Smart’ Meter Spying Finally Admitted

by Warren Woodward

Industry mouthpiece SmartGridNews finally admitted that “smart” meters are surveillance devices.  Of course they didn’t quite put it that bluntly.  In fact, they celebrate the ability of utilities to know what appliances people use as another tool to help craft the wonderful world of the future.
Below is my letter to the Arizona Corporation Commission pointing out that industry has finally come out and admitted what I and others have been saying for years. [Note from TBYP: It's important that you send your utility your notice of Non-Consent via registered mail.  Subscribe to our Newsletter for forthcoming document templates, solutions & news -- and see our Solutions page for current links to templates.]
The SmartGridNews article, entitled “Now utilities can tell customers how much energy each appliance uses (just from the smart meter data),” is here.

May 15, 2014
Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC)
Docket Control Center
1200 West Washington Street
Phoenix, Arizona 85007
Re: Docket # E-01345A-14-0113
Ladies and Gentlemen;
Here is breaking news. SmartGridNews has just come out of the closet and admitted what I and others have been saying all long: “Smart” meters are surveillance devices.
APS and utilities nationwide have been denying the surveillance capability of “smart” meters but here is one of the foremost “smart” meter cheerleaders in the world finally admitting the truth.
SmartGridNews calls such “smart” grid industry names as Telvent, Silver Spring Networks and Lockheed Martin its “major sponsors”. So of course the news story attempts to put a positive spin on the surveillance, hyping such nonsense as an “over 4% conservation [of energy] after just a few months”.
Wow, that means I might save four whole dollars and change on a one hundred dollar electrical bill. Where do I sign up to be spied on?
Enclosed is the SmartGridNews article, Now utilities can tell customers how much energy each appliance uses (just from the smart meter data).
Sincerely,
Warren Woodward

PS – In the article, note the creepy picture of a guy dressed in black and using binoculars. SmartGridNews is shameless to promote Peeping Toms as cool. Note also Orwellian phrasing such as “behavioral science“ and turning ratepayers into “willing partners“. It’s not a “smart” grid; it’s a sick grid.

It Ain't Just the NSA -- Your Local Cops are Spying on You

By Michael Price

By now, it’s well known that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting troves of data about law-abiding Americans. But the NSA is not alone: a series of new reports show that state and local police have been busy collecting data on our daily activities as well — under questionable or nonexistent legal pretenses. These revelations about the extent of police snooping in the U.S. — and the lack of oversight over it — paint a disturbing picture for anyone who cares about civil liberties and privacy protection.

The tactics used by law enforcement are aggressive, surreptitious, and surprising to even longtime surveillance experts. One report released last month made front page news: an investigation by more than 50 journalists that found that local law enforcement agencies are collecting cell phone data about thousands of innocent Americans each year by tapping into cellphone towers and even creating fake ones that act as data traps.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law details how police departments around the country have created data “fusion centers” to collect and share reports about residents. But the information in these reports seldom bears any relation to crime or terrorism. In California, for example, officers are encouraged to document and immediately report on “suspicious” activities such as “individuals who stay at bus or train stops for extended periods while buses and trains come and go,” “individuals who carry on long conversations on pay or cellular phones,” and “joggers who stand and stretch for an inordinate amount of time.” In Houston, Texas, the criteria are so broad they include anything deemed “suspicious or worthy of reporting.” Many police departments and fusion centers have reported on constitutionally protected activities such as photography andpolitical speech. They have also demonstrated a troubling tendency to focus on people who appear to be of Middle Eastern origin.

Like the NSA – their heavy-handed Big Brother – these fusion centers cast a wide net and risk civil liberties for paltry returns. And all of it is happening without sufficient oversight or accountability. In other words, no one is watching Little Brother.

How did it come to this? In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, all levels of government – federal, state, and local – embarked on a massive effort to improve information sharing. Federal taxpayer dollars fueled the transition into a new role for state and local police as the eyes and ears of the intelligence community.

The ad-hoc system that has developed — of individual police departments feeding information to federal authorities — has been plagued by vague and inconsistent rules. For one thing, there’s a lack of agreement about what counts as “suspicious activity” and when that information should be shared.

The goal, in theory, is to reveal potential terrorist plots by “connecting the dots” of disparate or even innocuous pieces of information. But in practice, such programs often infringe on civil liberties and threaten safety, producing a din of data with little or no counterterrorism value. In Boston, for example, the regional fusion center fixated on monitoring peace activists and Occupy Boston protesters but may have been unaware that the FBI conducted an assessment of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev based on a tip from Russia, or that local authorities had implicated him in a gruesome triple homicide on the anniversary of 9/11.

In fact, a 2012 report by the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that much of the information produced by fusion centers was not only useless, but also possibly illegal. Indeed, more than 95 percent of so-called “suspicious activity reports” are never investigated by the FBI.

We can do better. First and foremost, there must be a consistent, transparent standard for state and local intelligence activities based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity – the traditional bar for opening an investigation. The federal government should make this standard a prerequisite for sharing suspicious activity reports on its networks. State and local police should adopt it as well.

