Category Archives: Department of Homeland Security

Mizzou University President Forced to Resign by Black Demands

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The University president did resign on November 9. This has the social justice types at the White House and the Department of Justice fingerprints all over it.

The social media campaign in earnest here and here.

In part: “We want the student body and the administration to know that we are calling for UM System President Tim Wolfe to step down or we risk losing a student,” Ervin said, referring to the possibility that Butler could die.

The group is using Twitter to push its message using the hashtag #BoycottUM.

They have also started a www.Change.org  petition to remove Wolfe from office.

“I think there are several things in the works to bring attention to what is going on,” Alexis Ditaway, who is an ally of Concerned Student 1950, said. “As minority students on campus this is something that can and will affect all of us. This is an issue.”

The students gathered Tuesday night with one final chant from Assata Shakur:

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

During the University of Missouri’s 104th homecoming parade, Saturday, October 10, 2015, eleven Black student leaders on campus interjected themselves into the parade, presenting UM system president, Tim Wolfe, and the Columbia community with a demonstration addressing Mizzou’s history of racial violence and exclusivity. The demonstration covered the raw, painful, and often silenced history of racism and discrimination on the University of Missouri’s campus.

This history of racism at Mizzou dates back to 1935 when Lloyd Gaines petitioned the university to be its first Black law student and was denied admission. The actual year that the first Black student, Gus T. Ridgel, was accepted in the University of Missouri wasn’t until 1950, hence where the concept of “Concerned Student 1950” comes from.

Concerned Student 1950, thus, represents every Black student admitted to the University of Missouri since then and their sentiments regarding racerelated affairs affecting their lives at a predominantly white institution. Not only do our white peers sit in silence in the face of our oppression but also our administrators who perpetuate that oppression through their inaction.

The Black experience on Mizzou’s campus is cornered in offices and rarely attended to until it reaches media. Then, and only then, do campus administrators seek reactionary initiatives to attest to the realities of oppressed students, faculty, and staff. These temporary adjustments to the university’s behaviors are not enough to assure that future generations of marginalized students will have a safe and inclusive learning experience during their time at Mizzou.

It is important to note that, as students, it is not our job to ensure that the policies and practices of the University of Missouri work to maintain a safe, secure and unbiased campus climate for all of its students. We do understand, however, that change does not happen without a catalyst.

Concerned Student 1950 has invested time, money, intellectual capital, and excessive energy to bring to the forefront these issues and to get administration on board so that we, as students, may turn our primary focus back to what we are on campus to do: obtain our degrees.

The following document presents the demands of Concerned Student 1950. This document reflects the adjustments that we feel should be made to the University. We expect a response to these demands by 5:00pm on October 28, 2015.

If we do not receive a response to these demands by the date above, we will take appropriate nonviolent actions. If there are any questions, comments or concerns, you may forward them to [email protected].

The struggle continues, Concerned Student 1950

List of Demands

I. We demand that the University of Missouri System President, Tim Wolfe, writes a handwritten apology to the Concerned Student 1950 demonstrators and holds a press conference in the Mizzou Student Center reading the letter. In the letter and at the press conference, Tim Wolfe must acknowledge his white male privilege, recognize that systems of oppression exist, and provide a verbal commitment to fulfilling Concerned Student 1950 demands. We want Tim Wolfe to admit to his gross negligence, allowing his driver to hit one of the demonstrators, consenting to the physical violence of bystanders, and lastly refusing to intervene when Columbia Police Department used excessive force with demonstrators.

II. We demand the immediate removal of Tim Wolfe as UM system president. After his removal a new amendment to UM system policies must be established to have all future UM system president and Chancellor positions be selected by a collective of students, staff, and faculty of diverse backgrounds.

III. We demand that the University of Missouri meets the Legion of Black Collegians’ demands that were presented in 1969 for the betterment of the black community.

IV. We demand that the University of Missouri creates and enforces comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum throughout all campus departments and units, mandatory for all students, faculty, staff, and administration. This curriculum must be vetted, maintained, and overseen by a board comprised of students, staff, and faculty of color.

