Earlier this week the government came under fire for hoovering up the personal call logs of more than twenty lines belonging to the Associated Press. Initially Uncle Same claimed the snooping and violation of press rights was due to an immediate and pressing life-risking investigation, but as the week rolled on it became clear the government was simply embarrassed by internal leaks and annoyed an AP story stole some public relations thunder. It has also since been made clear that Verizon Wireless was the company that handed over the data without a second thought:Granted the law muzzles most of the people to whom these requests are made, but that doesn't mean that carriers have to be quite so mindlessly compliant every time government knocks. We've seen repeated instances where time after time, carriers showed absolutely no independent intelligence or ethics when considering whether to help the government break the law. Only small carriers, like Sonic.net, have bothered to show anything resembling a spine.

As we've noted previously, Obama and intelligence/law enforcement agencies are working on a new domestic surveillance expansion plan that would fine ISPs and companies who don't cooperate with wiretap requests. The FBI and DOJ have spent the last year or so whining about the fact that despite all their immense (and often legally dubious) wiretapping powers, they're having a hard time accessing encrypted services.

The Justice Department is under fire for obtaining two months of telephone records for twenty different lines used by reporters and editors for The Associated Press. Said data included phone numbers, names, calls made, and potentially call duration.

The effort to get Do Not Track functionality embedded into browsers quickly descended into total farce, with sides currently bickering over the very definition of "tracking." In this new age of undeletable cookies, behavioral advertising, deep packet inspection, clickstream sales and search result hijacking, neither the FTC, the W3C, nor the marketing, content and telecom industries really want to jeopardize the billions to be made from snoopertising by empowering consumers. The result? A privacy safeguard quagmire that feels like a 1960's absurdist play.

As I've been discussing, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are making a strong new push to mandate backdoors in e-mail, cloud storage services, social networking websites and other encrypted services to make real-time wiretapping easier. As part of this effort to overhaul CALEA, the DOJ has even gone so far as to propose that ISPs be fined for failure to comply.

Efforts in several countries to block user access to the Pirate Bay haven't gone particularly well, in large part thanks to the fact that users are simply using proxies and VPNs to access the website and its linked content. According to Torrent Freak, around 8% of the traffic hitting the controversial website is now via proxied IP addresses, a percentage the website argues could be potentially higher. "The 8% is just what goes through the dedicated IP-address, a lot of proxies use the site’s domain name instead," a Pirate Bay spokesman tells Torrent Freak. There has also been an uptick in VPN services in the States, as users hide from the entertainment industry's new six strikes initiative.

We've noted repeatedly how privacy technology discussions often have a bizarre and amusing lack of context, the press getting borderline hysterical about every NebuAD or CarrierIQ scandal, while all-but ignoring that carriers and the government buy, sell and trade all user information daily with a total disregard (and often disdain) for law. Your iPhone tells Apple you went to Costco? Unified outrage.

The EFF this week released their latest privacy report card, which grades companies on how well they help protect your data from government over-reach. The full report (pdf) explores which companies require a warrant to access content, inform users about government data requests, publishes transparent government interaction guidelines and fights for user privacy in the courts and Congress.

While carriers already now give real-time access to all network data, the FBI says that real-time wiretapping of encrypted services is their top priority in 2013. Speaking last week at the American Bar Association, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann argued once again that the agency wants to revamp the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to allow for real-time surveillance of e-mail, cloud storage services, and social networking websites.

By now AT&T's total disregard for privacy and wiretap laws in their cooperation with the government's warrantless wiretap program is fairly well established. As numerous NSA and AT&T whistleblowers have illustrated, the company dumps all voice and data from any carrier that touches their network directly into the lap of the NSA -- with no warrants or transparency and only marginal government oversight.

Last week CISPA passed the house courtesy of oodles of lobbying cash from companies like AT&T, Verizon, Google, Intel and Cisco. Those companies are thrilled that the bill protects them from privacy violations, as are security firms eager to net billions in government contracts to fight an endless parade of phantom "cybersecurity" menaces.

