• Tag Archives surveillance

  • The FISA Reauthorization Only Boosts Big Brother

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

     

    In a bipartisan manner, Congress recently passed the FISA Reauthorization Act of 2017. On January 19th, President Trump signed this bill into law. The new law extends the controversial Section 702 program that allows the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance of non-US citizens or residents.

    This program clearly serves the interests of our intelligence agencies. However, the private information of millions of Americans is also collected in this program. And the private information of anyone in the US who communicates with someone outside of the country could potentially be stored in this massive database.

    Significant Privacy Issues

    How expansive is this program? The Washington Post reviewed a sample of communications from the Edward Snowden leaks and found that 9 out of 10 people in the database were not surveillance targets. Nearly half of these people were American citizens or residents, and their private information was swept up in this net.

    This isn’t just a matter of preserving privacy. Once information enters this program, all conventional constitutional law goes by the wayside. The FBI has access to this program to do “backdoor searches” for any crime without a warrant. That information can be passed along to whichever law enforcement agencies the FBI deems necessary. Furthermore, this isn’t a minor program that applies to a few people. There were an estimated 106,469 targets in 2016.

    Even former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden has admitted that the FBI’s access to this information without a warrant is a “no-fooling legitimate issue.” Hence, a small but bipartisan group within Congress supported the USA RIGHTS Act that would have maintained national security intelligence without sacrificing Americans’ basic freedoms. The bill would have required a warrant for FBI access to US citizens’ communications.

    A group of five Senators, notably Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY), filibustered the FISA Reauthorization Act of 2017 in hopes of redirecting support for the USA Rights Act. Unfortunately, their effort was nullified when Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) cast the deciding vote that ended the filibuster. She was one of 18 Democrats who voted in kind.

    Bear in mind, the Democrats have consistently criticized President Trump’s authoritarian ways, yet their support for this bill contradicted all of their pleas for responsible leadership. Moreover, this filibuster was nullified on January 16th, the day after the birthday of Martin Luther King, one of the foremost victims of federal government persecution.

    No Reform, Just Expansion

    Nonetheless, Congress passed this bill under the guise that reforms in favor of civil liberties had been made. The new law requires the FBI to obtain a warrant to search the 702 database for information about American citizens. However, there’s a catch. The FBI only needs to get a warrant if that person is already under criminal investigation. Consequently, this “reform” actually incentivizes the FBI to conduct more arbitrary searches and provides criminals with better protections.

    Some legal experts, such as Robyn Greene of the Open Technology Institute at New America, contest that the new law has also essentially reauthorized and expanded a practice that the NSA agreed to discontinue. This involves the collection of “about” data in which your personal communications can be swept up by the NSA for mentioning a person who is a target of surveillance. This decision poses a particular danger to the media or political activists.

    Furthermore, there were no reforms of a little-known system called “parallel construction.” As mentioned earlier, the information in the NSA’s database can be used by federal law enforcement agencies, particularly the DEA, for domestic operations. However, the government doesn’t have to disclose in a court of law that the investigation was initiated by information from the NSA. Considering that prosecutors can omit the origin of the investigation, a former DEA agent, Finn Selander, accurately criticized this practice by analogizing it as “money laundering” for evidence.

    There are many disturbing revelations about the FISA Reauthorization Act. Suffice it to say, Congress provided a tremendous amount of latitude to an agency that has shown no determination for reform in the wake of high-profile scandals. As a matter of fact, on the same day that President Trump signed the FISA Reauthorization Act, Politico reported that the NSA destroyed info related to Bush’s warrantless wiretaps. That “mistake” was quite convenient because that information was to be used as evidence in pending lawsuits against the government.

    A pair of Trump tweets illustrated some of the hypocrisy on this issue. At 4:33 in the morning on January 11th, Trump’s tweet asserted that the FISA Act “may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump campaign by the previous administration and others?” Nearly two hours later, he flipped his stance tweeting, “With that being said, I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”

    As easy as it is to poke fun at Trump on this issue, his views related to authoritarian government surveillance aren’t much different from most Americans. Polls show that public opinion on NSA spying shifts back and forth depending upon who is in the White House. In other words, liberal or conservative voters generally aren’t opposed to mass surveillance as long as their party is in power.

    Both sides can point to a list, which is far too lengthy for this space, of federal government abuses for political purposes. However, the two major parties have continued raising the stakes by providing more power to the federal government with few meaningful reforms.

    No Protection of Whistleblowers

    The FISA Reauthorization Act received strong support from the Republicans despite the backdrop of the “Nunes memo” alleging misconduct towards President Trump. Over the last year, conservatives have heard from NSA whistleblower William Binney who is now a frequent guest on Fox News. Binney was persona non grata during the Bush administration, but now his revelations indirectly help build a narrative that the Deep State is suppressing Trump.  

