Undercover Feds on Social Networking Sites Raise Questions: Via Threat Level.

The next time someone ties to “friend” you on Facebook, it may turn out to be an undercover fed looking to examine your private messages and photos, or surveil your friends and family, according to an internal Justice Department document obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The 33-page document shows that law enforcement agents from local police to the FBI and Secret Service have been logging on to MySpace and other sites undercover to communicate with suspects, read private postings and view photos and videos that are restricted to a user’s friends, according to the Associated Press.

The document also describes techniques for verifying alibis — such as checking messages posted by a suspect on Twitter disclosing his whereabouts at the time a crime was committed — and uncovering information that might point to illegal activity, such as photos depicting a suspect with expensive jewelry, a new car or even a weapon.

The document says that evidence from social networking sites can: [ Read more ... ]

EFF Posts Documents Detailing Law Enforcement Collection of Data From Social Media Sites: Via EFF.org Updates.

EFF has posted documents shedding light on how law enforcement agencies use social networking sites to gather information in investigations. The records, obtained from the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice Criminal Division, are the first in a series of documents that will be released through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that EFF filed with the help of the UC Berkeley Samuelson Clinic.

One of the most interesting files is a 2009 training course that describes how IRS employees may use various Internet tools -- including social networking sites and Google Street View -- to investigate taxpayers. [ Read more ... ]

Feds Move to Break Voting-Machine Monopoly: Via Threat Level.

Citing anti-competitive concerns, the Justice Department sued Election Systems & Software in order to force the company to divest itself of the voting machine assets it obtained from Premier Election Solutions last year.

The department’s Antitrust Division, along with nine state attorneys general, filed the civil antitrust lawsuit (.pdf) in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., charging that the acquisition threatened competition. The department proposed a settlement that, if accepted, would dissolve the merger and force ES&S to sell its Premier business to a buyer approved by the Justice Department.

“The proposed settlement (.pdf) will restore competition, provide a greater range of choices and create incentives to provide secure, accurate and reliable voting equipment systems now and in the future,” said Molly S. Boast, deputy assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division in a statement. [ Read more ... ]

FBI Tracks Suspects' Cell Phones Without a Warrant: Via Newsweek.com .

Law enforcement is tracking Americans' cell phones in real time—without the benefit of a warrant.

But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. [ Read more ... ]

Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers: Via Threat Level.

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.” [ Read more ... ]

Handy Chart Tracks Proposed Amendments to Patriot Act: Via Threat Level.

Confused by all the proposed changes to the Patriot Act ricocheting through the Capitol? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has put together a handy chart comparing the current law with the various amendments in the House and Senate.

The chart compares proposed amendments (.pdf) to National Security Letters (NSLs) and the so-called “lone wolf” provisions of the Patriot Act. The proposals have only been passed by the judiciary committees, and face further amendments before they hit the full House and Senate for votes.

According to Gregory Nojeim, CDT’s director of project on freedom, security and technology, although neither of the current proposals goes far enough in fixing all of the problems that civil libertarians find in the Patriot Act, they do show improvements. [ Read more ... ]

Federal Court Denies Government Attempt to Delay Release of Telecom Records. Again.: Via EFF.org Updates.

Today a federal district court denied the government's latest emergency motion asking for a 30-day stay in last Friday's deadline to release records relating to telecom lobbying over last year's debate over immunity for corporate participation in government spying. The new deadline is October 16, at 4 p.m. Pacific time. We sought the records pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

On September 24, Judge Jeffrey White had ordered the Director of National Intelligence and Department of Justice to turn over many of the records we requested by Friday, October 9, 2009. Last week, the agencies asked him to postpone his order while the government de [ Read more ... ]

Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit: Via Threat Level.

The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The  nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.

Fortunately, a judge says that relationship isn’t enough to squash a rights group’s open records request for communications between the nation’s telecoms and the feds.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wanted to see what role telecom lobbying of Justice Department played when the government began its year-long, and ultimately successful, push to win retroactive immunity for AT&T and others being sued for unlawfully spying on American citizens.

The feds argued that the documents showing consultation over the controversial telecom immunity proposal weren’t subject to the Freedom of Information Act since they were protected as “intra-agency” records: [ Read more ... ]

Obama Tightens State Secrets Standard: Via washingtonpost.com .

The Obama administration on Wednesday announced a new policy making it much more difficult for the government to claim that it is protecting state secrets when it hides details of sensitive national security strategies such as rendition and warrantless eavesdropping.

