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Mobile Spy ups mobile snooping powers

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Mobile Spy, a new application from Retina-X Studios, monitors calls and text messages and reports them back to a central server.

When installed on a Windows Mobile device, Mobile Spy allows parents to keep watch on their child’s phone, or enables employers to enforce an acceptable use policy on their staff - though the legality of doing so will depend where in the world you are.

A similar application called FlexiSpy has been around for Symbian handsets for the last year, offering much the same functionality.

FlexiSpy’s website even provides endorsements from the recently-divorced, who discovered their partner’s infidelity thanks to the software.

“Thanks to FlexiSPY I finally figured out my wife was cheating on me with my brother. I had a bad feeling about this for over a year. After the divorce, my life is so much better now. This Could Be You!”

Makes you want to rush out and buy a copy doesn’t it?

Installing either FlexiSpy or Mobile Spy requires physical access to the phone, so the authors claim they can’t be classed as Trojan applications. But anti-virus companies disagree.

According to the F-Secure blog: “This application installs itself without any kind of indication as to what it is. And when it is installed on the phone it completely hides itself from the user…So yes, FlexiSpy is indeed a Trojan and we have added the detection to our F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus so that any user who has a phone that has been infected with this Trojan will get a warning that someone is spying on them.”

Ollie Whitehouse, security architect at Symantec, was equally damning of Mobile Spy: “Once Symantec has obtained a sample of this application we would likely add detection in our Windows Mobile anti-virus product. Symantec already detects other applications by Retina-X Studios due to what some would describe as their nefarious nature.”

For those interested in hearing what was said, as well as when and to whom it was said, various applications exist for recording calls into MP3 files for later retrieval or automatic uploading, and at least one application can even record what’s going on in the room at the time: relaying it over an incoming call from a pre-configured number.

The incidence of mobile phones being infected with viruses, Trojans or worms remains pitifully low, partly because of the low installed base (compared to desktop computers) and partly because the networks are much more secure, so until now the usefulness of mobile phone anti-virus software has been very much open to question.

But, depending on who you are and what you’re saying, the chances of someone deliberately installing a spying application of this type are much higher than of catching a chance infection, which might make additional defences worthwhile. ®

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US under pressure for civilian deaths in Afghanistan

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Peter Lloyd

The United States-led coalition in Afghanistan has come under pressure over the rising number of civilian deaths in clashes with the Taliban.

Afghan and United Nations (UN) investigators have found that about 50 civilians, including many women and children, were killed in weekend fighting in west Afghanistan.

On top of that, more than 1,600 families fled the area and 100 houses were damaged or destroyed.

It is the highest number of civilians killed in military operations in Afghanistan in months.

Protesters rallying in several cities have chanted anti-American slogans and demanded the withdrawal of foreign forces from the country.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai says the casualties are unacceptable.

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Is Big Brother in your car?

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Michelle Esteban

When you hear about “black boxes” you probably picture airplanes that have been in horrible accidents.

The black box is the first thing investigators look for. The boxes record cockpit communications and airplane information, and can often tell investigators what lead to the disaster.

But few people know that black boxes aren’t just in airplanes. They’re in cars too. And chances are good there’s one in your car, but you can’t lift the hood to see it.

But if you get in an accident the information could be used against you.

There are hundreds of vehicle collisions every day. Sometimes the cause is obvious, and other times its not. Drivers often get into a blame game and the accident investigators are left to sort out who is at fault.

But your car’s black box can help them do just that.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than half of all new cars now carry a so-called black box. The device records how a car was being driven just seconds before impact. The black box, which is really silver, is buried in the car’s underbelly and incorporated into the airbag system.

Silent Passenger

Car makers call it an EDR, event data recorder, or a CDR, crash data recorder. They collect crash data to help design safer cars.

But cops and the insurance industry want the black box data too.

That’s exactly why the American Civil Liberties Union has a problem with the black box. “It’s my information not public information,” said Doug Klunder, privacy director of the ACLU’s Seattle chapter. He insists a black box amounts to a spy in your car.

You may have the right to remain silent, but your car just might talk.

“That’s very true. Wow! You be quiet now, poor thing,” said Carol Corley as she stroked the door of her Ford wagon. NHTSA says Ford, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, General Motors, Isuzu, and Suzuki vehicles all have Event Data Recorders.

