The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released numerous reports of increased government spying on American citizens. Once upon an unhappy time, U.S. law enforcement agencies, from the FBI to local police, had a history of political spying during the Cold War. The ACLU said that the old political spying tendencies are running high again. Individuals and groups are being monitored and harassed for “little more than peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.”

One ACLU report, Policing Free Speech: Police Surveillance and Obstruction of First Amendment-Protected Activity (.pdf), reveals that, in recent years, Americans have been put under surveillance or harassed by law enforcement agencies in 33 states plus the District of Columbia. What horrific acts did these Americans commit? Organizing, marching, protesting, supporting unusual viewpoints, and engaging in “normal, innocuous behaviors such as writing notes or taking photographs in public.”

The map below show states where the ACLU uncovered incidents of political spying:

In California, there were 22 reports of spying. One such example is the Los Angeles Police Department Reporting Policy which included 65 behaviors LAPD officers were required to report. “The list includes such innocuous, clearly subjective, and First Amendment-protected activities as, taking measurements, using binoculars, taking pictures or video footage ‘with no apparent esthetic value,’ drawing diagrams, taking notes, and espousing extremist views.”

13 incidents in Colorado were reported, including one when FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) agents opened “domestic terrorism” investigations after the Colorado American Indian Movement, peace groups, and environmental groups posted notices on websites. The announcements were of an anti-war protest in Colorado Springs and a protest against Columbus Day in Denver.

In Georgia, among seven spying reports the ACLU uncovered, a vegetarian activist was arrested for writing down the license plate of a Department of Homeland Security agent who had been photographing her and others during a peaceful protest outside a Honey Baked Ham store.

In Chicago, Illinois, the FBI JTTF conducted a three-day manhunt searching for a Muslim man due to him clicking a hand counter during a bus ride. The investigation revealed he was using the hand counter to keep track of his daily prayers.

In Maine, the FBI intercepted and stored e-mails planning peaceful protests. In Massachusetts, a “plain-clothes Harvard University detective was caught photographing people at a peaceful protest for ‘intelligence gathering’ purposes. Protesters who then photographed the officer were arrested.” In North Carolina, an honorably discharged U.S. Army woman, whose husband is on active duty, was put under Pentagon surveillance for participating in a protest at Fort Bragg.

Meanwhile, in Maryland, the “Maryland State Police spied on more than 30 activist groups, mostly peace groups and anti-death penalty advocates, and wrongly indentified 53 individual activists and about two dozen organizations as terrorists.” DHS further disseminated e-mails from one of the peace groups.

There are many such surveillance reports on a national level as well. An example is when a DHS contractor reported environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the Humane Society, and the Audubon Society as “mainstream organizations with known or possible links to eco-terrorism.”

An intelligence bulletin, from a DHS-supported North Central Texas Fusion System, was distributed to over 100 different agencies. It described a “purported conspiracy between Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department, and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the U.S.”

Once you unfortunately land on some kind of watchlist, it’s unlikely you will ever have your name removed. One example was a Kentucky minister who had never been arrested, had never been charged with a crime, and had never participated in a protest. During a sightseeing trip, he was detained by Canadian border officials. The ministered learned he was under federal scrutiny because, immediately after September 11, he ordered books over the Internet about the Islamic religion, like the Koran, to help his congregation better understand that faith.

Does this make you sick or does it make you mad? Does this even slightly sound like America, the land of the free?

Source: Network World

“ACLU”

Today the government is spying on Americans in ways the founders of our country never could have imagined. The FBI, federal intelligence agencies, the military, state and local police, private companies, and even firemen and emergency medical technicians are gathering incredible amounts of personal information about ordinary Americans that can be used to construct vast dossiers that can be widely shared with a simple mouse-click through new institutions like Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, and public-private partnerships. The fear of terrorism has led to a new era of overzealous police intelligence activity directed, as in the past, against political activists, racial and religious minorities, and immigrants.

This surveillance activity is not directed solely at suspected terrorists and criminals. It’s directed at all of us. Increasingly, the government is engaged in suspicionless surveillance that vacuums up and tracks sensitive information about innocent people. Even more disturbingly, as the government’s surveillance powers have grown more intrusive and more powerful, the restrictions on many of those powers have been weakened or eliminated. And this surveillance often takes place in secret, with little or no oversight by the courts, by legislatures, or by the public.

The erosion of reasonable restrictions on government’s power to collect people’s personal information is putting the privacy and free speech rights of all Americans at risk. The American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates across the country have uncovered and reported on many aspects of this growing domestic surveillance activity over the last several years. Our updated Spy Files website combines the information we’ve collected from Freedom of Information Act requests, ACLU lawsuits and reports, and news accounts so that members of the public can begin to get a comprehensive view of how these networked intelligence activities threaten their civil liberities.

You can navigate the links to get updated information on spying conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, intelligence agencies, state and local police, and even private companies. Click here to read about specific spying platforms, such as fusion centers, Joint Terrorism Task Forces and Suspicious Activity Reporting programs.

IT LOOKS LIKE PROSECUTORS are not going to get involved in the bizarre case of the school which switched on laptops to spy on students while they were in their own bedrooms.

US Attorney Zane David Memeger told USA Today, investigators had found no evidence of criminal intent by Lower Merion School District employees who activated tracking software that took thousands of webcam and screenshot images on school-provided laptops.

A student and his family sued the district in February, claiming officials invaded his privacy by activating the software and the civil case is ongoing.

