[Vision2020] Are the police tracking your calls?

Fri May 25 15:08:32 PDT 2012

Just re-read an old favorite: "The Doorbell Rang" by Rex Stout. It's an early (1965) Nero Wolf detective novel with an anti-FBI (J. Edgar Hoover era) theme. How he got away with this when it was written is amazing....Nothing new under the sun, or under cover of "patriotism", "protecting the public", and "national security"....

I still remember our 1960's anti-war group having a pot-luck dinner where the FBI showed up to bust our "pot party" and arrested my (then) husband as an illegal alien. Turns out he was a US Air Force Staff Sgt. and was born in Canoga Park CA....Embarrasing for them. The FBI also put agents in a field across the street from our house in open monitoring of us. They got quite an eyeful of a pregnant teenager sun-bathing, hippies planting spinach, and US Air Force members coming and going. Courtesy of the folks they were watching they got sandwiches, organic salad, and iced tea to keep them going on those long, hot, tiresome August days in Mtn. Home ID.. I hope they all made it through those crazy times, and I surely wish well to those folks who have replaced them in the newest cazy times. To their bosses: not so much well wishes. In fact, a good deal of animosity.
Debi R-S
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ted Moffett 
  To: Art Deco 
  Cc: vision2020 at moscow.com 
  Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2012 4:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Are the police tracking your calls?

  "You already have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." 1 Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy 

  ----------------------------------------
  I assume anything I place on my computer, or send over the Internet, or any phone call I make anywhere, even from a public phone, is subject to potential surveillance.

  I am way far from super well educated on these complex issues, but from what I have gathered, encryption does not necessarily assure privacy, with key stroke loggers such as Magic Lantern.  

  What if when you are not home, the FBI or government black-op operatives, or others from who knows where, break-in, with surveillance technology placed on your computer, that records or sends every keystroke?  Maybe there are safeguards against Magic Lantern or tampering directly with a computer to surveil it:

  Info on Magic Lantern:

  https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=20+J.+Marshall+J.+Computer+%26+Info.+L.+287&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=3addc849b1738f1c82c98f8bd294a0ab

  COMMENT: THE "MAGIC LANTERN" REVEALED: A REPORT OF THE FBI'S NEW "KEY LOGGING" TROJAN AND ANALYSIS OF ITS POSSIBLE TREATMENT IN A DYNAMIC LEGAL LANDSCAPE

  McNealy "You already have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." 1 Although this quip from Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy seems extreme, it strongly illustrates the current tension between the power of technology and an individual's expectation of privacy. 2 This tension creates an incessant struggle, because for power of surveillance technology to increase, privacy must decrease, and vice versa. These struggles are best illustrated through the Federal Government's attempts to maintain national security through surveillance of communications and activities while attempting to sustain the legitimate expectations of privacy in the American people. 3 One of the most recent developments resulting from this quandary is the FBI's new enigmatic surveillance tool - a "keystroke logger" Trojan horse/computer worm they have dubbed "Magic Lantern." 4

  ." 6 Historically, the FBI has been thwarted by certain counter-intelligence technologies, specifically encryption. 7 Magic Lantern would assist the FBI by recording the passwords used to encode/decode the encrypted messages, thereby permitting the Bureau to access the content of the otherwise indecipherable documents. 8 However, critics of the software raise serious concerns about the software's conflict ...

  ---------------------------------------------------

  The Carnivore program may be old fashioned, given the speed of computer technology advances, but it was major news, even discussed in the US Congress by tech savvy US Senator from Washington, Maria Cantwell, along with Magic Lantern, in questions to former US Attorney General Ashcroft:

  http://www.salon.com/2001/12/08/ashcroft_15/

  Info on Carnivore:

  Carnivore: US Government Surveillance
  of Internet Transmissions

  http://www.vjolt.net/vol6/issue2/v6i2-a10-Jennings.html

  ----------------------------------------------------

  From "Wired" magazine, a recent article on the NSA's spying expansion.  Orwell rolls in his grave!

  The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
    a.. By James Bamford
    b.. Email Author 
    c.. March 15, 2012 
  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

  Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
  -----------------------------------------------------
  Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett

  On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 5:24 PM, Art Deco <art.deco.studios at gmail.com> wrote:

    Good advice.  Do you have any recommendations for a VPN provider?

    w.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  =======================================================
   List services made available by First Step Internet,
   serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994.
                 http://www.fsr.net
            mailto:Vision2020 at moscow.com
  =======================================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120525/f49d4249/attachment.html>