Learn about what could happen when you rent your next vehicle from Hertz.   They claim the audio and video capabilities they installed in their vehicles aren't active, but do you want to chance having some company spy on you beyond their means of tracking speed and movements?    Learn more about this shocking news by clicking here.

NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally (Washington Post)   The National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans, according to senior intelligence officials and top secret documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The collection program, which has not been disclosed before, intercepts e-mail address books and “buddy lists” from instant messaging services as they move across global data links. Online services often transmit those contacts when a user logs on, composes a message, or synchronizes a computer or mobile device with information stored on remote servers. Rather than targeting individual users, the NSA is gathering contact lists in large numbers that amount to a sizable fraction of the world’s e-mail and instant messaging accounts. Analysis of that data enables the agency to search for hidden connections and map relationships within a much smaller universe of foreign intelligence targets. During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation. Those figures, described as a typical daily intake in the document, correspond to a rate of more than 250 million per year. Each day, the presentation said, the NSA collects contacts from an estimated 500,000 buddy lists on live-chat services as well as from the “in-box” displays of Web-based e-mail accounts. The collection depends on secret arrangements with foreign telecommunications companies or allied intelligence services in control of facilities that direct traffic along the Internet’s main data routes. Although the collection takes place overseas, two senior U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged that it sweeps in the contacts of many Americans. They declined to offer an estimate but did not dispute that the number is likely to be in the millions or tens of millions. A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said the agency “is focused on discovering and developing intelligence about valid foreign intelligence targets like terrorists, human traffickers and drug smugglers. We are not interested in personal information about ordinary Americans.” The spokesman, Shawn Turner, added that rules approved by the attorney general require the NSA to “minimize the acquisition, use, and dissemination” of information that identifies a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. The NSA’s collection of nearly all U.S. call records, under a separate program, has generated significant controversy since it was revealed in June. The NSA’s director, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, has defended “bulk” collection as an essential counterterrorism and foreign intelligence tool, saying “you need the haystack to find the needle.” Contact lists stored online provide the NSA with far richer sources of data than call records alone. Address books commonly include not only names and e-mail addresses but also telephone numbers, street addresses, and business and family information. In-box listings of e-mail accounts stored in the “cloud” sometimes contain content such as the first few lines of a message. Taken together, the data would enable the NSA, if permitted, to draw detailed maps of a person’s life, as told by personal, professional, political and religious connections. The picture can also be misleading, creating false “associations” with ex-spouses or people with whom an account holder has had no contact in many years. The NSA has not been authorized by Congress or the special intelligence court that oversees foreign surveillance to collect contact lists in bulk, and senior intelligence officials said it would be illegal to do so from facilities in the United States. The agency avoids the restrictions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by intercepting contact lists from access points “all over the world,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified program. “None of those are on U.S. territory.” Because of the method employed, the agency is not legally required or technically able to restrict its intake to contact lists belonging to specified foreign intelligence targets, he said. When information passes through “the overseas collection apparatus,” the official added, “the assumption is you’re not a U.S. person.” In practice, data from Americans is collected in large volumes — in part because they live and work overseas, but also because data crosses international boundaries even when its American owners stay at home. Large technology companies, including Google and Facebook, maintain data centers around the world to balance loads on their servers and work around outages. A senior U.S. intelligence official said that the privacy of Americans is protected, despite mass collection, because “we have checks and balances built into our tools.” NSA analysts, he said, may not search or distribute information from the contacts database unless they can “make the case that something in there is a valid foreign intelligence target in and of itself.” In this program, the NSA is obliged to make that case only to itself or others in the executive branch. With few exceptions, intelligence operations overseas fall solely within the president’s legal purview. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, enacted in 1978, imposes restrictions only on electronic surveillance that targets Americans or takes place on U.S. territory. By contrast, the NSA draws on authority in the Patriot Act for its bulk collection of domestic phone records, and it gathers online records from U.S. Internet companies, in a program known as PRISM, under powers granted by Congress in the FISA Amendments Act. Those operations are overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in August that the committee has less information about, and conducts less oversight of, intelligence-gathering that relies solely on presidential authority. She said she planned to ask for more briefings on those programs. “In general, the committee is far less aware of operations conducted under 12333,” said a senior committee staff member, referring to Executive Order 12333, which defines the basic powers and responsibilities of the intelligence agencies. “I believe the NSA would answer questions if we asked them, and if we knew to ask them, but it would not routinely report these things, and in general they would not fall within the focus of the committee.” Because the agency captures contact lists “on the fly” as they cross major Internet switches, rather than “at rest” on computer servers, the NSA has no need to notify the U.S. companies that host the information or to ask for help from them. “We have neither knowledge nor participation in any mass collection of webmail addresses or chat lists by the government,” said Google spokesman Niki Fenwick. At Microsoft, spokesman Nicole Miller said the company “does not provide any government with direct or unfettered access to our customers’ data,” adding that “we would have significant concerns if these allegations about government actions are true.” Facebook spokesman Jodi Seth said “we did not know and did not assist” in the NSA’s interception of contact lists. It is unclear why the NSA collects more than twice as many address books from Yahoo than the other big services combined. One possibility is that Yahoo, unlike other service providers, has left connections to its users unencrypted by default. Suzanne Philion, a Yahoo spokesman, said Monday in response to an inquiry from The Washington Post that, beginning in January, Yahoo would begin encrypting all its e-mail connections. Google was the first to secure all its e-mail connections, turning on “SSL encryption” globally in 2010. People with inside knowledge said the move was intended in part to thwart large-scale collection of its users’ information by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders. Three NSA documents describe short-term efforts to build an “across-the-board technology throttle for truly heinous data” and longer-term efforts to filter out information that the NSA does not need. Spam has proven to be a significant problem for NSA — clogging databases with data that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.” In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.” The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf. After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.” In a briefing from the NSA’s Large Access Exploitation working group, that example was used to illustrate the need to narrow the criteria for interception of data. It called for a “shifting collection philosophy”: “Memorialize what you need” vs. “Order one of everything off the menu and eat what you want.”

Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years "SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations." The 2005 IRS document focuses on SOD tips that are classified and notes that the Justice Department "closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight." While the IRS document says that SOD information may only be used for drug investigations, DEA officials said the SOD role has recently expanded to organized crime and money laundering. According to the document, IRS agents are directed to use the tips to find new, "independent" evidence: "Usable information regarding these leads must be developed from such independent sources as investigative files, subscriber and toll requests, physical surveillance, wire intercepts, and confidential source information. Information obtained from SOD in response to a search or query request cannot be used directly in any investigation (i.e. cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings or maintained in investigative files)." The IRS document makes no reference to SOD's sources of information, which include a large DEA telephone and Internet database. CONCERN IN CONGRESS House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, expressed concern with the concept of parallel construction as a method to hide the origin of an investigation. His comments came on the Mike Huckabee Show radio program. "If they're recreating a trail, that's wrong and we're going to have to do something about it," said Rogers, a former FBI agent. "We're working with the DEA and intelligence organizations to try to find out exactly what that story is." Spokespeople for the DEA and the Department of Justice declined to comment. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said he was troubled that DEA agents have been "trying to cover up a program that investigates Americans." "National security is one of government's most important functions. So is protecting individual liberty," Paul said. "If the Constitution still has any sway, a government that is constantly overreaching on security while completely neglecting liberty is in grave violation of our founding doctrine." Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement. The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said. REUTERS - The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defence lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure. A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA's Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency. As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Monday's Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin - to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information. DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence. NEW DETAIL Defence attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a procedure they call "parallel construction" to recreate the investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example, that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an SOD tip. The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction program. "Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects," the IRS document says.