Second, stronger oversight and accountability is necessary across the board. At the federal level, Congress should tie continued funding for fusion centers to regular, independent, and publicly available audits to assess compliance with privacy rules. State and local elected officials should also consider creating an independent police monitor, such as an inspector general, to safeguard privacy and civil rights.

To be sure, cooperation between levels of government is essential, and state and local law enforcement have an important role to play in keeping Americans safe. But the current system is ineffective, wasteful, and harmful to constitutional values.

It is time to recalibrate the system and make the state and local role in national security efficient, rational, and fair.

Its not paranoia if they really are spying on you.

NSA has spy hardware installed in every single electronic device in existence

The NSA Quartering “Digital” Troops Within Our Homes

Appelbaum shows that the NSA has literally taken over our computer and our phones, physically intercepting laptop shipments and installing bugware before themselves shipping the laptop on to the consumer, installing special hardware that overcomes all privacy attempts, including “air gaps” (i.e. keep a computer unplugged from the Internet). Appelbaum also notes that spyware can suck up a lot of system resources on a computer or smartphone. NSA spyware hardwired in our computers

So, it turns out the NSA can drop in on your Apple iPhone anytime it wants to - codename DROPOUT JEEP

Thanks to the best technical minds your tax dollars can buy, the NSA has come up with something called “DROPOUT JEEP,” an application that can hijack your an iPhone’s SMS messages, contacts, location, camera, and microphone. The hack is really comprehensive, according to a leaked NSA doc acquired by Der Spiegel:

DROPOUT JEEP is a software implant for the Apple iPhone that utilizes modular mission applications to provide specific SIGINT functionality. This functionality includes the ability to remotely push/pull files from the device. SMS retrieval, contact list retrieval, voicemail, geolocation, hot mic, camera capture, cell tower location, etc. Command, control and data exfiltration can occur over SMS messaging or a GPRS data connection. All communications with the implant will be covert and encrypted.

Apple said today they know nothing about any of this:

So, Apple is either lying or the NSA is so good at using this stuff big technology corporations are completely clueless.

It is now readily apparent most if not all computer technology and consumer electronic companies have been folded into the Stasi surveillance state architecture. It can no longer be denied that we are living in an all-encompassing Orwellian panopticon nightmare.

Kurt Nimmo

Smart Meter Technology: Armed Spy Devices

Firefox plug-in warns users of NSA surveillance

http://rt.com/usa/prism-floyd-nsa-surveillance-723/

Your TV is watching you

Your TV is Watching you! Smart TVs are remotely activated to spy on families in their homes - just like cellphones!

WikiLeaks Volunteer Was a Paid Informant for the FBI

On an August workday in 2011, a cherubic 18-year-old Icelandic man named Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson walked through the stately doors of the U.S. embassy in Reykjavík, his jacket pocket concealing his calling card: a crumpled photocopy of an Australian passport. The passport photo showed a man with a unruly shock of platinum blonde hair and the name Julian Paul Assange.


Thordarson was long time volunteer for WikiLeaks with direct access to Assange and a key position as an organizer in the group. With his cold war-style embassy walk-in, he became something else: the first known FBI informant inside WikiLeaks. For the next three months, Thordarson served two masters, working for the secret-spilling website and simultaneously spilling its secrets to the U.S. government in exchange, he says, for a total of about $5,000. The FBI flew him internationally four times for debriefings, including one trip to Washington D.C., and on the last meeting obtained from Thordarson eight hard drives packed with chat logs, video and other data from WikiLeaks.



http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/wikileaks-mole/

How NSA access was built into Windows from Windows 97 onward

Careless mistake reveals subversion of Windows by NSA.


A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.

The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.

Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows software "driver" used for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the C:\Windows\system directory of your computer.

ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only run cryptographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are, or what they do.

Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery.

A second key

Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft's developers had failed to remove or "strip" the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY".

Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto'99" conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the "NSA" key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.

A third key?!

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of "information warriors".

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

"For non-American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate highly secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. "The US government is currently making it as difficult as possible for "strong" crypto to be used outside of the US. That they have also installed a cryptographic back-door in the world's most abundant operating system should send a strong message to foreign IT managers". "How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?" he asked. Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers?

He also went further, and said that both McCaffee and Norton work closely with Microsoft, and build additional back doors competitors can exploit the same way and that these security suites do nothing to plug Microsoft's back doors and instead provide a different flavor of method for raping data, (the difference being like your preference for either Word or Wordperfect). In the same way Microsoft will allow a system rape, these additional paid for back doors can be used to destroy individuals by allowing ordinary priviledged people full access to your system, even if they are not an intelligence agency at all. Bottom line? The only secure system is a small fully open source Linux system that you can read through yourself and verify secure. Any Microsoft O.S. is as intentionally penetrable as your cell phone, which is also inevitably the product of a zionist corporation.

I had asked this programmer for the specifics, but then, as usual, all contact got cut and I received no further info, and this communication took place through a fresh mailbox for as long as it lasted (he was able to respond ONCE).

So it is far beyond just the NSA, if you are wondering how your competitor released your idea before you ever spoke about it to ANYONE, that is exactly how.



http://jimstonefreelance.com/