V. We demand that by the academic year 20172018, the University of Missouri increases the percentage of black faculty and staff campuswide to 10%.

VI. We demand that the University of Missouri composes a strategic 10 year plan by May 1, 2016 that will increase retention rates for marginalized students, sustain diversity curriculum and training, and promote a more safe and inclusive campus.

VII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding and resources for the University of Missouri Counseling Center for the purpose of hiring additional mental health professionals; particularly those of color, boosting mental health outreach and programming across campus, increasing campuswide awareness and visibility of the counseling center, and reducing lengthy wait times for prospective clients.

VIII. We demand that the University of Missouri increases funding, resources, and personnel for the social justices centers on campus for the purpose of hiring additional professionals, particularly those of color, boosting outreach and programming across campus, and increasing campuswide awareness and visibility.

 

Report: Christianity will be Extinct in Ten Years

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On the brink: Christianity facing Middle East purge within decade, says group

FNC: By  The dwindling Christian population of the Middle East could vanish completely within a decade unless the global community intervenes, say alarmed aid groups who say followers of the Bible are being killed, driven from their land or forced to renounce their faith at an unprecedented pace.

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The world has largely stood by as a dangerous tide of intolerance has washed over the region, according to a new study by the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. The study includes disturbing data about the plunging numbers of Christians in the part of the world that gave birth to the faith, and makes a dire prediction of what could happen.

“It’s an answer that depends on the response of the world,” Edward Clancy, director of outreach for the United Kingdom-based Aid to the Church in Need, told FoxNews.com. “What response is there going to be toward us if we act?”

 “Last Christmas was the first time that bells did not ring out in the city of Mosul in 2000 years. I think that speaks to the reality that hundreds of thousands of Christian families are living on the edge of extinction.”

– Elijah Brown, 21st Century Wilberforce

While Christians are under siege from Islamic State radicals in war-torn Syria and Iraq, the report notes that the religion is being targeted throughout the region. Christians who have managed to escape ISIS have fled to places like Europe and Lebanon, while members of the faith also are under increasing pressure in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations.

The Christian population in Iraq has plummeted from 1.5 million in 2003 to current estimates of 275,000 and could be gone for good within five years, according to the report. The dwindling numbers are due to genocide, refugees fleeing to other countries, those who are internally displaced, and others hiding in plain sight and not allowing their faith to be publicly known. A dozen Christian families flee Iraq each day, according to 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, a Falls Church, Va., nonprofit dedicated to promoting religious freedom in the Middle East.

 

“Unless the global community gets involved, we will witness the loss of Christian witnesses in a land that is biblically significant,” Elijah Brown, executive vice president for 21st Century Wilberforce, told FoxNews.com.

He noted that Iraq’s second-largest city, once home to a thriving Christian community as old as the faith itself, has now been overrun by ISIS and purged of Christians.

“Last Christmas was the first time that bells did not ring out in the city of Mosul in 2,000 years,” Brown said. “I think that speaks to the reality that hundreds of thousands of Christian families are living on the edge of extinction.”

In Syria, where Aid to the Church in Need has sent $9 million in aid to help Christians driven from small villages north of Damascus, an estimated 15,000 Christians have left their villages to seek refuge in Homs, Zaidal and Fairouzeh in recent days, according to Syrian Orthodox Archbishop Selwanos Boutros Alnemeh. He told the charity Christians are terrified that ISIS, in a constant see-saw battle for territory with government forces, will capture their villages and kill all non-Muslims. They are particularly fearful for the key city of Sadad, where Christians lived peacefully with Muslims for centuries.

“We are afraid that ISIS — which God will hopefully prevent — will conquer the town. We would lose the center of Christianity in our diocese,” Archbishop Selwanos said, adding that two years ago, jihadists held the town briefly and killed at least 45 Christians, and destroyed churches and homes.

The report names Egypt as the one nation in the Middle East that has reversed the trend under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist agenda. El-Sisi, himself a Muslim, has vowed to protect Egypt’s Coptic Christians, and last Christmas attended church services with them in an unprecedented show of tolerance and solidarity.

