The Heavily Redacted World of the FBI's Tracking Technology Unit (muckrock.com) 53
v3rgEz writes: If you search the FBI website for details the Tracking Technology Unit, nothing shows up: They have no official home page, their leadership is not mentioned, and the few public mentions of the group seem to be at court appearances where members explain that information they gather cannot be released publicly. But a recent FOIA request for information on the FBI's shuttered warrantless GPS tracking program shed a little more light on this secretive unit, whose motto is "Factum Non Verba": Deeds, not Words.
"Deeds, not Words" (Score:3)
Do they have the gold-lame spandex suits and cool motorcycles too?
Deeds Not Words [allaboutduncan.com]
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Hey, nothing is a *complete* disaster when it's got motorcycles that shoot rockets!
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Gold Lame? I can make my MP3's shiny now??
Better motto (Score:5, Insightful)
How about "Mendacium non veritum"... "Lies, not truth".
Re:Better motto (Score:4, Funny)
Well, they could also go with the more accurate ... "All your base are belong to us".
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Latin geeks, how accurate is that? I can't wait to pOwn someone online and type that in. : )
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Don't use that. A direct translation is all of us are ugly.
Fuck these Constitution-ignoring traitors (Score:4, Insightful)
Very little of what the government does should be secret, all of that should be confined to foreign intelligence operations, and no domestic law enforcement agency should be operating in the shadows. You took an oath, you traitorous pieces of shit.
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yeah guy, you tell 'em!
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What proof do you have that they aren't getting warrants for their tracking activities? It is quite an assumption that you are making that they somehow are ignoring the constitution; which is something the FBI is forbidden from doing.
Since the tracking has been in court cases, and none of the court cases were thrown out for illegal data gathering methods, more likely you are the one who doesn't know what they are talking about here.
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It's right in the summary, "a recent FOIA request for information on the FBI's shuttered warrantless GPS tracking program."
It's in the first sentence of the article, "In 2012, the FBI's warrantless GPS tracking system went dark - after a Supreme Court ruling forbid the practice."
They were not using warrants. It's the entire point of the story.
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Any action of government that would affect the vote of a citizen should be made public prior to elections. A elected government representative somewhere and at some time signed off on this and their position should be up for review based upon it. As an empathic example, clearly the other commenter had severe issues with this and it clearly would affect their vote and as such under electoral law it should have been made public. The core of any democratic constitution is maintaining that democracy and democr
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If all that is the case, you should be able to point to it somewhere in the constitution. As it is, the government has many programs that are considered Secret and Top Secret, and the whole point of those programs is that they need to remain that way as it would cause grave harm to the US for them to be commonly known about. You are essentially saying that the government isn't allowed to run secret programs, because that "hides" the information from the electorate. I encourage you to tell your representa
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Talk about off track. I did not say all programs need to be public just those programs that would affect the vote and as such the government is not allowed to spend money on electioneering by keeping secret those things that would affect the democracy. Right there in pretty much every countries constitution, the government is not allowed to use it's offices for electioneering purposes, elected officials are not allowed to use tax payer funds to stay in power, that is a sure sign of the end of democracy. Ba
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In that case, maybe you misunderstood what this is about? This is about a program that tracks the vehicles of those under FBI investigation to attempt to find their associates involved in the crime. This program has nothing to do with electioneering, and its effect on the election is the same as any other program the government doesn't publically talk about.
This program doesn't help anyone stay in power, so the whole premise that it should be public knowledge makes no logical sense just as secret and top
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The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
So, your assertion is that it isn't reasonable, the court ruled that it wasn't, the program was shuttered. It isn't unconstitutional unless the program continues, which so far there is no evidence of.
How does it feel to be owned?
Comment (Score:2)
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give me [redacted] or give me death.
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Anyone else notice that the vast majority of those pages are marked as unclassified and/or non-secret yet severely redacted?
