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FBI's use of Patriot Act to collect US citizens' records up 1,000 percent

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 01:13:48 +0000

Michael Isikoff at NBC News reports that the FBI has "dramatically increased its use of a controversial provision of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain a vast store of business records of U.S. citizens under President Barack Obama." The FBI filed 212 requests for this kind of data in a national security court last year, which represents a 1,000-percent increase from the number of similar requests four years prior.

What some former CIA spies say they'd do to evade capture if they were Snowden

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 01:58:31 +0000

Edward Snowden was a technology contractor, not a trained operative. AND Magazine talked to a few former CIA operatives about the tradecraft they'd use if they were in his much-sought shoes, and wanted to avoid ending up in a US court. "Staying off the grid and holing up in a low-rent bordello or someplace else that doesn't require a credit card" is seen as a more prudent move than Hong Kong; China, Russia, and Ecuador are among the countries that could offer him safe harbor, but it's not clear what options exist for the NSA whistleblower. Read: "Man On The Run."

Shia LaBeouf, a prescient phone surveillance whistleblower

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:24:22 +0000

Oh, if only we'd listened to Shia LaBeouf. CBC News reports that back in 2008, while the actor was promoting his film Eagle Eye, (about a mysterious stranger who spies on other people's phone calls), he told Tonight Show host Jay Leno the movie's FBI consultant warned him the government was doing just that, on a grand scale, with innocent Americans. "He told me that one in five phone calls that you make are recorded and logged, and I laughed at him and then he played back a phone conversation I'd had two years prior," said LaBeouf. And we ignored him.

Denial-of-Service attacker tells Brian Krebs he's working for the FBI

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 17 May 2013 00:23:33 +0000

Last week, I blogged Brian Krebs's amazing piece on AsylumBooter, a cheesy denial-of-service-for-hire site apparently run by a 17-year-old Chicago-area honor-roll student named Chandler Downs, whose PayPal account was flush with more than $30,000 paid by people who'd launched more than 10,000 online attacks.

Now, Krebs has uncovered an even weirder booter story: Ragebooter is another DoS company, but this one is run by a guy who claims to be working part time for the FBI, and who says that the FBI has its own login to his site, and review all the IP addresses and other traffic data it logs.

Ragebooter.net’s registration records are hidden behind WHOIS privacy protection services. But according to a historic WHOIS lookup at domaintools.com, that veil of secrecy briefly fell away when the site was moved behind Cloudflare.com, a content distribution network that also protects sites against DDoS attacks like the ones Ragebooter and its ilk help to create (as I noted in Monday’s story, some of the biggest targets of booter services are in fact other booter services). For a brief period in Oct. 2012, the WHOIS records showed that ragebooter.net was registered by a Justin Poland in Memphis...
... “I also work for the FBI on Tuesdays at 1pm in memphis, tn,” Poland wrote. “They allow me to continue this business and have full access. The FBI also use the site so that they can moniter [sic] the activitys [sic] of online users.. They even added a nice IP logger that logs the users IP when they login.”
When I asked Poland to provide more information that I might use to verify his claims that he was working for the FBI, the conversation turned combative, and he informed me that I wasn’t allowed to use any of the information he’d already shared with me. I replied that I hadn’t and wouldn’t agree that any of our discussion was to be off the record, and he in turn promised to sue me if I ran this story. That was more or less the end of that conversation.

Poland gave Krebs the working personal number of an FBI agent identified as "Agent Lies," who put him onto the FBI's press contact, who stonewalled. Meanwhile, Ragebooter leaks a lot of info and there's some reason to believe that the FBI really does have its own back door.

Ragebooter: ‘Legit’ DDoS Service, or Fed Backdoor?

UFO memo the FBI's most viewed

Rob Beschizza — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 13:03:42 +0000

An unconfirmed report of a UFO over New Mexico is the most popular item in the FBI's online reading room, the agency reports. Russell Contreras with the AP:

Vaguely written, the memo describes a story told by an unnamed third party who claims an Air Force investigator reported that three flying saucers were recovered in New Mexico, though the memo doesn't say exactly where in the state. The FBI indexed the report for its files but did not investigate further; the name of an "infomant" reporting some of the information is blacked out in the memo.