“Such a development holds out a potential beacon of hope for Christians and others in the Middle East against a backdrop of growing Islamism,” the report stated.

While the situation is most dire in the Middle East, Christianity is under assault in Africa and Asia, too, according to the Aid to the Church in Need study. It cited persecution at the hands of Islamist terror groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria and other extremists in Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania and other parts of the continent. Asia’s Christians have been targeted by nationalist religious movements — Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist — in such countries as Pakistan, Hindu and Myanmar. Many of these groups increasingly view Christianity as a foreign, “colonial” import, and believe its practitioners are doing the bidding of the West, said Clancy.

Persecution has been allowed to spread in many of these countries because of the complacency of its citizens and inaction of the international community, said Brown.

“On average, in many of the Muslim majority countries, an average of 73 percent believe that they already have religious freedom,” he said, referring to a Pew research poll. “So we often see a passive public that is resistant to change.

“Unfortunately, there are also many who are hesitating to use the proper label for what is occurring in many of these countries, which is genocide.”

 

Both 21st Century Wilberforce and Aid for The Church in Need agree that preventing further genocide requires an international undertaking.

“It’s going to have to be a multi-tiered effort,” Clancy said. “We can definitely start with restrictions on the borders of some of these countries. There are definitely weapons flowing into the region. These channels need to be squeezed.

“We need to start putting on the pressure and if and when there is some sort of peace, we need to ensure that minority religious groups are represented in newly forming governments.”

The Billion Dollar Fleece of Taxpayers at DHS

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There are defined dollars assigned to projects, when there is no enough money or the timeline for completion is missed, who says stop and inspects why? What have members of Congress been told, if anything? Who spends a billion dollars with no results? Sure, this Federal government. The same playbook applied to Obamacare and countless other government operations. Where is the outrage and will this too head to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for investigation?

It should be noted that the Ellis Island did this successfully as did Ancestry.com.

A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online

WaPo: Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

From the start, the initiative was mismanaged, the records and interviews show. Agency officials did not complete the basic plans for the computer system until nearly three years after the initial $500 million contract had been awarded to IBM, and the approach to adopting the technology was outdated before work on it began.

By 2012, officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which includes USCIS, were aware that the project was riddled with hundreds of critical software and other defects. But the agency nonetheless began to roll it out, in part because of pressure from Obama administration officials who considered it vital for their plans to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, according to the internal documents and interviews.

Only three of the agency’s scores of immigration forms have been digitized — and two of these were taken offline after they debuted because nearly all of the software and hardware from the original system had to be junked.

The sole form now available for electronic filing is an application for renewing or replacing a lost “green card” — the document given to legal permanent residents. By putting this application online, the agency aimed to bypass the highly inefficient system in which millions of paper applications are processed and shuttled among offices. But government documents show that scores of immigrants who applied online waited up to a year or never received their new cards, disrupting their plans to work, attend school and travel.

“You’re going on 11 years into this project, they only have one form, and we’re still a paper-based agency,’’ said Kenneth Palinkas, former president of the union that represents employees at the immigration agency. “It’s a huge albatross around our necks.’’

DHS officials acknowledge the setbacks but say the government is well on the way to automating the immigration service, which processes about 8 million applications a year. The department has scrapped the earlier technology and development method and is now adopting a new approach relying in part on cloud computing.

“In 2012, we made some hard decisions to turn the Transformation Program around using the latest industry best practices and approaches, instead of simply scratching it and starting over,’’ said Shin Inouye, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services. “We took a fresh start — a fix that required an overhaul of the development process — from contracting to development methodology to technology.’’

“Since making these changes, we have been able to develop and deploy a new system that is able to process about 1.2 million benefit requests out of USCIS’s total annual work volume,” Inouye added. “Our goals remain to improve operations, increase efficiency, and prepare for any changes to our immigration laws. Based on our recent progress, we are confident we are moving in the right direction.”