The new policy requires agencies, including the intelligence community and the military, to convince the attorney general and a team of Justice Department lawyers that the release of sensitive information would present significant harm to "national defense or foreign relations." In the past, the claim that state secrets were at risk could be invoked with the approval of one official and by meeting a lower standard of proof that disclosure would be harmful.

That claim was asserted dozens of times during the Bush administration, legal scholars said. [ Read more ... ]

CIA Directors conclude CIA shouldn't be investigated for murder: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below)

In a truly shocking development being treated as major news, seven former CIA Directors -- including all three who served under George W. Bush -- jointly concluded that the CIA should not be criminally investigated for torture deaths, and they have written a letter to President Obama (.pdf) expressing that view.  Do leaders of organizations in general ever believe that their organizations and its members should be criminally investigated and possibly prosecuted for acts carried out on behalf of that organization, and do CIA Directors specifically ever believe that about the CIA?  Has a CIA Director ever advocated that CIA agents be criminally investigated for illegal intelligence activities?

But what's most notable about this letter is that it is not addressed to the individual charged with making decisions about whether an individual should be prosecuted:  namely, the Attorney General of the U.S.  Instead, it is addressed to the President himself, and they "urge [him] to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General's August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations."  What so-called "authority" are they talking about? [ Read more ... ]

Attorneys Can See Classified Info in Coffee Table Spy Suit: Via Threat Level.

A federal judge in Washington has ordered the government to grant security clearances to lawyers on both sides of a lawsuit claiming illegal spying against a DEA agent, in a ruling that challenges the government’s long-held claim that the executive branch alone has the authority to determine who can access classified material.

The attorneys in the case, which was noted by Secrecy News, need the security clearances to obtain classified knowledge held by their clients so they can adequately argue the lawsuit, the judge said, in an August 26 ruling supported by attorneys on both sides of the lawsuit, but bitterly opposed by the government.

On Thursday, a federal appeals court ordered an emergency stay of the order pending an appeal by the Justice Department. [ Read more ... ]

A really ugly case risks making some really bad law: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

CDT and the ACLU have joined a “friend of the court” brief filed in the Supreme Court by the DKT Liberty Project in what is a very ugly case. As the adage goes, “bad cases make bad law,” and this is especially true in First Amendment cases involving unseemly (or worse) speech. There is a great risk that this case – U.S. v. Stevens — will yield some very bad law.

Stevens was convicted and sentenced to prison for distributing over the Internet videos depicting cruelty to animals. The videos including depictions, for example, of dog fights in Japan (where, as it happens, such activities are legal). Dog fights and other acts of cruelty to animals are (and should be) illegal in all fifty states, but this case raises the question of whether depictions of such dogfights should be wholly unprotected by the First Amendment. [ Read more ... ]

Spy Memo Author to America: No Apologies for Tapping You: Via Threat Level.

Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo is fighting back against a recent inspectors general report that criticized the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs established in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

“The best way to find an al Qaeda operative is to look at all e-mail, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S.,” Yoo wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Thursday, “This might involve the filtering of innocent traffic, just as roadblocks and airport screenings do.”

Yoo was responding to a report released last week by five inspectors general from several agencies who questioned the government’s legal grounds for launching the programs without approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The IG’s stopped short of calling the programs illegal but criticized the flawed memos that Yoo authored, which offered the government legal justification for its actions. [ Read more ... ]

Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Prosecutions, Report Warns: Via Threat Level.

The Justice Department needs to investigate whether the secretiveness of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program tainted terrorism prosecutions by hiding exculpatory evidence from defendants, an oversight report from five inspectors general warned Friday.

The report (.pdf), mandated by Congress, also warned that President’ Bush’s post-9/11 extrajudicial  intelligence programs involved unprecedented collection of communications, and that the government needs to be careful about storing and using that data.

Senator Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat who sits on the Intelligence committee, said the report showed the programs were “outrageous” and called for more declassification.

“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power,” Feingold said. “I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.” [ Read more ... ]

DoJ Agrees: IP Enforcement Bill is a Bad Idea - Via EFF.org Updates:

Yesterday, the Department of Justice delivered a letter to Senators Specter and Leahy, blasting S.3325, the "Enforcement of Intellectual Property Right Act of 2008." In the letter, the DoJ echoes, almost exactly, the concerns that EFF and other public interest groups have had for months: [ Read more ... ]

Senators Press, Mukasey Equivocates - Via ACLU Blog:

On Wednesday, Attorney General Mukasey went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his first oversight hearing since heading up the Department of Justice. In the days leading up to the hearing, the AG finally responded to the Committee’s request for follow-up regarding his views towards the harsh interrogations that nearly derailed his nomination and for which the CIA has become infamous. [ Read more ... ]

White House Secrecy On Wiretaps Described - washingtonpost.com: No more than four Justice Department officials had access to details of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program when the department deemed portions of it illegal, following a pattern of poor consultation that helped create a "legal mess," a former Justice official told Congress yesterday.

