By Carey Wedler
Privacy advocates are urging the House of Representatives and Senate to vote against bills that further increase the government’s widespread surveillance of citizens. The bills, called the “Protecting Cyber Networks Act” (H.R. 1560) and the “Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act” (S. 754) are the latest move by lawmakers to bolster the strength of the domestic spying apparatus.
One of the main objectives of the new laws is to eliminate consequences for companies that share their users’ private information with the government. The bills refer to this as “liability protection.”
Letters written to members of the House and Senate from a coalition of privacy advocates caution lawmakers that the bills
…would significantly increase the National Security Agency’s (NSA) access to personal information, and authorize the federal government to use that information for a myriad of purposes unrelated to cyber security.
Derrick Broze
A former member of President Obama’s National Security Agency review committee said there is no significant value in mass surveillance programs.
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone spoke at the Constitutional Law University Law School on the failures of the surveillance programs revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Activist Post
Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) has announced the launch of the Snowden Archive, a comprehensive database of all of the documents published to date from the Snowden leak.
Created in partnership with the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, the Archive is the world’s first fully indexed and searchable collection of publicly released Snowden documents.
The Archive is a powerful resource for journalists, researchers and concerned citizens to find new stories and to delve deeply into the critically important information about government surveillance practices made public thanks to Edward Snowden.
Carey Wedler
Per a Freedom of Information Act Request lawsuit filed byVice News, the Department of Defense has released a report on the damaging effects of Edward Snowden’s 2013 NSA leaks.
The only problem? It’s redacted. Entirely. Not a crumb of evidence was present in the “evidence” the government released.
Vladimir Platov
Stolen encryption keys are just the beginning. US NSA appears to have compromised big telecom, IT manufacturers, online banking, and even passports, starting on the factory floor.
Recent days have been marked by a record number of news stories regarding the US and its allies trying to establish total control over Internet users.
On February 16, researchers at the Moscow-based security group Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of the ultimate virus which has virtually infected all spheres of military and civilian computing in more than 40 countries around the world. They’ve managed to discover a piece of malware that must have been installed on hard disks while they were still being manufactured, and due to its complexity and a certain number of features that it shares with Stuxnet, it’s safe to assume that it was created by US secret services.
Nadia Kayyali
Want to know if GCHQ spied on you? Now you can find out. Privacy International (PI) has just launched a website that lets anyone find out if their communications were intercepted by the NSA and then shared with GCHQ.
The website is the result of a February 6 ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). Similar to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in the US, the IPT is a special court in the UK established by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that deals with issues of surveillance and human rights.
The February 6th ruling held that intelligence sharing between GCHQ and NSA done prior to December 2014 was unlawful. The decision, which applied to information collected by the NSA through Prism and Upstream, was based on the secrecy of the rules governing sharing of that information. This followed a December ruling in which the court held that information sharing between the NSA and GCHQ could continue because the oversight of the data-collection program had been made public, bringing it into compliance with European law. Privacy International disagreed with the decision made by the tribunal on this point and is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
Ted Baumann
Sometimes I wonder just how bad the news about government spying can get. The answer was in my inbox this morning. I quickly ran out of superlatives: Awful. Terrible. Appalling. Dreadful.
The article in question reported that for most of the last two decades, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been deliberately infecting the “firmware” that runs most common hard drives, including those made by Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Toshiba, Samsung and Maxtor.
There’s a 99% chance that the computer you’re using has one of those in it. Mine has four.
The malware campaign, called “Equation,” has infected tens of thousands of public and private computers in more than 30 countries. And it allows the NSA to read everything on those machines at will.
Unless you’ve done one simple thing to thwart them…
By Tenth Amendment Center
A bill filed in the Utah state house yesterday would deny critical resources - like water - to the massive NSA data center there should it pass. House Bill 150 (HB150), introduced by Rep. Marc Roberts, would require that the water being supplied to the NSA’s data center in Bluffdale be shut off as soon as the city’s $3 million bond is paid off.
Support this effort at OffNow.org/Utah
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April Glaser
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Watch for it. This year student protest and resistance to mass surveillance might be bursting at the seams. The Internet, which students across the world have grown up with, is under threat. And now more than ever, student leaders are contacting EFF, wanting to know how to get involved to protect our rights online.
Now is the time to organize. We’re calling on all concerned students, whether new organizers or seasoned campus leaders, to join the growing movement to fight for our right communicate and innovate, unhampered by oppressive government surveillance and creativity-stifling copyright law.
Surveillance chills speech. When we know that researching politically controversial topics might make us targets for increased government scrutiny, we are less likely to research. Digital privacy is an intellectual freedom issue. And that’s why we’re thrilled to bring this movement to college campuses.
