Benton RSS Feed
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced plans to establish a national Center for Advanced Communications in Boulder (CO). A key focus of the center will be to promote interdisciplinary research, development and testing in radio frequency technology and spectrum sharing for public safety and commercial broadband applications.
The two agencies recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to collaborate on the establishment of the center. The MOU states that the center will leverage the “critical mass of NIST and NTIA research and engineering capabilities concentrated in Boulder” to form a “unique national asset,” and includes the infrastructure and collaborative environment needed to address a wide range of advanced communications challenges. This joint effort will increase the impact of existing efforts already under way in both agencies.
Examples of the specific types of research, facilities and other activities at the new center may include:
- multiuser test beds that allow government and industry researchers to realistically measure and evaluate the performance of new advanced communications technologies;
- targeted interdisciplinary research, development and testing projects in fields such as digital information processing, interoperability and quantum communications; and
- outreach to international standards development organizations to help ensure compatibility of U.S. advanced communications efforts with the global marketplace.
NIST and NTIA Announce Plans to Establish New Center for Advanced Communications
[Commentary] There is a popular story going around about the state of America’s broadband networks: service is pitifully slow, hugely overpriced and limited to the richest neighborhoods — whereas in Europe, service is cheap, fast and widespread because regulators force big companies to make room for smaller service providers. Almost none of this is true: America’s broadband networks lead the world by many measures, and they are improving at a more rapid rate than networks in most developed countries.
Much of the disparity between perception and reality has to do with timing. Before the recession, American Internet service was on a very different path, not keeping pace with large sections of Western Europe and East Asia. But that began to change as the economy turned around. Private investment and advances in technology, brought about by a competition policy that encouraged cable and phone companies to improve their networks, have propelled America’s networks forward.
[Bennett is a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation]
No Country for Slow Broadband
The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that." If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Rep Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Rep Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee. Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls. Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
NSA admits listening to US phone calls without warrants
The US government only searched for detailed information on calls involving fewer than 300 specific phone numbers among the millions of raw phone records collected by the National Security Agency in 2012, according to a government paper obtained by Reuters on June 15. The unclassified paper was circulated Saturday within the government by US intelligence agencies and apparently is an attempt by spy agencies and the Obama Administration to rebut accusations that it overreached in investigating potential militant plots. The paper said that data from the NSA phone and email collections programs not only led U.S. investigators to the ringleader of a plot to attack New York's subway system in 2009, but also to one of his co-conspirators in the United States.
US spy agency paper says fewer than 300 phone numbers closely scrutinized
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) said the National Security Agency is not listening to the content of Americans’ phone calls. His comments on the CNN program “State of the Union” follow a report that lawmakers were informed in a classified briefing that the NSA does not need court authorization to listen to domestic calls.
Asked if he could provide assurance that calls were not being listened to or recorded by the U.S. government without warrants, Chairman Rogers replied, “absolutely.” “It is against the law for the NSA to record and monitor U.S., Americans’ phone calls. It is against the law, and the law is very clear on this,” Chairman Rogers said. “It would mean that the NSA had to conspire with the FBI, would have to conspire with both parties in Congress on the intelligence committees and the oversight functions in the executive branch to do something beyond what the law very narrowly allows. I find that implausible,” he added. “The NSA is not listening to Americans phone calls and it is not monitoring their emails. If it did it is illegal, it is breaking the law.”
House Intelligence chairman: NSA ‘not listening to Americans' phone calls’
The Obama Administration, under pressure to lift a cloak of secrecy, is considering whether to declassify a court order that gives the National Security Agency the power to gather phone call record information on millions of Americans. The document, known as a "primary order," complements a shorter Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court document leaked to The Guardian newspaper earlier this month. That document revealed the U.S. government had been asking Verizon Business Network Services Inc. to turn over, on a daily basis, phone call records for its subscribers, for 90 days.
Source: President Obama Considering Releasing NSA Court Order
A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs.
Many senators elected to leave Washington early June 13 afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials. Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity. The room on the lower level of the Capitol Visitor Center is large enough to fit the entire Senate membership, according to a Senate aide.
Senators skip classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home
In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers. Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider. The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government. Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate. Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans. This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to PRISM, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies.
Secret to PRISM Program: Even Bigger Data Seizure
On March 12, 2004, acting attorney general James B. Comey and the Justice Department’s top leadership reached the brink of resignation over electronic surveillance orders that they believed to be illegal. President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.
What exactly STELLARWIND did has never been disclosed in an unclassified form. Which parts of it did Comey approve? Which did he shut down? What became of the programs when the crisis passed and Comey, now Obama’s expected nominee for FBI director, returned to private life? Authoritative new answers to those questions, drawing upon a classified NSA history of STELLARWIND and interviews with high-ranking intelligence officials, offer the clearest map yet of the Bush-era programs and the NSA’s contemporary U.S. operations.
US surveillance architecture includes collection of revealing Internet, phone metadata
Government agencies requested information on somewhere between 18,000 and 19,000 Facebook accounts, according to a post on the company’s website.
The disclosures follow negotiations that Facebook and other tech companies have held with federal agencies over their desire to include requests approved under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those requests are approved by a secret court and even discussing the fact that the requests have ever been made has been prohibited by law. In the post, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot said that the company had received a total of between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from government agencies, meaning that about two accounts were involved for each request received. And that’s out of about 1.1 billion total Facebook accounts or about 0.0009 percent of total accounts. It’s unclear exactly how many times Facebook cooperated, and how many times and on what grounds it may have refused. The disclosure covers the six months ending December 31 of last year.
Governments Requested Information on as Many as 19,000 Facebook Accounts Facebook Reaches Agreement With Feds to Allow Data Request Disclosures (Wall Street Journal) Facebook releases information on NSA requests for user data (Los Angeles Times) Web companies begin releasing surveillance information after U.S. deal (Reuters)