Tag: mass surveillance

FBI Made ‘Inappropriate Use’ of Foreign Surveillance Program To Spy on Americans

A White House advisory board has recommended that Congress place new restrictions on the FBI’s access to a foreign surveillance tool to prevent the bureau from using it to spy on Americans’ electronic communications.

That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was intended to track foreign spies and potential terrorists but has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications. In the report published Monday, the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board said the FBI’s use of the databases created by Section 702 should be limited to investigations dealing with foreign intelligence—the same standard that is used at the other intelligence agencies with access to that data.

“FBI’s use of Section 702 should be limited to foreign intelligence purposes only and FBI personnel should receive additional training on what foreign intelligence entails,” the report recommends. The report says the FBI has made “inappropriate use of Section 702 authorities, specifically U.S. person queries.”

While the full scope of Section 702 data collection remains unknown, there’s no doubt about the FBI’s aggressive use of the database. In 2021, for example, the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database, according to a government transparency report. Separately, a 2021 report from the secret federal court responsible for adjudicating FISA-related matters documented 40 instances in which the FBI accessed surveillance data as part of investigations into a host of purely domestic crimes, including health care fraud and public corruption.

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The Government Wants to Turn Blockchain Firms into Servants of the State

In recent years, blockchain surveillance (BS) companies have become increasingly important players in the cryptocurrency industry. Their business model consists in developing proprietary software that collects and interprets public data available on public blockchains and in selling their services to governments, banks, exchanges, and others that need access to this data. Usually, governments are interested in collecting information about financial crimes, while other institutional players use BS companies for compliance, especially with regard to customer due diligence. This article argues that BS companies can be understood as governmentalities.

Michael Rectenwald deploys this term to “refer to corporations and other non-state actors who actively undertake state functions.” The partnership between the state and BS companies threatens cryptocurrency users’ privacy and their ability to transact freely, away from the prying eyes of unwanted third parties.

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Homeland agency expanded authority to wage ‘domestic surveillance and censorship,’ House report says

Secret documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that a Department of Homeland Security agency “expanded its mission to surveil Americans’ speech on social media, colluded with Big Tech and government-funded third parties to censor by proxy, and tried to hide its plainly unconstitutional activities from the public,” according to an interim staff report released Monday night.

The findings add details to reporting by Just the News about the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its work with private entities to remove, throttle and label purported misinformation on elections, Hunter Biden and COVID-19 — efforts that might even constitute election meddling and sometimes target true content.

The “severe public outcry” in spring 2022 against DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board, shuttered a few months later, so alarmed CISA and its advisors that they “tried to cover their tracks” on censorship and surveillance, which “included scrubbing CISA’s website of references to domestic ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,'” the report says.

By outsourcing its “censorship operation” to a CISA-funded nonprofit in the wake of First Amendment litigation by Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general, CISA was “implicitly admitting that its censorship activities are unconstitutional,” House Judiciary Republicans said.

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The EU Wants To Make It Legal To Install Spyware on Journalists’ Devices

In a contentious turn, EU leaders have unveiled draft legislation permitting national security agencies to deploy spyware on journalists’ phones in certain circumstances. The move has obviously triggered an outcry from media and civil society organizations, who argue that the draft European Media Freedom Act could be a perilous weapon against the press.

Sophie in’t Veld, a Dutch Member of the European Parliament (MEP) who has been integral in the European Parliament’s inquiry into the use of Pegasus spyware against journalists and prominent figures, termed the reasoning behind the draft as mendacious. “I think what the council is doing is unacceptable. It’s also incomprehensible. Well, it’s incomprehensible if they are serious about democracy,” in’t Veld remarked.

A striking aspect of the draft’s release was the absence of an in-person meeting involving ministers in charge of media affairs, which typically precedes such announcements.

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UK Home Secretary Uses Idea of Keeping Children Safe as a Justification To Demand Ban on Private Messaging

It would be extremely refreshing to hear a government official in the UK, or in a number of other countries, make a, “think of the encryption” plea – which would show they understand the very fundamentals of a safe and privacy-preserving internet.

But instead, we are getting more and more “think of the children” platitudes – as always, designed not to actually do that, but mask other, controversial and unpopular policies.

This time, it is UK’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman who claims that her opposition to Facebook’s slow-moving, alleged attempt to make a number of its products safe via implementing end-to-end encryption has to do with fears that children might get abused online.

Any tech-literate person would present the big picture, and argue quite the opposite, but Braverman is either not one of those, or elects to pretend not to be, in order to serve a policy that is staunchly anti-encryption, for a whole different reason – summed up, that technology stands severely annoyingly, no doubt, in the way of governments’ wholesale mass surveillance of everybody on the internet.

And what better place to twist the narrative about fears of awful things like child grooming and sexual abuse – perversely juxtaposed with actually improving internet security, i.e., encryption – than a get-together of the (in)famous “Five Eyes,” held in one eager member – New Zealand.

