Electronic surveillance

State sanctioned secrecy: NSA's criminality shield

Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the National Security Agency (NSA) telephone metadata program first exposed in June 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden “…may have violated the Fourth Amendment and did violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”) when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans…” The program was repeatedly reauthorized by Congress before finally (allegedly) being shelved in 2019, despite a Trump administration effort to revive legal authority for it. Snowden recognized the program’s inherent criminality and unconstitutional character, which is precisely why he exposed it — and why all pending federal charges against him should be dismissed with prejudice.

Unfortunately, NSA still has a critical legal tool to hide other criminal or unconstitutional acts: the six-decade old National Security Agency (NSA) Act of 1959 (P. L. 86-36).

Enacted at the height of the Cold War, the NSA Act gives the agency radically sweeping powers to withhold any information from public disclosure. Specifically, Section 6 of the Act states “…nothing in this Act or any other law…shall be construed to require the disclosure of the organization or any function of the National Security Agency, or any information with respect to the activities thereof, or of the names, titles, salaries, or number of the persons employed by such agency.”

Electronic surveillance

FBI and NSA violated surveillance law or privacy rules, a federal judge found

Two of the nation’s largest surveillance agencies repeatedly violated either the law or related court orders in incidents reported last year despite training on the procedures set up to protect the privacy of U.S. persons, a federal judge found.

The FBI flouted the law and the National Security Agency ignored a rule to safeguard civil liberties when these agencies gathered or searched emails and other communications gathered from U.S. tech and phone companies, under a statute designed to produce foreign intelligence, ruled Judge James E. Boasberg, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in a significant opinion made public Friday.

“It should be unnecessary to state that government officials are not free to decide for themselves whether or to what extent they should comply with court orders,” Boasberg wrote in the December 2019 opinion.

Electronic surveillance

Technology has abetted China’s surveillance state

China’s new networked surveillance and control systems are designed not just for domestic use, but also for export to 63 countries. Companies including Huawei, Hikvision and ZTE are securing new sources of revenue and data, as well as strategic leverage. The ties help Beijing counter, even silence, outside criticism of its autocratic and aggressive practices, such as Hong Kong’s new national security law. Step by step, Mr Xi and the party are turning China into the world’s most ambitious, well-funded and tightly organised research laboratory dedicated to exploring how technology can serve rather than undermine autocracy. The pretension and scope of the surveillance brings to mind George Orwell’s dystopian vision. “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it,” observed one character in Orwell’s 1984. Mr Xi is unlikely to disprove his rule.

Electronic surveillance


Tech-enabled 'terror capitalism' is spreading worldwide. The surveillance regimes must be stopped

The people being targeted by terror capitalism include entire stateless groups, such as ethnic Bengalis in north-east India and Palestinian Arabs. They are almost always from minority or refugee populations, especially Muslim ones. While the Chinese system is unique in terms of its scale and the depth of its cruelty, terror capitalism is an American invention, and it has taken root around the world.

In China, the terror capitalism system targets many of the more than 15 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslims in the region. Coercing these people into low-wage work means fewer Chinese jobs move to Vietnam and Bangladesh. The companies that have developed China’s policing technologies are now selling them to police units and regional governments in Zimbabwe, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, the Philippines and many other locations.

Meanwhile, across Europe and North America, terror-capital surveillance tools have placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims on watchlists as part of Countering Violent Extremism programs. In the United States, immigration control measures taken in the aftermath of 9/11 have paved the way for a system that monitors and controls asylum seekers who enter the country at the southern border.

Electronic surveillance


Inside the NSA’s Secret Tool for Mapping Your Social Network

IN THE SUMMER of 2013, I spent my days sifting through the most extensive archive of top-secret files that had ever reached the hands of an American journalist. In a spectacular act of transgression against the National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor, Edward Snowden had transmitted tens of thousands of classified documents to me, the columnist Glenn Greenwald, and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras.

One of those documents, the first to be made public in June 2013, revealed that the NSA was tracking billions of telephone calls made by Americans inside the US. The program became notorious, but its full story has not been told.