Other DHS officials emphasized that if Congress passes immigration reform in the near future, they would have an electronic system that could accommodate any significant changes, including a surge in demand from immigrants seeking legal status.

Until then, immigrants and their lawyers say they will remain hugely frustrated by the government’s archaic, error-plagued system. Processing immigration applications now often involves shipping paper documents across the country, and delays are legend. A single missing or misplaced form can set back an approval by months.

“It’s shameful that they’ve been on this for a decade and haven’t been able to get a working system in place,’’ said Vic Goel, an immigration lawyer in Reston, Va., who has followed the computerization project as a liaison for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Online forms get pulled

When the electronic immigration system began in May 2012, it was hailed as “a significant milestone in our agency’s history” by the USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas, who is now the deputy secretary of homeland security.

The first form that went live was intended for foreigners who were in the United States on certain types of visas who wanted to renew their non-immigrant status.

But only a fraction of applicants ever used that form before the agency took it offline, after officials decided to abandon the initial technology and development method and move toward a cloud-based system. Some officials inside DHS said the system should never have been launched at all because of reports that it was suffering from so many technical errors.

The second form, released in 2013, didn’t fare much better. It was designed to allow a certain group of foreigners — those wanting to immigrate to the United States and invest in a business — to apply electronically. Only about 80 people used the online form, DHS officials said. More than 10,000 others opted for old-fashioned paper. It was also pulled.

The third form, which debuted last year, is the one that would allow permanent residents to renew or replace their green cards online. In nearly 200 cases, applicants did not receive their cards or had to wait up to a year, despite multiple requests, according to a June report from the USCIS ombudsman.

The agency also hoped to make it possible for immigrants to pay fees online. There are more than 40 kinds of filing fees that immigrants pay to the government with their applications. As of now, however, only one can be paid online — by those who immigrate to the United States as lawful permanent residents. And even this limited electronic payment system has encountered major problems, such as resistance from immigrants who have trouble because they may not have computers or bank accounts.

A series of government reports has skewered the online immigration system, named ELIS after Ellis Island, even after the old technology was scrapped and officials were scrambling to move to the new cloud-based approach. These studies have found that it is slow, confusing and inefficient for immigrants and government employees alike.

A report last year from the DHS inspector general’s office said it sometimes took up to 150 clicks for employees to navigate the system’s various complex features and open documents — and that the system lacked functions as basic as a usable search engine. Internal DHS evaluations have warned of “critical engineering uncertainties” and other difficulties.

“It’s in­cred­ibly slow to use the few forms they put online,’’ said Goel, the immigration lawyer. “Most immigration lawyers have concluded the system is half-baked.’’

‘It wasn’t going to work’

Government watchdogs have repeatedly blamed the mammoth problems on poor management by DHS, and in particular by the immigration agency.

When the project began, DHS was only two years old, cobbled together after the Sept. 11 attacks from myriad other government agencies, and the department was still reeling. “There was virtually no oversight back then,’’ a former federal official said. “DHS was like the Wild West on big acquisitions.”

The Government Accountability Office has blasted the immigration service for shoddy planning, saying the agency awarded the IBM contract “prior to having a full understanding of requirements and resources needed to execute the program.” As a result, basic planning documents were incomplete or unreliable, including cost estimates and schedules. The basic requirements for the project, the report said, were not completed until 2011 — nearly three years after the IBM contract was awarded.

IBM had as many as 500 people at one time working on the project. But the company and agency clashed. Agency officials, for their part, held IBM responsible for much of the subsequent failure, documents show.

The company’s initial approach proved especially controversial. Known as “Waterfall,” this approach involved developing the system in relatively long, cascading phases, resulting in a years-long wait for a final product. Current and former federal officials acknowledged in interviews that this method of carrying out IT projects was considered outdated by 2008. “The Waterfall method has not been successful for 40 years,” said a current federal official involved in the project, who was not an authorized spokesperson and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

An IBM spokesman declined to address the criticisms, saying only that the company’s work on Transformation concluded in May.

