Mobiles used to surveil shoppers..

Times Online: "Customers in shopping centres are having their every move tracked by a new type of surveillance that listens in on the whisperings of their mobile phones.

The technology can tell when people enter a shopping centre, what stores they visit, how long they remain there, and what route they take as they walked around.

The device cannot access personal details about a person’s identity or contacts, but privacy campaigners expressed concern about potential intrusion should the data fall into the wrong hands."


Seems like this would be easy enough to correlate with time-coded surveillance video on premises... Speaking of which, aren't they already doing this with the cameras?

Terrorists have officially won.

27BStroke6: "The Senate overwhelming voted Tuesday evening to legalize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program and grant amnesty to the phone companies that helped out with the domestic spying..

The 68 to 29 vote is a major step in radically re-configuring 30 year-old limits on how the nation's spying services operate inside America's borders. The vote also deals a severe blow to civil liberties groups that are suing companies such as AT&T and Verizon for turning over millions of American's phone records to the government, and for helping the government wiretap American's phone and internet communications without a court order."


Sad. Predictable, but sad.

FBI data mines consumer grocery records for 'signs of terrorists'

CQ Politics: "Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails. "


As 27BStroke6 points out - "It's not clear how the FBI got the records to sift through in the first place - did grocery stores volunteer the data or get served with national security letters or the dread Section 215 of the Patriot Act."

Not going to say we told you so...

Really.

Face Police coming to US Airports...

Newsweek: "Specially trained security personnel" will be watching passengers for "micro-expressions" that will reveal treacherous agendas and insidious intentions at airports around the country. These agents, who may literally hold your fate in their hands have been given a lofty, Orwellian name: 'Behavior Detection Officers.'"

"So while TSA employees are confiscating our scissors and water bottles, they’re going to secretly be staring at us, looking for some telltale sign of terrorist intent in a grimace, a sigh, a crinkled nose"


Creepy, yes. But probably more effective than strip searching toddlers based on inaccurate name matches from a super-duper-secret watchlist, or taking our water away. Can we just be free and get on with it? Take our chances? Not be anal probed OR terrorized?

U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites

Wall Street Journal: "The U.S.'s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation's vast network of spy satellites in the U.S. The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.'s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials.

The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement.

Until now, only a handful of federal civilian agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey, have had access to the most basic spy-satellite imagery, and only for the purpose of scientific and environmental study. "


When did the people represented by the government become separated from it? Why have they become the enemy, to be tagged, cataloged, monitored and watched? Why are we wasting resources watching ourselves? Do you, personally, need to be watched? If the answer is 'no', then any time spent watching you is wasted, and time that could be spent watching someone who needs watching. Why would you support a plan to watch yourself, at great cost and exactly zero impact? Lame.

So Democrats and Republicans both hate freedom after all...

27bStroke6: "A new law expanding the government's spying powers gives the Bush Administration a six-month window to install possibly permanent back doors in the nation's communication networks. The legislation was passed hurriedly by Congress over the weekend and signed into law Sunday by President Bush."

"In short, the law gives the Administration the power to order the nation's communication service providers -- which range from Gmail, AOL IM, Twitter, Skype, traditional phone companies, ISPs, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, and social networks -- to create possibly permanent spying outposts for the federal government."


Let the Noise to Signal ratio increase in 3...2...1... now. Not even going out on a limb to say that this infrastructure will absolutely be used in routine wholesale surveillance of US citizens, our actions, our thoughts, and our interconnections.

So the meta-theme is that people want freedom, and governments want control. Looks like we're well on our way to joining the ranks of nations we would have ridiculed as being 'not free' even 20 years ago.

Question: Why do we feel like the 'war on terrr' is merely a pretext? Why do those charged with preserving individual freedom seem driven to curtail it at every available opportunity? Republican. Democrat. Doesn't seem to matter. The motivations and actions of our elected representatives appear counter to what they should be as leaders of a free society.

Unless we're over that?

Windows Vista streams personal data to Microsoft

Softpedia: "Are you using Windows Vista? Then you might as well know that the licensed operating system installed on your machine is harvesting a healthy volume of information for Microsoft. In this context, a program such as the Windows Genuine Advantage is the last of your concerns. In fact, in excess of 20 Windows Vista features and services are hard at work collecting and transmitting your personal data to the Redmond company. "

So on the plus side, Microsoft is pretty open about the fact that they're watching you - although we'd wager that most Vista users are utterly unaware that a steady stream of personal info is phoning home. Is it a spyware OS? Maybe. Maybe not. We're not using it, so we don't really care.