    Binney and his fellow NSA whistleblowers felt the wrath of the FBI for merely speaking truth to power. Ironically, the disturbing information from intelligence whistleblowers led to the creation of the 702 program, which was approved by Congress in 2008, in part, to rein in the warrantless wiretaps by the Bush administration.

    In an environment where there is no real government accountability, it elevates the importance of whistleblower protection. Nonetheless, numerous government whistleblowers have faced retaliation for merely performing their civic duty. The latest victim being Dan Meyer, the director of the Intelligence Community Whistleblowing and Source Protection program.

    Meyer was escorted out of the building in December of last year, and his office was marked with police tape. He has been placed on leave and faces termination in an act of clear retribution. For several years, Meyers has worked as an advocate for whistleblowers in the Defense Department.

    This is a familiar situation for Meyer personally as he has acted as a whistleblower in the past. He once received a settlement from the government due to the retribution he faced after disclosing that Leon Panetta allegedly leaked classified material to the directors of Zero Dark Thirty. In his current situation, Meyer is reportedly facing retaliation for pressuring the inspector generals from the 17 intelligence agencies to implement better whistleblower protections.

    We face a system that punishes the reformers and rewards the most corrupt. For years, an AT&T technician, Mark Klein, warned of the secret backroom that connected to the NSA. His efforts were suppressed from the public eye until leaks from NSA whistleblowers were printed by the press. Nonetheless, AT&T has been rewarded handsomely with a multi-billion contract that was reported last week.

    Unfortunately, public outrage against government abuses is generally selective and partisan. All in all, both major political parties use critical rhetoric that warns of the power of Big Brother, yet neither entity does much to prevent the growth of the surveillance state.


    Brian Saady

    Brian Saady is a freelance writer who focuses on a number of human rights and criminal justices issues. He’s also the author of four books, including a three-book series, Rackets, which is about the legalization of drugs and gambling, and the decriminalization of prostitution.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.




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  • NSA Internet Surveillance Under Section 702 Violates the First Amendment

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The First Amendment is too often overlooked in discussions of the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance authorities. But as Congress considers whether to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA this winter, we must remember that it’s not just our Fourth Amendment rights to privacy that are in the crosshairs, but also our First Amendment rights. These rights to anonymously speak, associate, access information, and engage in political activism are the bedrock of our democracy, and they’re endangered by the NSA’s pervasive surveillance.

    The NSA uses Section 702 to justify ongoing programs to siphon off copies of vast amounts of our communications directly from the Internet backbone as well as require system-wide searches across the information collected by major Internet companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple.

    So how does the First Amendment come to apply to mass surveillance? To understand this, we need to begin with a little history of the civil rights movement.

    As part of the backlash to the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down segregation in schools, the Attorney General of Alabama, John Patterson, brought a lawsuit against a leading civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The lawsuit alleged that the NAACP violated a state law requiring “foreign corporations” to file certain paperwork and get approval before practicing business in Alabama. The NAACP is a nonprofit membership organization; it didn’t file the paperwork because it believed it was exempt. While the NAACP fought the suit, the state issued a subpoena demanding detailed records from the NAACP, including membership lists and bank records. The NAACP refused to surrender its membership lists, fearing retaliatory consequences for its members. Because of this refusal, the court fined the NAACP $10,000, which after five days was raised to $100,000. The NAACP continued to fight the order for two years until the Supreme Court took up the issue, never surrendering its membership lists.

    Ultimately the NAACP was vindicated. The Supreme Court recognized that the First Amendment protected the associational privacy interests of NAACP members. It directly recognized that freely associating for advocacy or other purposes is a fundamental right. It noted that state invasions of privacy could infringe on that right: “It is beyond debate that freedom to engage in association for the advancement of beliefs and ideas is an inseparable aspect of the “liberty” assured by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which embraces freedom of speech… Of course, it is immaterial whether the beliefs sought to be advanced by association pertain to political, economic, religious or cultural matters, and state action which may have the effect of curtailing the freedom to associate is subject to the closest scrutiny.”

    The Supreme Court found that the “Inviolability of privacy in group association may in many circumstances be indispensable to preservation of freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.”

    In short, we all have the right to engage in associate with one another and to join and communicate with political and religious groups free from government surveillance.

    As our society has moved online, our associations have become digital in nature. Signing up for a membership or learning about an advocacy group often happens over a website or app. Members of modern political groups coordinate donations, activities, and information over social networks, email, and websites. When the NSA—either by itself or by working with corporate “partners”—collects the digital communications and browsing history of countless individuals, it’s also obtaining records of innocent Americans visiting activism websites, becoming members of advocacy groups, and coordinating social movements. EFF also raised this argument in our case against the mass telephone records collection by the NSA (substantially narrowed in 2015) First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v NSA.

