• Tag Archives FISA

  • 58 Human Rights and Civil Liberties Organizations Demand an End to the Backdoor Search Loophole

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    EFF and 57 organizations, including American Civil Liberties Union, R Street, and NAACP, spoke out against warrantless searches of American citizens in a joint letter this week demanding reforms of the so-called “backdoor search” loophole that exists for data collected under Section 702.

    The backdoor search loophole allows federal government agencies, including the FBI and CIA, to, without a warrant, search through data collected on American citizens.

    The data is first collected by the intelligence community under a section of law called Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which provides rules for sweeping up communications of foreign individuals outside the United States. However, the U.S. government also uses 702 to collect the communications of countless American citizens and store them in a database accessible by several agencies.

    EFF and many others believe this type of mass collection alone is unconstitutional. The backdoor search loophole infringes American rights further—allowing agencies to warrantlessly search through 702-collected data by using search terms that describe U.S. persons. These terms could include names, email addresses, and more.

    This practice needs to end. And a proposal before Congress to require warrants on backdoor searches used only in criminal investigations—as recently reported by the New York Times—does not go far enough.

    As EFF, and several other organizations, said in an Oct. 3 letter:

    “Applying a warrant requirement only to searches of Section 702 data involving ‘criminal suspects,’ is not an adequate solution to this problem. Most fundamentally, it ignores the fact that the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement is not limited to criminal or non-national security related cases.”

    Further, carving out a warrant requirement solely for criminal investigations ignores the broader umbrella term under which the FBI conducts many searches—that of “foreign intelligence.” Because the FBI conducts investigations with both criminal and foreign intelligence elements, the agency could predictably bypass backdoor warrant requirements by ascribing their searches to foreign affairs matters, rather than criminal.

    Warrantless searches of American communications may especially impact those communities that may be speaking frequently to family outside of the United States of which have historically faced unjust surveillance. As we wrote: “Existing policies make it far too easy for the government to engage in searches that disproportionately target Muslim Americans and immigrants with overseas connections based merely on the assertion of a nebulous ‘foreign intelligence’ purpose.”

    These searches are happening. In 2016, the CIA and NSA reported they conducted 30,000 searches for information about U.S. persons. That number does not include metadata searches by the CIA, a related problem that can also be fixed by Congress before Section 702 sunsets in December.

    Backdoor searches of 702-collected data about U.S. citizens and residents should require a warrant based on probable cause. Congress can protect the rights of countless Americans by closing this loophole.

    Read the full letter.

    Source: 58 Human Rights and Civil Liberties Organizations Demand an End to the Backdoor Search Loophole | Electronic Frontier Foundation



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  • NSA Reneges on Promise to Tell Congress How Many Innocent Americans it Spies On

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Lawmakers should know how the laws they pass impact their constituents. That’s especially true when the law would reauthorize a vast Internet and telephone spying program that collects information about millions of law-abiding Americans.

    But that’s exactly what the Intelligence Community wants Congress to do when it considers reauthorizing a sweeping electronic surveillance authority under the expiring Section 702, as enacted by the FISA Amendments Act, before the end of the year.

    Intelligence officials have been promising Congress they would provide lawmakers with an estimate of the number of American communications that are collected under Section 702. That estimate is a critical piece of information for lawmakers to have as they consider whether and how to reauthorize and reform the warrantless Internet surveillance of millions of innocent Americans in the coming months.

    But during a hearing on Section 702 in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, despite previous assurances, said he won’t be providing that estimate out of national security and, ironically, privacy concerns.

    He told lawmakers it is “infeasible to generate an exact, accurate, meaningful, and responsive methodology that can count how often a U.S. person’s communications may be incidentally collected under Section 702.” To do so would require diverting NSA analysts’ attention away from their current work to “conduct additional significant research” to determine whether the communications collected under Section 702 are American. “I would be asking trained NSA analysts to conduct intense identity verification research on potential U.S. persons who are not targets of an investigation,” he said. “From a privacy and civil liberties perspective, I find this unpalatable.”

    From a privacy and civil liberties perspective, we find it unpalatable that the Intelligence Community would ask Congress to reauthorize a controversial surveillance program without first following through on the promise—reiterated by Coats as recently as earlier this year—to provide some much needed information about how the program impacts Americans. To do so supposedly in the name of privacy concerns is even worse.

    It should go without saying: if the Intelligence Community is truly worried about the privacy and civil liberties of ordinary Americans, officials will take the looming Section 702 sunset as an opportunity to give lawmakers the information they need to have an informed and meaningful debate about how government spying programs impact Americans’ privacy.

    Privacy advocate Sen. Ron Wyden criticized DNI Coats for his backtracking, calling his reversal a “very, very damaging position to stake out.” He warned, “We’re going to battle it out in the course of this, because there are a lot of Americans that share our view that security and liberty are not mutually exclusive.”

    And that battle is already happening. With Congress’ debate over Section 702 reauthorization heating up, now is the time to tell your representatives in Congress to let this warrantless spying authority lapse.

    Source: NSA Reneges on Promise to Tell Congress How Many Innocent Americans it Spies On | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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  • The FISA Court Didn’t Even Know NSA Was Collecting Some Domestic Communications

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) provided another redacted information data dump today, which ends the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s legal battle with them over a Freedom of Information Act request.

    At the heart of the matter was a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decision from 2011 that determined that the National Security Agency and the FBI were somehow violating the Fourth Amendment with its surveillance methods. The details were unknown because the report was classified. EFF sued and won, and today the 85-page document was released.

    …

    The report is highly technical and significantly redacted, but here’s a number of discoveries from the memo:

    The NSA’s collection of “upstream” data, that is data gathered without the cooperation of Internet service providers, includes the acquisition of tens of thousands of Internet transactions annually involving Americans within the United States who are not connected to any sort of legitimate investigation.

    The NSA does not have the technology to avoid collecting domestic Internet transactions by the thousands in its upstream data collection. They are swept up automatically as part of the process and they have no way to exclude them before hand or even know whether they’re going to snag protected communications in advance.

    Until 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, charged with judicial oversight to make sure laws weren’t being broken, did not know that this was happening. And this was not the first time the Court felt that it was being misled. From a footnote:

    The Court is troubled that the government’s revelations regarding NSA’s acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.

    The footnote goes on to explain that in 2009, the court discovered it had been misled about how a business records data program worked from the very inception of the program in 2006. The bottom third of the footnote is entirely redacted, so it’s not clear whether they might be discussing the other example of being misled.

    The NSA acquires more than 250 million Internet communications each year, but only 9 percent arrive from this upstream collection method. The other 91 percent are provided directly to the NSA by Internet service providers. The problematic records the report refers to only come from the upstream collection.

    Full article: http://reason.com/bl … -even-know-nsa-was-c


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