The black boxes record what happened in the critical seconds before, during and after a crash. They even record near-crashes.

The so called black box is like having a silent passenger that you never but witnesses your every move. In the event of a crash it knows if you were speeding, whether you’re wearing a seat belt, and if you hit the brakes.

“I had no idea it was in there,” said John LaForest. The Olympia teacher has a black box in his car, but didn’t know it, until we told him.

Not one driver I interviewed knew they had a silent witness on board. Some cars have had them since the late 90s, but the devices didn’t become prevalent until until 2001.

To get the black box talking, investigators just have to download the data. They can do that right at the scene of a crash.

“There is more and more of this hidden data collection that people don’t know about which is even scarier than Big Brother,” says Klunder.

State Patrol Detective Sgt. Jerry Cooper said troopers use the information as part of their investigations. “We’re gathering the data as the result of a crash, we’re not gathering it to see what people’s driving habits are on the highway,” he said.

Legal Questions

One of the first things Cooper does at a crash scene is salvage the black box. No questions asked.

Klunder doesn’t like that policy. “At a minimum they should be required to have probable cause and get a warrant,” he said.

Asked what gives him the authority to download data from the black box at a crash site, Cooper said “It’s collecting evidence at the scene, similar to skid marks and other data.”

Investigators say they have every right to take the black box unless the car’s been moved from the crash scene and the owner won’t give permission. They say most times the box is only used to validate what they already know.

“The CDR is not stand alone evidence,” Cooper said, adding that it’s just another tool in the tool box. “It’s a validation tool.”

On Valentine’s Day 2006, Trooper Tim Hanson nearly died in a head on collision on State Route 18. The driver of the other vehicle was killed.

The reconstruction proved it wasn’t Hanson’s fault, and the black box data confirmed it. “It validated that our investigation was done correctly,” said Cooper.

Klunder said the important thing is whether the vehicle’s owner is involved in the decision to use the data. “It depends on whether the owner has a choice in advance,” he said.

Black box data can also help speed up investigations for auto insurers and identify fraudulent claims. According to the Northwest Insurance Council, auto insurers use black box data in Washington state in less than one percent of their investigations. And they say they always ask the driver’s if it’s okay.

But, nothing is stopping those insurers in our state from bypassing permission and getting court orders to obtain the black box data.

What can you do about it? The ACLU says that’s not clear, as black boxes are in a kind of a legal vacuum in our state. Washington has no laws on the books regarding the data recorders.

But Jim Harris, owner of Harris Technical Services, a traffic reconstruction business based in Florida, says that when it comes to auto insurers keep this in mind: “If you total your car and your auto insurer pays you what it’s worth in exchange for the vehicle — your insurer now holds the title of that car and the black box is their property.”

And there’s nothing stopping insurers from using it against you. “It’s their property!” says Harris.

His web site lists about 50 court cases nationwide involving black boxes. And the judgements go both ways, for and against the defendants.

The site also list all the states that have black box laws. But Harris says even without a black box law in Washington, a lot of drivers may be protected and don’t know it.

“Some 38 state have Computer Trespass Laws, and most people aren’t even aware of it.” He says those computer laws protect internal program devices that process data. “That sounds like a black box to me,” laughs Harris.

If you want to know if your car has a black box just check your owner’s manual, where it will list the device. Car makers list it voluntarily.

The NHSTA says starting in 2011, owner notification will become a requirement.

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Bush officials defend proposal to expand domestic spying powers

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Kate Randall

Before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Bush officials defended the administration’s domestic surveillance operations as well as a proposal to expand spying powers aimed at the population both in and outside the United States.

Mike McConnell, the new director of national intelligence, maintained before the Senate Intelligence Committee that the president has the power to order the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct surveillance inside the country without warrants.

Claiming the president has the authority under Article II of the US Constitution to conduct such warrantless spying, McConnell stated, “If the president chose to exercise Article II authority, that would be the president’s call.”

McConnell’s statements came as he gave testimony in defense of proposed amendments to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which places restrictions on spying against US citizens and other residents in the United States. The law requires that warrants be issued by the FISA court for any domestic spying to proceed.

FISA was created following revelations of massive, politically motivated spying on civil rights and antiwar organizations in the 1970s. Using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext, the Bush administration has routinely violated this law, most notably through a huge warrantless spying program overseen by the NSA.

