The National Security Agency routinely listened in on the intimate and innocent phone calls of Americans in Iraq, including government personnel, journalists and aid workers, as they called back into the United States, according to two former NSA operators who spoke to ABC News. The accusations that the NSA routinely listened in on Americans' phone calls contradicts the Administration's repeated claims that its secret spying did not listen to any Americans other than suspected terrorists. The conduct also appears to violate the rules that govern when the NSA can listen in to Americans' making calls overseas-- which then required high-level approval for each target. The two operators, who ABC News say do not know one other, came forward after speaking with the foremost chronicler of the NSA, James Bamford, whose new book the Shadow Factorycomes out on Tuesday. ABC News reports: "These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003. Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007. Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer. "Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. It's not clear whether the allegations refer to the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program that the Administration admitted to running after the New York Times revealed its existence in December 2005. The government describes that program as listening into phone calls where one end is outside the United States and where one party is suspected of being a terrorist. That program likely intercepted phone calls with help from American telecom companies. The program described by the operators in the ABC News story likely collected the intelligence outside the United States. Kinne's allegations are not new -- she's been making them public for sometime as part of her involvement in the Iraq Veterans Against the War. If the allegations are true, they show that when the government secretly tossed aside the decades-old credo that the NSA doesn't spy on Americans, it did not simply make one or two exceptions -- it shredded the it. ABC Newssays the head of the Senate Intelligence committee Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) is disturbed by the news and pledges to look into it. However, it fails to note that Rockefeller was the key lawmaker in this summer's legislation that largely legalized the government's formerly secret warrantless wiretap program and gave immunity to the companies that helped. Threat Level will have more next week with the release of Bamford's book and a tag team Danger Room/Threat Level interview with Bamford. See Also: Attorney General Pulls the Immunity Trigger, But Denies 'Dragnet ... Rights Group Suing AT&T for Spying Sues NSA and Cheney, Too Analysis: NSA Spying Judge Defends Rule of Law, Congress Set to ... Feds Use Phone Bills to Get Journo's Sources on NSA Spy Program Analysis: NSA Spying Judge Defends Rule of Law, Congress Set to ... Bush Signs Spy Bill, ACLU Sues Secret Spying Court Stays Secret, Rejects ACLU Plea Again Photo: JosephTate73/Flickr Less

video, Imaging, Security Wade Roush wrote: Generally, I’m a big fan of the CSI shows (CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, and of course, the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation), because the heroes are scientists. Who would have expected a trio of dramas about a bunch of wonky forensics experts to stay atop the ratings for years? But I do have a pet peeve about the shows: they routinely exaggerate the power of the image-enhancement software available to crime labs. CSI: Miami took this to a ridiculous and irresponsible extreme a couple of seasons ago, with an episode in which the Miami-Dade PD’s super-sleuths isolated a frame in a surveillance video, then blew up the image to such huge proportions that they were able to read a car’s license plate number in a reflection on a passerby’s eyeball. What a lot of TV viewers probably don’t understand is that simply zooming in on a tiny feature in a digital image doesn’t reveal hidden information. It just makes the existing pixels bigger and fuzzier. But when influential TV shows mix science fiction with science facts, it can give average citizens—including jury members—unrealistic expectations about the capabilities of law-enforcement agencies. Indeed, according to USA Today, the “CSI effect” has made it harder for prosecutors to win convictions in the absence of spectacular physical evidence. But there’s a company right here in Boston that’s correcting misperceptions about video enhancement technology—and at the same time pushing its real capabilities forward. It’s called Salient Stills, and it’s helping police departments and other government agencies around the world wring as much evidence as they can from surveillance recordings—which are usually far more blurry, jerky, and jittery than the videos portrayed in detective shows. “Unfortunately, not only are juries and judges under these misapprehensions, but a lot of our customers need to be educated as well, so we spend a fair amount of time talking about the difference between what happens in Hollywood and what happens on your desktop,” says Salient Stills founder and CEO Laura Teodosio, a former Apple researcher who was one of the first people to get a degree from the MIT Media Lab in the early 1990s. “But once people begin to understand what can be done, they really start to appreciate it.” Last month, the company rolled out the latest version of its flagship product, VideoFocus Pro, a Windows program that can take in video from almost any source—say, an old VCR-based surveillance system in a convenience store, a modern DVR-based system at a bank, or even a crime victim’s cell phone camera—and help users clean it up and sift through it, frame by frame, for key details. In the past, says Teodosio, many police personnel have tried to process crime-scene videos by kludging together separate tools such as Adobe Premiere (for video editing) and Adobe Photoshop (for cleaning up still images). But VideoFocus Pro handles most of the same tasks as both of those programs, and adds specialized features that become crucial when surveillance video is being used to identify criminal suspects—and when it’s likely to end up as legal evidence in court cases. That includes software filters that correct common video artifacts such as interlacing (more on that below) and highlight hard-to-see features in nighttime shots. VideoFocus Pro also creates audit trails documenting exactly how a video file has been modified at each stage of processing, which helps to maintain the chain of evidence. “All of the things most law enforcement customers would need to do have been brought into one application, without the overhead and the complexity of things they don’t need to do,” says Teodosio. Salient Stills’ 10 programmers, who recently escaped rising rents in Boston’s Fort Point Channel area to occupy a fourth-floor loft in Brighton, work with customers at dozens of city, county, and state police agencies, as well as national agencies like the FBI, CIA, DEA, and NSA and quite a few foreign organizations, such as Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency. But the company didn’t start out catering to law enforcement. When Teodosio founded the company in 1998, the main idea was to help big media companies create print-quality still images from video footage. Salient Stills’ very first customer was The New York Times, which put the software to a dramatic test the night of November 7, 2000, when George W. Bush’s razor-thin margin over Al Gore in Florida appeared to have …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share |  E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS Less