C O M M E N T A R Y The recent disclosure of the National Security Agency (NSA) information that most digital communications, in one form or another, are monitored and their "metadata" retained for ALL communications is quite disturbing. There are two schools of thought in this (and likely shades of gray between them). The first school of thought is by those who believe that all data should be tracked under the guise of protecting the nation from terrorist attacks.   Those people who subscribe to this belief would have you believe that the "snooping" on digital communications is only being conducted on "incoming" communications from foreign sources to those in the United States (or insert your country depending on where you live).    This slight of hand declaration that the NSA is only monitoring inbound communication from foreign countries sounds very reassuring.   After all, there shouldn't be any harm in monitoring the communications of ALL FOREIGN communications when it comes to trying to track SOME individuals or groups of individuals. In my eyes, there is a critical flaw in this reasoning that is only exacerbated when you consider the other school of thought's belief that the NSA is monitoring ALL communications - even if it is just restricted to "metadata".    Even if the first school of thought based on monitoring "foreign" communications is actually what is going on, there is still a wide dragnet of scrutiny being conducted that unreasonably snags innocent and harmless communications in order to snag the potentially harmful ones. In this era of highly effective and efficient computer systems that can monitor up to pentaflops of data in short periods of time, it seems inefficient and ludicrous to monitor ALL communication (whether it is aggregate or metadata) of citizens when you have specific targets whom you are tracking. It is true that the Government technically in the United States has to present a "case" for monitoring to a court, herein referred to as FISA.    Technically, the Government presents their finds and asks for additional monitoring, but the proceedings are ENTIRELY ONE SIDED.    The Government is the only one who presents a case and there is no advocate for the "suspected" party to argue the case - there is in fact no "advocate" for even the population at large to present a counter argument in the traditional adversarial judicial system that we cling to like Charlton Heston and his guns.    This FISA court is not set up to present real facts - it is all based on the supposition of the Government and then the only BARRIER to infringing on individual liberties is having the Judge to act as both Judge and hopefully the adversary to the Government. On the other hand, we must understand that the recent "leaks" of what is REALLY happening shows that the Government is lying about only monitoring INBOUND communications. You see, we know as FACT that Verizon and scores of internet based communications companies (as well as telecoms) are providing the NSA with metadata which includes dates and times, number called, originating numbers, but supposedly not the actual communications.   This data is collected ON ALL communications - this is billions of transactions per day and there is a new data facility being constructed to help facilitate even more communication interception. It is said that because only the metadata of the communications is being intercepted and RETAINED, this is not an invasion of privacy.    Suppose you called an AIDS or SUICIDE hotline - that you visited a gay website or called a gay organization, this information can easily be turned into potentially harmful (for you) situations.    And while the website address and phone number of the organization/company you visited is basically all they have, it is almost 5th grade level to reverse lookup what that website address and phone number is associated with.     So if you have a pattern of visiting gay sites, guess what?    You are known to be gay - or you might have visited AIDS sites - you might have AIDS.    Read here how MetaData could have snagged Paul Revere on his ride. Even to this point, just using meta data has a potentially chilling effect.   We already know that this current administration will use government agencies to target political adversaries.    Whether it is the use of the IRS to harass and to prevent conservative and libertarian groups, or the even more insidious cross application of using OSHA and EPA investigations on the same groups from data collected by the IRS, we know we cannot trust this current administration. As a Libertarian, I have long noted that Government should never be trusted.   Always assume that Government will do the evil and dishonest thing.   That is why those like me always seek the smallest Government with the least influence on our lives.   Having such a monster of a Government as we have now with its tentacles in everything only means that the Tyrant we currently have will be able to easily eliminate and to neutralize his enemies and to quell the ability of his opponents to push back on his insidious dishonest and unethical conduct. Even if individual calls are not monitored for content, we cannot allow even the use of meta data searches on ALL AMERICANS to be allowed to continue.    The spying on ALL AMERICANS is not what FISA was established to permit.    If there is a compelling case of danger that can be established, then have each case presented before FISA and those records and ONLY THOSE RECORDS being the ones which are monitored and reviewed.    It makes no logical sense to retain all meta data from innocent folks and it seems to create an even tougher job to sift through useless data just to find the pin.   And since the Government has no opposition in FISA, their general threshold to get permission to snoop is woefully low. And if the Government is monitoring a potential terrorist and cell, it can ask for the data on the numbers that are called by those individuals and the rest of the 99.99% of Americans data is worthless and should never be monitored nor retained. And while some people implicitly trust their Government, we have learned that sometimes we elect dishonest men like Richard Nixon and Barack Obama who are hell bent to wage political war using all of the resources of the Federal Government.    It is better that we restrict the pool of data that such a potential Government should have than to take the easy way out and capture all data to save Federal Enforcement Agencies 15 minutes worth of time to present a case before FISA!     And maybe Obama is not as insidious as he seems, but do you leftists want another Nixon looking at you?