Andy Beale
What happens when an NSA college recruiter gets confronted on the legality of the agency's data collection on Americans? Hint: They attack and then retreat.
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Michael Snyder
What is our society going to look like when our faces are being tracked literally everywhere that we go? As part of the FBI's new Next Generation Identification System, a facial recognition database known as the Interstate Photo System will have collected 52 million of our faces by the end of 2015. But that is only a small part of the story. According to Edward Snowden, the NSA has been using advanced facial recognition technology for years.
In addition, as you will see below, advertising companies are starting to use Minority Report-style face scanners in their billboards and many large corporations see facial recognition technology as a tool that they can use to serve their customers better. Someday soon it may become virtually impossible to go out in public in a major U.S. city without having your face recorded. Is that the kind of society that we want?
Nadia Kayyali
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Turns out, the DEA and FBI may know what medical conditions you have, whether you are having an affair, where you were last night, and more—all without any knowing that you have ever broken a law.
That’s because the DEA and FBI, as part of over 1000 analysts at 23 U.S. intelligence agencies, have the ability to peer over the NSA’s shoulder and see much of the NSA’s metadata with ICREACH.
Metadata is transactional data about communications, such as numbers dialed, email addresses sent to, and duration of phone calls, and it can be incredibly revealing. ICREACH, exposed by a release of Snowden documents in The Intercept, is a system that enables sharing of metadata by “provid[ing] analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.” It’s the latest in a string of documents that demonstrate how little the intelligence community distinguishes between counter-terrorism and ordinary crime—and just how close to home surveillance may really be.
Janet Phelan
Okay, we now know that our phone calls are being monitored. Snowden has made it clear that none of our electronically conveyed communications are secure from NSA snooping. But to find that they are now listening to our potato chips?
As revealed recently in an article in MIT News, technology has been developed which would allow our relentlessly nosy government to pick up voice prints from a bag of potato chips, a glass of water, a window or potted plant.
This is how it works:
Americans Deserve Full Protection of the Fourth Amendment for their Telephone Records, Groups Argue
Activist Post
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today filed an amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, a high-profile lawsuit that challenges mass surveillance, arguing that Americans' telephone metadata deserves the highest protection of the Fourth Amendment.
Larry Klayman, conservative activist and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, was among the first plaintiffs to sue the National Security Agency (NSA) over the collection of telephone metadata from Verizon customers that was detailed in documents released by Edward Snowden. In December 2013, Judge Richard Leon issued a preliminary ruling that the program was likely unconstitutional, and the case is currently on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In the new amicus brief in Klayman v. Obama, the EFF and ACLU lawyers repudiate arguments by U.S. officials that the records are "just metadata" and therefore not as sensitive as the contents of phone calls. Using research and new case law, the civil liberties groups argue that metadata (such as who individuals called, when they called, and how long they spoke) can be even more revealing than conversations when collected en masse.
David Greene
Electronic Frontier Foundation
A few weeks ago we fought a battle for transparency in our flagship NSA spying case, Jewel v. NSA. But, ironically, we weren't able to tell you anything about it until now.
On June 6, the court held a long hearing in Jewel in a crowded, open courtroom, widely covered by the press. We were even on the local TV news on two stations. At the end, the Judge ordered both sides to request a transcript since he ordered us to do additional briefing. But when it was over, the government secretly, and surprisingly sought permission to “remove” classified information from the transcript, and even indicated that it wanted to do so secretly, so the public could never even know that they had done so.
Activist Post
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today released a video by acclaimed documentarian Brian Knappenberger (The Internet's Own Boy) that explores how and why an unlikely coalition of advocacy organizations launched an airship over the National Security Agency's Utah data center.
The short documentary explains the urgent need to rein in unconstitutional mass surveillance, just as the U.S. Senate has introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act.
Jason Erickson
Whether one calls the revelations of Edward Snowden legitimate whistleblowing or treason, the technology to potentially thwart future security breaches has been rolled out in an unlikely place: Estonia.
After a wave of cyber attacks in 2007, Estonia began focusing on data integrity and is now leading the world toward big data governance. Simultaneously, Estonia is laying claim as the first country to implement a national digital identity system, proving that all forms of tracking are being taken seriously:
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| Pine Gap, Australia |
Jon Rappoport
Remember the name “Pine Gap.” It lies at the heart of this story.
I’ve always thought Australians were more blunt and forthright than Americans. I don’t know if that’s true, but the current debate about total surveillance in the Land Down Under is cutting to the bone.
The government wants to tax the Australian people so it can use giant telecoms to collect wall to wall “metadata” on them. (Pay us so we can spy on you.)
The Age newspaper reports on an Australian senate inquiry into the plan:
