Surveillance

One of President Donald Trump’s top advisers called on Congress to reauthorize authorities that gives intelligence agencies the ability to collect and analyze communications of foreigners outside the US Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert said Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—set to expire in December—is the best means for intelligence agencies to monitor terrorist threats en masse given today’s internet-driven world.

“The terrorist threat isn’t going to sunset, so the authority shouldn’t either,” he said at the Intelligence and National Security Summit.The provision in the FISA amendment act dates back to 2008 and previously reauthorized in 2012. While the intelligence community including the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency has advocated for its renewal, Section 702 has critics in Congress and among privacy advocates. Critics contend the authority allows intelligence agencies to scoop up emails, text messages and other communications of Americans who communicate with foreign targets or mention potential targets in conversations with non-targeted foreigners.

Artificial intelligence is giving rise to unprecedented capabilities for surveillance, from facial recognition at bridge crossings to the ability to identify thousands of people at once. Now, new research suggests that AI could potentially be used to identify people who have taken steps to conceal their identities by wearing hats, sunglasses, or scarves over their faces.

When the Obama administration was designing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), privacy was a chief concern for immigration advocates, who worried about having undocumented immigrants identify themselves to the government. So US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) vowed it would wall off that data, protecting it from other agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that wanted to use it for deportation purposes. But because DACA was merely a policy, not a law, even the framers of this process knew full well that that promise to Dreamers was not binding. Even if the Dreamer data remains confidential, however, immigration advocates fear that ICE already has all the information it needs to target Dreamers where they work.

One reason many Dreamers applied for the program, after all, is to receive a work permit. Many employers use a system called e-verify to keep tabs on their employees’ immigration statuses. If President Donald Trump reverses DACA protections and stops renewing those permits, there’s not much stopping ICE from showing up at an employer's office the day after an employee's DACA permit expires.

Government requests for the mass disclosure of every caller who connected to a particular cellphone tower have spiked during the first half of 2017, according to Verizon’s latest transparency report. Law enforcement seek so-called tower dumps to try to identify a suspect in a crime, compelling tower operators to provide the phone numbers of all devices that connected to a specific tower during a given period of time. “This tool is being used much more frequently by law enforcement,” Verizon said in the report.

Verizon has received approximately 8,870 warrants or court orders for cell tower dumps in the first half of this year — a huge increase over 2013, when the government sought only 3,200 dumps across the whole of that year. In 2016, the total figure was 14,630. Law enforcement demands for customer data totaled at 138,773 for the first half of the year — relatively steady with six-month segments over the past two years. Verizon rejected around 3 percent of requests, granting around 68,000 subpoenas, 700 wiretap demands and about 4,000 “trap and trace” orders that let investigators see what phone numbers are calling a target in real time.

The acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency charged with deportations, has confirmed in a new letter that it does not use cell-site simulators, also known as stingrays, to locate undocumented immigrants. In the August 16 letter, which was sent to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), acting Director Thomas Homan wrote that, since October 2015, ICE has followed similar guidelines put in place by the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security a month earlier, which require a warrant before deploying a stingray. Sen Wyden has also recently sent a similar letter to the Department of Justice, which has not yet responded.

Fourteen of the biggest US tech companies filed a brief with the Supreme Court on Aug 14 supporting more rigorous warrant requirements for law enforcement seeking certain cell phone data, such as location information. In the statement, the signatories—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft among them—argue that the government leans on outdated laws from the 1970s to justify Fourth Amendment overreach. One perhaps surprising voice in the chorus of protesters? Verizon.

Verizon's support means that the largest wireless service provider in the US, and a powerful force in Silicon Valley, has bucked a longtime trend of telecom acquiescence. While carriers have generally been willing to comply with a broad range of government requests—even building out extensive infrastructure to aid surveillance—Verizon has this time joined with academics, analysts, and the company’s more privacy-focused corporate peers. Carpenter v. United States is “one of the most important Fourth Amendment cases in recent memory,” wrote Craig Silliman, Verizon’s executive vice president for public policy and general counsel. “Although the specific issue presented to the Court is about location information, the case presents a broader issue about a customer’s reasonable expectation of privacy for other types of sensitive data she shares with any third party.… Our hope is that when it decides this case, the Court will help us better apply old Fourth Amendment doctrines to an evolving digital era.”

Computer companies are standing with a web hosting company that is facing a search warrant obtained by the Department of Justice to 1.3 million IP addresses of an anti-Trump protest web site. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose members include Amazon, Facebook, Google, and eBay, came to the company's defense.

“CCIA supports DreamHost and calls on DOJ to revise this request, and reassess its search warrant practices to respect the First and Fourth Amendments," said CCIA President Ed Black. “U.S. tech companies are often compelled to resist sweeping dragnets aimed at political dissent from foreign regimes. The U.S. government itself has criticized countries that target political dissent with criminal process. We would urge DOJ to consider the consequences of such requests both in terms of emboldening countries like China and in the message this sends to democratic allies.”

A Los Angeles-based tech company is resisting a federal demand for more than 1.3 million IP addresses to identify visitors to a website set up to coordinate protests on Inauguration Day — a request whose breadth the company says violates the Constitution. “What we have is a sweeping request for every single file we have” in relation to DisruptJ20.org, said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, which hosts the site. “The search warrant is not only dealing with everything in relation to the website but also tons of data about people who visited it.”

The request also covers e-mails between the site’s organizers and people interested in attending the protests, any deleted messages and files, as well as subscriber information — such as names and addresses — and unpublished photos and blog posts that are stored in the site’s database, according to the warrant and Ghazarian. The request, which DreamHost made public Aug 14, set off a storm of protest among civil liberties advocates and within the tech community. “What you’re seeing is pure prosecutorial overreach by a politicized Justice Department, allowing the Trump administration to use prosecutors to silence critics,” Ghazarian said.

More than a dozen high technology companies and the biggest wireless operator in the United States, Verizon, have called on the US Supreme Court to make it harder for government officials to access individuals' sensitive cellphone data. The companies filed a 44-page brief with the court Aug 14 in a high-profile dispute over whether police should have to get a warrant before obtaining data that could reveal a cellphone user's whereabouts.

Signed by some of Silicon Valley's biggest names, including Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Snap, and Alphabet's Google, the brief said that as individuals' data is increasingly collected through digital devices, greater privacy protections are needed under the law. "That users rely on technology companies to process their data for limited purposes does not mean that they expect their intimate data to be monitored by the government without a warrant," the brief said.

Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads. The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.