Govt's Lie Steal Spy On You

[grarpamp]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/06/parallel_construction_lies_in_english_courts/

The U.K.'s newly-based Investigatory Powers Act (the Snoopers'
Charter) "allows the State to tell lies in court," according to The
Register, saying it enshrines into law "the practice where prosecutors
lie about the origins of evidence to judges and juries." Their report:
The operation of the oversight and accountability mechanisms...are all
kept firmly out of sight -- and, so its authors hope, out of mind --
of the public. It is up to the State to volunteer the truth to its
victims if the State thinks it has abused its secret powers. "Marking
your own homework" is a phrase which does not fully capture this...

Section 56(1)(b) creates a legally guaranteed ability -- nay, duty --
to lie about even the potential for State hacking to take place, and
to tell juries a wholly fictitious story about the true origins of
hacked material used against defendants in order to secure criminal
convictions. This is incredibly dangerous. Even if you know that the
story being told in court is false, you and your legal representatives
are now banned from being able to question those falsehoods and cast
doubt upon the prosecution story. Potentially, you could be legally
bound to go along with lies told in court about your communications --
lies told by people whose sole task is to weave a story that will get
you sent to prison or fined thousands of pounds.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture


http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2016/12/snoop-case
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/a1633.pdf

For years, officials from the Department of Justice testified, the DEA
has paid millions of dollars to a variety of confidential sources to
provide tips on travellers who may be transporting drugs or large sums
of money. Those sources include staff at airlines, Amtrak, parcel
services and even the Transportation Safety Administration...
According to [a DOJ] report, airline employees and other informers had
an incentive to search more travellers' bags, since they received
payment whenever their actions resulted in DEA seizures of cash or
contraband. The best-compensated of these appears to have been a
parcel company employee who received more than $1 million from the DEA
over five years. One airline worker, meanwhile, received $617,676 from
2012 to 2015 for tips that led to confiscations. But the DEA itself
profited much more from the program. That well-paid informant got only
about 12% of the amount the agency seized as a result of the his tips.
The DEA had paid out $237 million to over 9,000 informants over five
years towards the end of 2015, according to the report. The Economist
writes that "travelers no doubt paid the price in increased searches,"
adding that the resulting searches were all probably illegal.


http://www.reuters.com/article/us-airlines-data-surveillance-idUSKBN13W2Q0
https://theintercept.com/2016/12/07/american-and-british-spy-agencies-targeted-in-flight-mobile-phone-use/

American and British spies have since 2005 been working on
intercepting phone calls and data transfers made from aircraft,
France's Le Monde newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing documents
from former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden. According to
the report, also carried by the investigative website The Intercept,
Air France was targeted early on in the projects undertaken by the
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, GCHQ
They all used their everyday GSM phone during a flight," the reports
cited one NSA document from 2010 as saying. In a separate internal
document from a year earlier, the NSA reported that 100,000 people had
already used their mobile phones in flight as of February 2009 The
Intercept also said that, in an internal presentation in 2012, GCHQ
had disclosed a program called "Southwinds," which was used to gather
all the cellular activity, voice communication, data, metadata and
content of calls made on board commercial aircraft.