The Government Wants A Backdoor Into Your Online Communications

Mark M. Jaycox and Seth Schoen
EFF

According to the New York Times, President Obama is "on the verge of backing" a proposal by the FBI to introduce legislation dramatically expanding the reach of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, orCALEA. CALEA forces telephone companies to provide backdoors to the government so that it can spy on users after obtaining court approval, and was expanded in 2006 to reach Internet technologies like VoIP.

The new proposal reportedly allows the FBI to listen in on any conversation online, regardless of the technology used, by mandating engineers build "backdoors" into communications software. We urge EFF supporters to tell the administration now to stop this proposal, provisionally called CALEA II.

Obama Administration Secretly Spied on the Associated Press

Activist Post

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration have been spying on the Associated Press without their knowledge.

The establishment news service is typically viewed as a repeater of officialdom, so it came as a bit of a shock to the organization who called it a "massive and unprecedented intrusion."

AP reports:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. 

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

In all, the government seized those records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. The exact number of journalists who used the phone lines during that period is unknown but more than 100 journalists work in the offices whose phone records were targeted on a wide array of stories about government and other matters.

The Associated Press recently received a letter from the Department of Justice informing them of the 2012 seizure of phone records. The AP points out that they're not sure if the phones were illegally wiretapped or if the phone companies turned over the records at the government's request.

The records were presumably obtained from phone companies earlier this year although the government letter did not explain that. None of the information provided by the government to the AP suggested the actual phone conversations were monitored.

Still the CEO, Gary Pruitt, feels his organization was violated.
"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt wrote in a response to Holder.

The AP writes that media companies are normally notified when the government wants phone records, and they usually comply.  But in this case the government waived the prior notification with cryptic reasoning that it may have "posed a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation":

News organizations normally are notified in advance that the government wants phone records and enter into negotiations over the desired information. In this case, however, the government, in its letter to the AP, cited an exemption to those rules that holds that prior notification can be waived if such notice, in the exemption's wording, might "pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation."

In other words, it seems like the AP is saying "you could have just asked and we probably would have given you what you needed."  Yet, the government is just saying "we'll do what we want, thanks."

Regardless, the AP has not seen a signed warrant or subpoena from the government, indicating that the DOJ was illegally spying on a major news organization. It appears no one is exempt from Big Brother's overreaches.

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Obama Supports Expansion of Wiretap Laws

U.S. Government to fine companies that do not comply with wiretap orders that violate user's privacy.

Activist Post

Spying without a warrant in America is a crime, a violation of privacy rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. Yet, the government is asking technology companies to commit this crime or be fined for insubordination. 

The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration is "on the verge of backing a Federal Bureau of Investigation plan for a sweeping overhaul of surveillance laws that would make it easier to wiretap people."

From Bush to Obama, the snooping goes on

The Patriot Act's section 215 – just renewed by Congress – permits almost unlimited powers of surveillance of US citizens

Prison Planet image

Dan Kennedy
Guardian

Remember section 215?

It was a notorious provision of the USA Patriot Act, renewed on Thursday, that allowed the government to snoop on what library books you'd borrowed, what videos you'd rented, your medical records – anything, really, if investigators thought it might have something to do with terrorism, no matter how tangential.

I wrote about it for the Boston Phoenix in 2003, as an example of the then budding excesses of the Bush-Cheney years.

Well, section 215 is back – not that it ever went away. Charlie Savage reports in Friday's New York Times that two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, have accused the Obama administration of using Section 215 for purposes not intended by Congress. Russ Feingold, then a Democratic senator for Wisconsin, raised similar alarms in 2009.

The senators know what the White House is up to because they were privy to secret testimony. But under Senate rules, they can't reveal what they learned. Thus they have demanded that the White House come clean with the public. "Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out," Udall is quoted as saying.

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US appeals court reinstates wiretap abuse lawsuit

 NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland
© AFP/File Saul Loeb

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - An appeals court Monday reinstated a lawsuit challenging a law giving the US government broad authority in electronic wiretapping and monitoring of overseas calls and emails in probing suspected terrorism.

The US Court of Appeals in New York said the suit by civil liberties activists can proceed, reversing a lower court decision dismissing the case.

The suit, filed by a coalition of groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, had been dismissed by a judge who said they had not established legal standing by showing their own communications had been monitored.

But the three-judge appeals panel said the plaintiffs "have established that they reasonably fear being monitored under the allegedly unconstitutional (law), and that they have undertaken costly measures to avoid it."

As a result, the plaintiffs "have established that they suffered present injuries in fact... stemming from a reasonable fear of future harmful government conduct."

The appeals court sent the measure back to a lower court to review the merits of the case.

New Proposal to Wiretap Suspected Infringers Raises Privacy Concerns

This is Part II of a series of articles analyzing specific aspects of the Obama Administration's White Paper (available for download here), recommending legislative changes to combat online piracy and counterfeiting.  Click here for if you missed our overview of the White Paper in Part I.

David Makarewicz, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

One of the most troubling recommendations in the White Paper is the Obama Administration's request for Congress to grant its enforcement agencies the power "seek a wiretap for criminal copyright and trademark offenses."  This would require Congress to amend the Wiretap Act, which does not currently include copyright and trademark infringement among the offenses that justify a privacy invasion as extreme as a wiretap.

In order to preserve the private nature of communications, the Wiretap Act (as amended by the The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986), 18 U.S.C. § 2511, makes it generally illegal for anyone, including the Government, to "intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication." However, the law has carved out certain exceptions to this rule under which the Government can request permission to intercept certain communications for a limited time.

Officials Push to Bolster Law on Wiretapping

Charlie Savage
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say.

The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that caused technical problems for surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.

An Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the F.B.I.and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law that says telephone and broadband companies must design their services so that they can begin conducting surveillance of a target immediately after being presented with a court order.


There is not yet agreement over the details, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, but they said the administration intends to submit a package to Congress next year.

Albert Gidari Jr., a lawyer who represents telecommunications firms, said corporations were likely to object to increased government intervention in the design or launch of services. Such a change, he said, could have major repercussions for industry innovation, costs and competitiveness.

“The government’s answer is ‘don’t deploy the new services — wait until the government catches up,’ ” Mr. Gidari said. “But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now.”

To bolster their case that telecom companies should face greater pressure to stay compliant, security agencies are citing two previously undisclosed episodes in which investigators were stymied from carrying out court-approved surveillance for weeks or even months because of technical problems with two major carriers.

The disclosure that the administration is seeking ways to increase the government’s leverage over carriers already subject to the 1994 law comes less than a month after The New York Times reported on a related part of the effort: a plan to bring Internet companies that enable communications — like Gmail, Facebook, Blackberry and Skype — under the law’s mandates for the first time, a demand that would require major changes to some services’ technical designs and business models.

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Wiretapped phones, now Internet?

Charlie Savage

The New York Times

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations of the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is "going dark" as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications -- including encrypted e-mail transmitters such as BlackBerry, social networking websites such as Facebook and software that allows direct "peer-to-peer" messaging such as Skype -- to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The legislation, which the Obama administration plans to submit to Congress next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering technological innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally.

James Dempsey, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet policy group, said the proposal had "huge implications" and challenged "fundamental elements of the Internet revolution" -- including its decentralized design.

"They are really asking for the authority to redesign services that take advantage of the unique, and now pervasive, architecture of the Internet," he said. "They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function."

But law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

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