When revelations of the NSA program first came out in the press, the administration asserted that the president had the authority as commander-in-chief and leader of the executive branch to carry out the spying even if it violated the FISA law, the same claim repeated by McConnell. They also claimed that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), passed after the September 11 attacks, overrode the FISA law, even though AUMF does not contain any reference to spying.

In January, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that the administration had crafted a new way to speed warrants from the FISA court to intercept communications to and from the US, and that it was no longer necessary to operate the program outside of the FISA law. Gonzales reported that on January 10 the FISA court had issued an order governing the Bush administration’s new “terrorist surveillance program.” But in the name of “national security” the new warrant process has never been made public.

Even though the administration now insists that it is following the law, it is trying to push through amendments to it, while at the same time claiming that the president is not in fact obliged to follow the law anyway.

While maintaining there were no plans “that we are formulating or thinking about currently to resume domestic wiretapping without warrants,” McConnell went on to add, “Article II is Article II, so in a different circumstance, I can’t speak for the president what he might decide.” In other words, despite the administration’s claims to be conforming to law, the president may violate the law at any turn by claiming executive privilege.

The reference to Article II of the Constitution—which includes the designation of the president as commander-in-chief of the military—has been used by the Bush administration in an effort to impart dictatorial powers to the White House in direct violation of Congressional oversight and the will of the American people.

The real significance of the administration’s position was hinted at by Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, who said, “We want to go after the bad guys, but we want to prevent the creation of a dictator who takes the law in his own hands.”

In two hours of testimony before the Senate committee, McConnell, NSA Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein and their attorneys underwent sometimes heated questioning on the Bush administration’s proposal seeking increased spying powers. They deferred answers to many questions to a committee session closed to the public.

The officials sought to present the requested amendments to the surveillance restrictions as adjustments to account for technological changes—in the form of cell phones and the Internet—since the FISA Act came into force. McConnell argued that under current rules, “We’re actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting.”

One of the “communications gaps” the administration reportedly wants to bridge is the ability to spy on “transit traffic.” These are international telephone calls and email correspondence between one foreign country and another, but which are digitally routed through the US telecommunications system.

Despite claims to the contrary, however, the requested amendments to FISA law have nothing to do with modernizing the restrictions to keep up with electronic technology. As the WSWS has observed, if enacted the changes would further erode the minimal barriers to surveillance while expanding the powers of the state to spy on the US population. (See “Bush administration seeking to expand spying powers”.)

The requested amendments would allow warrants for surveillance of any non-citizens in the US “reasonably expected to possess, control, transmit, or receive foreign intelligence information while such a person is in the United States,” even if they are not the target of an investigation. Under current law, the FISA court can only grant such warrants to spy on persons the government claims are targets of foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. Warrants would also be allowed for spying on individuals suspected of activities related to purchasing or developing weapons of mass destruction.

Significantly, the amendments would strip the power of all courts except the FISA court, which meets in secret, to hear claims against the spying program. Last year, a federal court ruled that the NSA program is unconstitutional, but under the amendments this decision would be rendered void.

The proposals would provide telecommunications companies with immunity from prosecution for their cooperation with the government in handing over phone records and emails. Since the immunity would be made retroactive to September 11, 2001, AT&T and other companies would be shielded from lawsuits already under way for violating customer privacy by turning over massive databases of communications.

Other changes would extend the length of time—from 72 hours to one week—in which the Justice Department could conduct surveillance without requesting a warrant from the FISA court.

The changes would also allow the government to utilize information obtained “unintentionally” through spying if it contains “significant foreign intelligence,” even if that surveillance was unrelated to what was authorized by the court.

Various Democrats on the committee criticized the administration officials. Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (Democrat of West Virginia) asked, “Is the administration’s proposal necessary, or does it take a step further down a path that we will regret as a nation?” While in agreement with the “war on terrorism” rationale for the spying operations, Congressional Democrats are under pressure from widespread public opposition to these methods.

“Congress is being asked to enact legislation that brings to an end lawsuits that allege violations of the rights of Americans,” Sen. Rockefeller said at the hearing. “We cannot legislate in the blind.”

However, with a record as a complicit partner in the “war on terror” and the accompanying assault on democratic rights, Congressional Democrats can be relied on to come to an agreement with the Bush administration on domestic spying at some point, whether in open session or behind closed doors.