As I noted the other day, documents recently obtained by the ACLU after a FOIA request suggest that IRS protocols still assume that the agency can freely snoop through United States citizen e-mails, despite the fact that a 2010 Appeals court ruled such behavior violates the Fourth Amendment. When pressed by several Senators during a hearing last week, IRS boss Steven Miller stated the agency would update their surveillance protocols as they pertain to e-mail, though his answers left it uncertain if the agency would do the same for things like social network websites and other online services.

CISPA, which critics insist erodes consumer privacy under the pretense of "cybersecurity," has passed the House with a vote of 288 to 127. CISPA isn't seeing the kind of corporate opposition SOPA did (read: Google) because in many instances it protect companies from being fast and loose with personal data, which is why it has the support of companies like AT&T and Verizon.

CISPA would significantly erode consumer privacy and expand Internet activity surveillance under the guise of "cybersecurity," and it's receiving lots of support from AT&T and Verizon because it would give them (more) blanket immunity for privacy abuses. The EFF is once again urging citizens to write their representatives in order to have CISPA put down humanely.

According to documents obtained by the ACLU after a FOIA request, the IRS currently operates under the belief that they can freely snoop through citizen e-mail accounts without obtaining warrants, something a 2010 Appeals court ruling (United States v. Warshak) claimed violated the Fourth Amendment.

"The documents the ACLU obtained make clear that, before Warshak, it was the policy of the IRS to read people’s email without getting a warrant," states the ACLU. "Not only that, but the IRS believed that the Fourth Amendment did not apply to email at all."

The ACLU assumes (probably accurately given the last decade or two of government behavior) that the IRS hasn't bothered to change their behavior or protocols after the Warshak ruling, and should clarify publicly whether they think warrants are necessary or, like much of the government, a silly and unnecessary diversion.

California Assembly Member and Los Angeles representative Bonnie Lowenthal has introduced a bill called "The Right to Know Act of 2013" (pdf). Her bill would require all California provide consumers, upon request, a list of all user data collected and precisely who that data is being shared with or sold to. "By modernizing the requirements, consumers have a right to know not just how their basic information may have been used for junk mail, but also how it's collected and shared with data brokers, advertisers, and others," Lowenthal says in a statement on her website. You can expect oh -- a wee bit of opposition from the government and the myriad of companies busily tracking and selling anything that isn't nailed down.

According to documents obtained by CNET, the DEA is upset because the encryption used by Apple's iMessage foils their ability to snoop on those communications. Even with a warrant (increasingly seen as optional these days by law enforcement and intelligence agencies) and the fact that carriers let the NSA snoop on everything in real time, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices."

Well not entirely impossible; the memo notes that sometimes interception is possible, but it would require the government to conduct man in the middle attacks using spoofed cell towers, something the feds just got busted for using for years without properly informing Judges.

The ACLU recently uncovered heavy government use of devices known as "stingrays," which allow law enforcement to trick a user's cell phone to connect to a spoofed device instead of a tower for the purposes of data collection. As Wired explores, the Department of Justice is under fire for using these devices without informing Judges about either the devices, or the fact they could collect data from uninvolved third parties.

While carriers already now give real-time access to all network data, the FBI says that real-time wiretapping of Gmail is their top priority in 2013. Speaking last week at the American Bar Association, FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann argued once again that the agency wants to revamp the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to allow for real-time surveillance of e-mail, cloud storage services, and social networking websites.

Everyone in the mobile ecosystem, from app developers to your carrier, is now collecting every shred of mobile location data that isn't nailed down and are busily selling that data to whoever wants to buy it, from civil engineers to marketing agencies. Consumer privacy protections here are virtually nonexistent, and the companies making billions off of your daily life have been busy arguing that there are no need for new protections because the data they collect is anonymized.

However, a new study by MIT and the Catholic University of Louvain studied fifteen months' worth of "anonymized" collected data from 1.5 million people, and found that people's routines are unique and predictable enough that ferreting out their identity is incredibly easy using just for location logs:If that location data is poorly secured, combining it with other databases creates unique and new privacy violation possibilities the researchers say we haven't really even fully started to fathom yet. The scientists tell the BBC they're not advocating that we stop collecting this data, though they do suggest we need to stop pretending it's truly anonymous, and consider additional privacy protections.