New law review article: "Pervasive Surveillance and the Future of the Fourth Amendment": Via FourthAmendment.com.

Pervasive Surveillance and the Future of the Fourth Amendment, by Russell D. Covey, 80 Miss. L. J. No. 4 (2010):

Abstract:
We are in a period of intense technological change. The continued explosive growth in technology has two major effects on the scope and application of the Fourth Amendment. First, the diffusion of powerful new technologies like DNA synthesis and high-powered computing makes it far easier than ever before for ill-meaning groups or individuals to obtain powerful and destructive weapons. Regardless of who is perceived to desire such weapons, the very existence and potential use of such weapons poses a permanent and growing threat to national security. Second, with the development of new technologies, governments are finding it increasingly cheap and easy to conduct intrusive surveillance on their populations and to obtain data and information about individuals in quantities and in detail never before imagined. For both of these reasons, states are increasingly likely to adopt strategies of pervasive surveillance. [ Read more ... ]

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Immigrants on Trains Near Northern Border Detained - NYTimes.com: Via NYTimes.com .

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September. [ Read more ... ]

Is New York the Next "Papers Please" State?: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Arizonans are not the only ones who should fear living in a "show me your papers" society.

As reported in Monday's New York Times, here in the great state of New York, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses to question passengers about their citizenship and detain those who are not carrying proper proof of their lawful status.

Nina Bernstein reported that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers board trains in western New York and ask passengers "Are you a U.S. citizen?" and "What country are you from?" And in case you were wondering, no, these trains do not cross the New York-Canadian border. They are used for domestic travel.

Take, for example, Ruth Fernandez, a 60-year-old U.S. citizen born in Ecuador. She was travelling on Amtrak from Ohio to New York City. On past trips she was photographed by Border Patrol agents, so this time she carried ID, and showed it to Border Patrol agents when asked about her citizenship.

Ruth was not arrested, but others have been. According to an analysis of government data, CBP arrested 2,788 bus and train passengers from October 2005 through September 2010. It's unknown how many of these individuals were U.S. citizens who just happened not to carry identification with them and could not prove their lawful status. [ Read more ... ]

Alleged Carder ‘BadB’ Busted in France — Watch His Cartoon: Via Threat Level.

An alleged old-timer in the international carding community and one of the top sellers of stolen bank card data has been arrested in France, and faces extradition to the United States on an indictment unsealed Wednesday in Washington, D.C.

Vladislav Anatolievich Horohorin, 27, aka BadB, holds dual-citizenship in Ukraine and Israel and was one of the earliest members of CarderPlanet, a first of its kind Russian-language carding forum that was launched around 2002 by a group of East Europeans. CarderPlanet was shuttered in 2004, and BadB had more recently been selling his stolen goods at carder.su and on his own websites, dumps.name and badb.biz, where he promoted his product in lighthearted Flash cartoons like the one above.

Authorities say the network created by Horohorin and other CarderPlanet veterans is linked to “nearly every major intrusion of financial information reported to the international law enforcement community.” [ Read more ... ]

‘John Doe’ Who Fought FBI Spying Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years: Via Threat Level.

The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still can’t reveal what information the FBI sought.

Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it. His company was a combination ISP and security consultancy business that was launched in the mid-90s and had about 200 customers, Merrill said, many of them advertising agencies and non-profit groups.

Despite the fact that the FBI later dropped its demand for the records, Merrill was prohibited from telling his fiancée, friends or family members that he had received the letter or that he was embroiled in a lawsuit challenging its legitimacy. He occasionally showed up for court hearings about the case, but sat silently in the audience with other court observers. In 2007, he was prevented from publicly accepting an award for his courage from the American Civil Liberties Union, because he was not allowed to identify himself as the plaintiff in the case.

U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York finally released Merrill partially from the gag order (.pdf) on July 30, which Merrill revealed publicly only on Monday. [ Read more ... ]

Videotaping Police Is Often Cause for Arrest : Via ABC News.

Arrests such as Graber's are becoming more common along with the proliferation of portable video cameras and cell-phone recorders. Videos of alleged police misconduct have become hot items on the Internet. YouTube still features Graber's encounter along with numerous other witness videos. "The message is clearly, 'Don't criticize the police,'" said David Rocah, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland who is part of Graber's defense team. "With these charges, anyone who would even think to record the police is now justifiably in fear that they will also be criminally charged." [ Read more ... ]

ACLU Video: "No Fly With Me": Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Ayman Latif is a disabled U.S. Marine veteran living in Egypt with his wife and two young children. Adama Bah is a 22-year-old caregiver living in New York with asylum status that protects her from the persecution she would face if she returned to her native Guinea.

Ayman and Adama are both on the U.S. government's "No Fly List," barring them from flying into or from the United States or over U.S. airspace. Neither poses any security threat or has any idea why the government has put them on the list – or how to get off it. For Ayman, this means he has no way to get home to the United States where the rest of his family lives, and that his new daughter may never meet her grandparents. For Adama, this means never leaving New York on a plane, and the feeling of being trapped in the country where she was supposed to feel free.

Last week, Ayman and Adama joined the American Civil Liberties Union and eight other American citizens and legal residents in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the No Fly List process. Here are their stories. [ Read more ... ]

Army Intelligence Analyst Charged With Leaking Classified Information: Via Threat Level.

A U.S. Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking videos and documents to Wikileaks was charged Monday with eight violations of federal criminal law, including unauthorized computer access, and transmitting classified information to an unauthorized third party.

Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, was charged with two counts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice: one encompassing the eight alleged criminal offenses, and a second detailing four noncriminal violations of Army regulations governing the handling of classified information and computers.

According to the charge sheet, Manning downloaded a classified video of a military operation in Iraq and transmitted it to a third party, in violation of a section of the Espionage Act, 18 U.S.C. 793(e), which involves passing classified information to an uncleared party, but not a foreign government. [ Read more ... ]

Too Scary to Fly, Not Scary Enough to Arrest: Via Threat Level.

Ten U.S citizens and residents, three of whom are veterans, are stuck abroad or cannot fly within or out of the United States because they are wrongly on a no-fly list, according to a federal lawsuit lodged Wednesday.

The Oregon federal court case claims the plaintiffs, many with Middle Eastern names who have committed no legal wrongdoing, have asked the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration for an explanation, to no avail.

The government, according to the suit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, has not offered any explanation for plaintiffs’ “apparent placement” on the no-fly list or any other watch list. “They’re too scary to fly but not scary enough to arrest,” quipped Ben Wizner, an ACLU attorney on the case.

Wizner believed it was the first lawsuit testing the constitutionality of the government’s ability to bar flight, though that topic has been the subject of repeated litigation often brought by those forced to undergo heavy screening before flying.

The no-fly list, its current form adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, includes some 8,000 names. About another 20,000 are on a so-called “selectee” list requiring passengers to endure extra airport security. [ Read more ... ]

With World Watching, Wikileaks Falls Into Disrepair: Via Threat Level.

Would-be whistle-blowers hoping to leak documents to Wikileaks face a potentially frustrating surprise. Wikileaks’ submission process, which had been degraded for months, completely collapsed more than two weeks ago and remains offline, in a little-noted breakdown at the world’s most prominent secret-spilling website.

Despite a surge in mostly laudatory media portraying Wikileaks as a fearless, unstoppable outlet for documents that embarrass corporations and overbearing governments, the site has published only 12 documents since the beginning of the year, the last one four months ago. And on June 12, Wikileaks’ secure submission page stopped working after the site failed to renew its SSL certificate, a basic web protection that costs less than $30 a year and takes only hours to set up. [ Read more ... ]

Suspected Wikileaks Source Described Crisis of Conscience Leading to Leaks: Via Threat Level.

On his last full day of freedom before Army CID investigators took him into custody, 22-year-old Bradley Manning pondered what would happen if his secret life as a self-described Wikileaks “hacktivist” were ever exposed.

“What would you do if your role [with] Wikileaks seemed in danger of being blown?” was the question posed by ex-hacker Adrian Lamo, who’d been chatting with Manning online for about five days.

“Try and figure out how I could get my side of the story out, before everything was twisted around to make me look like Nidal Hassan,” wrote back Manning.

Manning, an Army intelligence analyst at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, doubtless thought it was a hypothetical question. But by that time, May 25, the 29-year-old Lamo had already tipped off FBI and Army investigators, and the former hacker was at that moment working to get more information for the government, which would result in Manning’s arrest the next day. [ Read more ... ]

Wikileaks to Ex-Hacker: Manning’s Not a ‘Spy’: Via Threat Level.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange wants a copy of the chat logs in which a U.S. intelligence analyst discussed providing classified materials to the whistle-blower site, according to an e-mail shown to Wired.com by the ex-hacker who turned the analyst in.

Assange says he’s arranging the legal defense for 22-year-old Bradley Manning, now in his third week in military custody.

In the Friday e-mail to Adrian Lamo, Assange (or someone convincingly posing as him) claims he wants to forward the logs to attorneys he says he’s hired to represent Manning, though the e-mail doesn’t explain why the unnamed lawyers aren’t approaching Lamo directly.

The e-mail also contains talking points Assange would like to see Lamo adopt in describing Manning, and in explaining his decision to report the suspected leaker to law enforcement.

[ Read more ... ]

State Department Anxious About Possible Leak of Cables to Wikileaks: Via Threat Level.

The State Department and personnel at U.S. embassies around the world are reportedly waiting anxiously to find out if an Army intelligence analyst was telling the truth when he boasted that he had supplied 260,000 classified State Department diplomatic cables to the whistleblower site Wikileaks.

If Wikileaks has the secret documents and publishes them, the leak could not only expose damaging information about U.S. foreign policy and national security issues, but also expose embarrassing information about backroom diplomatic deals and U.S. attitudes toward foreign leaders — such as the opinions of U.S. ambassadors about the honesty, integrity, and strength and longevity of those leaders.

The concerns are reported in a story published at the Daily Beast that appears to confirm that alleged leaker Bradley Manning had access to the kinds of cables he discussed with a former hacker who turned him in to authorities.

Manning told ex-hacker Adrian Lamo that he had given 260,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, and said the documents exposed “almost-criminal political back dealings.” [ Read more ... ]

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook: Via NYT > Privacy.

Four N.Y.U. students have decided people should be able to communicate online without surrendering their privacy to a big business.

How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn’t force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

“We were shocked,” said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. “For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.” [ Read more ... ]

Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline: Via NYT > Privacy.

Members of the under 30 tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud. [ Read more ... ]

Facebook Glitch Brings New Privacy Worries: Via NYT > Privacy.

A major security flaw in Facebook’s privacy settings heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.

For many users of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, it was just the latest in a string of frustrations.

On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations.

Not long before, Facebook had introduced changes that essentially forced users to choose between making information about their interests available to anyone or removing it altogether.

Although Facebook quickly moved to close the security hole on Wednesday, the breach heightened a feeling among many users that it was becoming hard to trust the service to protect their personal information.

“Facebook has become more scary than fun,” said Jeffrey P. Ament, 35, a government contractor who lives in Rockville, Md. [ Read more ... ]

Judge Rules Cop-Rating Site is Protected Speech: Via Threat Level.

A federal judge has struck down a Florida law prohibiting the publication of a police officer’s name, phone number or address, calling the statute an unconstitutional restraint on speech.

The decision leaves Arizona, Colorado and Washington state with similar laws on the books. Florida authorities were not immediately prepared Wednesday to comment.

