• Tag Archives 1st Amendment

  • U.S. Customs and Border Protection Wants to Know Who You Are on Twitter

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    U.S. border control agents want to gather Facebook and Twitter identities from visitors from around the world. But this flawed plan would violate travelers’ privacy, and would have a wide-ranging impact on freedom of expression—all while doing little or nothing to protect Americans from terrorism.

    Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, has proposed collecting social media handles from visitors to the United States from visa waiver countries. EFF submitted comments both individually and as part of a larger coalition opposing the proposal.

    CBP specifically seeks “information associated with your online presence—Provider/Platform—Social media identifier” in order to provide DHS “greater clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections” for “vetting purposes.”

    In our comments, we argue that would-be terrorists are unlikely to disclose social media identifiers that reveal publicly available posts expressing support for terrorism.

    But this plan would be more than just ineffective. It’s vague and overbroad, and would unfairly violate the privacy of innocent travelers. Sharing your social media account information often means sharing political leanings, religious affiliations, reading habits, purchase histories, dating preferences, and sexual orientations, among many other personal details.

    Or, unwilling to reveal such intimate information to CBP, many innocent travelers would engage in self-censorship, cutting back on their online activity out of fear of being wrongly judged by the U.S. government. After all, it’s not hard to imagine some public social media posts being taken out of context or misunderstood by the government. In the face of this uncertainty, some may forgo visiting the U.S. altogether.

    The proposed program would be voluntary, and for international visitors. But we are worried about a slippery slope, where CBP could require U.S. citizens and residents returning home to disclose their social media handles, or subject both foreign visitors and U.S. persons to invasive device searches at ports of entry with the intent of easily accessing any and all cloud data.

    This would burden constitutional rights under the First and Fourth Amendments. CBP already started a social media monitoring program in 2010, and in 2009 issued a broad policy authorizing border searches of digital devices. We oppose CBP further invading the private lives of innocent travelers, including Americans.

    States from visa waiver countries. EFF submitted comme

    Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection Wants to Know Who You Are on Twitter—But It’s a Flawed Plan | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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  • Trump Isn’t the First Politician to Threaten Newspapers

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Donald Trump isn’t happy with the Washington Post, which has steadfastly opposed his presidential campaign on its editorial pages and now has assigned a reporter team to write a book about him. And he has repeatedly responded in Trump fashion: by threatening the business interests of the newspaper and its owner Jeff Bezos.

    Trump cited the Post by name in his February comments about how he wants to “open up” libel law so that “when the Washington Post… writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” And he said then of Amazon, of which Bezos is CEO, “If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re going to have such problems.”

    He has claimed for months that Bezos was using the newspaper as either itself a tax dodge or as a tool of influence to prevent Amazon from having to pay “fair taxes,” a theory hard to square with the institutional arrangements involved (Bezos owns the Post separately from his Amazon stake; the Post editors credibly deny that Bezos has interfered, and as it happens Amazon itself supports the idea of an internet sales tax.)

    More recently Trump has opened up a second front, arguing last week on the Sean Hannity show that Bezos employs the paper “as a political instrument to try and stop antitrust,” and implying that he, Trump, would hit Amazon with antitrust charges.

    As you might expect, many critics are crying foul. “He’s basically giving us a preview of how he will abuse his power as president. … He is clearly trying to intimidate Bezos and in turn The Washington Post from running negative stories about him,” writes Boston Globe columnist Michael A. Cohen.

    “Mr. Trump knows U.S. political culture well enough to know that gleefully, uninhibitedly threatening to use government’s law-enforcement powers to attack news reporters and political opponents just isn’t done. Maybe he thinks he can get away with it,” writes Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins.

    But as I wrote four years ago, if you think blatant use of the machinery of government to punish newspaper owners or interfere in papers’ management somehow happens only in other countries, think again:

    [Since-convicted Illinois Gov. Rod] Blagojevich, Harris and others are also alleged [in the federal indictment] to have withheld state assistance to the Tribune Company in connection with the sale of Wrigley Field. The statement says this was done to induce the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members who were critical of Blagojevich.