Jack L. Goldsmith, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the White House so tightly restricted access to the National Security Agency's program that even the attorney general and the NSA's general counsel were partly in the dark. [ Read more ... ]

Justice Department Withholds Records of Stealth Campaign to Block Surveillance Suits: "

EFF Lawsuit Demands Information About Telecom Industry Lobbying

Washington, D.C. - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed suit against the Department of Justice (DOJ) today, demanding any records of a telecom industry lobbying campaign to block lawsuits over their compliance with illegal electronic surveillance. EFF's lawsuit comes as Congress debates letting telecommunications companies off scot-free as part of the hotly disputed 'modernization' of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). [ Read more ... ]

Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results - New York Times: WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia. [ Read more ... ]

Senators Ask for Special Counsel to Investigate Attorney General for Perjury: "

Four U.S. Democratic Senators requested that the Justice Department appoint a special counsel to investigate the possibility that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales perjured himself in testimony to Congress about the Administration's warrantless spying program and its firing of U.S. attorneys for political purposes.

Senators Dianne Feinstein (California), Russell Feingold (Wisconsin), Charles Schumer (New York) and Sheldon Whitehouse (Rhode Island) signed the letter (.pdf) sent to the Solicitor General Paul Clement, who is acting Attorney General in matters where the AG has recused himself.

The Senators asked Clement to immediately appoint a special counsel from outside the Justice Department to determine if the Attorney General has misled or lied to Congress in regards to the NSA wirretapping program, the Intensive Care showdown and the firing of U.S. attorneys.

The letter cited three statements the Senators considered to be half-truths or misleading statements, including this one: [ Read more ... ]

Thursday Hearing on Secret Orders for Domestic Spying: "

Justice Department Withholds Records on Electronic Surveillance

Washington, D.C. - On Thursday, July 26, at 11 a.m., the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will argue for the release of court orders that supposedly authorize the government's highly controversial electronic domestic surveillance program that intercepts and analyzes millions of Americans' communications. [ Read more ... ]

U.S. Details Some Data-Mining Programs, Hints at Others: "Justice Department and Homeland Security inspectors slid a broad range of government data-mining programs under a microscope last week in two reports to Congress that covered systems both sinister and banal.

But while the reports -- required under two separate federal laws -- convey a sense of the breadth of these powerful agencies' data mining, they only hint at several projects powerful enough to accidentally land innocent Americans in the cross hairs of the government's antiterrorism efforts. [ Read more ... ]

NSA Snooped on Lawyers Knowing Spying Was Illegal, Suit Charges: "Islamic charity lawyers contend they were spied on during a period in which the Justice Department refused to bless the government spy program. Their lawsuit may be the only one that can determine if the domestic spy program is legal.

[...]

The government's surveillance of two attorneys challenging the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of Americans took place partly during a period in which the top secret program operated without the approval of the Bush administration's own Justice Department, according to a newly filed court document. [ Read more ... ]

White House Is Subpoenaed on Wiretapping - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, June 27 -- The Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday issued subpoenas to the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department after what the panel's chairman called "stonewalling of the worst kind" of efforts to investigate the National Security Agency's policy of wiretapping without warrants.

The move put Senate Democrats squarely on a course they had until now avoided, setting the stage for a showdown with the Bush administration over one of the most contentious issues arising from the White House's campaign against terrorism.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, said the subpoenas seek documents that could shed light on the administration's legal justification for the wiretapping and on disputes within the government over its legality. [ Read more ... ]

Official: Cheney Urged Wiretaps - washingtonpost.com: "Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004, a former senior Justice official told senators yesterday.

The meeting came one day before White House officials tried to get approval for the same program from then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who lay recovering from surgery in a hospital, according to former deputy attorney general James B. Comey.

Comey's disclosures, made in response to written questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicate that Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program. The program allowed the National Security Agency to monitor phone calls and e-mails between the United States and overseas.

Comey said that Cheney's office later blocked the promotion of a senior Justice Department lawyer, Patrick Philbin, because of his role in raising concerns about the surveillance. [ Read more ... ]