Robert Bradshaw, a 35-year-old apartment manager, brought the challenge to Florida’s law after he was briefly jail in 2008 for posting personally identifying information of a Tallahassee police officer on RateMyCop.com — a 2-year-old website that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community.

RateMyCop uses public records requests to gather the names and, in some cases, badge numbers of thousands of uniformed cops at police departments around the country, and allows users to post comments about police they’ve interacted with. The site’s launch in 2008 drew cries of outrage from police, who complained that they’d be put at risk if their names were on the internet. [ Read more ... ]

Former Con Man Helps Feds Thwart Alleged ATM Hacking Spree: Via Threat Level.

A North Carolina grocery worker is being held without bail in Houston on attempted computer hacking charges after inadvertently partnering with an undercover FBI agent in an alleged citywide ATM-reprogramming caper.

Thor Alexander Morris, 19, was arrested at a Houston flea market last month after trying a default administrative passcode on a Tranax Mini-Bank ATM there, according to the FBI. Morris, who was wearing a wig to disguise his appearance, allegedly hoped to reprogram the machine to think it was loaded with $1 bills instead of $20 bills. That would let him pull $8,000 in cash with $400 in withdrawals from a prepaid debit card.

Details of the federal case are laid out in a criminal complaint (.pdf) filed in Houston in late April. Morris allegedly hoped to hit more than 30 Houston ATMs and clear at least $250,000. But he made the mistake of approaching a reformed Texas con man for help with the scheme, who helped the feds set up a sting operation.

Cash-machine–reprogramming scams were first noticed in the financial industry in 2005, and surfaced publicly in 2006 when a cyber thief was caught on video looting an ATM at a Virginia gas station. Threat Level later confirmed that default administrative passcodes for retail ATMs manufactured by Tranax and Triton were printed in owner’s manuals easily found online. [ Read more ... ]

"America's Tiniest Terrorist"?: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Sometimes, it feels like we at the ACLU are fighting an uphill battle when we try to draw attention to just how bloated and ineffective the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) airline watchlist is. We've pointed out that dead people, heads of state, U.S. senators, and little kids are on the list.

Well, add 6-year-old Allison Mosher to that unfortunate group.

The Boston Herald reports that when Allison's father Peter tried to print out boarding passes for their family's vacation to the Grand Canyon, he was unable to print out Allison's. When he called the airline, the employee told him that Allison "had been flagged by TSA security," and that she's on the no-fly list. [ Read more ... ]

Man Indicted for ‘Cyber-Extortion’ Threat Against Insurance Firm: Via Threat Level.

A California man was hit with an extortion charge this week for allegedly threatening to send out millions of e-mails criticizing his insurance company, if the firm didn’t pay him as much as $3 million.

Anthony Digati, 52, faces a maximum two-year prison term if convicted of charges the Federal Bureau of Investigation is calling “cyber-extortion” (.pdf).

The authorities said Digati erected a website to damage the reputation of New York Life unless it returned his $50,000 premium, and an extra $150,000 for good measure, by a certain date. If the deadline was not meant, the price would climb to $3 million, according to the indictment unsealed late Thursday.

The bureau’s statement said that Digati threatened on his website to “make false public statements and transmit millions of spam e-mails in an effort to damage the reputation of New York Life and cost the company millions of dollars of revenue.” [ Read more ... ]

NSA Official Faces Prison for Leaking to Newspaper: Via Threat Level.

A former senior National Security Agency official was slammed with a 10-count indictment Thursday after allegedly leaking top secret information to a reporter at a national newspaper.

Thomas Andrews Drake, 52, was a high-ranking NSA employee with access to signals intelligence documents when he repeatedly leaked classified information to the unnamed reporter, who ran stories based on the leaks between February 2006 and November 2007, the indictment alleges.

Fox News is reporting that the journalist was Siobhan Gorman, who worked at the time for the Baltimore Sun and is now a reporter with The Wall Street Journal, which is published by Fox parent corporation News Corp.