    And in 1987, at the secret behest of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) inserted a legislative rider aimed at preventing Rupert Murdoch from simultaneously owning broadcast and newspaper properties in Boston and New York. The idea was to force him to sell the Boston Herald, the most persistent editorial voice criticizing Kennedy in his home state.

    More recently, when the Tribune Company encountered financial difficulties and explored the sale of several large papers, city councils in more than one city passed resolutions opposing the sale to politically “bad” prospective owners; powerful Congressional figure Henry Waxman (D-CA) could not resist the urge to meddle as well in management issues affecting his hometown paper, the L.A. Times.

    This all goes back much farther, of course. Historian David Beito, writing about the FDR-Truman era, cites a long series of federal investigations of and retaliations against the distributors of pro-liberty books and pamphlets, including the proposal of Indiana Democratic Senator and New Dealer Sherman Minton (D-Ind.) to make it “a crime to publish anything as a fact anything known to be false,” a downright Trumpian idea that Minton let drop after an outcry.

    It is thoroughly appalling – but, alas, it is not new.

    Source: Trump Isn’t the First Politician to Threaten Newspapers | Foundation for Economic Education


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  • Microsoft sues U.S. government over data requests

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has sued the U.S. government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their emails, the latest in a series of clashes over privacy between the technology industry and Washington.

    The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in federal court in Seattle, argues that the government is violating the U.S. Constitution by preventing Microsoft from notifying thousands of customers about government requests for their emails and other documents.

    The government’s actions contravene the Fourth Amendment, which establishes the right for people and businesses to know if the government searches or seizes their property, the suit argues, and Microsoft’s First Amendment right to free speech.

    The Department of Justice is reviewing the filing, spokeswoman Emily Pierce said.

    Microsoft’s suit focuses on the storage of data on remote servers, rather than locally on people’s computers, which Microsoft says has provided a new opening for the government to access electronic data.

    Using the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the government is increasingly directing investigations at the parties that store data in the so-called cloud, Microsoft says in the lawsuit. The 30-year-old law has long drawn scrutiny from technology companies and privacy advocates who say it was written before the rise of the commercial Internet and is therefore outdated.

    “People do not give up their rights when they move their private information from physical storage to the cloud,” Microsoft says in the lawsuit. It adds that the government “has exploited the transition to cloud computing as a means of expanding its power to conduct secret investigations.”

    The lawsuit represents the newest front in the battle between technology companies and the U.S. government over how much private businesses should assist government surveillance.

    By filing the suit, Microsoft is taking a more prominent role in that battle, dominated by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) in recent months due to the government’s efforts to get the company to write software to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in a December massacre in San Bernardino, California.

    Apple, backed by big technology companies including Microsoft, had complained that cooperating would turn businesses into arms of the state.

    “Just as Apple was the company in the last case and we stood with Apple, we expect other tech companies to stand with us,” Microsoft’s Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said in a phone interview after the suit was filed.

    One security expert questioned Microsoft’s motivation and timing. Its lawsuit was “one hundred percent motivated by business interests” and timed to capitalize on new interest in customer privacy issues spurred in part by Apple’s dispute, said D.J. Rosenthal, a former White House cyber security official in the Obama administration.

    As Microsoft’s Windows and other legacy software products are losing some traction in an increasingly mobile and Internet-centric computing environment, the company’s cloud-based business is taking on more importance. Chief Executive Satya Nadella’s describes Microsoft’s efforts as “mobile first, cloud first.”

    Its customers have been asking the company about government surveillance, Smith said, suggesting that the issue could hurt Microsoft’s ability to win or keep cloud customers.

    In its complaint, Microsoft says over the past 18 months it has received 5,624 legal orders under the ECPA, of which 2,576 prevented Microsoft from disclosing that the government is seeking customer data through warrants, subpoenas and other requests. Most of the ECPA requests apply to individuals, not companies, and provide no fixed end date to the secrecy provision, Microsoft said.

    Microsoft and other companies won the right two years ago to disclose the number of government demands for data they receive. This case goes farther, requesting that it be allowed to notify individual businesses and people that the government is seeking information about them.

    Source: Microsoft sues U.S. government over data requests | Reuters


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