• Tag Archives surveillance

  • 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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  • Vault 7 Confirms, You’re Right to Be Paranoid

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Vault 7 Confirms, You’re Right to Be Paranoid

    On March 7, the transparency/disclosure activists at Wikileaks began releasing a series of documents titled “Vault 7.” According to the New York Times, Vault 7 consists of “thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the [US Central Intelligence Agency] to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.”

    Stranger Than Fiction

    If the documents are authentic — and WikiLeaks has a sterling reputation when it comes to document authenticity — every paranoid thriller you’ve ever watched or read was too timid in describing a hypothetical Surveillance State. Even the telescreens and random audio bugs of George Orwell’s 1984 don’t come close to the reality of the CIA’s surveillance operations.

    In theory, the CIA doesn’t spy on Americans in America. In fact, digital traffic pays no heed to national borders, and the tools and tactics described have almost certainly been made available to, or independently developed by, other US surveillance agencies, not to mention foreign governments and non-government actors.

    Bottom line: You should accept the possibility that for the last several years anything you’ve done on, or in the presence of, a device that can connect to the Internet was observed, monitored, and archived as accessible data.

    Paranoid? Yes. But the paranoia is justified.

    Even if “they”  — the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, some random group of credit card thieves or voyeurs or whatever — aren’t out to get you in particular, they consider your personal privacy a technical obstacle to overcome, not a value to respect.

    All the Skeletons

    If you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to fear? Everyone has something to hide. Somewhere, sometime, you’ve said or done something you regret or wouldn’t want the world to know. And you probably said or did it within a few feet of your smartphone, your laptop, or your Internet-connected television. Maybe nobody was listening or watching. Or maybe someone was. The only plausible conclusion from the Vault 7 disclosures is that you should assume the latter.

    Vault 7 confirms that as a State entity, the CIA answers to philosopher Anthony de Jasay’s description of the State as such. Just as a firm acts to maximize profits, the State and its arms act to maximize their own discretionary power. Even if it doesn’t do some particular thing, it requires the option, the ability to do that thing. It seeks omnipotence.

    The abuses of our privacy implied by the WikiLeaks dump aren’t an aberration. They’re the norm. They’re what government does.

    Reprinted from Libertarian Institute.


    Thomas Knapp

    Thomas L. Knapp, aka KN@PPSTER, is Director and Senior News Analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism and publisher of Rational Review News Digest. He lives and works in north central Florida.

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


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  • Why We’re Being Watched

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Why We’re Being Watched

    Wikileaks has just published over 8,000 files they say were leaked from the CIA, explaining how the CIA developed the capacity to spy on you through your phone, your computer, and even your television. And Wikileaks’s Julian Assange claims these “Vault 7” documents are just one percent of all the CIA documents they have.

    The media will be combing through these for weeks or months, so now is a perfect moment for us to reconsider the role of privacy, transparency, and limited government in a free society.

    We’ve put together a quick list of the six best Learn Liberty resources on government spying and whistleblowing to help inform this discussion.



    1. War Is Why We’re Being Watched

    Why is the US government spying on its citizens in the first place? Professor Abby Hall Blanco says that expansive state snooping at home is actually the result of America’s military interventionism abroad:

    2. Is Privacy the Price of Security?

    Yes, you may think, the government is snooping on us, but it’s doing that to keep us safe!

    That’s the most common justification for sweeping and intrusive surveillance, so we held a debate between two experts to get right to the heart of it. Moderated by TK Coleman, this debate between Professor Ronald Sievert and Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was inspired in part by the revelations about NSA surveillance leaked by Edward Snowden in June 2013.

    3. Freedom Requires Whistleblowers

    People are already drawing parallels between the Snowden leaks and the Vault 7 revelations. If the leaks are indeed coming from a Snowden-like whistleblower, that will once again raise the issue of government prosecution of people who reveal classified information to the public.

    Professor James Otteson argues that a free society requires a transparent government, and whistleblowers play a key role in creating that accountability. Otteson also sounds a warning that should resonate with many Americans today:

    Maybe you’re not concerned about the invasions of privacy that the federal government agencies are engaging in because you think, “Well, I haven’t done anything wrong. What do I have to fear?” Maybe you think, “I like and support this president. I voted for him.”

    But what about the next president?  The powers that we let the government have under one president are the same powers that the next president will have too.

    What if the next president is one you don’t support? He, too, will have all the power that you were willing to give the president you now support.”

    4. Encryption Is a Human Rights Issue

    Documents from Vault 7 suggest that the CIA has been so stymied by encrypted-messaging apps, such as Signal and Whatsapp, that it has resorted to taking over entire smartphones to read messages before they are sent.

    That turns out to be a costly, targeted, and time-consuming business that doesn’t allow for mass data collection. But for decades, government officials have tried to require tech companies to give the government a backdoor into their encryption. In “Encryption Is a Human Rights Issue,” Amul Kalia argues that protecting encryption from government is essential to our safety and freedom.

    5. The Police Know Where You Live

    It turns out that it’s not just spy agencies that have access to detailed information about your life. Ordinary police officers have it, too, and they often face little supervision or accountability. As Cassie Whalen explains, “Across the United States, police officers abuse their access to confidential databases to look up information on neighbors, love interests, politicians, and others who had no connection to a criminal investigation.”

    Surveillance is a serious issue at every level of government.

    6. Understanding NSA Surveillance

    If you’re ready to take your learning to the next level, check out our complete video course on mass government surveillance with Professor Elizabeth Foley. In it, you’ll learn what you need to know to make sense of the NSA scandal in particular and mass surveillance in general.

    Reprinted from Learn Liberty.


    Kelly Wright

    Kelly Wright is an Online Programs Coordinator at the Institute for Humane Studies.

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


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