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US government moves to gag terrorist on CIA ties

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Bill Van Auken

With his trial on immigration charges set for May 11, the US government has filed a motion in federal court seeking to bar the international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from testifying on his role as an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Venezuela has demanded that Posada Carriles be extradited to face charges there related to his masterminding of a 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian passenger jet that killed 73 people. He evaded punishment for the crime—at the time the worst single act of terrorism in the Western Hemisphere—by escaping a Venezuelan prison in 1985.

Violating international and bilateral treaties, Washington has rebuffed Venezuela’s request, charging Posada Carriles instead with minor violations of US immigration law for entering the US without a visa and lying to immigration officials. Last month, the terrorist, who had been in federal custody since May 2005, was set free on bail and returned to Miami.

The release has provoked international protests and exposed the hypocrisy of the so-called “global war on terrorism” proclaimed by a government that has sponsored and continues to harbor and protect a wanted terrorist.

The nine-page motion submitted to the federal court in El Paso, Texas, argues that the relationship between Posada Carriles and the CIA ended 30 years ago and therefore is irrelevant.

Declassified documents have established that Carriles was recruited as an agent of the CIA in 1961, was sent into the US Army for a year of training in demolition and terrorist tactics and remained directly on the CIA payroll at least until 1967. From 1969 to 1974, he served as a senior officer in the Venezuelan secret police, DISIP, charged with capturing, torturing and killing left-wing opponents of the government. During that period he remained an informant and “asset” of the CIA in Latin America.

In 1976, he planned the airline bombing, leaving its execution to two employees of his private detective agency that he set up in Caracas after a change of government forced him out of the secret police. Just two weeks before the October 1976 airline bombing, he was involved in another terrorist attack, this one in the center of Washington. A car bomb killed the exiled former foreign minister of Chile, Orlando Letelier, and an American aide, Ronni Moffitt.

After his escape from prison in Venezuela, Posada Carriles made his way to El Salvador, where he became a key operative in the illegal terror war against Nicaragua financed by the CIA and directed by the network established by the Reagan administration under the direction of Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council. He went on to Guatemala, becoming a government intelligence officer during a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

In the 1990s, by his own admission, Posada Carriles directed a series of terrorist bombings against hotels and tourist spots in Cuba, killing an Italian tourist.

And, in November 2000, he was involved in an aborted attempt to blow up a conference hall in Panama, where Cuban President Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak to hundreds of people. He was arrested and jailed for the plot, but then pardoned by outgoing Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso in 2004, reportedly as the result of either US pressure or bribes from anti-Castro Cuban exile groups.

In response to the government attempt to quash any public testimony about Posada Carriles’s ties to the CIA, the terrorist’s defense lawyers filed a countermotion this week, insisting that it was impossible to discuss the “context” of the case without dealing with their client’s relation with the agency. Moreover, the document claimed, this relationship “lasted for 25 years.”

“The government’s statement that his service to the United States ended in 1976 is incorrect,” the document said.

The implications of the motion are clear. Posada Carriles was working for the CIA when he planned and executed the terrorist bombing that murdered 73 people aboard the Cuban plane as well as the car-bomb assassination in Washington. Moreover, he remained an agent or “asset” of the US intelligence agency while continuing to carry out acts of terrorist and repressive violence in Cuba, Central America and elsewhere for at least another decade. Both of the 1976 terrorist acts took place when George H.W. Bush, the current US president’s father, was director of the CIA.

Declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm in 2005 establish that the CIA had advance intelligence on the planned airline bombing and that the FBI’s attaché in Caracas had repeated contacts with one of the operatives who placed the bomb on the plane and, just days before the bombing, obtained a visa for him to travel to the US.

The US government’s attempt to gag Posada Carriles about his CIA ties and the countermotion alleging that these connections spanned at least 25 years expose the real reason that the Bush administration refuses to abide by international law and extradite him to Venezuela to face trial.

While the administration has offered the incredible justification that Posada Carriles could face torture in Venezuela—this from a government that has not only tortured its own detainees at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, but also deliberately sent them to other countries to be tortured—the real reason is that such a prosecution would expose Washington’s role in decades of terrorism and repression in Latin America.

