The FBI is Playing Politics with Your Privacy

A bombshell report from WIRED reveals that two days after the U.S. Congress renewed and expanded the mass-surveillance authority Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Paul Abbate, sent an email imploring agents to “use” Section 702 to search the communications of Americans collected under this authority “to demonstrate why tools like this are essential” to the FBI’s mission.

In other words, an agency that has repeatedly abused this exact authority—with 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans’ communications in 2021 alone, thinks that the answer to its misuse of mass surveillance of Americans is to do more of it, not less. And it signals that the FBI believes it should do more surveillance–not because of any pressing national security threat—but because the FBI has an image problem.

The American people should feel a fiery volcano of white hot rage over this revelation. During the recent fight over Section 702’s reauthorization, we all had to listen to the FBI and the rest of the Intelligence Community downplay their huge number of Section 702 abuses (but, never fear, they were fixed by drop-down menus!). The government also trotted out every monster of the week in incorrect arguments seeking to undermine the bipartisan push for crucial reforms. Ultimately, after fighting to a draw in the House, Congress bent to the government’s will: it not only failed to reform Section 702, but gave the government authority to use Section 702 in more cases.

Now, immediately after extracting this expanded power and fighting off sensible reforms, the FBI’s leadership is urging the agency to “continue to look for ways” to make more use of this controversial authority to surveil Americans, albeit with the fig leaf that it must be “legal.” And not because of an identifiable, pressing threat to national security, but to “demonstrate” the importance of domestic law enforcement accessing the pool of data collected via mass surveillance. This is an insult to everyone who cares about accountability, civil liberties, and our ability to have a private conversation online. It also raises the question of whether the FBI is interested in keeping us safe or in merely justifying its own increased powers.

Section 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance inside the United States by vacuuming up digital communications so long as the surveillance is directed at foreigners currently located outside the United States. Section 702 prohibits the government from intentionally targeting Americans. But, because we live in a globalized world where Americans constantly communicate with people (and services) outside the United States, the government routinely acquires millions of innocent Americans’ communications “incidentally” under Section 702 surveillance. Not only does the government acquire these communications without a probable cause warrant, so long as the government can make out some connection to FISA’s very broad definition of “foreign intelligence,” the government can then conduct warrantless “backdoor searches” of individual Americans’ incidentally collected communications. 702 creates an end run around the Constitution for the FBI and, with the Abbate memo, they are being urged to use it as much as they can.

The recent reauthorization of Section 702 also expanded this mass surveillance authority still further, expanding in turn the FBI’s ability to exploit it. To start, it substantially increased the scope of entities who the government could require to turn over Americans’ data in mass under Section 702. This provision is written so broadly that it potentially reaches any person or company with “access” to “equipment” on which electronic communications travel or are stored, regardless of whether they are a direct provider, which could include landlords, maintenance people, and many others who routinely have access to your communications.

The reauthorization of Section 702 also expanded FISA’s already very broad definition of “foreign intelligence” to include counternarcotics: an unacceptable expansion of a national security authority to ordinary crime. Further, it allows the government to use Section 702 powers to vet hopeful immigrants and asylum seekers—a particularly dangerous authority which opens up this or future administrations to deny entry to individuals based on their private communications about politics, religion, sexuality, or gender identity.

Americans who care about privacy in the United States are essentially fighting a political battle in which the other side gets to make up the rules, the terrain…and even rewrite the laws of gravity if they want to. Politicians can tell us they want to keep people in the U.S. safe without doing anything to prevent that power from being abused, even if they know it will be. It’s about optics, politics, and security theater; not realistic and balanced claims of safety and privacy. The Abbate memo signals that the FBI is going to work hard to create better optics for itself so that it can continue spying in the future.

Source: The FBI is Playing Politics with Your Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation

The FBI is Playing Politics with Your Privacy

Local Cops Can Skirt State Limits on Surveillance By Joining Federal Task Forces

\By joining joint law enforcement task forces run by the federal government, local cops can often ignore stringent state and local laws governing surveillance and engage in warrantless spying.

It's well-known that a federal program known as “Equitable Sharing” allows local prosecutors and police to bypass more restrictive state asset forfeiture laws by passing cases off to the federal government through a process known as adoption. A Department of Justice directive issued last summer by Attorney General Jeff Sessions reiterates full support for the equitable sharing program, directs federal law enforcement agencies to aggressively utilize it, and sets the stage to expand it in the future.

Through the adoption process, local police claim cases are federal in nature to justify transferring them to federal jurisdiction. Under these arrangements, state officials simply hand cases over to a federal agency, participate in the case, and then receive up to 80 percent of the proceeds.

Participation in federal joint law enforcement task forces gives state and local police a similar means to circumvent restrictive state surveillance laws and conduct warrantless spying with immunity.

How Local Cops Can Ignore Local Laws

When state or local law enforcement officers join a federal joint task force, they are deputized as federal agents. As a result, they can operate under the exact same parameters as an FBI or DEA agent. That means they are no longer bound by state laws governing surveillance. In practice, this allows local cops to ignore state laws as they collect information on people in their communities.

For instance, last year, Illinois passed the most restrictive law on cell site simulators in the country. Commonly referred to as “stingrays," these devices essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower. This allows law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

Under the Illinois law, police must get a warrant before using a stingray to track an individual's location in most situations, and they are barred from using the devices to access data on electronic devices or listen to conversations. But an Illinois police officer serving on a joint task force can ignore the warrant requirement and deploy a stingray despite the state law.

According to a report by the Century Foundation, Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) are particularly invasive due to their broad and sweeping mandate to "prevent terrorism."

The War on Terror Expands Law Enforcement's Reach

Prior to 9/11, there were about 30 JTTFs scattered around the US. Today, more than 180 such task forces operate all across the US. According to memoranda of understanding (MOUs) obtained by the ACLU, state and local law enforcement officers assigned to JTTFs follow federal rules for intelligence gathering.

According to the New Century report, these JTTFs also allow state and local cops to operate in virtual secrecy and with little or no local oversight.

Partnerships on JTTFs may also enable local and state police to conduct activities in secret, under cover of federal law protecting 'classified information,' where their activities would otherwise be subject to public scrutiny through state open records laws. Sometimes, local officers deputized to work as federal agents on JTTFs aren’t even subject to ordinary chain-of-command requirements, for example, if their local commanding officer doesn’t have security clearance to access information held by the JTTF member. These frameworks make it impossible to hold local and state law enforcement officials accountable for their work on JTTFs.

In 2008, the DOJ established rules allowing FBI agents to conduct "assessments"—essentially an investigation without any indication of terrorist or criminal activity. Any FBI agent can unilaterally initiate an assessment for up to 30 days without any oversight. After 30 days, the agent must report to a supervisor. From that point, the supervisor can renew the assessment every 30 days. An agent does not have to have probable cause or even reasonable suspicion to open an assessment. He only needs to have an "authorized purpose" and a "clearly defined objective." According to the Brennan Center for Justice, agents can engage in the following activities, among others, during the assessment phase.

• Recruit informants to monitor the subject.
• Question people without revealing their identity.
• Search commercial and government databases.
• Conduct physical surveillance of a person's public movements.

When operating within a JTTF, a local law enforcement officer can engage in all of these activities, regardless of state law or department policy.

The Warrantless Collection of Data

Deputization and membership in a JTTF also opens the door for local cops to access federal databases holding information that was collected without a warrant.

Local and state police assigned to JTTFs and deputized as federal agents may even have access to information collected by the CIA, NSA, or foreign intelligence agencies, as their FBI counterparts do. Indeed, FBI guidelines allow agents to ask the CIA and NSA for information on people agents are investigating during an assessment. Again, agents and task force members do not even need to suspect someone of involvement in criminal activity before opening such an assessment. Local police assigned to the JTTF may therefore have access to information about Americans that was collected by the NSA without any judicial process, even if the targets of the spying aren’t suspected of any crime—let alone a serious offense connected to terrorism.

The FBI calls JTTFs “our nation’s front line on terrorism: small cells of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT experts, and other specialists from dozens of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”

The New Century report came up with a much less glowing assessment.

Communities and individuals who have been monitored, harassed, or threatened by JTTF operations or their task force officers may see their role differently. To those groups, the JTTFs likely appear more interested in solidifying and expanding the power of their own bureaucracy, and protecting the political, social, and economic status quo—often at the expense and on the backs of marginalized communities. And despite the FBI’s claim that the JTTFs are the nation’s “front line on terrorism,” the FBI doesn’t have much to show, in terms of benefits to public safety, for the vast expenditures of public funds poured into them.

State and Local Governments Need to Step Up

Joint task forces further detach local peace officers from the communities they ostensibly serve. Federal deputization allows your local cops to operate outside of state law with virtually no local or state oversight or accountability. They can surveil you with impunity, even if your state has passed laws to protect your privacy.

Joint task forces should not serve as a vehicle to circumvent state law. State and local governments need to take steps to regain control over their police departments. They should refuse to lend their officers to any joint task force that does not operate within the limits of state surveillance laws. They should also insist on having an oversight role when any of their officers are involved in joint investigations.

Despite revelations by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers revealing the total disregard of the Fourth Amendment by federal agencies like the NSA, Congress has shown no inclination to rein in the federal surveillance state. State and local government may not be able to completely shut down the federal surveillance state, but they certainly don't have to participate.

Michael Maharrey

Michael Maharrey is the national communications director at the Tenth Amendment Center.

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

Why We Have a Surveillance State

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Henry Stimson, Secretary of State, 1929

I was upbraided recently by a dear friend for my frequent praise of outcast investor Peter Thiel over Thiel’s involvement with big data company Palantir. He forwarded me a Bloomberg article titled “Peter Thiel’s data-mining company is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens” adding: “Really scary. Not good for democracy; a better version of the Stasi’s filing system and way cheaper and more efficient.”

Increasingly, we live under the kind of comprehensive surveillance predicted by science fiction writers. But Palantir is just an arms merchant, not the architect of our brave new world. Like gun manufacturers, its products can be used for good or evil.  I have always believed that moral responsibility lies with the wielder of weapons, not the manufacturers. (This is often expressed as “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”)

Peter Thiel’s choice to become an arms merchant rather than invest his considerable talents and fortune elsewhere is a fair question given his libertarian leanings. I have no insight into the answer. I would guess that he founded Palantir as an act of patriotism after 9/11, and it metastasized following the money, cash being the mother’s milk of the state, something the celebrated Alexander Hamilton deeply understood.

Surveillance Is Not the Problem, but It Is a Symptom

The real threat to the republic, however, lies not in the weapons available but in the unlimited and unaccountable bureaucracy in Washington that deploys them, both at home and abroad. Having broken free of constitutional constraints, America’s political class now directs an all-powerful state that naturally adopts every tool technology has to offer.

Because our prevailing governing philosophy acknowledges no limits to the doing of good or the thwarting of evil, any means necessary may be employed as long as worthy ends can be plausibly asserted. Evil must be discouraged, taxed, or outlawed; good must be encouraged, subsidized, or made mandatory. This progressive government mission must be implemented in the public square, in the marketplace, in our educational institutions, around the world, and in our homes until all forms of social injustice are eliminated.

To be sure, such an expansive impulse is not unique. The communists felt the same way from the 1920s to the 1980s as did the fascists through the 1930s and 1940s, alarmingly making a recent comeback. But the sustained march of the progressive movement from Woodrow Wilson’s cartelization of the economy to support his War to End all Wars to FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society to the spectacle of Obamacare outlasted all other pretenders. Progressivism has fueled a centralization of American power whose growth and global reach is unparalleled in human history. The end result is a multi-headed Leviathan that scoffs at the quaint notion that the federal government should be limited to the 17 powers enumerated in Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution.

Examples of Democracy’s Dependence on Surveillance Abound

Since the passage of the 16th amendment, we have learned to live with an Internal Revenue Service against which citizens have no right to privacy, no right to remain silent, and no presumption of innocence. This most invasive tax system ever devised insists on comprehensive intrusion into every citizen’s financial life, dragooning every employer, banker, broker, and financial intermediary into an unpaid spy network that makes Palantir look like a rank amateur. Government schools began educating us to submit to this kind of blanket surveillance as the price we pay for civilized society long before computers played a role.

As Congress increasingly abdicated regulatory power to agencies of the executive branch a parallel judicial system emerged wherein administrative law courts act as legislators, prosecutors, police, judge, and jury in matters touching every aspect of our lives and businesses. This system, too, has a voracious appetite for information. How else to ensure that its tens of thousands of mandates, regulations, prohibitions, guidances, edicts, and reporting requirements are strictly obeyed? The opportunity to manipulate this shadow government invites a degree of lobbying and influence peddling that would make the Grant administration blush.

Our national government was once unique in having only two crimes over which it claimed jurisdiction: treason and counterfeiting. This was due to the federalist architecture our founders devised, reserving ordinary police powers for the states. But such a division of powers did not hold. Our central government has since created a vast and complex criminal code with laws too numerous to count. This includes weaponized vagaries like conspiracy, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice that ensure crimes can be manufactured even after exhaustive investigations find that none have been committed.

This has empowered a cabal of politicized federal prosecutors that can selectively indict anyone they please, using legal thuggery to threaten targets with bankruptcy to better extract plea bargains, which is why 90 percent of their cases never go to trial. These inquisitors also have the power to compel third parties to surrender vast troves of information that agents can comb through searching for anything that can be construed as a crime, even if these infractions bear no relation to the charges for which the target was originally indicted.

So I disagree that comprehensive and inescapable surveillance is “not good for democracy.” It is the inevitable consequence of democracy, only recently empowered by the advent of big data and total interconnectedness. Our founders were rightly fearful of democracy, doing everything they could to make sure it never took root in America. Their efforts to preserve our liberty, our property, and our privacy failed, and we are paying the price.


Bill Frezza


Bill Frezza is the former host of RealClear Radio Hour and the author of New Zealand’s Far-Reaching Reforms: A Case Study in How to Save Democracy from Itself.

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

NSA Internet Surveillance Under Section 702 Violates the First Amendment

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

Government Surveillance and Academic Thought Policing Are Taking Us to 1984

Government Surveillance and Academic Thought Policing Are Taking Us to 1984

Government Surveillance and Academic Thought Policing Are Taking Us to 1984

There are some books you should read only once, and others you should reread occasionally. George Orwell’s 1984 is one you should read repeatedly and deeply. Without it, no education is complete.

It tells the story of a man, Winston, grappling with ordinary desires for love and privacy – but in a totalitarian socialist world in which every word and even desire is subject to control and punishment by “the Party.”

1984 teaches timeless truths and shows its characters grappling with questions that do not have easy answers. The dystopia Orwell presents emerged out of the soil of a society in which little by little, inch by inch, thought by thought, and idea by idea, people forsook their liberty, their dignity, and their humanity.

Parallels between the world of Orwell’s 1984 and our own are increasingly obvious – and troubling.

Surveillance and Thought Policing

For one thing, we live in an ever-growing “anti-terror” surveillance state, and one that is encouraged, if not openly embraced, by fearful people who are, if I may be blunt, really bad at math and really lacking in perspective. Every death is a tragedy, but terrorism is far down on any list of mortality risks – and it always has been. And there is little evidence that all the surveillance and security programs added since 9/11 have caught or prevented terrorists in any significant number.

For another thing, on college campuses across the country, we are seeing disinvitations of controversial speakers, demands for “safe spaces,” and shout-downs of ideas deemed heretical – proof that the open and rigorous exchange of ideas does not come easily and must be defended.

In their Atlantic cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explain and explore how higher education is fast becoming a place where students expect not to be faced with or to contend with controversial ideas but to be protected from them.

Commentators such as American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Summers have drawn unflattering comparisons between Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League and those controlling campus discussions today. The subtle change from “these ideas are incorrect as matters of logic and evidence” to “it is immoral to even subject these ideas to rigorous inquiry” threatens to subject the liberal arts and sciences to a thought police.

Obedience Only

The way the characters in 1984 are “conditioned” once their subversive activities are found out turns this novel from interesting dystopian fiction to an absolutely terrifying classic. Mere obedience is not enough for the Party officials. They can only be satisfied, if that’s the right word, once they completely occupy the thoughts and wants of their subjects.

An obedient objector is still a potentially dangerous revolutionary. Dissent – anything other than wholehearted, brainwashed obedience – is intolerable. The humanity of Winston is completely abolished, and in a fate worse than death, his resistance is crushed and he comes to love Big Brother.

On this, the 68th anniversary of 1984’s publication, it is perhaps worthwhile to take a few minutes and consider whether we have unconsciously adopted the three slogans of the Party – War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength. In our unthinking rush for “safety” of all kinds, I’m afraid that in some ways, we have.

Reprinted from Learn Liberty.

Art Carden


Art Carden is an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University’s Brock School of Business. In addition, he is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, a Senior Fellow with the Beacon Center of Tennessee, and a Research Fellow with the Independent Institute. He is a member of the FEE Faculty Network. Visit his website.

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

Why We’re Being Watched

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.

Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out

Obama Expands Surveillance Powers on His Way Out



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

Surveillance bill includes internet records storage

Surveillance bill includes internet records storage


Police and intelligence officers will be able to access suspects’ “internet connection records”.

But new safeguards, including allowing judges to block spying operations, will be introduced to prevent abuses.

The home secretary said the powers in the draft Investigatory Powers Bill were needed to fight crime and terror.

