June 2013

Consumers, privacy advocates call for investigation into PRISM

The backlash against the PRISM surveillance program, which gives the U.S. government a direct pipeline to data from major consumer technology companies, is in full force with several groups calling for a full Congressional investigation of the program. Companies reported to be a part of the program include Apple, Google and Facebook.

Several of the tech firms have denied participating in or even knowing about PRISM. Internet privacy advocates have decried the government’s secret monitoring. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has raised alarms for years about what it calls “domestic spying” run by the NSA, is asking for support to petition Congress for a full investigation of the program. A Progressive Change Campaign Committee petition calling for a similar investigation has gotten nearly 20,000 signatures in 36 hours. A petition from the progressive technology company CREDO has gotten more than 40,000 signatures asking President Obama to justify the surveillance.

Intelligence leaders call for prosecuting NSA leaker

The leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees said that the leaker who disclosed the National Security Agency’s phone and internet surveillance programs should be prosecuted.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the leak could endanger the security of Americans. “Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us, it's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took,” Chairman Rogers said. “I absolutely think they should be prosecuted,” he added. Chairman Feinstein said efforts were made to protect the privacy of American citizens, including relying on a secret intelligence court for authorization. “If there is strong suspicion that a terrorist outside of the country is trying to reach someone on the inside of the country, those numbers then can be obtained,” Chairman Feinstein said. “If you want to collect content on the American, then a court order is issued.” "Here's the rub, the instances where this has produced good -- has disrupted plots, prevented terrorist attacks is all classified, that's what's so hard about this," Chairman Feinstein added. "So that we can't actually go in there and other than the two that have been released give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing."

Will PRISM damage tech companies’ reputations for privacy?

Privacy is a big selling point for tech firms, particularly those that are asking to host your personal data. That’s what’s so potentially damaging about reports from The Washington Post and the Guardian that the U.S. government has broad access to data of nine leading Internet firms as part of a surveillance program known as PRISM.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook have denied that they have granted the government access to their servers. But the fallout from the revelation of PRISM — regardless of whether the companies knew about the program — takes some of the shine off of these firms’ reputations. Users have reacted to the revelations with outrage. It’s hard to capture all of the reactions out there, but let’s just say words like “disgusting,” “big brother” and “outrageous” are some of the most common phrases cropping up across the Web. Even those who expected to hear news like this someday seem disappointed.

Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program

When government officials came to Silicon Valley to demand easier ways for the world’s largest Internet companies to turn over user data as part of a secret surveillance program, the companies bristled. In the end, though, many cooperated at least a bit.

Twitter declined to make it easier for the government. But other companies were more compliant, according to people briefed on the negotiations. They opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests. And in some cases, they changed their computer systems to do so. The negotiations shed a light on how Internet companies, increasingly at the center of people’s personal lives, interact with the spy agencies that look to their vast trove of information — e-mails, videos, online chats, photos and search queries — for intelligence. They illustrate how intricately the government and tech companies work together, and the depth of their behind-the-scenes transactions.

Silicon Valley through the NSA prism

[Commentary] The revelations surrounding the National Security Agency over the last two days underline a well-known fact in the tech world: Silicon Valley is a land of secrets. Exclusivity. Secrecy.

They’re part of the Valley’s engine. But, to the casual observer, they may seem anathema to its culture. This is, after all, the land of open data, open source software and public APIs. This is the land of sharing, liking, poking, posting, uploading and circling. This is a land that not only allows but encourages you to broadcast public details about yourself and your environment constantly. It is, culturally, all about openness. It is also increasingly about intimacy. Enter the NSA … and FBI, and according to the Guardian, the GCHQ, or the British version of the NSA.

Silicon Valley firms deny giving government broad access to data

The top executives of Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley firms on Friday fiercely denied they gave intelligence officials broad access to data about their users. The statements sharply contradict the language in a National Security Agency document, cited by The Washington Post and the British newspaper the Guardian, that described the companies’ participation in a secret surveillance program called PRISM.