The real question is "who does your computer, your property, serve? You, or others?"

NYC Trying to Regulate Photon Detection and Recording

New York Times: "Some tourists, amateur photographers, even would-be filmmakers hoping to make it big on YouTube could soon be forced to obtain a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance before taking pictures or filming on city property, including sidewalks."



..meanwhile installing their own surveillance cameras on every corner.

AT&T expands domestic surveillance to include 'copyright violations'...

Via 27BStroke6: "AT&T, one of the nation's largest ISPs and internet backbone providers, is now working with Hollywood and the recording industry to create a network-based solution to police copyright infringement, according to the Los Angeles Times."

Well, since they have the deep packet inspection technologies riding on the backbone, and since their collaboration with the NSA (and the tech used) is in the open, why not resell the service... Discounting the invasive nature of sniffing customer's (and potentially non-customer's) internet traffic, there's the issue of privacy, security, false positives, and of course, the ever-present issue that an IP address doesn't equal identity. Will they start filtering porn next? Or spam? Or offers from competing ISPs?

Once they've demonstrated the capability, will they be compelled to try to identify and block fraud, threats, or other activities? What about corporate data? What about legitimate fair use of copyright works (e.g. streaming MP3s of CDs you own from your home PC to your work PC? Or, god forbid Trent Reznor tries to upload one of his own tracks to his web site)...

And will it all be moot once this hits the public eye, and session encryption tools like Tor become more mainstream? Blah.

AT&T sucks. Seriously. They should be ashamed of spying on their own customers - and AT&T customers suck too. At least the ones who continue to subscribe to AT&T services knowing the open hostility that AT&T exhibits toward its customers.


Oh, and in related AT&T wholesale surveillance news, The SpyRoom docs have been released. Also from Wired: "A civil liberties group suing telecom giant AT&T for allegedly installing illegal secret surveillance rooms in its internet facilities at the behest of the National Security Agency published substantial portions of long-sealed case documents Tuesday."

Now even the ads are watching us...

Wired: "The eyebox2 from xuuk is a palm-size video camera surrounded by infrared light-emitting diodes. It can record eye contact with 15-degree accuracy at a distance of up to 33 feet. A simple glance from a passerby scores an impression, providing a tally that enables new Google-like measurement metrics that real-world advertisers could only dream about until recently."


Peachy.

Google spy-vans

Roundup of the Google residential and vehicle spy-van stories... For those not yet in the loop, Google Maps has rolled out a new 'feature' where you can click on a street and get a 360 degree view of that location - including whatever happened to be there when the shots were taken.

People and their faces. Car make, model, and license plates. Through open windows... While it shows what anyone would see while sitting on the street at that moment in time, it's now available to any interwebs user, including stalkers, thieves, or profile builders. (Nice new Mercedes in this driveway, next to house address, including license plate - And hey - there's the owner's face.. Seems to have a nice plasma on the living room wall... etc.)

Here's BoingBoing's look at the spy vehicles being used to make the photos.

And 27StrokeB6's running log of interesting street level views (bikini-clad sunbathers, dude walking out of strip club, etc)...

And the appropriately named "streetviewer"

While limited to major metro areas (SF, NYC, Vegas), the goal is probably to capture everything. They do have a 'this invades my privacy' button, but we're not sure what it does. Here's a flash-back to keeping your house out of the photo database, using the DMCA and a wall sized original poem.

And we're still holding our breath hoping that Elinor Mills of CNet will follow up last year's CNet / Google spat by posting a street level view of the homes of Google's founders.

Step 1. Aquire ad companies. Step 2. Wholesale surveillance. Step 3. Profit.

Interesting duo-fecta of announcements this week from two competing retardo-level market cap companies in the computing world. Both Micro$oft and Google have acquired ad-serving companies that extend reach beyond their own properties - and curiously, both have plans to do the deep cross-property profiling of individuals and their online activities.


From the Financial Times, on Google's 'do no evil' plan: "Google’s ambition to maximise the personal information it holds on users is so great that the search engine envisages a day when it can tell people what jobs to take and how they might spend their days off. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand... Fears have been stoked by the potential for Google to build up a detailed picture of someone’s behaviour by combining its records of web searches with the information from DoubleClick’s “cookies”, the software it places on users’ machines to track which sites they visit."


