Tag: warrantless surveillance

Are The Feds Buying Gun Data On Private Citizens Without A Warrant? 

The Biden Administration has shown time and time again how they weaponize federal law enforcement agencies against gun owners.

A recent report by the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security highlighted how several DHS component agencies, including the Secret Service, bought Americans’ phone location data without a court order.

Several other agencies, including the IRS, FBI, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, also admitted to using data brokers to sidestep American’s Fourth Amendment rights.

Under normal circumstances, a Judge would need to issue a warrant to collect this kind of data, but in this case, private companies act as a middleman between your data and the government by scraping anywhere that personal data is publicly available. Government lawyers have decided that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to Americans’ personal data — if the government buys it from data brokers.

Using the same quasi-legal methods used to obtain phone location data, federal law enforcement agencies may have already targeted gun owners by purchasing email lists and data sets that contain location, name, and other personal information from data brokers.

Several sites promote their extensive list of “Shooting Fanatics,” “Concealed carry licensed gun owners,” and even “New York City Gun Owners”! These lists are perfect targets for an administration focused on attacking the individual right to keep and bear arms.

With these lists, the Biden Administration’s law enforcement agencies could purchase and misuse the personal information of millions of gun owners without a single warrant or court order.

Keep reading

NSA secretly buying Americans’ data without a warrant

The National Security Agency has secretly been buying Americans’ internet records and using them for spying purposes without obtaining a warrant, a senior senator revealed Thursday.

Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat, said the practice had been a “legal gray area,” with data brokers quietly obtaining and reselling the internet “metadata” without the users’ consent. He said the NSA has been trying to keep the whole thing under wraps.

In a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, the senator said the government needs a “wake-up call,” and he called for new rules limiting purchases only to data that Americans have consented to be sold.

He also asked for Ms. Haines to take an inventory of what the government already has and toss out any information that doesn’t meet the standard of consent.

“The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal,” he said.

He released a letter from Army General Paul M. Nakasone, director of the NSA, detailing and justifying the agency’s actions.

Gen. Nakasone said it acquires what it calls “commercially available information” but said the acquisitions are limited. They don’t include location data from phones “known to be used in the United States,” and they don’t buy or use location data from automobiles in the U.S.

They do buy “non-content” data “where one side of the communication is a U.S. Internet Protocol address and the other is located abroad.”

The general said that information was critical for “the U.S. Defense Industrial Base.”

“NSA understands and greatly values the congressional and public trust it has been granted to carry out its critical foreign intelligence and cybersecurity missions on behalf of the American people,” Gen. Nakasone wrote.

In a separate letter, Under Secretary of Defense Ronald S. Moultrie defended the legality.

“I am not aware of any requirement in U.S. law or judicial opinion … that DoD obtain a court order in order to acquire, access or use information, such as CAI, that is equally available for purchase to foreign adversaries, U.S. companies and private persons as it is to the U.S. government,” he wrote.

Mr. Wyden, though, says the legal landscape may have just changed.

Keep reading

The NDAA’s ‘Warrantless Backdoor Surveillance’ of Americans Gets Approved by the Senate

In a last-minute rush to sanction spending before the end of the year, the Senate enacted a $886 billion defense spending proposal Wednesday, sponsored by President Joe Biden, that includes financing for Ukraine, yearly pay hikes for personnel, and most controversially, a reauthorization of the the National Defense Authorization Act

The NDAA funds Pentagon objectives such as training and equipment. The Act was approved by a bipartisan majority of 87-13 in the Senate. For the last 61 years in a row, Congress has advanced the must-pass defense budget measure.

“At a time of huge trouble for global security, doing the defense authorization bill is more important than ever,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “Passing the NDAA enables us to hold the line against Russia, stand firm against the Chinese Communist Party and ensure America’s defense remain state of the art at all times.”

The package now moves to the House, where some conservative Republicans have vowed to derail it after legislators removed disputed elements that would have changed the Pentagon’s abortion policy and provide certain so-called “transgender” medical procedures.

The NDAA approved by the Senate is a compromise version of the budget package passed by the House earlier this year. The House version includes elements aimed at the Pentagon’s transgender health care regulations, as well as an amendment to repeal a Pentagon policy that reimburses out-of-state travel for service members who have abortions.

