Recently I’ve been see­ing a lot of talk about a new game Google is devel­op­ing for Android, called Ingress. I’ve noticed that so far nobody seems to have noticed an unin­tended (pre­sum­ably) con­se­quence of the game: peo­ple play­ing it will be trav­el­ing around to libraries, post offices, cour­t­houses, fire sta­tions, mon­u­ments, and the like, stand­ing around for sev­eral min­utes, and then mov­ing on to another loca­tion in a seem­ingly ran­dom pattern.

What the peo­ple writ­ing about Ingress as a game seem to have missed is that it’s fairly well known by peo­ple who pay atten­tion that the gov­ern­ment tracks everyone’s move­ments using the loca­tion data from their cell phone ser­vices. The strange and erratic move­ments of Ingress play­ers are bound to drive the secret police­men respon­si­ble for such spy­ing berserk, which I con­sider to be a huge ben­e­fit. I’m con­sid­er­ing get­ting a Nexus 7 just so I can help con­fuse Big Brother.

Ana­lyst: Only one in ten tablets sold has a cel­lu­lar con­nec­tion. It’s clear that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for new tablets, but it’s also clear that they aren’t yet ready to take on the fee for cel­lu­lar con­nec­tiv­ity to their tablets. [Mac­Cen­tral]

Per­son­ally, I don’t care about the fee, but I refuse to vol­un­teer to carry a track­ing and sur­veil­lance device around with me. The idea that I’d pay to carry one is just insulting.

A few days ago I found the notice on the left in the photo above in my apart­ment build­ing. The notice states that some­one from the local gov­ern­ment will be con­duct­ing an ille­gal search of my apart­ment build­ing tomor­row. This isn’t the first time some­thing like this has hap­pened. About ten years ago, a sim­i­lar notice appeared and I took the day off from work to keep the “inspec­tor” from get­ting into my apart­ment with­out a search warrant–which, nat­u­rally, he didn’t have. After a bit of the expected veiled threats and attempts at intim­i­da­tion and trick­ery that inspec­tor gave up and left, and I’m hop­ing that the one tomor­row will go as well.

The two pages of Korean text next to the notice are a trans­la­tion of the Bill of Rights, with the Fourth Amend­ment high­lighted. I found this on the web­site of a civil rights orga­ni­za­tion called Jews for the Preser­va­tion of Firearms Own­er­ship, which has trans­la­tions of the Bill of Rights into many dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Most of my neigh­bors were born in Korea, and many speak no Eng­lish, so I fig­ured it was likely they wouldn’t be aware that they have the right to refuse war­rant­less searches of their homes. Hope­fully read­ing the trans­la­tion of the rel­e­vant US law will help at least some of them stand up for them­selves and their liberty.

Update: This time around the inspec­tor took “get a war­rant” quickly and with­out mak­ing a fuss.

Abuse of Power Gets a Pass, Report­ing It Gets Jail Time.

Here’s Glenn Green­wald on the Obama administration’s pros­e­cu­tion of NSA whistle­blower Thomas Drake, and it’s out­ra­geous tri­umphal­ism after win­ning an indictment.

As Green­wald writes, it’s now clear that Obama’s “Look For­ward, Not Back­ward” phi­los­o­phy applies only to high-ranking Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who abused their power and posi­tion. The peo­ple who risked their careers and free­dom to come for­ward to report on those abuses won’t be get­ting the same con­sid­er­a­tion. Or put another way: If you break the law to expand the power of gov­ern­ment at the expense of the peo­ple, you get a pass. But if you break the law to make gov­ern­ment more trans­par­ent and account­able, expect them to throw the book at you.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Another exam­ple of how noth­ing has changed, regard­less of who occu­pies the White House.

Gov’t, cer­tifi­cate author­i­ties con­spire to spy on SSL users?.

SSL is the cor­ner­stone of secure Web brows­ing, enabling credit card and bank details to be used on the ‘Net with impunity. We’re all told to check for the lit­tle pad­lock in our address bars before hand­ing over any sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion. SSL is also increas­ingly a fea­ture of web­mail providers, instant mes­sag­ing, and other forms of online communication.

Recent dis­cov­er­ies by Wired and a paper by secu­rity researchers Christo­pher Soghoian and Sid Stamm sug­gests that SSL might not be as secure as once thought. Not because SSL itself has been com­pro­mised, but because gov­ern­ments are con­spir­ing with Cer­tifi­cate Author­i­ties, key parts of the SSL infra­struc­ture, to sub­vert the entire sys­tem to allow them to spy on any­one they wish to keep tabs on.