The first accounts revealed only bare bones. If you placed a call, whether local or international, the NSA stored the number you dialed, as well as the date, time and duration of the call. It was domestic surveillance, plain and simple. When the story broke, the NSA discounted the intrusion on privacy. The agency collected “only metadata,” it said, not the content of telephone calls. Only on rare occasions, it said, did it search the records for links among terrorists.

Electronic surveillance

BND: Court curbs German spy agency's bugging abroad

Germany's highest court has ruled that laws allowing the country's BND foreign intelligence service to spy on foreigners' telecommunications outside Germany breach fundamental rights.

The Constitutional Court case was brought by foreign journalists, who say the ruling is a win for press freedom.

The BND will no longer be able to monitor the emails or other data of foreigners abroad, without good reason.

Currently some of that data is passed on to other countries' spy agencies.

The key question considered by the court was whether the German state was bound by the protections of the constitution outside the country.

The BND (Federal Intelligence Service) is already barred from snooping on German citizens' internet data abroad but the new ruling means that German spies will only be able to monitor foreign nationals abroad if there is evidence of a threat.

Electronic surveillance

Can the FBI access your browser history if you use a VPN?

As many of you are aware, the US Senate recently passed a bill to extend elements of the Patriot Act. Notably, this legislation included parts that would increase the FBI and CIA’s ability to legally access your browser search history without a warrant.

Many organizations, including the ACLU, pushed for an amendment to this bill that would protect the internet privacy of American citizens. However, as of May 15, 2020, these amendments failed to pass. Since other amendments were made to the bill, it is currently being passed to the House of Representatives for another vote before being potentially signed into law.

This has some people wondering, “Can a VPN protect me from the FBI accessing my browsing history?”

Before we dive in, I think it’s important to address the elephant in the room. This is not a sponsored article. It does, however, contain affiliate links that give Android Authority a cut of profits if you choose to make a purchase through them. If you decide to pick up a VPN here, then you’ll be getting a quality VPN service while also helping us keep the lights on.

Electronic surveillance

Mitch McConnell is pushing the Senate to pass a measure that would let the FBI collect Americans' web-browsing history without a warrant

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing forward with an amendment that would let the FBI collect records on Americans' web-browsing and search histories without a warrant this week.

McConnell proposed the amendment as part of the renewal of the 2001 Patriot Act, The Daily Beast first reported. The Senate is voting on amendments this week.

The McConnell amendment would let Department of Justice officials — overseen by Attorney General Bill Barr — look through anyone's browsing history without the approval of a judge if they deem the browsing history relevant to an investigation. It blocks the FBI from accessing the "content" of people's web-browsing history but would let the FBI access records detailing which sites and search terms people entered.

Electronic surveillance

China is installing surveillance cameras outside people's front doors ... and sometimes inside their homes

The morning after Ian Lahiffe returned to Beijing, he found a surveillance camera being mounted on the wall outside his apartment door. Its lens was pointing right at him.

After a trip to southern China, the 34-year-old Irish expat and his family were starting their two-week home quarantine, a mandatory measure enforced by the Beijing government to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

He said he opened the door as the camera was being installed, without warning.

"(Having a camera outside your door is) an incredible erosion of privacy," said Lahiffe. "It just seems to be a massive data grab. And I don't know how much of it is actually legal."

Electronic surveillance

Would You Live In A Coronavirus Surveillance State If It Meant An End To Lockdown?

The coronavirus pandemic has already required millions of people to accept limits on their personal freedoms, as countries around the world have imposed lockdowns and enforced strict social distancing measures in an effort to control the spread of Covid-19.

Lifting those restrictions may require people to sacrifice a degree of personal privacy, however — raising concerns among politicians and civil liberties advocates.

Dozens of countries have implemented, or are developing, mobile apps and other technological surveillance systems that allow officials to monitor people’s movements, track the spread of the virus, and contain future outbreaks.

In China, residents have been required to download smartphone software that broadcasts their location to local authorities. A mandatory traffic light-style system determines whether people can move about or meet. Green means they are free to go about their daily lives, but individuals rated red or yellow are not allowed to travel or visit public places such as restaurants or shopping malls...

