Student detained at airport because of Arabic flash cards

A college student was detained by the TSA for hours at an airport because he was carrying Arabic flash cards. Thankfully, the ACLU has taken up his case and is suing the TSA and the FBI, amongst others.

FBI violates your privacy... again

From Slashdot which links to the Washington Post:

An anonymous reader writes to tell us of a report from the Washington Post which alleges that the FBI "illegally collected more than 2,000 US telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records."

FBI Looking for Terrorists contributes to pervasive Financial Fraud

Turns out that all of these Ponzi schemes and otherwise financial fraud might not be as prevalent if the FBI allocated as many resources as in the past to stopping these crimes. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's emphasis on terrorism put more FBI officers chasing bad guys that may or may not exist and less on things that are now putting people on the streets. Another endearing chapter in the Bush administration legacy.

FBI, Police Detaining GOP Convention Protest Group Members

Glenn Greenwald is covering the FBI and Minnesota Police's raids of protesters houses ahead of the Republican convention. This is without any probable cause and mostly without warrants. Hopefully someone in the political establishment will object to this unlawful and un-American treatment of citizens, but who am I kidding? What's the chance of politicians sticking up for democratic freedoms? Slim.

FBI involvement:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/31/raids/index.html

Police raids:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/30/police_raids/index.html

FBI Pushing for Warantless Investigations

Oh gawd, is this really happening? (Link to NY times version)

FBI amassing eye scan database

And the new personal information that the government is vacuuming up this week is... eye scans! It appears that the FBI is adding information about people's eyes to the already existing biometric databases of the populace. Great.

FBI Abusing NSL

The FBI has been found to have been abusing National Security Letters, aka warrants sans judge. Here is the article from Wired and Slashdot. Is anyone surprised that when you give an investigative agency license to investigate anyone at the drop of a hat, it will (a lot)? I guess I just have more foresight than Dick Cheney, et al. Either that or they hate due process and privacy. Probably the latter.

Eating falafel? You're a terrorist!

Apparently the FBI thought that it could track down terrorists by watching falafel sales (collected from grocer data) in the Bay Area. If you ate too many, you would be put on a terrorist watch list.

Our tax dollars are going to _this_? Check out the Boing Boing comments for some well-deserved ridicule.

Point and Click Surveillance

Wired has an excellent article on the FBI's surveillance system used to eavesdrop on anyone with a cellphone. Some of the pictures are particularly revealing; they show how simple it is to use this powerful system. Some commentary on the system from the article:

Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.

"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."

Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.

"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"

Well it's a good thing that we can completely trust the FBI to understand the scope of its responsibilities and the limits of its power because it has never abused the privileges entrusted to it in the past. Oh, wait.

Your cellphone is listening... even when it's off

The FBI is pulling some sweet new tricks on mob bosses. Cell phones can be made to listen in on conversations even when they are turned off. This is just another reminder, however, of how easy it is for law enforcement to monitor us with today's technology. Let's hope that mob bosses are the only ones that they choose to monitor, and not deploy it on a much wider, illegal scale...