According to the indictment, Drake exchanged hundreds of e-mails with the reporter, and the two met in the Washington, D.C., area half a dozen times. Drake also researched stories for the journalist, sending e-mail to other NSA employees asking questions, and accessing classified documents to obtain information.

Drake even “reviewed, commented on, and edited drafts, near final and final drafts” of the reporter’s articles, according to the government.

He later allegedly shredded documents and lied about his activity to federal agents investigating the leaks. [ Read more ... ]

Take From ATM Malware Caper Exceeded $200,000: Via Wired: Threat Level.

A Bank of America worker who installed malicious software on his employer’s ATMs was able to siphon at least $200,000 from the hacked machines before he was caught, according to a plea agreement he entered with prosecutors last week.

Rodney Reed Caverly, 37, was a member of the bank’s IT staff when he installed the malware, which instructed the machines to dispense free cash without creating a record of the transaction. The Charlotte, North Carolina, man made fraudulent withdrawals over a seven-month period ending in October 2009, according to prosecutors, who’ve charged him with one count of computer fraud.

Caverly has agreed to plead guilty and is set to appear in court on Tuesday. Nobody involved in the case —  Caverly, his defense attorney, prosecutors and Bank of America — has revealed how much Caverly stole, but the April 7 plea agreement (.pdf) discloses that the crime resulted in a “loss of more than $200,000 and less than $400,000.”

The document lays out the terms of the plea deal but provides no additional facts about the nature of the malware Caverly installed or how he conducted the fraudulent withdrawals. [ Read more ... ]

International man of mystery: Via Sydney Morning Herald.

The founder of WikiLeaks lives a secret life in the shadow of those who blow the whistle, writes Bernard Lagan.

On the Al Jazeera television network, an overbearing host was grilling Julian Assange, one of the founders of WikiLeaks, the online drop zone for whistleblowers.

Assange, an Australian who rarely makes public appearances and shuffles around the world with little more than a rucksack and a laptop, quickly dealt with his haughty inquisitor. Lean and tall with a handsome, distant face, long grey locks and dressed in a a dark suit, Assange, in his late 30s, is a commanding presence.

He has a deep broadcaster's voice and gave measured, drum-tight answers about the blow he had just dealt the US military with WikiLeak's release of footage of an American helicopter gunship killing Iraqi citizens and two Reuters journalists on a Baghdad street in July 2007. [ Read more ... ]

Identity Thieves Filed for $4 Million in Tax Refunds Using Names of Living and Dead: Via Wired: Threat Level.

A group of sophisticated identity thieves managed to steal millions of dollars by filing bogus tax returns using the names and Social Security numbers of other people, many of them deceased, according to a 74-count indictment unsealed in Arizona Thursday.

The thieves operated their scheme for at least three years from January 2005 to April 2008, allegedly filing more than 1,900 fraudulent tax returns involving about $4 million in refunds directed to more than 170 bank accounts. The conspirators used numerous fake IDs to open internet and phone accounts, and also used more than 175 different IP addresses around the United States to file the fake returns, which were often filed in bulk as if through an automated process. [ Read more ... ]

Bank of America Employee Charged With Planting Malware on ATMs: Via Wired: Threat Level.

A Bank of America worker installed malicious software on his employer’s ATMs that allowed him to make thousands of dollars in fraudulent withdrawals, all without leaving a transaction record, according to federal prosecutors.

Rodney Reed Caverly, 37, was a member of the bank’s IT staff when he installed the malware. The Charlotte, North Carolina, man made fraudulent withdrawals over a seven-month period ending in October 2009, according to prosecutors, who’ve charged him with one count of computer fraud.

The government wouldn’t say how much money Caverly stole; the charging document (.pdf), filed April 1, states only that his payoff surpassed the statutory minimum of $5,000. [ Read more ... ]