Surveillance

President Donald Trump refused to authorize the release of a Democratic rebuttal to a Republican intelligence committee memo alleging that FBI and Justice Department officials abused their power to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. The White House said it could not release the Democrats' memo because the Justice Department "has identified portions...which it believes would create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests." That explanation stands in stark contrast to his release of the GOP memo.

With government access to foreign communications much on the minds of Washington legislators these days--particularly a FISA Act warrant related to a Trump Administration official--a bipartisan group of Congressmen is introducing the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act.

[Commentary] China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism.

Department of Homeland Security draft report from late January called on authorities to continuously vet Sunni Muslim immigrants deemed to have “at-risk” demographic profiles.

The New York Times is asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to unseal secret documents related to the wiretapping of Carter Page, the onetime Donald Trump campaign adviser at the center of a disputed memo written by Republican staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. The motion is unusual. No such wiretapping application materials apparently have become public since Congress first enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.

[Commentary] I voted to release the Nunes memo because I believe that the duty to inform the American public is one of my biggest responsibilities as an elected representative in our democratic republic. This is in accordance with the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, which directed House and Senate committees to “exercise continuous watchfulness” over executive-branch programs.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) says Congress late last year received “extraordinarily important new documents” in its investigation of President Donald Trump and his campaign’s possible collusion with the 2016 Russian election hacking, opening up significant new lines of inquiry in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe of the president.

At the center of the firestorm over a congressional memo that President Trump and his allies say reveals federal authorities’ missteps is a 40-year-old law passed in the wake of explosive domestic spying scandals. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) grew from congressional investigations into spy agencies’ eavesdropping on Americans, including civil rights activists and protesters against the Vietnam War, without warrants. The law created a warrant requirement for federal authorities to intercept the communications of anyone in the United States, including foreigners.

Early in Jan, in the days after Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said he'd be moving forward with a plan to require thousands of Detroit businesses to buy into a costly surveillance program intended to reduce crime, a sponsored post that looked favorably upon the program appeared at the top of our Facebook timeline. The linked content — "Inside the Real Time Crime Center, DPD's 24-hour monitoring station" — had all of the trappings of a news story. There was a headline, a byline, a mix of quotes and information.

Verizon is pleased to release our Transparency Report for the second half of 2017. This is our ninth Transparency Report. As in the past, this report describes the different types of demands we receive and the types of data that we disclose in response to those demands. The number of demands that we have received each year continues to be fairly stable since we released our first report.