By 2012, the system’s fundamental flaws — including frequent computer crashes and bad software code — were apparent to officials involved with the project and, according to one of them, and it was clear that “it wasn’t going to work.”

But killing the project wasn’t really an option, according to officials involved at the time. President Obama was running for reelection and was intent on pushing an ambitious immigration reform program in his second term. A workable electronic system would be vital.

“There was incredible pressure over immigration reform,” a second former official said. “No one wanted to hear the system wasn’t going to work. It was like, ‘We got some points on the board, we can go back and fix it.’”

Delays and lost papers

Immigration reform never made it out of Congress, but it could resurface after the presidential election next year. If it does, and if it involves possible citizenship or legal status for the 11.3 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, the policy would flood the government with millions of complicated new applications.

“Oh, God help us,’’ said Harry Hopkins, a former immigration services official who worked on the Transformation project. “If there is immigration reform, they are going to be overwhelmed.’’

The project’s failures already have daily consequences for millions of immigrants who are in the country legally. Immigration lawyers say the current system leads to lost applications, months-long delays and errors that cause further delays. Immigrants miss deadlines for benefits, meaning they lose everything from jobs and mortgages to travel opportunities.

Luke Bellocchi, an immigration lawyer and former deputy ombudsman at Citizenship and Immigration Services, said he has handled at least 100 cases of lost applications in the past few years, mostly for green cards.

“No one knows where these applications are,” he said. “It’s an absolute nightmare.’’

Another concern is national security. DHS officials said they are confident that the current paper-based system is not putting the nation at risk. But others, like Palma Yanni, a D.C. immigration lawyer and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, are dubious.

“If there are some bad apples in there who should not get a green card, who are terrorists who want to do us harm, how on earth are they going to find these people if they’re sending mountains of paper immigration files all over the United States?’’ Yanni asked.

United States Ranks #3 in Refugee Destinations

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From the UN: The current refugee crisis arising from civil upheaval in the Middle East and Africa has caused over 4.1 million people to flee Syria alone since 2011. While the majority of asylum seekers in the region initially flee to neighboring countries (more than a quarter of the population resident in Lebanon is Syrian) most aspire to establish refugee status in Europe.

Despite the European Union’s Dublin Treaty, which states that an asylum seeker must apply for asylum in their country of first entry into the union, many are moving north to places that promise higher economic chances. At the top of their list: Germany, which expects to receive 1.5 million asylum seekers in 2015. This recent influx has resulted in diverse reactions in the European political and social spheres. Photographs of fences erected around Hungary and Austria’s border to Slovenia, and Hungarian camerawoman tripping a man fleeing with his son evidence the exclusionary sentiment present on the continent, supported by growing right wing movements.

And yet some countries and politicians have insisted that they can and will accommodate large numbers of refugees.

What makes a country a ‘good’ country for refugee resettlement, fairly assuming their burden in the global community? Here are four countries on three continents that both quantitatively and qualitatively stand out.

With as many refugees arriving in Europe last month than all of last year, this question of where they can and should resettle is all the more urgent.

1)   Germany. The huge migration of refugees seeking asylum in Germany in autumn of 2015 has dominated the news for months. Many believe that this sudden influx arose from rumors spread through co-nationals living in Germany that refugees would encounter both physical and economic security, if they made it to this EU leader. Angela Merkel made headlines with her strong position in favor of processing the huge numbers of refugees. “If Europe fails on the question of refugees, then it won’t be the Europe we wished for.” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizere characterized the influx as “challenging but not overwhelming.” Germany now expects 1.5 million asylum applications this year alone, the highest in Europe. Last year, Germany accepted 40,000 applications, granting asylum to more individuals than any other European country.

2)   Sweden. It is important to discern between countries that process and temporarily provide residence to, and those that actually recognize large numbers of asylum seekers (the above case of Germany does both). When considering the total accepted asylum applications in relation to the overall country population, Sweden tops the charts. Sweden has historically accepted refugees from across the globe, beginning with those fleeing authoritarian rule in Chile during the 1970s. In 2013, the Swedish Migration Board granted Syrian refugees permanent residence in Sweden. In Sweden, the rights granted to refugees on account of this permanent status—immediate capacity to work, choosing place of residence and family reunification—are notable and vital for quality of life.

3)   The United States. Influenced by its political and military position regarding conflict in Syria, the U.S. has not favorably made the news on the current refugee crisis, offering to resettle only approximately 10,000 Syrian refugees. Yet looking holistically at its system reveals a sunnier picture of U.S. refugee policy. The United States permanently resettles more refugees than any other country in the world, historically taking half of all applications received via the UN Refugee Agency. Last year, this amounted to about 70,000 refugees worldwide who, for the most part, were living in limbo in the country to which they fled.  The USA may not be a viable option for Syrian refugees, but large numbers of refugees from elsewhere are routinely resettled in the USA.

4)   Brazil. Comprehensively evaluating policies though a survey rating refugees’ actual access to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as well as national human rights legislation, the World Refugee Survey 2013 grades countries based on refoulement/physical protection; detention/access to courts; freedom of movement and residence; and right to earn a livelihood. The only country reciving an “A” grade in all categories is Brazil. Additionally, the reciprocal entry policy between Brazil and numerous African countries allows asylum seekers to circumvent dangerous routes and smuggling often used by those attempting to reach the United States or Europe. Brazil, whose little known refugee system may not excel quantitatively (although asylum requests have exploded from a mere 560 in 2010 to 12,000 in 2014), excels qualitatively in its refugee resettlement policies.

Meanwhile, who is among those refugees?

Al Qaeda Terror Boss Discovered On Migrant Boat, Authorities ‘Tried To Hide News’

A convicted terrorist has been caught trying to smuggle himself into Europe by posing as an asylum seeker, in a stark event proving correct those who warned of terrorists taking advantage of the European Union’s lax border controls.

BreitbartLondon: Ben Nasr Mehdi, a Tunisian who was first arrested in Italy in 2007 and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for plotting terror attacks with an Islamic State-linked group, was caught trying to re-enter the country last month.

Authorities discovered him among 200 migrants who were rescued at sea and taken to the island of Lampedusa. Although he gave a false name, migration officers identified him through finger print records, the Independent reports.

German channel n-tv claims the Italian government initially tried to hide the story to avoid “panic” and “scare tactics”. The news did not emerge until several days after Mehdi had been detained last week.

Mehdi was then interrogated for several days before being deported back to Tunisia, where he was handed over to local police.

The revelation will likely add to fears that Islamist terrorists are using the migrant crisis as a means to enter Europe.

In April, UKIP leader Nigel Farage told the European Parliament that terrorists would try to exploit the crisis. He told MEPs: “When ISIS say they want to flood our continent with half a million Islamic extremists they mean it, and there is nothing in [the Common European Asylum Policy] that will stop them.

“I fear we face a direct threat to our civilisation if we allow large numbers of people from that war torn region into Europe.”

The following month, Italian authorities arrested Abdel Majid Touil, a Moroccan accused of being involved in a terror attack on the Bardo museum in Tunisia. He had smuggled himself into Italy on a migrant boat in February.

Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has until now insisted there is no evidence that Islamist terrorists are smuggling themselves into the country among the thousands of migrants, but his ministry has admitted that Ben Nasr Mehdi is exceptionally dangerous.

When police arrested him in 2007, they found explosive detonators, poisons and guerrilla warfare manuals. Prosecutors said he had been part of a group that was setting up militant cells that had recruited potential suicide bombers.

Authorities intercepted phone calls in which he indicated he had supplied instructions and contacts to terrorists in Damascus, thus marking him out as a senior operative.

European leaders are becoming increasingly worried about the potential terror threat from the migrant crisis. Last month, German Interior Minister Thomas de Mazière said his country had become a “focus of international terrorism” thanks to migration. NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg has also expressed similar fears.