From New Scientist on Micro$oft's continued push to assimilation: "If you thought you could protect your privacy on the web by lying about your personal details, think again. In online communities at least, entering fake details such as a bogus name or age may no longer prevent others from working out exactly who you are. That is the spectre raised by new research conducted by Microsoft. The computing giant is developing software that could accurately guess your name, age, gender and potentially even your location, by analysing telltale patterns in your web browsing history. But experts say the idea is a clear threat to privacy - and may be illegal in some places."


Spiffy. Inescapable pervasive wholesale surveillance, by Micro$oft, Google, the federal government, and ISPs.. Let the countdown to investigative subpoenas begin? Pleh. Time to start a new internet. This one's been infected.

Total Information Awareness - more lives than a cat.

Washington Times: "Homeland Security officials are testing a supersnoop computer system that sifts through personal information on U.S. citizens to detect possible terrorist attacks, prompting concerns from lawmakers who have called for investigations.

The system uses the same data-mining process that was developed by the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that was banned by Congress in 2003 because of vast privacy violations. "

" The ADVISE and TIA data-mining projects rely on personal data to track individual behavior and consumer transactions to develop computer algorithms that create a pattern that some behavioral scientists say can predict terrorist behavior. Data can include credit-card purchases, telephone or Internet details, medical records, travel and banking information"


Notice a pattern here? Aside from the academic and civil rights arguments against pervasive monitoring of pretty much everything, and aside from the 'bad science' behind this approach as a preventative security apparatus, we're seeing a pattern of disregard.. Executive branch starts it up, Legislative shuts it down. Executive branch moves it to another agency, gives it a new name. Legislative shuts it down. Ad infinitum.

It's a bad idea, open to massive abuse, inaccuracy, and is unlikely to be effective at much more than wasting time and money - at least in the 'war on terrrr'.. Human intelligence and traditional law enforcement is a better bet here.

The information that one is missing a kidney, makes occasional trips to Cleveland, and prefers Colgate toothpaste in no way susses out criminal or terrorist intent. It's all noise, no signal. But it's a great tool for traditional crimes, drug crimes, etc - that happens to bypass due process protections and thresholds for probable cause. (you know, one or two foundational Constitutional amendments...)

It's also a great way to keep tabs on affiliations, dissidents and those who disagree with the those in power. Opinion crimes.

It's just a question of 'what kind of society do we want'... What freedoms do we value? And even if we trust the party in power not to abuse the systems, what about your least favorite party? Going through mail, monitoring phone calls, tracking behaviors. Not to mention insiders... individuals with searchable access to every fact on everyone. Bah.

Justice Dept.: FBI Misused Patriot Act

AP: "The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

And for three years the FBI has underreported to Congress how often it forced businesses to turn over the customer data, the audit found.

FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to the 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances."


No big surprise here. Law enforcement has a job to do, and will use whatever tools are available to them to do so. The problem is a policy level issue, and is a good example of the need for checks and balances between branches of government -- back to the framer's intent to prevent abuses of individual rights. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg.

House introduces bill to require ISPs to monitor, archive everything forever

CNet: "All Internet service providers would need to track their customers' online activities to aid police in future investigations under legislation introduced Tuesday as part of a Republican 'law and order agenda.'

Employees of any Internet provider who fail to store that information face fines and prison terms of up to one year, the bill says. The U.S. Justice Department could order the companies to store those records forever."

"Because there is no limit on how broad the rules can be, Gonzales would be permitted to force Internet providers to keep logs of Web browsing, instant message exchanges, or e-mail conversations indefinitely."

"That broad wording also would permit the records to be obtained by private litigants in noncriminal cases, such as divorces and employment disputes. That raises additional privacy concerns, civil libertarians say."


It's a given that this is a bad idea for several reasons - from 'this completely guts the notion of personal privacy' to 'the law of unintended consequences'. While surely a boon for storage companies, it pretty much sucks for everyone else.

1. Tremendous privacy implications for individuals, small business, anyone using an ISP for any reason.

2. Giant cyber-criminal target (crack, mine, build profiles for spearphishing, compromise unencrypted passwords, find legal but extortable information, etc)

3. Will trap data of normal people and do exactly zero to trap info on criminals (who are using encryption, other people's connections, blah blah)

4. IP and behavioral data doesn't prove identity or intent. Functionally useless. (see Splunk'd AOL Search Info, wardriving, RIAA/MPAA dragnets, log poisoning and rewriting, etc.)