Electronic surveillance

The Surveillance State Thrives During the Pandemic

From cellphone tracking to drone eyes in the sky, perused health records, and GPS ankle bracelets, an epidemic of surveillance-state measures is spreading across the world. It's all done in the name of battling the spread of COVID-19, of course, since every crisis is used to justify incursions into our liberty. But long after the virus has done its worst and moved on, we're likely to be stuck with these invasions of our privacy—unless we push back, hard.

The rationales for surveillance are easy to understand, within certain limits. Public health authorities battling the pandemic want to know who is spreading the virus, which people they may have infected, and the movements of those potentially carrying the bug.

China, where the COVID-19 outbreak began, leveraged its already deeply intrusive system of social control to force people to install cellphone apps that assigned them a code according to (allegedly) their perceived risk of spreading contagion. Permission to travel or enter public spaces depended on that code even as the software also tracked their whereabouts and shared data on users' phones with the authorities.

Electronic surveillance

Dictatorships often start in the face of a threat’: UN privacy chief warns against long-lasting theft of freedoms amid coronavirus surveillance

Strict surveillance measures adopted to monitor citizens during coronavirus lockdowns could result in the long-lasting theft of personal freedoms, the United Nations’ privacy chief has warned.

“Dictatorships and authoritarian societies often start in the face of a threat,” Joseph Cannataci, the UN special rapporteur on the right to privacy told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“That is why it is important to be vigilant today and not give away all our freedoms”.

The coronavirus pandemic has led governments to declare themselves essentially on a war footing – with many politicians referencing an “invisible” enemy or attacker.

At the advice of health experts, even countries regarded as the world’s most liberal democracies have enforced quarantine measures thought unthinkable mere weeks ago.

Electronic surveillance

Snowden warns: The surveillance states we’re creating now will outlast the coronavirus

Governments around the world are using high-tech surveillance measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak. But are they worth it?

Edward Snowden doesn’t think so.

The former CIA contractor, whose leaks exposed the scale of spying programs in the US, warns that once this tech is taken out the box, it will be hard to put it back.

“When we see emergency measures passed, particularly today, they tend to be sticky,” Snowden said in an interview with the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival.

The emergency tends to be expanded. Then the authorities become comfortable with some new power. They start to like it.

Supporters of the draconian measures argue that normal rules are not enough during a pandemic and that the long-term risks can be addressed once the outbreak is contained. But a brief suspension of civil liberties can quickly be extended.

Electronic surveillance

As Coronavirus Surveillance Escalates, Personal Privacy Plummets

In South Korea, government agencies are harnessing surveillance-camera footage, smartphone location data and credit card purchase records to help trace the recent movements of coronavirus patients and establish virus transmission chains.

In Lombardy, Italy, the authorities are analyzing location data transmitted by citizens’ mobile phones to determine how many people are obeying a government lockdown order and the typical distances they move every day. About 40 percent are moving around “too much,” an official recently said.

In Israel, the country’s internal security agency is poised to start using a cache of mobile phone location data — originally intended for counterterrorism operations — to try to pinpoint citizens who may have been exposed to the virus.

Electronic surveillance

Surveillance Company Says It's Deploying 'Coronavirus-Detecting' Cameras in US

An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be carrying the coronavirus.

Athena Security is pitching the product to be used in grocery stores, hospitals, and voting locations. It claims to be deploying the product at several customer locations over the coming weeks, including government agencies, airports, and large Fortune 500 companies.

"Our Fever Detection COVID19 Screening System is now a part of our platform along with our gun detection system which connects directly to your current security camera system to deliver fast, accurate threat detection," Athena's website reads.

Athena previously sold software that it claims can detect guns and knives in video feeds and then send alerts to an app or security system.

Athena's new system claims to do much the same but for people exhibiting a fever, with the system designed to send an alert if it detects someone with a higher than normal body temperature, a company representative told Motherboard in an email.

Electronic surveillance

House leaders strike deal to renew surveillance law

The three expiring FISA provisions include “roving wiretap” authority for federal intelligence agents to surveil suspects who change phones, the power to monitor people acting as “lone wolves” — inspired by, but not necessarily at the direction of, foreign powers — and the ability to access business records and email metadata of suspects.