The school has admitted that it captured 56,000 screen shots and webcam images mostly so it could find missing student laptops. But in the case of this student the school appears to have been using the laptops to investigate home drug use.

By saying that the school was not “criminal” the prosecutors are not implying that the outfit was right. However it does mean that schools do not have to be worried about being locked up for spying on their students using this method.

It also says that breaches of privacy that are not carried out for “bad reasons” is OK in the United States. So if you are a company that wants to watch what its employees get up to in their home in case they might be taking corporate secrets, that is OK one imagines.

You could still be sued if the employee finds out, but it is not criminal. One wonders then if HP should ever have gone down for the pre-texting scandal or are schools allowed to do what they like?

One of the biggest prisoner swaps since the cold war unfolded
on the tarmac of Vienna's airport on Friday as two airplanes
-- one carrying 10 accused Russian sleeper agents and the
other with four Russians deemed to be spies for the West --
traded their human cargoes and took off into the bright clear
sky.

An American official confirmed the exchange had taken place,
hours after the 10 accused Russian spies were whisked out of
the United States on a charter plane. The American and
Russian airplanes landed and departed in what appeared to be
a clockwork operation on a remote part of the runway in
Vienna, once a hub of clandestine East-West maneuvering.

The exchange was part of a deal with Moscow to put a quick
end to an episode that threatened to disrupt relations
between the two countries.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na

Doris Stanley said she and her husband have lived on Trowbridge Street in Cambridge for about 10 years, and still barely speak to anyone. So when a bubbly blonde came to introduce herself early last week as the new neighbor moving in next door, Stanley was delighted.

“I kept thinking how nice this is – finally, there’s someone who’s really friendly,” Stanley, 65, said today from her front porch,. “Most people don’t talk to each other here.”

Those new neighbors, who called themselves Donald Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, were arrested by federal authorities on Sunday and accused of spying for Russia. They had purchased the condo on June 9 for $790,000.

Stanley, a French teacher, recalled that when her conversation with Ann Foley turned to language, she noticed some inconsistencies in Foley’s dialect.

“I noticed she had an accent, and I said, because I’m nosy, ‘What’s this accent you have?’ ” Stanley said. “And she said ‘I’m from Montreal.’”

Then Stanley and Foley began speaking French, and surprisingly, Stanley said, she was able to understand her new neighbor.

“I was thinking, that’s strange, because I actually understood this person and I usually don’t understand people from Montreal,” she said. “They have this accent that is not Parisian.”

Stanley said she asked Foley why her French dialect was so Parisian. Foley told her it was because she went to school in Switzerland.

“Then it hit me that that’s an odd reason to understand her,” she said. “Your accent doesn’t usually change just because you’ve been somewhere for a while; it’s usually stuck with you no matter what you do.”

When the two women were discussing their children, Stanley said Foley asked her to elaborate when Stanley mentioned her two children were professors. “She seemed very interested,” Stanley said.

Later, Stanley mentioned her father was originally from Odessa, Ukraine, a former Soviet city. In reaction, Foley’s “eyes kind of widened,” Stanley said. “I just thought that was an odd reaction. I thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t.”

Stanley and her husband later watched Foley’s sons carry boxes into the condo, as they moved from up the street.

“They were bringing things like video games and stuff like that, and I thought, how cute,” Foley said. “And the father was helping one of the sons with one of the packages, and I said, ‘Oh, it seems like a nice family.’ ”

Lila Hexner, 85, lived across a shared driveway from the family in a low-key condo complex at 111 Trowbridge St. Hexner said Ann Foley was always friendly, but Heathfield and the sons were noticeably cold.

“They just didn’t want to talk to me,” she said of the couple’s two sons. “I tried, they would sort of look down. … They weren’t interested in interrelating at all.”

Hexner’s interactions with Foley were much different, however.

“She’d say, ‘How are you Lila?’ She was very friendly,” Hexner said. “But she didn’t want to develop any relationships; that’s now very obvious to me.”

Heathfield was hardly ever at the house, Hexner said, but the few times she did see him, he, too, would ignore her.

One time, Hexner recalls encountering the couple walking down the street, and after greeting Foley, she turned to Heathfield.

“I said, ‘Oh, how are you?’ And he sort of shook his head; he didn’t speak,” Hexner said.

Vicky Steinitz 71, who also lives in the complex, said she had little interaction with the family, but remembers that, when they moved in, the young sons attended a bilingual school for French children.

As time went on, they began speaking less and less.

“We don’t stop and chat here,” Steinitz said. “It’s a pretty anonymous place.”

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins’s child was disciplined for “improper behavior in his home” and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

If true, these allegations are about as creepy as they come. I don’t know about you, but I often have the laptop in the room while I’m getting dressed, having private discussions with my family, and so on. The idea that a school district would not only spy on its students’ clickstreams and emails (bad enough), but also use these machines as AV bugs is purely horrifying.

Schools are in an absolute panic about kids divulging too much online, worried about pedos and marketers and embarrassing photos that will haunt you when you run for office or apply for a job in 10 years. They tell kids to treat their personal details as though they were precious.

But when schools take that personal information, indiscriminately invading privacy (and, of course, punishing students who use proxies and other privacy tools to avoid official surveillance), they send a much more powerful message: your privacy is worthless and you shouldn’t try to protect it.

Robbins v. Lower Merion School District (PDF)