at Columbia University were able to identify the senior-most company officers at the bankrupt Enron Corp. by studying individual e-mail volume and average response time in 620,000 company e-mails. The highest-ranking officers got the most e-mail and the quickest responses.

Similarly, federal agents use software and social-network analysis to map out terrorist cells and criminal groups. They look, for instance, at who calls whom most frequently, in a technique known as “link analysis.”

“It’s remarkable how just the phone-call data can give you at least a preliminary picture of how the organization operates and who its members are,” said Jason Weinstein, a former deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division. “It’s by no means the whole picture, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle to solve the most serious crimes people can commit.”

Sometimes, metadata patterns can be tip-offs — a driver or courier in a terrorist cell or criminal group may be the one to receive short phone calls from several different operatives just before and after an operation.

Cellular-tower location data can help place criminals at the scene if they are using their phones just before they commit a robbery, murder or attack.

“Every day, law enforcement officers are using this data to place suspects at the scene of murders and other crimes,” said Weinstein, now a partner at Steptoe & Johnson.

Data about a communication may be just as revealing as the content itself, said Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union.

“If you call an abortion clinic and make an appointment, the fact that you’re making the appointment is far more sensitive than what time your appointment is,” he said. “If you’re calling Alcoholics Anonymous or a suicide counselor, what you’re saying will certainly be sensitive. But the fact that you’re calling Al Anon or a suicide counselor is extremely sensitive, too.”

Under U.S. law, it’s easier for the government to obtain metadata than content. Authorities generally need to show probable cause for a wiretap or intercept of communications.

Telephone records, but not e-mail metadata, can be obtained by law enforcement agencies without any kind of court order.

Weitzner said metadata is “arguably more revealing because it’s actually much easier to analyze the patterns in a large universe of metadata and correlate them with real-world events than it is to go through a semantic analysis of all of someone’s e-mail and all of someone’s telephone calls, if you could get that.

“Metadata is objective: I called you. You called me.”

Cellphone data helped Italian authorities identify CIA agents who abducted an Egyptian cleric suspected of terrorist involvement in Milan in 2003. The investigators pulled the records and identified the agents by their aliases, where they had stayed and whom they had called — including each other. Similarly, in 2011, Hezbollah identified a half-dozen CIA informants through analysis of their cellphone records and calling patterns.

Critical as metadata is, Weinstein said, it does not give you the subject’s words and thoughts. “Only the content,” he said, “will provide you with the evidence you need that the conversations are about terrorism or other crimes.”

Direct Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/metadata-reveals-the-secrets-of-social-position-company-hierarchy-terrorist-cells/2013/06/15/5058647c-d5c1-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

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