This is not at all unusual. Sometimes documents are declassified because the content is no longer considered sensitive. Sometimes documents are declassified by redacting the sensitive content. More information here [archives.gov].
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As far as I can tell, the markings AC is talking about are not declassifications, the documents are actually marked unclassified. There are reason codes given for the redactions, though I don't know what those align with.
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As far as I can tell, the markings AC is talking about are not declassifications, the documents are actually marked unclassified. There are reason codes given for the redactions, though I don't know what those align with.
Well yes, the documents are actually marked unclassified, because they have been declassified. Documents that have been declassified, whether due to being redacted or because the information previously considered sensitive has been determined to no longer be sensitive, should either be marked unclassified or have no classification markings. To the best of my knowledge, documents bearing classified markings are never intentionally made public by the government.
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BUT, information that is declassified will have the original classification marking, but crossed out. In this case it is marked as unclassified, and there is no other classification marking.
http://www.archives.gov/resear... [archives.gov]
Items are absolutely declassified after a certain amount of time, the national archives has a whole division dedicated to this activity.
Here is an example of a declassified document, you can see the classification of Top Secret is crossed out.
https://nsarchive.files.wordpr... [wordpress.com]
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Items are absolutely declassified after a certain amount of time, the national archives has a whole division dedicated to this activity.
Yes, some items are scheduled for declassification after either 10 or 25 years. Some aren't.
Here is an example of a declassified document, you can see the classification of Top Secret is crossed out.
I'm sure you noticed that the example document is over 50 years old (and appears to have been redacted with white-out). The rules have changed since then. 18 CFR 3a.31 - "Classification markings and special notations" has the details, but specifically, "When classification changes are made, the classification markings themselves will be changed or canceled, and each copy or item of the material will be marked with th
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50 years is the automatic declassification period for TS labeled items. My curiosity about that document is that it is both marked "Secret" and "Top Secret" as well as says to not automatically declassify, which is unusual to me.
APK still stalks me and will occasionally respond, but I and others were finally able to successfully get him to give up on the constant attack by having his hero (who deemed his code "safe") contact him about the issue he was making of himself and explain why it wasn't helping his
Trot out the cool patches (Score:3)
Always a bad sign when the Federales whip up a slogan for themselves - doubly so if it's in fucking Latin. A little pomp and circumstance to round off the sharp edges of the police state.
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"Why the US Launched a Spy Rocket With an Earth-Sucking Octopus On It" (December 7, 2013)
http://motherboard.vice.com/bl... [vice.com]
All part of the very long term collect it all domestic dragnet surveillance and the use of insignia badges with Latin phrases.
Deeds rather than words, indeed (Score:3)
There were no words - since their "deeds" appeared (from TFA) to consist of redacting over 300 pages of what he did request, (which was pretty innocuous and non-specific, BTW; he just asked what TOWNS the program had been active in...)
They then fill-in with a bunch of boilerplate to look like they had actually complied with the request.
Bad-faith bureaucratic stonewalling at its finest.
The main payload in the article is that the dude infers that a program that was declared illegal was simply repackaged and buried deeper, hence the desire to not give away too many details since they'll probably being doing the same old....
I'm happy to pay my taxes to live in a state of law, since democracy cannot exist without it.
But I'm increasingly of the impression that I'm getting short changed on both.
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hey the Supreme is working on making taxes(dues) on unions not required....
"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union... blah blah"
Where are the courts to protect us? See below.. (Score:5, Insightful)
"I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it."
US judge and judicial philosopher Learned Hand (1872-1961).
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ie the gov is doing NSA collect it all on domestic hops of friends friends from one persons court paperwork for a cell phone or tracking one SUV.
A good lawyer should be able to see what else was built from one case. How was so much information found from one court order that might not even be for their client...
Methods and what a court allowed. Beacon was for gps? Why t
At court appearances (Score:2)
At other times, cooling their heels in a jail cell contemplating the judges contempt order for refusing to release information.
That's a world I could happily live in.
Obligatory Latin correction (Score:3)