The NSA’s Utah data centre, as taken by the EFF.
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Tag: United States
Low-level federal judges balking at law enforcement requests for electronic evidence:
Among the most aggressive opinions have come from D.C. Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola, a bow-tied court veteran who in recent months has blocked wide-ranging access to the Facebook page of Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and the iPhone of the Georgetown University student accused of making ricin in his dorm room. In another case, he deemed a law enforcement request for the entire contents of an e-mail account “repugnant” to the U.S. Constitution.
For these and other cases, Facciola has demanded more focused searches and insisted that authorities delete collected data that prove unrelated to a current investigation rather than keep them on file for unspecified future use. He also has taken the unusual step, for a magistrate judge, of issuing a series of formal, written opinions that detail his concerns, even about previously secret government investigations.
“For the sixth time,” Facciola wrote testily, using italics in a ruling this month, “this Court must be clear: if the government seizes data it knows is outside the scope of the warrant, it must either destroy the data or return it. It cannot simply keep it.”
Broad based access to telecommunications information can be extremely revealing: law enforcement know this, civil advocates (and defence attorneys) know this, and (increasingly) justices know this. And as justices in particular become more cognizant of just what law enforcement agencies are accessing, and of authorities’ decisions to not target their searches but instead collect (and retain) the entirety of people’s personal information, we’ll see more and more pushback against authorities’ overreaches.
Politics and justice tend to move slowly, often to the point where they ‘lag’ a decade or more behind technology and social norms. However, even these conservative systems tend to eventually correct themselves. As federal American judges ‘balk’ at over collection we’ll see these issues of evidence collection rise through the courts until, hopefully, a good ruling is issued by the Supreme Court of the United States. And then we’ll move onto the next overreach that authorities identify and begin exploiting…
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2014.3.20
It is disconcerting to realize that the reassessment of classification policy described by Mr. Litt was not prompted by the diligent exercise of congressional oversight or by judicial review or by ordinary advocacy. Rather it was explicitly inspired by the Snowden leaks, which Mr. Litt described as “criminal.” The upshot is that leaks emerge as a uniquely powerful tool for shaping intelligence classification policy, while conventional checks and balances appear all but irrelevant by comparison.
Moreover, the purpose of the newfound push for greater transparency seems to be instrumental, not principled. In other words, it is driven by tactical considerations, not by statutory requirements or any other objective norm.
“I strongly believe that the best way to prevent the damage that leakers can cause is by increased transparency on our part,” Mr. Litt said. “Transparency can both lessen the incentive for disaffected employees to disclose our activities improperly, and provide the public appropriate context to evaluate leaks when they occur.”
That implies that what is needed is only as much transparency as it takes to achieve these imprecise and transient goals. It is a unilateral move that can be unilaterally reversed.
Steve Aftergood, “ODNI Rethinks Secrecy and Openness in Intelligence”
The security design of the system as implemented in tests so far will require a national certificate infrastructure much like that used for preventing domain spoofing and securing the Web. It will require a database of certificates—like the X.509 certificates used in public key infrastructure (PKI)—to verify that devices are legitimate and make it possible to rescind permissions to ensure that no one can send out spoofed messages. If a certificate were to become compromised or if a manufacturer misconfigured a batch of V2V systems, the certificate authority would be able to revoke the associated certificate. This prevents spoofing much in the way that DNS SEC prevents the “poisoning” of Internet domain address tables by a rogue Domain Name Service server.
The problem is that no one has ever developed a PKI system large enough to handle every vehicle in the United States—every car, truck, bus, and motorcycle. The revocation table for expired or compromised certificates would have to be distributed constantly to cars to make sure they weren’t victimized by recorded data attacks or other systems that used hacked hardware to spoof traffic.
So far, there hasn’t been any agreement yet on how this PKI would distribute its certificates. Proposals have included having roadside systems issue certificates as vehicles drive by and having certificates sent to vehicles out-of-band over cellular connections. The latter would mean that every car in the country would have to have its own integrated cellular phone or that drivers would have to connect their phones regularly to the systems to ensure they didn’t get shut out of the network.