[Ars Tech­nica]

The weak­nesses of SSL are well known, which is why peo­ple who know any­thing about secu­rity don’t trust Cer­tifi­cate Author­i­ties, but in the past this has just been known as some­thing that gov­ern­ments were prob­a­bly doing. Now we have the first bit of evi­dence that they’re actu­ally doing it. I don’t think this will make any dif­fer­ence in the long run–after all, nobody cared when, after years of sus­pi­cion, the US gov­ern­ment admit­ted to using cell phones as track­ing and lis­ten­ing devices–but hope­fully at least a few peo­ple will read this and rec­og­nize that the gov­ern­ment can and does spy on them.

Dear Old Golden Rule Days.

A recent grad­u­ate of Virginia’s pub­lic schools explains how
searches, sur­veil­lance, and zero-tolerance poli­cies have pro­duced a
whole new way for child­hood to suck.

[Hit and Run]

From what I’ve read, pris­ons pub­lic schools in other states are just as bad. I really can’t under­stand why any­one who has kids and doesn’t hate them would want to sub­ject them to this sort of treatment.

Sprint fed cus­tomer GPS data to cops over 8 mil­lion times.

Christo­pher Soghoian, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at Indi­ana University’s School of Infor­mat­ics and Com­put­ing, has made pub­lic an audio record­ing of Sprint/Nextel’s Elec­tronic Sur­veil­lance Man­ager describ­ing how his com­pany has pro­vided GPS loca­tion data about its wire­less cus­tomers to law enforce­ment over 8 mil­lion times. That’s poten­tially mil­lions of Sprint/Nextel cus­tomers who not only were prob­a­bly unaware that their wire­less provider even had an Elec­tronic Sur­veil­lance Depart­ment, but who cer­tainly did not know that law enforce­ment offers could log into a spe­cial Sprint Web por­tal and, with­out ever hav­ing to demon­strate prob­a­ble cause to a judge, gain access to geolo­ca­tion logs detail­ing where they’ve been and where they are.

[Ars Tech­nica]

It’s well known by now (at least, to any­one who pays atten­tion) that cell phones are used to spy on the loca­tion and move­ment of their own­ers. This is the first solid infor­ma­tion I’ve seen on just how often the cops spy on people–and keep in mind that this is only one com­pany. It’s pretty much guar­an­teed that other com­pa­nies are equally eager to col­lab­o­rate with Big Brother.

War­rant­less sur­veil­lance law­suit thrown out.

Fed­eral dis­trict judge Vaughn Walker has rejected law­suits that aimed to hold telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies account­able for their role in a con­tro­ver­sial war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram that was orches­trated in secret by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. The Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union are prepar­ing to appeal the dismissal.

The war­rant­less sur­veil­lance pro­gram is one the more con­tentious con­tro­ver­sies that still lingers from Bush’s tenure in office. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion attempted to lever­age the State Secrets priv­i­lege to block lit­i­ga­tion that aimed to hold par­tic­i­pants in the sur­veil­lance pro­gram account­able for vio­lat­ing pri­vacy laws. When it became clear that the courts were going to allow the law­suits to move for­ward, Con­gress inter­vened and passed a FISA amend­ment to grant the tele­com com­pa­nies explicit immu­nity. Pres­i­dent Obama voted in favor of immu­nity, despite con­sis­tently promis­ing to oppose it.

Click here to read the rest of this article

[Law & Dis­or­der]

A gov­ern­ment judge rul­ing in favor of the government’s inter­ests? Imag­ine that.

No War­rant Required in U.S. for GPS Track­ing.

At least, accord­ing to a U.S. Dis­trict Court rul­ing:

As the law cur­rently stands, the court said police can mount GPS on cars to track peo­ple with­out vio­lat­ing their con­sti­tu­tional rights — even if the dri­vers aren’t suspects.

Offi­cers do not need to get war­rants before­hand because GPS track­ing does not involve a search or a seizure, Judge Paul Lund­sten wrote for the unan­i­mous three-judge panel based in Madison.

That means “police are seem­ingly free to secretly track anyone’s pub­lic move­ments with a GPS device,” he wrote.

The court wants the leg­is­la­ture to fix it:

How­ever, the Dis­trict 4 Court of Appeals said it was “more than a lit­tle trou­bled” by that con­clu­sion and asked Wis­con­sin law­mak­ers to reg­u­late GPS use to pro­tect against abuse by police and pri­vate individuals.

I think the odds of that hap­pen­ing are approx­i­mately zero.

[Schneier on Secu­rity]

I agree. Also note that this really only applies to cops spy­ing on dri­vers who don’t have cell phones. If you’ve got a cell phone, it’s sim­pler and cheaper for the cops to spy on you using the track­ing device you paid for and vol­un­teered to carry around rather than going to the trou­ble of bug­ging your car.