Google has Known Your Every Move for Years

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The surveillance state continues. Google is widely accepted by internet and smart phone users as the ‘go-to’ application while few understand the historical implications of what Google knows about each user. Reading terms of services with each update is key to explaining how intrusive Google and Windows 10 is, so this begs the question, is this a good thing? Have you been told and read the facts on the collaboration between Google and the Federal government? Perhaps it is a good time to being your own research.

How Law Enforcement Can Use Google Timeline To Track Your Every Move

by Jana Winter:

THE RECENT EXPANSION of Google’s Timeline feature can provide investigators unprecedented access to users’ location history data, allowing them in many cases to track a person’s every move over the course of years, according to a report recently circulated to law enforcement.

“The personal privacy implications are pretty clear but so are the law enforcement applications,” according to the document, titled “Google Timelines: Location Investigations Involving Android Devices,” which outlines the kind of information investigators can now obtain.

The Timeline allows users to look back at their daily movements on a map; that same information is also potentially of interest to law enforcement. “It is now possible to submit a legal demand to Google for location history greater than six months old,” the report says. “This could revitalize cold cases and potentially help solve active investigations.”

The report was written by a law enforcement trainer, Aaron Edens, and provides detailed guidance on the wealth of historic location information available through Google Timeline and how to request it. A copy of of the document was obtained by The Intercept.

The expansion of Google’s Timeline feature, launched in July 2015, allows investigators to request detailed information about where someone has been — down to the longitude and latitude — over the course of years. Previously, law enforcement could only yield recent location information.

The 15-page document includes what information its author, an expert in mobile phone investigations, found being stored in his own Timeline: historic location data — extremely specific data — dating back to 2009, the first year he owned a phone with an Android operating system. Those six years of data, he writes, show the kind of information that law enforcement investigators can now obtain from Google.

The document also notes that users can edit or delete specific locations in their history, or an entire day, stressing the importance of preservation letters for criminal investigators involving Android phones. “Unfortunately, Google has made it very easy to delete location history from a specific date,” he wrote.

There is no indication data is recoverable from Google once it has been deleted by the user, the report says.

Location data is only stored in users’ Google accounts if they enable the feature. Individual Android users can turn it off, but users often don’t.

The ability of law enforcement to obtain data stored with privacy companies is similar — whether it’s in Dropbox or iCloud. What’s different about Google Timeline, however, is that it potentially allows law enforcement to access a treasure trove of data about someone’s individual movement over the course of years.

The report also advises investigators to remember there is a significant amount of other information retained by Google.

“Consider including Gmail, photos and videos, search history, contacts, applications, other connected devices, Google Voice and Google Wallet, if they are relevant to the investigation,” the report suggests. Investigators are also advised to include a non-disclosure order with their search warrants for Google data, which prevents the company from notifying the account holder that their data is being provided to law enforcement.

It’s impossible to know how many of these requests for historic Timeline location information have been made by law enforcement, since Google does not specify what types of requests it gets from law enforcement. Google’s transparency report provides information on the number of requests received from law enforcement, and the most recent requests go up to the end of 2014 and do not cover the time period after the expanded Timeline was launched. (In the first half of 2014, Google received 12,539 criminal legal requests in the U.S. and in the second half it received 9,981.)

The major barrier law enforcement faces is that Google does not provide any additional advice or help on deciphering data, once it is turned over under subpoena or warrant. “Based on conversations with other law enforcement investigators and prosecutors, they have resisted attempts to bring them into court to discuss the issue,” Edens wrote.

“Google does not provide expert witness testimony,” Edens said in response to The Intercept’s questions, noting that this is a similar practice to that of other companies, like Facebook. His report, he added, was written to help law enforcement in the absence of assistance from Google.

“Google has always been wary of any perceived cooperation with law enforcement, even before [Edward] Snowden,” he said.

“We respond to valid legal requests, and have a long track record of advocating on behalf of our users,” a Google spokesperson told The Intercept.

Research: Micah Lee

[Update: In an email, the Google spokesperson notes that the company requires a warrant to obtain detailed user data, such at that available in Timeline. “A subpoena,” the  spokesperson writes, “is not and has never been sufficient to get it.” The article has been updated to reflect this.]