Keep reading

House Proposal Would Expand Federal Warrantless Spying Authority

The House of Representatives could vote this week on a bill to greatly expand federal digital surveillance powers—potentially broadening both the scope of electronic communications to be scooped up and giving law enforcement more opportunities to access that data.

Edward Snowden, who exposed parts of this same federal surveillance apparatus in 2013, called the new proposal “the biggest encroachment on your privacy rights since the Patriot Act” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Civil libertarian groups have roundly criticized the bill and are encouraging lawmakers to vote against it.

That bill, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act of 2023, is one of two measures aiming to make changes to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that could be brought to the House floor on Tuesday. Section 702, created after 9/11, allows federal intelligence agencies to vacuum up communications between Americans and foreigners. Under some circumstances, law enforcement is allowed to query the Section 702 database, which includes an unknown amount of “incidental” data pulled from Americans’ online communications with foreigners.

Section 702 is set to expire at the end of the year, and recent revelations about how the FBI has misused the spying program have raised hopes that Congress might rein in the program.

Despite its name, however, the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act appears to expand, not reform, the program.

One portion of the bill “vastly expands the universe of U.S. businesses that can be conscripted to aid the government in conducting surveillance,” Elizabeth Goitein, director of the national security program at the Brennan Center, a liberal think tank, posted on X.

Currently, the federal government can compel only businesses that have direct access to digital communications—telecom providers, internet service providers, and the like—to turn over that data to the Section 702 database. Under the terms of the House proposal, however, any business or entity that has access to telecom or internet equipment could be forced to participate in the federal government’s digital spying regime.

“Hotels, libraries, coffee shops, and other places that offer wifi to their customers could be forced to serve as surrogate spies,” writes Goitein.

That change would “effectively overrule” a recent decision from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret court that reviews America’s spying programs, write Steve Lane and Marc Zwillinger, two lawyers with experience arguing before the FISC.

“The new definition,” Lane and Zwillinger argued in a post on a legal blog connected to Zwillinger’s law firm, “could give the government warrantless access to any communication system in America through which any one-side-foreign communication could be found.”

The FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act would also expand how the government uses its Section 702 database.

Specifically, the bill would add a new provision to authorize Section 702 investigations as part of the process of “vetting of all non-United States persons who are being processed for travel to the United States.”

“This new authority proposes to give immigration services the ability to audit entire communication histories before deciding whether an immigrant can enter the country,” writes India McKinney, director of federal affairs for the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), which opposes the bill. “This is a particularly problematic situation that could cost someone entrance to the United States based on, for instance, their own or a friend’s political opinions—as happened to a Palestinian Harvard student when his social media account was reviewed when coming to the U.S. to start his semester.”

Again, that provision of the bill seems to directly overrule the FISC, which has repeatedly struck down attempts by federal officials to expand Section 702 surveillance to include greater scrutiny of immigrants, McKinney notes.

Keep reading

Congress Prepares To Reauthorize a Warrantless Domestic Spying Program the FBI Abused

Congress is gearing up for a potential showdown over the expected reauthorization of a warrantless domestic spying program that’s been misused by the FBI and widely criticized by civil libertarians.

That surveillance program—authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—was created after 9/11 with the intention of tracking foreign spies and potential terrorists. But it has predictably morphed into a way for law enforcement agencies to get a warrantless peek at Americans’ phone records, emails, and other electronic communications—the FBI ran more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database in 2021, according to an annual transparency report.

With the program set to expire at the end of this year, Congress has a rare opportunity to reform Section 702 by, at the very least, prohibiting law enforcement from using it to snoop on Americans. So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening.

The Senate voted Thursday to advance the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and the 3,000-page bill contains a “clean” reauthorization of Section 702, according to Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah), a longtime critic of the surveillance program.

“After all we’ve learned about the FBI in recent years, the fact that some members of Congress are still willing to reauthorize FISA 702 without reforms—not even a warrant requirement for “backdoor” surveillance of Americans—makes me wonder if they’re illiterate,” Lee posted to X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.

Lee says he intends to vote against the NDAA when it comes to the Senate floor for a final vote. He likely won’t be the only Republican to do so, but rolling the Section 702 reauthorization into the larger military spending bill means it will be difficult to prevent its passage.

