Snowdon is a dummy

CI said himself that it does not matter what we do, the country has no chance to get better

http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=100007JDSJ8G

The US Marshals Service is flying over parts of the country with devices that can collect large amounts of data Relevant Products/Services from the cellphones of anyone on the ground, according to a report published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. The devices, called "dirtboxes," can collect registration and location information from phones by mimicking the behaviors of cellphone towers, the newspaper reported.
In that regard, the dirtboxes appear to be similar to the StingRay devices that have been used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation since at least 1995 to track and locate cellphones and cellphone users.

According to this latest report, the U.S. Marshals Service -- which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice -- is operating dirtbox-equipped Cessna airplanes out of at least five airports across the country. An anonymous Justice Department official wouldn't confirm or deny the existence of the program, but told the Journal that the agency's use of any such equipment complied with federal law.

'Pretty Jarring'

We reached out to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-profit organization that advocates for privacy and civil rights, to learn more about the implications of this latest revelation about U.S. government surveillance of cellphones.

"I think this disclosure is pretty jarring, considering the fact they're using a device . . . that, really, we haven't had the opportunity to discuss in public," said EPIC Senior Counsel Alan Butler. "We're just pulling back the curtain on how broadly this technology is used. It's clear now these devices have been used for many years."

In the wake of this latest report, Butler said that EPIC was preparing to file Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government to obtain more information about the dirtbox devices and how they are being used.

More than Just Metadata

Since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden released a large amount of classified information from the agency beginning in June 2013, the public has learned about numerous government surveillance programs that have been, or still are, scooping up data from e-mails, online browsing and cellphone activity.

While federal officials have said such programs are legal and aimed at fighting terrorism and crime, privacy and civil rights advocates question the legality of such broad surveillance tactics that collect vast amounts of data about ordinary citizens.

The latest news about the airborne dirtboxes indicates "a much more expansive surveillance activity than collection of metadata," Butler said. Because such techniques could gather information not just from criminal suspects but from a large number of ordinary citizens out on the streets or even in their homes, "that's a 4th Amendment search," Butler said.

Butler acknowledged that the government can justify the use of devices like StingRays and dirtboxes by obtaining warrants that specify the need for such surveillance in criminal or terrorism investigations. What's needed at this point was an explicit acknowledgment -- via legislation, if necessary -- that government agencies would use these devices "only with a warrant," he said.

I have no idea of what "believing in the current leadership" is supposed to mean...

...but I can tell you this:

Barack Obama has been as good and effective a president as was Ronald Reagan...and has done a hell of a lot less damage to our nation morally and economically than Reagan did.

But your opponents, Bill, consider Ronald Reagan to be a major success, with many considering him to be damn near a god...

...while people like you and others here almost manufacture fault with Obama.

Some of the crap going on disgusts me...and should disgust anyone with a sense of balance.

There are Americans who SHOULD KNOW BETTER who are aiding and abetting the American far right in this ill-advised attempt to show that they can criticize with the best of 'em.

So it is your right...all of you.

Continue to do it.

And you eventually will reap what you are sowing.

In the meantime, I repeat: People who should know better and who should be showing better restraint...but who continue down this destructive path...DISGUST ME.

But, hey, I'm just one person.

...while people like you and others here almost manufacture fault with Obama.

Published on
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
by Blog of Rights / ACLU
Will Obama Follow Bush Down the Made-Up Torture Loophole?

Given that Obama has little to lose at this point in his presidency, Eric Posner dreams. On what legal authority?


[Obama] could cite his commander-in-chief power under the Constitution and argue that Congress cannot force him to detain enemy combatants he believes should be released. It was on that basis that he recently traded five Guantanamo detainees for Bowe Bergdahl, an American solider captured by the Taliban. There are also various statutory loopholes he could exploit. Indeed, the president could declare the war with al-Qaida over, and in this way remove the legal foundation for the remaining Guantanamo detentions. It is perhaps for this reason that the president has announced that he wants a statute from Congress that authorizes the use of force against ISIS.

Once that statute is in place, he could formally declare the war with al-Qaida, and would be able to drop the fiction that ISIS and al-Qaida are the same entity, which he used to justify relying on the statute that authorizes the use of military force against al-Qaida for hostilities with ISIS.

One major constraint on all these actions is that Obama can sustain them only as long as he remains in office. Since he can’t make law, the next president will not be bound to continue them. However, the practical significance of this constraint is nil. If Obama releases Guantanamo detainees, the next president will not be able to put them back in Guantanamo. He or she could reopen Guantanamo and repopulate it with a new batch of terrorists, but the Guantanamo experiment was a failure, and no future president will repeat it.

I’d argue that this is a legitimate use of the president’s wartime executive authority. Would Obama ever do it? Maybe as a final, irreversible act two years from now – like his power to pardon. But it does not seem to me to be likely given the president’s institutional conservatism and aversion to “any sudden moves.” But then, I have no idea what Obama is really like when his long game is done and he really does not have anything left to lose. It sure would be a high note to go out on – the mother of all meep meeps.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/11/whatsapp-brings-strong-end-to-end-crypto-to-the-masses/


In a coup for privacy advocates, strong end-to-end encryption is coming to Whatsapp, a cross-platform instant messaging app with more than 500 million installations on the Android platform alone.

Until now, most popular messaging apps for smartphones have offered woefully inadequate protections against eavesdropping. Whatsapp, which Facebook recently acquired for $19 billion, has itself been criticized for a series of crypto blunders only spooks in the National Security Agency would love. Most other mobile apps haven't done much better, as a recent scorecard of 39 apps compiled by the Electronic Frontier Foundation attests. Many fail to implement perfect forward secrecy, which uses a different key for each message or session to ensure that an adversary who intercepts a key can't use it to decrypt old messages. The notable exception among popular messaging apps is Apple's iMessage, but it's not available for Android handsets.

FURTHER READING


IN SURVEILLANCE ERA, CLEVER TRICK ENHANCES SECRECY OF IPHONE TEXT MESSAGES
"Perfect forward secrecy" comes to iOS and gets a boost on Android.
Enter Moxie Marlinspike, the highly regarded security researcher and principal developer of TextSecure, an SMS app for Android. Over the past three years, his team at Open Whisper Systems has developed a open encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. The term asynchronous means that the endpoints don't need to wait for a message from a server or other party to function properly. That's what allows one person to send a burst of a dozen messages while the other remains idle. Implementing strong end-to-end crypto on such systems is especially challenging, particularly when it comes to devising a way to implement forward secrecy. But as Ars reported last year, TextSecure devised a clever technique for doing just that.
For now, Whatsapp encryption is limited to the Android platform, and even then it doesn't work for group messages or for messages containing photos or videos. In a blog post, Open Whisper Systems said those limitations will be addressed in future updates. Developers are also working on options for key verification, so users can make sure a key truly belongs to the person they want to communicate with, rather than an adversary digitally impersonating that person.

Until now, user-friendly strong crypto has been something of an oxymoron. If Whatsapp makes good on its promise to bring strong crypto to iOS and other platforms, it could change that. In the process, it very well may make NSA-style surveillance much harder if not impossible to carry out on a billion or so users.

That's where Obama fails; he's (supposed to be) the Commander In Chief.
No ethics, no backbone, no legacy.

From your article:
The White House however says he is not planning to override the law.

cicerone imposter wrote:
He promised to close it

Obama is the commander in chief and Gitmo is a military prison. He can close it whenever he wants to.