Braverman made an effort to write to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and, ignoring the reality of what an internet without encryption would turn into, tried, no doubt, above all to pull at her constituents’ heartstrings:

“As a mother to young children,” the politician stomped her feet, “I won’t stand by idly and watch this happen,” The Daily Mail reported.

“This” would be – platforms like Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct introducing secure communications, so that third parties – be they criminals, malign (foreign) actors, or (sometimes (effectively malign) domestic law enforcement – cannot just swoop in and use personal information in any way they please, including to directly harm those participating, children included, by gaining unfettered access to all their data.

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Obama suggests ‘digital fingerprints’ to counter misinformation ‘so we know what’s true and what’s not true’

Former President Barack Obama suggested in a new interview the development of “digital fingerprints” to combat misinformation and distinguish between true and misleading news for consumers.

Obama sat down with his former White House senior adviser David Axelrod for a conversation on the latter’s podcast, “The Axe Files,” on CNN Audio. During the interview, Axelrod noted he’s seen “misinformation, disinformation, [and] deepfakes” targeting Obama.

“As I’ve told people, because I was the first digital president when I left office, I was probably the most recorded, filmed, photographed human in history, which is kind of a weird thing,” responded Obama. “But just the odds are that I was. As a consequence, there’s a lot of raw material there.”

The former president added that the deepfakes — digitally manipulated images, audio or video that appear legitimate — started with a version of him dancing, “saying dirty limericks” and similar kinds of activity.

“That technology’s here now,” continued Obama, who warned about the issue getting worse moving forward. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

He then suggested “digital fingerprints” to discern truth from misinformation.

“And the need for us, for the general public, I think to be more discriminating consumers of news and information, the need for us to over time develop technologies to create watermarks or digital fingerprints so we know what is true and what is not true,” he said. “There’s a whole bunch of work that’s going to have to be done there, but in the short term, it’s really going to be up to the American people to kind of say.”

Obama and Axelrod went on to say that today many consumers are only viewing information from sources they are predisposed to agree with and will likely believe what they see.

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“Nightmare Scenario”: US Government Has Been Secretly Stockpiling Dirt On Americans Via Data Brokers

The US Government has been purchasing troves of information on American citizens from 3rd party data providers, according to Wired, which cites privacy advocates who say this constitutes a “nightmare scenario.”

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. -Wired

“This report reveals what we feared most,” according to attorney Sean Vitka of the Demand Progress nonprofit. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.”

The government has been using ‘craven interpretations of aging laws’ to bypass privacy rights, as prosecutors have increasingly ignored limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance.

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).

During a March 8 hearing, Wyden pressed Haines to release the panel’s report – after Haines said it should “absolutely” be read by the public. On Friday, that’s exactly what happened after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released it amid a battle with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over various related documents.

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The CIA Is Begging Congress to Please Keep Spying on U.S. Citizens Legal

High-level officials from the CIA, FBI, and NSA are testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, asking Congress to continue allowing the agency to spy on the communications of US citizens. They are urging Congress to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—one of the nation’s most hotly contested government surveillance programs. Intelligence agencies have long cited the powerful 2008 FISA provision as an invaluable tool to effectively combat global terrorism, but critics, including an increasing number of lawmakers from both parties, say those same agencies have morphed the provision into an unchecked, warrantless domestic spying tool. The provision is set to expire at the end of this year.

Federal agents urged lawmakers to reauthorize 702 without adding new reforms that could potentially slow down or impair operators’ access to intelligence. The officials danced around advocates’ concerns of civil liberty violations and instead chose to focus on a wide array of purported national security threats they say could become reality without the “model piece of legislation.” Multiple intelligence agents speaking Tuesday invoked the specter of September 11th and warned lawmakers new safeguards limiting agents’ ability to rapidly access and share intelligence on Americans could risk a repeat scenario.

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The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens

THE UNITED STATES government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. 

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders. 

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system’s cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon, says. 

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WIRED was unable to reach any members of the senior advisory panel, whose names have been redacted in the report. Former members have included ex-CIA officials of note and top defense industry leaders.

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The Bizarre Reality of Getting Online in North Korea

FOR 25 MILLION North Koreans, the internet is an impossibility. Only a few thousand privileged members of the hermit kingdom’s society can access the global internet, while even the country’s heavily censored internal intranet is out of reach for the majority of the population. Getting access to free and open information isn’t an option.

New research from South Korea-based human rights organization People for Successful Corean Reunification (Pscore) details the reality for those who—in very limited circumstances—manage to get online in North Korea. The report reveals a days-long approval process to gain internet access, after which monitors sit next to people while they browse and approve their activities every five minutes. Even then, what can be accessed reveals little about the world outside North Korea’s borders.

Documentation from the NGO is being presented today at the human rights conference RightsCon and sheds light on the regime with the most limited internet freedoms, which fall far below the restrictive and surveilled internet access in China and Iran. For millions of people in North Korea, the internet simply doesn’t exist.

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