    The surveillance of our communications systems, and thereby the surveillance of our communications, infringes on the very rights of private association upheld by the Supreme Court in 1958.

    So while the Fourth Amendment concerns about 702 and mass surveillance are important, they are not the only problem created by the law. And as Alex Abdo, an attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, argues that when it comes to confronting government surveillance, we shouldn’t expect the Fourth Amendment alone to protect our First Amendment interests. He recently wrote that “The Fourth Amendment, unlike the First, is blind to the cumulative effects of invasions of privacy that are small in isolation but substantial in combination.”

    Those cumulative effects are especially felt when it comes to the right to publish and access information freely. While the government may be forbidden from censoring online speakers and readers, the cumulative impact of pervasive digital surveillance has a chilling effect on online communities. The specter of government surveillance quells engagement in online forums, social networks, and blogs that discuss controversial, political, or unpopular positions. Knowing that the government is keeping a digital dossier of comments we leave online and articles we digitally share creates an environment in which speakers hesitate to engage in online political advocacy.

    Readers also hesitate to visit websites that may be seen as out of favor with the government, whether that’s Al Jazeera or CNN or EFF’s own site, knowing that their visit may be recorded in a government database for years to come.

    The NSA’s digital surveillance of countless law-abiding Americans also indirectly affects another key First Amendment right: our right to assembly. Today’s modern protest movements are often organized and fueled by social media and digital communication, where activists coordinate across a wide range of physical locations. The NSA’s pervasive digital surveillance challenges our values as a society that respects and safeguards the right to plan and participate in protests and other political activity, rights which are themselves baked into the First Amendment.

    The pervasive digital surveillance programs of the NSA chip away at the First Amendment protections that underpin our democracy. As Congress considers whether to reauthorize or reform Section 702 surveillance in the coming weeks, we urge them to remember that their choice will not just impact the privacy of Americans, it will have a profound impact on freedom of speech, association, and assembly protected by the First Amendment and ultimately, upon our democracy itself.

    Contact Congress today to speak out against NSA surveillance.

    Source: NSA Internet Surveillance Under Section 702 Violates the First Amendment | Electronic Frontier Foundation



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  • Stop the Border Surveillance Bill

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    EFF opposes a new federal bill that would dramatically expand dragnet biometric and other surveillance of U.S. citizens and immigrants alike at and near the U.S. border. Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) introduced S. 1757, styled the Building America’s Trust Act, in August.

    EFF’s opposition letter objects to the following provisions of the bill:

    Biometric Border Screening. The bill would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect biometric information from all people who exit the U.S., including U.S. and foreign citizens. This would entrench and expand DHS’s existing program of facial recognition of all international travelers who take certain outgoing flights from U.S. airports. EFF opposes such biometric border screening, given the sensitivity of biometric information, the threat it will be stolen or misused, and the hazard of mission creep.

    Collection of Immigrants’ DNA. The bill would require DHS to collect DNA and other biometric information from “any individual filing an application, petition, or other request for immigration benefit or status.” EFF has long opposed dragnet biometric surveillance of immigrants. DNA surveillance raises special concerns, because DNA can expose sensitive information about familial history and health issues.

    Dissemination of Immigrants’ Biometrics. The bill would require DHS to share its biometric information about immigrants with the FBI, the Defense Department, and the State Department. It also would require DHS to store its voiceprints and iris scans of immigrants in a manner compatible with state and local law enforcement database. EFF opposes this dissemination of immigrants’ biometrics. The greater the distribution, the greater the risks of theft, employee misuse, and mission creep.

    Screening Social Media of Visa Applicants. The bill would require DHS to review the social media accounts of visa applicants from “high risk countries.” EFF opposes existing DHS and State Department programs of screening social media of foreign visitors. These programs threaten the digital privacy and free speech of innocent foreign travelers, and the many U.S. citizens who communicate with them. The bill would entrench and expand these programs. Also, it is all too likely that the bill’s focus on “high risk countries” will invite “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim nations.

    Drones Near the Border. The bill would require DHS and the Defense Department to deploy drones at the U.S. border. This will invariably capture the faces and license plates of the vast number of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who live close the border.

    ALPRs Near the Border. The bill would appropriate $125 million to upgrade the automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) deployed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. ALPRs collect massive amounts of sensitive location information about identifiable law-abiding people. It is unclear whether the bill’s new ALPR surveillance would be limited to cars that actually cross the U.S. border, or would also apply more broadly to cars at CBP’s many interior checkpoints, some located as far as 100 miles from the border. CBP should not track people’s movements merely because they live and work near the border.

    Source: Stop the Border Surveillance Bill | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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