The large and complex draft bill also contains proposals covering how the state can hack devices and run operations to sweep up large amounts of data as it flows through the internet, enshrining in law the previously covert activities of GCHQ, as uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The draft bill’s measures include:

A new criminal offence of “knowingly or recklessly obtaining communications data from a telecommunications operator without lawful authority”, carrying a prison sentence of up to two years

Local councils to retain some investigatory powers, such as surveillance of benefit cheats, but they will not be able to access online data stored by internet firms

The Wilson doctrine – preventing surveillance of Parliamentarians’ communications – to be written into law

Police will not be able to access journalistic sources without the authorisation of a judge

A legal duty on British companies to help law enforcement agencies hack devices to acquire information if it is reasonably practical to do so

Mrs May told MPs the draft bill was a “significant departure” from previous plans, dubbed the “snooper’s charter” by critics, which were blocked by the Lib Dems, and will “provide some of the strongest protections and safeguards anywhere in the democratic world and an approach that sets new standards for openness, transparency and oversight”.

The legislation brings together a variety of existing powers that cover how the home secretary and other ministers can authorise operations to intercept communications – such as telephone taps and other surveillance.

But it also proposes to order communications companies, such as broadband firms, to hold basic details of the services that someone has accessed online – something that has been repeatedly proposed but never enacted.

This duty would include forcing firms to hold a schedule of which websites someone visits and the apps they connect to through computers, smartphones, tablets and other devices.

Police and other agencies would be then able to access these records in pursuit of criminals – but also seek to retrieve data in a wider range of inquiries, such as missing people.

Theresa May unveils UK surveillance measures in wake of Snowden claims

Theresa May unveils UK surveillance measures in wake of Snowden claims


New surveillance powers will be given to the police and security services, allowing them to access records tracking every UK citizen’s use of the internet without any need for any judicial check, under the provisions of the draft investigatory powers bill unveiled by Theresa May.

It includes new powers requiring internet and phone companies to keep “internet connection records” – tracking every website visited but not every page – for a maximum of 12 months but will not require a warrant for the police, security services or other bodies to access the data. Local authorities will be banned from accessing internet records.

The proposed legislation will also introduce a “double-lock” on the ministerial approval of interception warrants with a new panel of seven judicial commissioners – probably retired judges – given a veto before they can come into force.

But the details of the bill make clear that this new safeguard for the most intrusive powers to spy on the content of people’s conversations and messages will not apply in “urgent cases” – defined as up to five days – where judicial approval is not possible.

The draft investigatory powers bill published on Wednesday by the home secretary aims to provide a “comprehensive and comprehensible” overhaul of Britain’s fragmented surveillance laws. It comes two-and-a-half years after the disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden of the scale of secret mass surveillance of the global traffic in confidential personal data carried out by Britain’s GCHQ and the US’s National Security Agency (NSA).

It will replace the current system of three separate commissioners with a senior judge as a single investigatory powers commissioner.

May told MPs that the introduction of the most controversial power – the storage of everyone’s internet connection records tracking the websites they have visited, which is banned as too intrusive in the US and every European country including Britain – was “simply the modern equivalent of an itemised phone bill”.

FBI flying surveillance aircraft over US cities; planes traced to fake companies

FBI flying surveillance aircraft over US cities; planes traced to fake companies


The FBI is operating a small air force with scores of low-flying planes across the country carrying video and, at times, cellphone surveillance technology — all hidden behind fictitious companies that are fronts for the government, The Associated Press has learned.

The planes’ surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge’s approval, and the FBI said the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations. In a recent 30-day period, the agency flew above more than 30 cities in 11 states across the country, an AP review found.

Aerial surveillance represents a changing frontier for law enforcement, providing what the government maintains is an important tool in criminal, terrorism or intelligence probes. But the program raises questions about whether there should be updated policies protecting civil liberties as new technologies pose intrusive opportunities for government spying.

U.S. law enforcement officials confirmed for the first time the wide-scale use of the aircraft, which the AP traced to at least 13 fake companies, such as FVX Research, KQM Aviation, NBR Aviation and PXW Services. Even basic aspects of the program are withheld from the public in censored versions of official reports from the Justice Department’s inspector general.

“The FBI’s aviation program is not secret,” spokesman Christopher Allen said in a statement. “Specific aircraft and their capabilities are protected for operational security purposes.” Allen added that the FBI’s planes “are not equipped, designed or used for bulk collection activities or mass surveillance.”

But the planes can capture video of unrelated criminal activity on the ground that could be handed over for prosecutions.

Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they’re not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers and gets phones to reveal basic subscriber information, is rare.

Details confirmed by the FBI track closely with published reports since at least 2003 that a government surveillance program might be behind suspicious-looking planes slowly circling neighborhoods. The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas.

FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation

But, as unwarranted and invasive as this all is, there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?

via megalextoria.com