A long-time reader whose read my posts on pseudoscience and the like sent me a link to an article I had missed. Cory Doctorow quotes a post by Bruce Schneier reacting to a news report by Stewart M. Powell and Yang Wang in the Houston Chronicle: Interesting data from the U.S. Government Accounting Office: But congressional auditors have…
Category: U.S.
National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance
In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower. Binney was a key source for investigative journalist James Bamford’s recent exposé in Wired Magazine about…
Judges Drive Truck Through Loophole in Supreme Court GPS Ruling
Kim Zetter reports: A federal judge in Iowa has ruled that evidence gathered through the warrantless use of covert GPS vehicle trackers can be used to prosecute a suspected drug trafficker, despite a Supreme Court decision this year that found such tracking unconstitutional without a warrant. U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett in Sioux City ruled last week (.pdf) that the…
What local cops learn, and carriers earn, from cellphone records
Bob Sullivan reports: The war on drugs has gone digital; but is it also a war on cellphone users? That’s just one of the questions raised by an msnbc.com investigation into use of cellphone tracking data by local police departments across the nation. Msnbc.com built a database of thousands of invoices issued by cell phone…