EFF explains yesterday's National Security Letter ruling

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 18:42:48 +0000

Further to Xeni's post from yesterday about the landmark ruling by a San Francisco district court judge that the FBI may not issue "national security letters" (NSLs), the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who fought the case, has posted a good explanation about what NSLs are and why they were so creepy:

The controversial NSL provisions EFF challenged on behalf of the unnamed client allow the FBI to issue administrative letters -- on its own authority and without court approval -- to telecommunications companies demanding information about their customers. The controversial provisions also permit the FBI to permanently gag service providers from revealing anything about the NSLs, including the fact that a demand was made, which prevents providers from notifying either their customers or the public. The limited judicial review provisions essentially write the courts out of the process.
In today's ruling, the court held that the gag order provisions of the statute violate the First Amendment and that the review procedures violate separation of powers. Because those provisions were not separable from the rest of the statute, the court declared the entire statute unconstitutional. In addressing the concerns of the service provider, the court noted: "Petitioner was adamant about its desire to speak publicly about the fact that it received the NSL at issue to further inform the ongoing public debate."
"The First Amendment prevents the government from silencing people and stopping them from criticizing its use of executive surveillance power," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "The NSL statute has long been a concern of many Americans, and this small step should help restore balance between liberty and security."

I am so proud of my friends at EFF this morning. Go team!

National Security Letters Are Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules

Aaron Swartz's FBI File

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 23:54:18 +0000

Aaron Swartz spent many years trying to get the FBI to cough up its file on him. Now that Aaron is dead, that file is automatically declassified, so FireDogLake's DSWright decided to request it, and has posted it, with a summary:

Exceptions aside, the records reveal that the FBI investigated Swartz for his role in the accessing the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) documents. Swartz himself was aware that he was being investigated and would later send a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for his own FBI file. Swartz’s request seems to be different than what I received at least in redactions for example the 4/16/2009 meeting was apparently with Swartz’s lawyer Andrew Good who refused to talk to the FBI unless an assurance was given that his client would not be hurt – no assurance would be given so no further conversation took place.
There is another odd redaction on 2/19/2009. The FBI agent writes a report that includes information from a New York Times article but redacts one of the names that is actually listed in the article – Carl Malamud. Malamud also seems to be the one referenced in the 4/15/2009 report in a conversation with the FBI claiming he did not know “how Aaron did it.”
Overall the files tell you more about the FBI than they do Swartz. They collected information from Linked In, followed his blog posts, and even thought his membership in the “Long-term Planning Committee for the Human Race” was worthy of note. There is also a Kafkaesque entry concerning Swartz’s blog post NYT Personals which includes the question “Want to have the F.B.I. open up a file on you as well?” – which I read for the first time in Swartz’s FBI file. One can only wonder what is in the two classified pages of Swartz’s FBI file.

Aaron Swartz’s FBI File

Aaron H. Swartz FBI File by Daniel Wright

Anonymous rocked by revelation that top LulzSec hacker was FBI snitch

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:48:37 +0000

Quinn Norton has an excellent piece over at Wired:Threat Level on the reactions within "Anonymous" to the news that LulzSec frontman "Sabu" (photo above) was collaborating with the FBI. Kim Zetter's take on the arrests and secret plea deals is here.

More on the Supreme Court ruling forcing FBI to turn off 3,000 GPS trackers

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 02:10:59 +0000

At ABC News, a thorough "explainer" by Ariane de Vogue on the January Supreme Court ruling that requires the FBI to immediately stop using GPS tracking devices to spy on suspects. Today, FBI Director Bob Mueller said the Bureau will cooperate, but not without complaint: “Trackers enabled us to utilize resources elsewhere, so it is going have an impact on the work that we do but of course we will comply with the ruling.”

FBI to increase monitoring of Twitter and Facebook, seeks help building new surveillance app

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:29:41 +0000

From the Guardian: "Earlier this month the FBI quietly published a request for information (RFI) looking for companies that might help it build a new social network monitoring system looking at "publicly available" information. Contractors have until 10 February to suggest solutions."

The Quantico Book of the Dead

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:01:39 +0000

Via a FOIA filing, Government Attic yielded the FBI's official list of notable dead people. (PDF link)

FOIA haul covers a half-century of government telephone security phear

Rob Beschizza — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:36:05 +0000

Government Attic's latest FOIA haul is a compilation of FBI documents concerning the security of telephone services, 1952-1995. The collection is posted as a single 66MB monster PDF. Get cracking! On reading the PDF, I mean.

