GPS Tracking and a ‘Mosaic Theory’ of Government Searches
...Perhaps ironically, the court’s logic here rests on the so-called “mosaic theory” of privacy, which the government has relied on when resisting Freedom of Information Act requests. The theory holds that pieces of information that are not in themselves sensitive or potentially injurious to national security can nevertheless be withheld, because in combination (with each other or with other public facts) permit the inference of facts that are sensitive or secret. The “mosaic,” in other words, may be far more than the sum of the individual tiles that constitute it. Leaving aside for the moment the validity of the government’s invocation of this idea in FOIA cases, there’s an obvious intuitive appeal to the idea, and indeed, we see that it fits our real world expectations about privacy much better than the cruder theory that assumes the sum of “public” facts must always be itself a public fact....

NSA Surveillance Targets Average Citizens, Not Terrorists
...The Dutch report goes on to say that "Just like criminals and hackers, jihadists use the invisible Web as a hiding place and do their utmost to keep activities from being tracked. Virtual gathering places constructed, administered and secured by fanatical jihadists are hidden inside this invisible Web."

But the NSA's Prism specifically targets Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, with promises of more high-profile companies to come. Is there value in that? "The AIVD has found that radicalising persons erase their social media accounts sooner or later. They consider the (mostly American) social media to be kuffa (infidel) sites, and therefore unacceptable and unsafe."

Instead of transmitting information in the clear through high-profile social media, Dutch intelligence finds terrorists to be pretty cagey and security conscious....

...So, justifying a surveillance net that focuses on Facebook and Google by uttering the magic word "terrorism" is like rationalizing a wide network of license-plate recognition cameras on the grounds that you may take a snap of a "Honk if You Love Jihad" bumpersticker....

License-Plate Cameras Are Part of the Domestic Surveillance You Didn't Know About
...The DEA has been working by itself and with law-enforcement agencies throughout the southwestern United States to install fixed-location license plate scanners along interstate highways with the stated goal of picking up patterns of movement that may lead to drug smugglers. Of course, to detect pattens, you need to store data, which means building a database recording the passage of vehicles along those highways.

But law-enforcement agencies don't need to create such databases from scratch to record and share information on our movements if they don't want to. They can just plug into the system already established by Vigilant Solutions, which boasts that its National Vehicle Location Service "aggregates between 35-50 million LPR records every month, and is the largest LPR data sharing initiative in the United States."

The quiet but rapid growth in use of license-plate readers is due to the enthusiasm that law enforcement has for the technology. The International Association of Chiefs of Police even adopted a resolution that "strongly encourages the U.S. Congress to fully fund license plate reader and related digital photographing systems, including interrelated information sharing networks, for the northern and southern borders of the United States" and urges other countries to adopt compatible technology to ease data sharing.

That the CIA is investing in Palantir shows that interest in tracking our movements extends beyond law enforcement agencies and into the intelligence community. The surveillance state is better established than most people realize, and reaches far beyond our communications and Internet activities....