So how do people (law enforcement, divorce lawyers, lawyers) access the traffic? where is it stored? how is it secured? how does one review the data for accuracy? will slightly different system-times wrongly implicate individuals based on timestamps and IPs ? (See 'DHCP for Dummies). How do we treat wifi hotspots? Open home and business wifi access points? Rogue ISP employees? Worms, botnets and malware infected computers (and whatever they might do)? Compromised law enforcement logins? We could do this all night.

It's retarded, impractical, an abhorrent breach of privacy, and dangerous for everyone.

On the plus side, maybe this will finally negate the 'net neutrality' argument (treating different bits differently) as users start using Tor, anonymizers, tunneling to Russian VPNs, etc. to encrypt all traffic - leaving nothing for ISP logs to grab or interpret. Maybe this is a good thing.

This is the litmus test for "do everyday people value their own privacy - and is the government still of, by, and for the people"...

Canadian company to photograph every house in America to build database for sale

Arizona Daily Star: "Photographers from a Canadian company are going house to house, shooting pictures of the roughly 300,000 houses in metropolitan Tucson. It's part of an effort to photograph and appraise every house in the country, creating a database that can be sold to banks and insurance companies. While the city attorney says the activity is perfectly legal, it has officials and some residents concerned about privacy rights."



Their FAQ says they don't go on private property. Their 'leaflets' for concerned residents say it's for law enforcement and first responders (not true, according to law enforcement and first responders). Unsavory that a foreign company is using photos of other people's stuff for profit without permission. Not illegal. Just distasteful. Like real-estate paparazzi.

So we have two solutions:

1. Compose an original poem large enough to be seen from the street, and affix it to the front of your house. If your house ends up in the database, sue for copyright infringement and illegal distribution (using arguments made popular by the RIAA and MPAA), issue a DMCA take-down notice to their hosting providers, and Bob's your uncle.


2. Someone please track down the home addresses of executives and investors so we can start collecting and publishing photos of their houses on these Internets. Please observe all local laws in photographing the executive's houses, do not trespass, and do not attempt to photograph people or attempt to collect additional personal information. Follow the same criteria they have published for their own photographers.




Link via /.

U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling

New York Times: "The Justice Department is completing rules to allow the collection of DNA from most people arrested or detained by federal authorities, a vast expansion of DNA gathering"

"The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons."

"While the proposed rules have not been finished, justice officials said they were certain to bring a huge new workload for the F.B.I. laboratory that logs, analyzes and stores federal DNA samples. Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said they anticipated an increase ranging from 250,000 to as many as 1 million samples a year. The laboratory currently receives about 96,000 samples a year, said Robert Fram, chief of the agency’s Scientific Analysis Section."


All your DNA are belong to us. Forever.
And still doesn't address the issue of the millions of chimeric twins out there. One body - multiple versions of DNA.

FBI conducting multi-year internet porn study

ZDNet: "The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed."

"Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI's Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what's legally permissible." On Monday, a Justice Department representative would not immediately answer questions about this kind of surveillance technique.

"What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting everyone and then choosing their targets."



Only a matter of time before the needle-stack makers legislate full data retention at ISPs.. First for the 'war on terr-r', then 'for the children', and later .. well, it will be too late to matter because they won't care what you think. ISP costs go up due to massive storage requirements, innocent Americans will have ALL internet surfing, communications, etc. stored for later perusal by law enforcement, divorce lawyers, the RIAA/MPAA or anyone else who can hack a massively distributed database.

Meanwhile, terrorists and others are unaffected as the needlestack gets larger. But it's not really about that. It's about control. And in the end, the government has the shiny new law enforcement tool they wanted. We're sure it will be useful, but at what cost to the rest of us? And what happens to checks, balances, the fourth amendment, etc. If anything will spur consumer adoption of encryption and Tor-like objects, this will be it.

Stay tuned.

Brittain planning cottage industry around "crowdporn" cameras

The Sun Online: "As part of the most shocking extension of Big Brother powers ever planned here, lenses in lampposts would snap “naked” pictures of passers-by to trap terror suspects.