Dayglo Abortions ("America Eats Her Young"); the rise of the machines and the vulnerability of the Wired Pentagon- deeply penetrated by "Chinese hackers", vast weapons systems whose command and control systems may now very well be compromised by "foreign" agents. Will the US military be turned against it's masters by "hackers"... are these "hackers" human... or an advanced AI with it's own inscrutable agenda?? Finishing with "I'm a Robot" by Flying Saucers in My Brain. Less

MacBook Earthquake Detector Google’s NSA Connection Penny Mining SDR News is a Daily (M-F) Technology Podcast with Tech News Highlights from Slashdot, Digg and Reddit Click Here to Sign Up for the SDR Newsletter Contact Us Prefer a Direct Download ? (mp3) Download today’s show. Newton Virus - Art Virus for Mac Watch the You Tube Episode Today’s Headlines Include… MacBook Earthquake Detector Google’s NSA Connection Penny Mining SDR News Links If a news item has disappeared from the Del.icio.us list above, try the full list here. Thumbnail Views: Via Thumblicio.us SEARCH ANY STORY YOU HEAR ON THE PODCAST Twenty Five and the Next by Andrew McCaskey News items such as the Infoworld 25th Anniversary of items such as the original Motorola Dynamax “Bananna Phone”, the Apple Lisa, the Death/rebirth of AT&T, Lotus 1-2-3 and the Compaq Portable are always entertaining, especially if you were a part of technology at that time. They were, for their time, as amazing and enthralling (at least to tech early adopters and enthusiasts) as any hardware or software product that we have today. Placed in context, the dial up 300Baud modems and primative networks such as Compuserve, GE Info Systems or the Lockheed provided network were as revolutionary as the roll out of 3G and FiOS. What is different ? The characteristics of technology that recedes into the background as an enabler, rather than as the main show itself. From a technologist viewpoint, it kind of misses the point - that you would have all this incredible applied science going on - and it would be used for the most trivial of purposes. H.L. Mencken said that no one ever went broke underestimating the American pubic, and regardless of the underlying technology, he was right on target. All you have to do is tie it to some sort of social network and you have a billion dollar ringtone business. Click to view videos submitted or recommended by other SDR podcast listeners. . . If you find a YouTube video that pertains to one of our news items, or have produced an item that would be of interest to SDR listeners, please send us the link slashdotreview{at}gmail.com Save $10 on any order of $50 or more at GoDaddy.com! Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable. Take 10% off any order at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH Take $5 off any $30 order at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH2 .com Domains $6.95 at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH3 More blogs about SlashdotReview… Slashdot Review by Email - Sign up here: Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz Less

Ten Million in the Pirate Bay Dark Side of RFID Facebook Apps on Any Webpage SDR News is a Daily (M-F) Technology Podcast with Tech News Highlights from Slashdot, Digg and Reddit Click Here to Sign Up for the SDR Newsletter Contact Us Prefer a Direct Download ? (mp3) Download today’s show. MagicJack USB VoIP Hardware and Software Watch the You Tube Episode Today’s Headlines Include… Ten Million in the Pirate Bay Dark Side of RFID Facebook Apps on Any Webpage SDR News Links If a news item has disappeared from the Del.icio.us list above, try the full list here. Thumbnail Views: Via Thumblicio.us SEARCH ANY STORY YOU HEAR ON THE PODCAST Dark Side of RFID by Andrew McCaskey The Washington Post article on RFID failed to mention the push that is underway by the nation’s largest retailer - Wal-Mart - requiring their suppliers to include RFID on virtually all of their materials supplied to them by - I believe- 2012. They are already starting the pressure on suppliers for the Sam’s Club portion of their business. One of the recurring themes that seem to influence the privacy debates is the fact that we are adamantly opposed to such measures, until our kids drift by the Mall and see a sign up for a “Free Boat” , enter a car raffle or some similar tidbit of private information in hope of future gain. That’s one element of the mix - but at least under (more or less) control. At least you know that you have released the information. The RFID version of dumpster diving (conducting a drive-by scan of your trash placed on the curb ) may be in the realm of science fiction now - but by 2012, there will be a LOT of targets in the refuse stream that some marketeer is going to want to cash in on. Click to view videos submitted or recommended by other SDR podcast listeners. . . If you find a YouTube video that pertains to one of our news items, or have produced an item that would be of interest to SDR listeners, please send us the link slashdotreview{at}gmail.com Save $10 on any order of $50 or more at GoDaddy.com! Be sure to sign up for our upcoming roundtable. We will be using GoToMeeting. Also, be sure to check out GoToMeeting. Why? Because you can hold meetings right over the Net — from anywhere. Plus, you can hold all the meetings you want for one flat rate. To get your free 30-day trial , visit www.gotomeeting.com/techroundtable. Take 10% off any order at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH Take $5 off any $30 order at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH2 .com Domains $6.95 at GoDaddy.com! Code SLASH3 More blogs about SlashdotReview… Slashdot Review by Email - Sign up here: Enter your Email Powered by FeedBlitz Less

So why are Bush & Harper so close? That wacky Bush ‘towel-snapping’ humour, the documented de-humanized behaviour of his youth. What would bring about that level of well-reported “Friendship” between George Bush & Canada’s new NeoCon, evangelical Prime Minister? Hum… We have a winning answer from AjaxMinoan! MAPLE SYRUP!! BlueBerry Pick’n can be found @ ThisCanadian.com “Silent Freedom is Freedom Silenced” Less

Inspired by; NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY, 5/11/06 Less