• Tag Archives surveillance

  • New CIA Director Mike Pompeo Sparks Privacy Concerns

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    The U.S. Senate confirmed Kansas Republican Rep. Mike Pompeo to be the Director of the CIA late on Monday over concerns from several congressional Democrats, who warned that putting Pompeo at the head of the intelligence agency would threaten civil liberties.

    In an impassioned floor speech, Sen. Bernie Sanders called it “vital to have a head of the CIA who will stand up for our constitution, stand up for privacy rights.” He continued, “Unfortunately, in my view, Mr. Pompeo is not that individual.”

    As we said late last year, we have concerns that many of President Donald Trump’s nominees, including Pompeo, will undermine digital rights and civil liberties, and those concerns persist.

    Specifically, Pompeo sponsored legislation that would have reinstated the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata—an invasive program that civil liberties and privacy advocates fought to curtail by enacting the USA FREEDOM Act.

    We also noted troubling op-eds written by Pompeo. In one piece in late 2015, Pompeo criticized Republican presidential candidates who were supposedly “weak” on national security and intelligence collection. “Less intelligence capacity equals less safety,” he wrote.

    In another op-ed a few weeks later, Pompeo criticized lawmakers for “blunting [the intelligence community’s] surveillance powers” and called for “a fundamental upgrade to America’s surveillance capabilities.”

    Critics on the Senate floor—including Sens. Ron Wyden, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders—honed in on the latter op-ed, which also recommended restarting the metadata collection that was curtailed under USA FREEDOM Act and “combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database.” Pompeo continued, “Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”

    While Pompeo’s defenders argued that an effective intelligence agency should be utilizing publicly available information posted to social media, Wyden—who fought for delay to give the Senate more time to consider Pompeo’s nomination—drew a sharp distinction between seeking out social media information related to a known intelligence target and creating the database Pompeo has envisioned.

    “It is something else entirely to create a giant government database of everyone’s social media postings and to match that up with everyone’s phone records,” Wyden said, calling the idea “a vast database on innocent Americans.”

    Wyden also criticized Pompeo for skirting questions from lawmakers about what kinds of information would end up in the database, including whether the database would include information held by data brokers, the third-party companies that build profiles of internet users. He criticized Pompeo for being unwilling to “articulate the boundaries of what is a very extreme proposal.”

    EFF thanks all 32 Senators who voted against Pompeo and his expansive vision of government surveillance. We were especially pleased by the “no” vote from our new home-state Sen. Kamala Harris of California.

    EFF and other civil liberties advocates will work hard to hold Pompeo accountable as CIA Director and block any attempts by him or anyone else to broaden the intrusive government surveillance powers that threaten our basic privacy rights.

    Source: New CIA Director Mike Pompeo Sparks Privacy Concerns | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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  • Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    With mere days left before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House, President Barack Obama’s administration just finalized rules to make it easier for the nation’s intelligence agencies to share unfiltered information about innocent people.

    New rules issued by the Obama administration under Executive Order 12333 will let the NSA—which collects information under that authority with little oversight, transparency, or concern for privacy—share the raw streams of communications it intercepts directly with agencies including the FBI, the DEA, and the Department of Homeland Security, according to a report today by the New York Times.

    That’s a huge and troubling shift in the way those intelligence agencies receive information collected by the NSA. Domestic agencies like the FBI are subject to more privacy protections, including warrant requirements. Previously, the NSA shared data with these agencies only after it had screened the data, filtering out unnecessary personal information, including about innocent people whose communications were swept up the NSA’s massive surveillance operations.

    As the New York Times put it, with the new rules, the government claims to be “reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.”

    Under the new, relaxed rules, there are still conditions that need to be met before the NSA will grant domestic intelligence analysts access to the raw streams of data it collects. And analysts can only search that raw data for information about Americans for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, not domestic criminal cases.

    However—and this is especially troubling—“if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department,” the Times wrote.  So information that was collected without a warrant—or indeed any involvement by a court at all—for foreign intelligence purposes with little to no privacy protections, can be accessed raw and unfiltered by domestic law enforcement agencies to prosecute Americans with no involvement in threats to national security.

    We had hoped for more. In November, we and other civil liberties and privacy groups sent a letter to President Obama asking him to improve transparency and accountability, especially around government surveillance, before he leaves office. This is not the transparency we were hoping for.

    We asked that he declassify and release Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions, shed some much-needed light on how certain foreign-facing surveillance programs are used to target Americans, and more.

    Obviously, and not for the first time, we are disappointed in the Obama administration.

    In his finals days in office, let the president know about your disappointment in the government surveillance infrastructure he’s bulking up before he hands the reins to Trump. Sign our petition here.

    Source: Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out | Electronic Frontier Foundation




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  • Shareholders Demand Transparency for AT&T’s Hemisphere Phone Records Spying Program

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    A group of investors in AT&T have had it with the phone company’s collaboration with law enforcement through the Hemisphere program, in which the company facilitates police access to trillions of phone records. At the spring shareholder conference, Zevin Asset Management plans to force discussion of contradictions between AT&T’s stated commitment to privacy and civil liberties and the Hemisphere program. One of the chief goals is to demand greater transparency over the highly secretive program.

    As EFF recently reported, police refer to Hemisphere as a “Super Search Engine” and “Google on Steroids” because it provides access to trillions of domestic and international phone call records dating back 30 years.  Each day, approximately 4 billion phone records are added to the system, including calls from non-AT&T customers that pass through the company’s switches and even when a customer changes phone numbers. Hemisphere can also map out social relationships and pinpoint locations of callers.

    Federal law enforcement officials are able to obtain this information without going through a judge, and they are instructed to take devious measures to keep the program out of the public record. AT&T is not a passive responder to police demands. Rather, AT&T retains records longer than its competitors, places its employees at the regional hubs of drug interdiction task forces, and requires police to hide their use of Hemisphere.

    Nobody is forcing AT&T to do this; the company could end the Hemisphere program tomorrow.

    In a post on Medium, Pat Miguel Tomaino, Zevin Asset Management’s Associate Director of Socially Responsible Investing, explains how the shareholders must use their investments to resist threats to civil liberties under the incoming Trump administration. He writes:

    We are shining a light on AT&T’s Hemisphere program, a giant database of customer calls which AT&T runs as a lucrative business line, charging law enforcement agencies upwards of $1 million for bespoke searches and analytics. AT&T says that it follows the law and hands over customer data only when police present a legal demand. But why does AT&T retain more call data than peer companies like Verizon and Sprint? Why does the company allegedly force law enforcement agencies to keep Hemisphere a secret? At AT&T’s annual meeting next year, Zevin will push for answers on this risky business and for an explanation of the gap between the company’s responsible-sounding privacy policies and Hemisphere’s immense scope.

    EFF has been fighting for more than a year in state and federal courts for records related to the Hemisphere program to hold the government accountable. Our efforts have yielded, for example, the police email calling Hemisphere “Google on steroids.” But private companies like AT&T are not subject to Freedom of Information laws. So we are pleased to see AT&T shareholders holding the company to account, and trying to compel it to publicly report on the consistency between its Hemisphere spying program and its own privacy policies.

    Read the shareholder proposal [.pdf].

    Source: Shareholders Demand Transparency for AT&T’s Hemisphere Phone Records Spying Program | Electronic Frontier Foundation


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