Noah Shachtman:

The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come.

CEO Christopher Ahlberg:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring

Julian Sanchez:

They're calling it a tweak.

Yet those four little words would make a huge difference.

I can see both sides of this dispute. It really boils down to what you think the scope of the term is. I tend to agree that the term ought to be clearly defined, and that is part of the problem. Congress will need to wade into this water and clearly regulate what kinds of electronic transactional records are available without court review.

A very good example is locational information from the cellular phone system. The FBI wants it without a warrant, some courts have argued that a warrant would be required. This change may push the argument in the FBI's favor.

The fact is that we're going to need to see some limit on warrantless collection of transactional information if we're going to maintain some semblance of a right against unreasonable privacy intrusions in a world where everything that we do is constantly being recorded by computers.

Obama's Power Grab

James Risen:

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

George Bush, in February 2008:

First of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening to terrorists making phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.

Decius, in February 2007:

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort.

Noam Cohen's friend, in February 2009:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius, in March 2009:

We are very close to the point where the 4th amendment will be an anachronism - a technicality that has very little impact on everyday life - and a radical reconsideration will be necessary in order to re-establish it.

Decius, in August 2008:

Don't worry about privacy ... privacy is dead ... there's no privacy ... just more databases ... No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Jello, in June 2009:

The cloud and big data analytics. That is where the boom will come from.

Decius, in March 2009:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Rivest, Schneier, Bellovin, Applebaum, Cranor, Cheswick, Soghoian, Spafford, Lynn (!), Moss, Neumann, et al:

Dear Dr. Schmidt,

The signatories of this letter are researchers and academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law. We write to you today to express our concern that many users of Google's cloud-based services are needlessly exposed to an array of privacy and security risks. We ask you to increase users' security and privacy protection by enabling by default transport-level encryption (HTTPS) for Google Mail, Docs and Calendar, a technology already enabled by default for Google Voice, Health, AdWords and AdSense.

As a market leader in providing cloud services, Google has an opportunity to engage in genuine privacy and security leadership, and to set a standard for the industry.

Extent of E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

Thom Shanker and David Sanger:

The process could ultimately be accepted as the digital equivalent of customs inspections, in which passengers arriving from overseas consent to have their luggage opened for security, tax and health reasons.

Expansion of this hole in the Constitution, now torn, is eagerly sought by the forces of government power, for any and every purpose.

Privacy May Be a Victim in Cyberdefense Plan

noteworthy wrote:
Tom Malone:

"Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly."

I prefer Alex Pentland:

You have a right to possess your own data, that you control the data that is collected about you, and that you can destroy, remove or redeploy your data as you wish.

RE: You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?

Kirby Plessas (Open source intelligence expert currently working as an independent contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency) at DNI Open Source Conference, 11 September 2008:

"Web sites like Wikileaks are not what interests us but those like YouTube where information is posted by thousands of people unaware of our intense interest in fragments which can be pieced together with many other sources. All media used by people eager to share, chat, reveal data about themselves and, most importantly, about others not aware of what is being publicized about them, are the richest sources."

I couldn't resist:

I loved my Olympus C-740. It has travelled all around the world. The batteries lasted a long time, the photos were excellent..

I'll bet!

DNI Open Source Conference Eyeball

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' privacy, the judge's ruling (.pdf) described that argument as "speculative" and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard drives.

The judge also turned Google's own defense of its data retention policies -- that IP addresses of computers aren't personally revealing in and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom | Threat Level from Wired.com

An online campaign to scuttle a deal giving retroactive amnesty to telecoms that helped the government warrantlessly wiretap Americans is growing in strength, catching Senator Barack Obama between the Netroots that helped vaunt him to the nomination and a presidential campaign desire to seem strong on national security.

Update on the anti-amnesty political campaign.

Telecom Amnesty Foes Lobby Obama Using Obama Tech | Threat Level from Wired.com

However, it should be noted that a more encompassing movement effort has recently sprung up, forged by both progressive and libertarians that will be using the Blue America PAC as a Phase I of of a multi-Phase strategy. It's being dubbed the Strange Bedfellows alliance. The headliners in this alliance are the ACLU, Glenn Greenwald, The Ron Paul Money Bomb team over at Break the Matrix, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, Matt Stoller of Open Left, and Ari Melber of The Nation.

Last winter political ads targeted opponents of telecom immunity. I felt the campaign was dishonest and in poor taste and spoke about it at Interz0ne. Spending huge amounts of money lying to people on television is a poor substitute for having a rational argument that stands up to criticism. Its interesting to see real money supporting a counter campaign. Is it any different? I think the real money funding the previous ad campaign came from Republican operatives who really don't know shit about the balance of civil liberties and national security in wartime and merely saw a political opportunity to put their allies in power. Clearly a lot of the money on the side of the issue is coming from the other side of the coin, but the mix of this coalition suggests that there may be some genuine non-partisan concern here about the incentives created by this immunity. I hope so.

Strange Bedfellows: The Progressive-Libertarian Alliance | Freedom Democrats

Insiders are not, after all, the main threat to networks, a detailed new analysis of real-world data breaches has concluded.

Verizon's 2008 Data Breach Investigations Report, which looked at 500 breach incidents over the last four years, contradicts the growing orthodoxy that insiders, rather than external agents, represent the most serious threat to network security at most organizations.

Seventy-three percent of the breaches involved outsiders, 18 percent resulted from the actions of insiders, with business partners blamed for 39 percent -- the percentages exceed 100 percent due to the fact that some involve multiple breaches, with varying degrees of internal or external involvement.

I've been wary of "business partners" for years... which is why they ALWAYS get firewalled onto their own segment. However, many companies who claim to be security vendors, advocate allowing them directly into the internal and server segments. Scary... and stupid.

PC World - Business Center: Insider Threat Exaggerated, Study Says