On April 25, Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, Nelson Pineda, charged the US with harboring a “convicted and confessed terrorist” and demanded that Washington comply with its bilateral extradition treaty with Venezuela. Pineda read out a statement from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry that stated:

“The freeing of the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is the final result of the maneuver that the government of George W. Bush put in motion to protect him and with this act it promotes impunity and disgracefully mocks the memory of the victims of the bombing of the Cubana de Aviación plane that took place in 1976.

“This act of complicity, committed by the sinister American president, seeks to buy the silence of Posada Carriles, who has for many years been an agent of the CIA and a pawn of the Bush clan, as the declassified documents of the US demonstrate and therefore has valuable information about the criminal activities carried out against the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.”

Responding to these charges, the US alternate representative to the OAS, Margarita Riva-Geoghegan, ignored Venezuela’s extradition request, baldly stating, “The United States is not harboring Luis Posada Carriles.” She continued, “The United States is proceeding with its own national prosecution in an area where Mr. Posada Carriles has broken US law.”

Such claims are absurd on their face. The charges of murder and terrorism, substantiated by Washington’s own declassified documents, clearly take precedence over the minor immigration infractions that are being used as a pretense for ignoring the demand for extradition and providing a cover for what is in reality the harboring and protection of Posada Carriles.

In Cuba, meanwhile, the annual May Day demonstration in Havana was dominated by signs and slogans demanding the extradition of Posada Carriles as well as the freeing of the “Cuban Five,” five Cuban nationals who have been jailed in the US since 1998. Framed up on conspiracy and espionage-related charges for monitoring anti-Castro terrorist exile groups based in Miami, the five were convicted in 2001 and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 15 years to life.

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Police and MI5 at odds over 7/7 mistakes

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Sean O’Neill

MI5 and police are in dispute over which organisation is to blame for mistakes that left Mohammad Sidique Khan free to lead the 7/7 bomb attacks.

The Times has been told there were serious “communications issues” between West Yorkshire Police and MI5, which meant that proper monitoring of Khan’s activities never occurred. The two bodies differ strongly over what was known about Khan and who was responsible for watching him after he was identified as an associate of known terrorists. MI5 is adamant that it passed information about Khan to the West Yorkshire force’s Special Branch in mid2004.

West Yorkshire Police have refused to comment but a Panorama documentary this week claimed that the force was neither asked about Khan nor informed that he was a potential terrorist suspect. The contradictory accounts will be the key issue for the fresh inquiry into 7/7 that the Prime Minister has asked the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) to conduct.

Senior figures in MI5 question whether the ISC, a group of senior parliamentarians appointed by and answerable to Mr Blair, is the best tribunal for that inquiry. Ithas been criticised as secretive, lacking independence and insufficiently inquisitorial.

Concerns about the handling of intelligence about Khan were revived this week after five men were jailed for life for plotting to build a 1,300lb fertiliser bomb for an attack on a nightclub or shopping centre.

Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, another of the 7/7 bombers, had been photographed, bugged and followed by surveillance teams watching the fertiliser bomb plotters in February and March 2004.

Khan’s name was logged twice as the owner of a mobile phone used to call the bomb plotters and as the driver of two cars in which he travelled to meet them. Khan, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, had also attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan with some of the plotters in July 2003.

After the fertiliser conspirators were arrested, Khan and Tanweer were placed on a list of peripheral figures to be subjected to further investigation or monitoring.

The Times understands that after frontline surveillance teams were diverted to another big terror operation in June 2004, information about Khan was passed to West Yorkshire Police.

The intelligence service believed that Khan was involved in petty fraud to raise money for jihadi groups overseas and that that was a matter to be dealt with by police.

But no action was taken to monitor Khan and he went on to plan and carry out the attacks that killed 52 people in London in July 2005.

When the ISC conducted its first inquiry into 7/7, it was told by MI5 that it passed information about Khan to West Yorkshire. Officers from the force were not called to give evidence to the committee but they did submit documents.

In its first report in May last year, the committee concluded that “more needs to be done to improve the way that the Security Service and Special Branches come together in a combined and coherent way to tackle the ‘homegrown’ threat”. A student acquitted of involvement in the fertiliser bomb conspiracy said yesterday that he abhorred terrorism. Nabeel Hussain, 22, told Sky News that the men convicted of the plot had “wasted their lives” and that he felt pride in being a British Muslim.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1744612.ece

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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