Clear and feeling a bit warmer, too, this early Wednesday on California’s north coast — the moon a bright light in the western sky.
Mid-week move-a-long.
A couple of privacy spots this morning, both leading the US toward one huge surveillance state of affairs. The first is the use of drones in America — law enforcement or what? The topic is of such concern the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee is set to hold a hearing today on what’s up with those eyes in the sky. And US citizens are in the dark.
Small steps can lead to a slippery slope.
(Illustration found here).
Such as this: Customs & Border Protection recently “discovered” additional daily flight logs that show the agency has flown its drones on behalf of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies on 200 more occasions more than previously released records indicated.
From the Washington Post yesterday:
In 2010, for example, Customs and Border Protection conducted 76 drone missions for other agencies.
The next year, that number quadrupled, and it remained at nearly the same level in 2012.
Although the border agency has acknowledged that it flies drones for other law-enforcement departments, it has revealed little about the number and precise nature of the missions.
All told, Customs and Border Protection flew 687 drone missions for other agencies from 2010 to 2012, according to the records provided to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Last summer, the border agency released a batch of records indicating that it had flown fewer than 500 missions during that period.
Officials offered no explanation for why the earlier release of documents was incomplete.
…
Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expressed frustration that CBP officials would not release the names of sheriff departments for which the agency flew drones.
She also expressed concern about policies allowing for indefinite retention of video feeds and other data collected during flights related to investigations.
“We don’t know what’s happening with that data, and that creates a bigger privacy risk,” Lynch said.
Yes, indeed, that slippery slope is ‘…indefinite retention of video feeds and other data…’
Which leads to the second example of privacy no-more — from the bowels of the popular NSA (New York Times):
The National Security Agency has implanted software in nearly 100,000 computers around the world that allows the United States to conduct surveillance on those machines and can also create a digital highway for launching cyberattacks.
While most of the software is inserted by gaining access to computer networks, the N.S.A. has increasingly made use of a secret technology that enables it to enter and alter data in computers even if they are not connected to the Internet, according to N.S.A. documents, computer experts and American officials.
…
The N.S.A. calls its efforts more an act of “active defense” against foreign cyberattacks than a tool to go on the offensive.
But when Chinese attackers place similar software on the computer systems of American companies or government agencies, American officials have protested, often at the presidential level.
…
“What’s new here is the scale and the sophistication of the intelligence agency’s ability to get into computers and networks to which no one has ever had access before,” said James Andrew Lewis, the cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“Some of these capabilities have been around for a while, but the combination of learning how to penetrate systems to insert software and learning how to do that using radio frequencies has given the U.S. a window it’s never had before.”
Just watch you do in the backyard, and in the house. Big Bro…