U.S.-China Surveillance

As I prepare a paper abstract for submission to an upcoming conference on national intelligence ethics, I’ve been thinking more about the historical context in which new federal standards for US “suspicious activity reporting” (the ISE-SAR) can be understood. Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) are an increasingly important tool of “domestic intelligence” distinct from the [...]

Former National Security Agency analyst turned whistleblower Russell Tice appeared on Keith Olberman’s Countdown last night, making new claims about the extent of NSA domestic surveillance during the Bush administration. Tice told Olberman that the NSA program was not only much wider than previous revelations suggested, targeting virtually everyone in America, but also that one [...]

Last week, a Supreme Court ruling deserving of much more attention than it has received to date, added to the steady erosion of Fourth Amendment protections Americans have been suffering since the September 11th attacks. Just how much the ruling has diluted the Fourth Amendment is open to debate, but there is little doubt that [...]

A recent blog post by Hal Roberts at the The Berkman Center for Internet & Society raises concerns about popular anonymizing and censorship circumvention services DynaWeb FreeGate, GPass, and FirePhoenix selling their individual user data to third parties. In the post, Roberts infers from a curiously-worded FAQ entry at Edoors.com that these three partner services [...]

A federal appeals court in Oregon will hold a hearing next month on a government appeal of a 2007 judicial ruling that said the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unconstitutional.
Full story at Secrecy News.

Studying how the U.S. government maintains records on its residents is not a simple matter of identifying “the dossier system” and following its history. According to the GAO, as of 2004, there were more than 122 data mining systems in over 50 government agencies and departments containing personally identifiable information on U.S. citizens. The names [...]

Just in time for the Olympics, the Guardian is reporting a development in how the Tor network diffuses that appears, at least temporarily, to obviate any established methods of web censorship. The Tor network was developed by the US Naval Research laboratory to anonymize (but not necessarily encrypt) Internet traffic. The Chinese government has been [...]

There’s an excellent, informative article by David Bandurski about what has become known as China’s “Fifty Cent Party” in the latest issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review. This growing group of state-financed “web commentators” has been attempting to monitor and influence public opinion via online chat rooms and BBSs since the spring of [...]

From today’s Seattle Times:
Microsoft device helps police pluck evidence from cyberscene of crime
By Benjamin J. Romano
Seattle Times technology reporter
Microsoft has developed a small plug-in device that investigators can use to quickly extract forensic data from computers that may have been used in crimes.
The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB [...]

The Information Office of China’s State Council released an English-language report on human rights in the US today. Section III of the report, On Civil and Political Rights, deals with issues of surveillance and data privacy. Here are some excerpts:
From January 2005 to September 2007, Verizon provided data to federal authorities “on an emergency [...]