The NSA document referred to “collection directly from the servers” of nine Internet companies. The conflict between the PRISM document and the company statements could be the result of imprecision by the author of the NSA documents. Another classified report obtained by The Post described the arrangement as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than direct access to company servers. Technology and security experts offered other explanations, with some arguing that the firms had carefully crafted their denials to leave open the possibility that they had participated in PRISM in some way. Several noted the similarity in the language of the company statements. Nearly all of the companies cited in the NSA documents said the government does not have “direct access” to their servers. But that leaves open the possibility that the government has indirect access to their technology, security experts said.

The Laws That Make It Easy for the Government to Spy on Americans

With all of the new disclosures in the last 24 hours about surveillance by the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of both telephone and Internet use by American citizens, it’s useful to dredge up some history of how all this came to be. With the new disclosures, there’s been a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and on the Obama Administration’s secret interpretations of various sections of that law as a legal basis for all this spying. But a law passed in 1994 and signed by then-president Bill Clinton is worth remembering for what it requires of American telecommunications companies.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecom carriers and the companies that manufacture the gear they use to modify the design of that equipment to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities. The point was to make it easier to tap digital phone networks, which were on the rise. Strangely, the law didn’t expressly cover data passing over the Internet. That changed in 2005, following a petition by the Department of Justice — the FBI’s parent agency — to the Federal Communications Commission. The DOJ asked that the scope of CALEA be expanded to cover the Internet. Broadband Internet companies would be required to open up their networks so that VOIP phone calls could be wiretapped, as well. The FCC agreed, arguing that the Internet had replaced the old telephone exchanges. This isn’t just a history lesson. In recent years, the FBI has been complaining of “going deaf.” Encrypted communications that use peer-to-peer connections like Skype and FaceTime and other tools like Google Hangouts are difficult to monitor. Now the FBI wants Congress to require that new communications software products that run on the user’s computer or smartphone be built from the ground up to be wiretap-friendly, essentially by inserting backdoor capabilities in the source code. Wiretaps could be executed silently, and without the user knowing. Companies that don’t comply would be subjected to a fine of $25,000 per day. The new proposal is being dubbed CALEA II by some people.

Key to government’s monitoring power lies in war, technology

Expanded government surveillance was cast as a price of war in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Yet nearly a dozen years later, the war on terrorism is showing signs of ebbing while the surveillance systems created to fight it continue unabated. If anything, they are becoming more powerful.

That’s because the nation went to a war footing at a time of profound technological change that fueled an explosion of personal data. Governments and businesses have developed the ability to mine, sort and analyze this information as never before — and show little inclination to relinquish that power. Few adults can navigate the modern world without leaving behind massive trails of data: where we go, where we live, how we look, what we buy, what we eat, what Web sites we visit and — perhaps most powerfully for those seeking to monitor us — who is in our network of personal relationships. From a legal perspective, this information is considered fair game in our wired world, given freely with every e-mail sent, every photo posted to Facebook, every bag of groceries bought with a credit card.

US public should know about government collection of phone, Internet records

[Commentary] Over the past few days, the country has had to absorb a rush of information about the techniques the government uses to collect intelligence information from everything from our phones to Facebook. The rapid-fire revelations about what’s going on in the secret world of the National Security Agency and elsewhere in the executive branch’s counterterrorism operation have been contradictory at times and confusing often. One of the only things that seems sure is that the news has rekindled a national debate about what Americans should accept in the fight against the continuing threat of international terrorism.

President Barack Obama was right when he said that Americans can’t have 100 percent security and 100 percent privacy. With that in mind, Congress passed, and this page supported, a variety of measures that empowered the executive branch to collect a lot of information — with supervision. The government should be able to intercept the communications of non-Americans outside U.S. borders to investigate possible plots. But, because the system is premised on trust, the government would have a stronger case, and the debate might be less slapdash, if it revealed more.

It is unclear to us why the existence of an extensive database of information about U.S. phone calls should have been secret, or why tech companies, some of which publish regular reports on user privacy, can’t reveal more basic information about their interactions with government, such as the number of FISA requests they get in a given period of time. Finally, whether a fair balance is being struck between security and privacy depends heavily on the procedures in place to minimize the collection and retention of Americans’ data. The public ought to hear more about how that is being accomplished.

Europeans call for answers over U.S. web spying allegations

After it emerged that the U.S. National Security Agency is apparently tapping into the Google and Facebook communications of people around the world, EU data protection officials and activists have started asking questions.

Benton

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