Oh yes, please: let’s build a mass communications network dependent on a (largely) creaky Certificate system, deploy the devices to the attackers (i.e. car owners), and just trust that no one’s gonna hack a mass, nation-wide, Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications network.
Also: taking bets on it being an escrowed certificate system. For public safety and all that good stuff.
Categories
2013.11.11
Generally it takes an incident to focus attention on the issue of informational privacy – and such incidents tend to focus on one type of record system at a time. This human interest element helps to define the policy problem, galvanize media and public attention, and give members of Congress concrete examples of privacy invasion to justify their votes. There is always vocal and well-financed opposition to privacy protections, generally from business and government bureaucrats who do not want to restrict access to information. Their opposition is usually quite successful in weakening the proposed privacy protections and in further narrowing the scope of such protections. And after passage opponents are likely the challenge legislation in the courts, often on the basis of First Amendment grounds that any information, including that about individuals, should flow freely and without government restrictions.
Priscilla M. Regan (2008), “The United States,” in Global Privacy Protection: The First Generation, James B. Rule and Graham Greenlead (eds.).
Zombie Kerry and his horde of zombies are displeased that you don’t support bombing Syria.
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2013.8.20
In the UK, the public, press, and politicians vigorously debated the Communications Data Bill, a law that would require ISPs and telecommunications providers to keep metadata records for 12 months (as of this writing, the bill has been withdrawn). The US had no discussion of such a bill; something more draconian simply happened through a secret interpretation of the law.
Susan Landau, “Making Sense from Snowden”
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2013.8.19
In 2012, the Migration Policy Institute reported that immigration and border enforcement spending totaled almost $18 billion. That is 24 percent more than the $14.4 billion combined budgets in the last fiscal year of the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add the billions anticipated in the Senate bill, and you have what the trade publication Homeland Security Today calls a “treasure trove” for contractors in the border security industry.
Projected as an approximately $19 billion industry in 2013, defense contractors seem, in the words of one representative from a small surveillance technology company hoping to jump into the border security market, to be “bringing the battlefield to the border.“
Todd Miller, “War on the Border”
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2013.8.16
I suppose everything Alexander said was technically true, since the “congressional review” was different from the “NSA audit”, but it’s still gross deception. He acts with the ethics of the head of a police state. We should either upgrade him to the title he deserves, “Chief of the Secret Police”, or ask for his resignation.
Robert Graham, Errata Security
Categories
2013.8.10
All four of Obama’s proposed reforms are useful. The second is adding an adversary to proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which has the power to approve secret warrants. Another is to assemble a committee that would issue a report about the balance between liberty and security. And then there’s a call to increase transparency. Some of this area’s elements are cosmetic—a new Web site for the N.S.A., for example, for which one hopes there is a better graphic designer than whoever puts together the agency’s classified PowerPoint presentations—and others are important but fragmentary. Obama said he’d make public the “legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215.” That is good, but legal rationales, for this and all other collection activities, are not things that should ever be fully classified in the first place. How an agency proceeds in a given case is one thing, but what it and we understand our rights to be should never be secret.
Source: http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/08/nsa-dirty-dishes-obama-press-conference.html
You’ll forgive me if thinking that releasing details of how laws are secretly interpreted constitutes ‘transparency’ to any reasonable degree. Though I’m well aware that a vast portion of American jurisprudence is effectively withheld from the public (you have to pay for access to PACER to see how legislation has actually been interpreted by courts, thus excluding individuals from understanding their laws and court processes) it is inexcusable that POTUS thinks that making their rationales public is sufficient. What is legal is not necessarily right nor constitutional, and dragnet surveillance of the world’s communications is an inexcusable affront to basic human freedoms and liberties in today’s digital era.
Excited Pixels 