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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.
Silicon Valley firms deny giving government broad access to data What the Tech Industry and Politicians Are Saying About NSA’s Massive Data Collection (WSJ – Quotes) Internet companies, government telling different tales (Politico)
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.
The Laws That Make It Easy for the Government to Spy on Americans PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back (The Atlantic)
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.
Key to government’s monitoring power lies in war, technology PRISM's Legal Basis: How We Got Here, and What We Can Do to Get Back (The Atlantic)
[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.
US public should know about government collection of phone, Internet records
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.
Europeans call for answers over U.S. web spying allegations
[Commentary] We can debate whether government access to our phone records and web data is making us safer or obliterating our civil liberties. But the reality is that in the tech era, which we have already entered, what we used to think of as privacy is becoming a relic. Before we know it, products like Google Glass will record everything we see and hear. Expect cameras and sensors to be everywhere in public places and office buildings and on drones. Face recognition technology will identify and track us. There will be all sorts of data collected about us from many sources.
The real debate we need to have centers around what is being done with these data. We will readily allow Google to track our searches, learn our likes and dislikes, and incorporate the advice of our friends so that it can recommend where we travel or what restaurants we choose. But should these data also be used to market to us? Should Google be allowed to share our data with third parties—and governments? And then the bigger question: how do we reign in government? We can’t stop the gathering of data, but we can surely limit its use. We can also put limits on the time that tech companies and governments are allowed to keep these data.
That is the real battle that needs to be fought.
The next big national intelligence debate
[Commentary] Verizon Business, a subsidiary of the giant telecoms operator Verizon, has been ordered to supply the National Security Agency with call records of all its customers for three months ending on July 19. It's a good bet that this isn't the first such order, and that other telcos are supplying the same information. This is less surprising that it should be. The world's biggest internet companies got rich doing exactly the same thing.
Like the security apparatus, they too are eager to gather every last speck of information about you. One group does it to target better ads and build more omniscient products. The other does it in the interests of national security. Internet activists are rightly concerned by the consolidation of power in the world's largest internet companies. But they seem lilliputian compared to gigantic volumes of data quietly being accumulated by governments. To call it Orwellian would be a cliché; it is just plain terrifying.
What Google and NSA Snoops Have in Common
The revelation that the National Security Agency seems to be collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers is shocking, but it's actually part of a growing trend in which governments worldwide are relying on widespread, unrestricted surveillance in the name of national security.
A report released by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the freedom of opinion and expression found that as communications systems have advanced, nations all over the world are increasingly logging and monitoring communications data, many even without just cause: "Changes in technology have been paralleled by changes in attitudes towards communications surveillance. When the practice of official wiretapping first commenced in the United States of America, it was conducted on a restricted basis, and was only reluctantly sanctioned by the courts. Over time, however, States have expanded their powers to conduct surveillance, lowering the threshold and increasing the justifications for such surveillance." In the worst cases, countries are actually listening in on their own citizens, remotely hacking into their computers and turning on Web cameras, or logging in and intercepting Skype calls.
Actually, Most Countries Are Increasingly Spying on Their Citizens, the UN Says
[Commentary] It's hard to argue against the notion that federal authorities need to do all that they can to defend America from terrorist attacks. But the revelations about Prism, the intelligence gathering program that involves data mining Internet traffic records tapped from Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook raises a sticky dilemma.
In this age of Internet-connected smartphones and touch tablets -- and pervasive use of social media -- it's possible to triangulate not just our personal preferences but also who we associate with and where we go during the course of an ordinary day. The tech companies who are guiding us deeper into the Internet cloud, and performing this triangulation, are doing so to profile us to sell targeted advertising. PRISM exists because this rich intelligence is useful for keeping terrorists in check. The question now becomes one of balancing national security interests against an individual’s right to privacy.
Data mining pits national security vs. personal privacy
Do the revelations about National Security Agency phone and Internet surveillance point to the end of privacy, law, and the Constitution? Nope.
There are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that these "scandals" signal a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties. Despite this apparent breadth, there are a lot of reasons to be cautious about rushing to the conclusion that it signals a massive, lawless new intrusion into Americans' civil liberties. The order seems to come from the court established to oversee intelligence gathering that touches the United States. Right off the bat, that means that this is not some warrantless or extrastatutory surveillance program. The government had to convince up to a dozen life-tenured members of the federal judiciary that the order was lawful. You may not like the legal interpretation that produced this order, but you can't say it's lawless. In fact, it's a near certainty that the legal theory behind orders of this sort has been carefully examined by all three branches of the government and by both political parties.
Why the NSA Needs Your Phone Calls…