But the agreement could be thwarted by Senate Republicans or President Donald Trump, who has demanded significant changes to the surveillance programs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has sought to protect the expiring FISA provisions.

The FISA debate has been a tricky endeavor for both parties, with progressives and libertarians insisting on long-standing demands for civil liberties protections, while conservatives have aligned with Trump, who has accused intelligence agencies of abusing the surveillance authorities to monitor his 2016 campaign.

Electronic surveillance

Dressing for the Surveillance Age

Tom Goldstein, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, took an “invisibility cloak” from a pile on a chair in his office and pulled it on over his head. To my eye, it looked like a baggy sweatshirt made of glossy polyester, printed with garish colors in formless shapes that, far from turning Goldstein invisible, made him impossible to miss.

It was mid-January. Early that morning, in my search for a suitable outfit to thwart the all-seeing eyes of surveillance machines, I had taken the train from New York City to College Park. As I rode the subway from Brooklyn to Penn Station, and then boarded Amtrak for my trip south, I counted the CCTV cameras; at least twenty-six caught me going and returning. When you come from a small town, as I do, where everyone knows your face, public anonymity—the ability to disappear into a crowd—is one of the great pleasures of city living. As cities become surveillance centers, packed with cameras that always see, public anonymity could vanish. Is there anything fashion can do?

Electronic surveillance

FISA Reform and National Security

National security has become an afterthought in the latest national-security debate. The debate centers, instead, on what is called “FISA reform,” the imperative of which appears to be making foreign intelligence surveillance powers harder to use.

I’ve long been worried that this was the way the wind was blowing. That would be apparent to anyone who read Ball of Collusion, my book about the absurd political narrative that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election from Democrats through cyber-espionage operations (mainly hacking), after which the new president was to become the Kremlin’s agent in the White House.

This narrative fueled a wide-ranging government investigation, launched by the Obama administration. Under the rubric of highly classified foreign counterintelligence operations, the investigation prominently featured FBI spying on the Trump campaign. (As I noted yesterday, the New York Times is back to describing the FBI’s covert monitoring as “spying,” so I’m assuming the era of garment rending at utterance of the dread s-word is over.)

In the course of that investigation, as catalogued by the Justice Department’s inspector general and highlighted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI serially abused its authority: providing misleading information to the FISC, falsifying a key document, running confidential informants at Trump campaign surrogates in the absence of a sound investigative predicate, making public statements that suggested the president was a criminal suspect (while privately telling him he was not), making private statements (dozens of them) that have convinced reasonable people that bureau decisions were influenced by political bias, and so on.

Electronic surveillance

The Government is Using its Foreign Intelligence Spying Powers for Routine Domestic Investigations

More than forty years ago, Congress gave the executive branch a set of exceptional surveillance powers to pursue foreign spies on U.S. soil. Now, the government is increasingly relying on those powers to advance ordinary domestic criminal investigations.

In United States v. Osseily, a fraud prosecution in California, the government appears to have used this surveillance — which is conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — to wiretap a longtime permanent resident of the U.S., Abdallah Osseily.

Mr. Osseily is a small business owner and a father of three. The government has charged him with bank and immigration fraud — charges that have nothing to do with “foreign intelligence” or “national security.” Indeed, the government has presented no evidence that Mr. Osseily ever acted on behalf of a foreign government. On top of all this, the government is trying to block Mr. Osseily from learning almost anything that would help him challenge this controversial surveillance.

Electronic surveillance

Anti-Surveillance Advocates Sue MTA Over Alleged Use Of Facial Recognition Technology

A nonprofit watchdog group is suing the MTA to get information about a video monitor installed in Times Square to deter fare evasion, which drew suspicions that the agency is deploying facial recognition technology.

In a lawsuit filed in state Supreme Court on Monday, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), an advocacy group which fights against local and state-level surveillance, charged the MTA with stonewalling its efforts to verify the agency's contention that the cameras had no facial recognition component.

"I want to finally get to the bottom of this," Albert Fox, STOP's founder and executive director told Gothamist in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Concerns over the MTA's surveillance strategies surfaced last April when Alice Fung, a New York Times employee, tweeted a photo of a large monitor above a subway turnstile in Times Square that had the phrases, "Recording in progress" and "Pay your fare."