ACLU: FBI practicing racial profiling on an "industrial scale"

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 17:07:45 +0000

The ACLU has sent a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder documenting its disturbing research into the use of racial profiling in the FBI's anti-terrorism efforts. According to the ACLU, the FBI practices "racial profiling on an industrial scale," targetting people of Muslim faith on the basis of their religion rather than any violent tendencies or beliefs.

Meanwhile, the ACLU has filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests – some backed up with lawsuits – to find out how the FBI is using racial and ethnic data as part of its investigations.
“The documents we have started to receive confirm our worst fears,” ACLU officials wrote to Attorney General Holder. “Although often heavily redacted, these documents, obtained from a number of different field offices, demonstrate that FBI analysts are using improper and crude racial stereotypes regarding the types of crimes committed by different racial and ethnic groups and then collecting demographic data to map where people of those racial or ethnic groups live.”
The result, charges the ACLU, has been “racial profiling on an industrial scale.”

ACLU: FBI guilty of 'industrial scale' racial profiling [csmonitor.com]

The FBI and the War On Us: Racial profiling on an "industrial scale"

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:42:48 +0000

Justin Elliott in Salon: "New documents obtained by the ACLU show that the FBI has for years been using Census data to “map” ethnic and religious groups suspected of being likely to commit certain types of crimes."

Subpoena for AG Holder imminent in "Fast and Furious" guns-for-narcos investigation

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 01:08:23 +0000

(Eric Holder. Photo: REUTERS)

A congressional subpoena directed to Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to be issued soon, according to CBS News, and will order him to hand over documents to lawmakers showing when he became aware of "Fast and Furious," a "gunwalking" operation that supplied guns to Mexican drug cartels. Snip from CBS:

CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports the the subpoena will come from the House Oversight Committee, led by Republican Darrell Issa. It will ask for communications among senior Justice Department officials related to Fast and Furious and "gunwalking." The subpoena will list those officials, says Attkisson - more than a dozen of them - by name.

In Fast and Furious, the ATF allegedly allowed thousands of assault rifles and other weapons into the hands of suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels. The idea was to see where the weapons ended up, and take down a cartel. But the guns have been found at many crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S., including the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry last December.

In related news, the very latest in a series of reports at the Los Angeles Times about "Fast and Furious" reveals that guns from that covert US operation were found literally inside the home of a narco boss in violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico:

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.

Photo, Los Angeles Times: The arsenal uncovered by police in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which included weapons from the ATF's ill-fated "Fast and Furious" operation. Note the highly classy "Scarface"-dollar-bill poster above the bookshelf, a favorite motif among gangsters worldwide.

FBI Anti-Piracy warning may now be used by just anyone

Rob Beschizza — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:34:03 +0000

You know that unskippable government warning on DVDs, which only big media corporations may use? The FBI's anti-piracy imprimatur may now be used by any copyright holder, not just members of trade associations such as the RIAA and MPAA. It is currently a violation of federal law to use the anti-piracy insignia if you are not one of them. [Wired]

How paid FBI anti-terror informants lead "terrorist attacks" that the FBI foils

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:08:47 +0000

Michael from Mother Jones sez, "This yearlong investigation by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at UC-Berkeley explores the network of thousands of informants the FBI employs in its domestic counter-terrorism program, operating in gray area where the snitches don't merely observe and report, but actively push their targets (in many cases hapless losers who never would have acted otherwise) to pursue their darkest fantasies. In the process, MoJo created a searchable database of 508 terror prosecutions."

Here's how it works: Informants report to their handlers on people who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names are then cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as immigration and criminal records. FBI agents may then assign an undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical. Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating information has been gathered, there's an arrest—and a press conference announcing another foiled plot.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because such sting operations are a fixture in the headlines. Remember the Washington Metro bombing plot? The New York subway plot? The guys who planned to blow up the Sears Tower? The teenager seeking to bomb a Portland Christmas tree lighting? Each of those plots, and dozens more across the nation, was led by an FBI asset.
Over the past year, Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined by the Department of Justice.

Terrorists for the FBI Exclusive | Mother Jones (Image: Jeffrey Smith)