Sen. Ron Wyden - despite being a politician - has done a service to his country in exposing the fact that the US government is using the PATRIOT Act in ways that far exceed even the excessive powers which it grants the government on its face. This is not shocking, of course, but it’s good to know. I’ve basically assumed - and I think every prudent person should assume - that we’re living in a post-liberty age and that the US government uses all means at its disposal to spy on everyone - US citizen or not - to whatever extent it can manage with its resources. If you are doing something that can be used against you in a government court, the onus is on you to keep your affairs private. This means you’re going to have to go out there and research the state of the art in all forms of surveillance and maybe add in a safety factor of 2 since the authorities go to great lengths to conceal their actual spying abilities.
To be more specific:
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You should assume the government reads all your email which is stored on any sort of web account, i.e. Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo. The same goes for all chat sessions. Video and audio may be scanned using “fourier transform” techniques that look for specific patterns in ways similar to how the human ear and eye operate.
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You should assume your cell phone is on and transponding at all times, even with the battery removed. It was recently revealed that the iPhone (and possibly the Android) collects and stores GPS location data for more than a year - sampled at the rate of 100 times per day - even if you disable the “Location Services” in your iPhone. This sort of data is a gold mine for adversarial public enforcers of the secret laws which we don’t even know we’re subject to.
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You should assume that any open microphone may be listened to… your computer could be infected with a virus that turns on and forwards audio data from your microphone. I’ve just recently considered the possibility that even the piezo-electric speaker present in all desktop PCs (the thing that goes “BEEP!” when you start your computer) could be operated in reverse as a microphone if the machine is properly programmed by a trojan horse or virus.
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You should assume the government can “sneak a peek” into any records - medical, financial, etc. - anytime, anywhere. You should assume that all electronic records are being datamined and correlated. A “phone records processing company” in Israel was exposed a few years back as a Mossad operation. They used the financial data for processing phone transactions to data-mine and track the activity of individuals of interest.
Basically, pretend you’re living in Soviet Russia and anything you do that isn’t officially rubber-stamped and red-taped by the Powers that Be is a “political crime” for which the FSB will tirelessly hunt you down with the latest 21st century technology. Then maybe multiply that paranoia by 2, just to be safe.
Clayton -