The proposal is contained in leaked documents drawn up by the Home Office and presented to PM Tony Blair’s working group on Security, Crime and Justice. But the prospect of the State snooping on individuals’ most private parts is certain to spark national fury. And officials are battling to find a way of dealing with that reaction."

"Officials have agreed one solution would be to allow only women to monitor female subjects — although they admit this would be “very problematic” in crowds... “Privacy is an issue because the machines see through clothing.”"

"Cops would also get the power to build a database of everyone in the land. Three-dimensional CCTV pictures would be coupled with records of people’s mobile phones and even their travel cards to get details of their movements and habits. Facial recognition systems to help track individuals’ movements are also being considered."


And UK parents want some perv behind a government camera looking through their children's clothes because....?

Canadian currency bugged with RFID

CBC News: "Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense."

Canada apparently took the idea of following the money trail a bit far... RFID in money.. interesting. Might be more efficient than the foil strip the US uses, but wouldn't range be an issue? Not clear that Canadians have RFID readers every 60-70 feet... Not sure what this is aboot.

Bush says feds can open mail without warrant

The Seattle Times: "President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant."


Slippery slope has become an open shaft.

Face search engine will let anyone find every picture of you on the Internets...

New Scientist: "A search engine that uses sophisticated facial recognition to allow users to identify and find people in online images will launch next month. But civil liberties groups say the biometric-style tool could compromise the privacy of anyone who has their picture online."


Yikes. And people have called us paranoid for years because we chose not to be in photographs or put our mugs on the Internets... Nice search tool for stalkers, ID thieves and governments.. Not to mention blackmailers. Or employers who want to pre-screen candidates for 'youthful indiscretions'..

Come to think of it, this is a huge risk to undercover officers, CIA or other covert operatives... Take a picture of someone who's past or loyalty or identity may be suspect, post it to the web, then run a cross index for every photo of this person -- turning up any family photos (and in the process, identifying family members), further leveraging any surrounding ID or metadata to suss out the real identity of the individual in question... This could go very dark very quickly.

It's like a huge internet-wide social network that you can't opt out of.

The idea's out there now (and was originally developed for governments), but it should still die a fiery death on principal.

Judge Shuts Down Warrantless Surveillance

AP: "A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered an immediate halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy."

Well, at least someone over there has read the Consitution...

License Plate Tracking for All

Wired News: "Jealous lovers may soon have an alternative to sniffing for perfume to catch a cheating mate: Just follow their license plate.

In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists' movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who's on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says.

Giant data-tracking firms such as ChoicePoint, Accurint and Acxiom already collect detailed personal and financial information on millions of Americans. Once they discover how lucrative it is to know where a person goes between the supermarket, for example, and the strip club, the LPR industry could explode, says Bucholz."


Ah, the mission creep of ubiquitous surveillance driven by private firms and governments alike... If the use of popup blockers, cookie blockers, caller-ID blocking and the universal hatred of spyware haven't been obvious enough, let's all say it together: no one likes being tracked. No one likes surreptitious information gathering by persons or groups unknown for purposes unknown.

No group can be trusted with information about you. They lose it, sell it, misuse it, and there's no 'opt out', no visibility, and no control...

This should be the tipping point where we all start talking about significant loophole-free personal privacy laws. The odds are currently violently stacked against Joe and Jane Human...

Al-Quota -- innocents landing on 'terror' watchlists...

TheDenverChannel.com : "You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

'Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong,' said one federal air marshal."


Lovely. Not like the watch list data was clean to start with, but whatever. Effective use of tax dollars for theater...

Senate Prepping Bill to Sue Bush

Associated Press: "A powerful Republican committee chairman who has led the fight against President Bush's signing statements said Monday he would have a bill ready by the end of the week allowing Congress to sue him in federal court.

'We will submit legislation to the United States Senate which will...authorize the Congress to undertake judicial review of those signing statements with the view to having the president's acts declared unconstitutional,' Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said on the Senate floor.

Specter's announcement came the same day that an American Bar Association task force concluded that by attaching conditions to legislation, the president has sidestepped his constitutional duty to either sign a bill, veto it, or take no action.

Bush has issued at least 750 signing statements during his presidency, reserving the right to revise, interpret or disregard laws on national security and constitutional grounds."


Wow. Who saw that one coming? It's about time Congress started checking and balancing.. Oh wait.. election year. Makes perfect sense now...