Instead, the fight will be over the language that gets added to the NDAA. While the Senate is moving forward will full reauthorization, there are competing proposals drafted in the House.

The House Judiciary Committee approved a bill on Wednesday to reauthorize Section 702 with the added requirement that the FBI and other intelligence agencies obtain a warrant before using the program to obtain information about Americans.

“The overwhelming, bipartisan vote in favor of this legislation confirms a mutual interest in protecting our Fourth Amendment privacy rights from rogue intelligence actors,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R–Ariz.), chairman of the House subcommittee on federal surveillance issues, said in a statement. “Any effort to stall consideration or pass a clean extension of the current FISA authorities is a punishment of the American people.”

However, the House Intelligence Committee passed its own version of a Section 702 reauthorization on Thursday. That bill would only require that the FBI establish probable cause before searching the Section 702 database for information about Americans, Roll Call reported.

Keep reading

No Warrant, No Problem

In 1928, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis characterized the values underlying the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as embracing the uniquely American right, and the right most valued by civilized persons, which he called the right to be let alone. Today we call it the right to privacy. He also warned that the greatest dangers to privacy lurk in the slow and insidious encroachments upon it by zealots in the government.

Last week, the Biden administration’s director of National Intelligence caused me to recall Justice Brandeis’ warnings when she revealed that the 16 federal spying agencies that she nominally supervises have begun to do indirectly what the Constitution prohibits them from doing directly.

Since they cannot obtain search warrants from a judge to surveil targets without first demonstrating under oath probable cause of crime by the persons whose surveillance they seek, these zealots in the government are purchasing private data about every American adult from the corporations and entities to which we all have unwittingly surrendered it.

This constitutes computer hacking – and it is as criminal as if federal agents had directly broken into the computers of those about whom and from whom they desire personal data.

Can the government do indirectly what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly? In a word: NO.

Here is the backstory.

Keep reading

Feds May Need Warrants To Search Cell Phones at the Border After All

The role of smart phones as snitches is well-established, with people paying for their handy communications capabilities while the treacherous devices track us and reveal details of our lives. Even as the government spoofs cellphone towers to locate phone users, or purchases commercial data about our movements, border agents also insist they can, at will, search the phones of Americans returning home. But last month a federal judge ruled that a free pass to probe electronic devices is too broad, and that Americans enjoy some protections at the border of the sort they have elsewhere.

In this latest case, United States v. Smith, Jatiek Smith, the subject of a federal investigation, was stopped at the airport in Newark on his return from Jamaica. As detailed by U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff, federal agents “forced him to turn over his cellphone and its password. They reviewed the phone manually and created and saved an electronic copy of it as it existed as of that date and time – all without a search warrant.”

Wait. No warrant? Unfortunately, yes.

Keep reading

“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.

Keep reading

Federal Agencies Routinely Spy On Phone Calls, Texts, Emails Of American Citizens, Experts Say

Despite the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits warrantless government searches, U.S. agencies are proving to be ever more intrusive in their routine surveillance of Americans’ speech and activities.

Often working in collaboration with private companies and banks, agencies like the FBI have been misusing laws against foreign terrorism to vacuum up and sift through the private data of millions of Americans without a warrant or any evidence of a crime.

As Congress now debates reauthorizing relevant sections of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that are set to expire this year, the libertarian Cato Institute held a four-day conference last week, which featured calls for major legal reforms by conservative and liberal speakers alike.

“The violations that we’ve seen have not just been epic in scale, but they’ve also been persistent, over and over again,” Jake Laperruque, a deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told attendees.

“To put a human scale on this, what we’re talking about is not just random typos or wrong clicks; we’re looking at things like pulling up batches of thousands of political donors in one go, without any suspicion of wrongdoing,” Laperruque said. “We’ve had reports of journalists, political commentators, a domestic political party; these compliance violations are the most worrisome type of politically focused surveillance.”

In 2001, Congress passed the PATRIOT Act as a means to combat foreign terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2008, Congress added an amendment to FISA, Section 702, which authorized warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. persons located outside the country. This amendment, which critics say is the source of much of the abuse, is scheduled to “sunset” on Dec. 31.

Keep reading