BURLINGTON, Vt., Jan. 23 – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) issued the following statement today after the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board urged President Barack Obama to shut down the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone data:
“This report underscores that the collection of records on virtually every phone call made in the United States is an unconstitutional violation of the privacy rights guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The president’s recommendations last week did not go far enough to rein in the out-of-control National Security Agency. Congress must pass strong legislation to protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.”
Sanders will host a town meeting Feb. 1 in Montpelier, Vt., on privacy and violations of constitutional rights by the National Security Agency. Two of the nation’s preeminent authorities on civil liberties – Professor David Cole of Georgetown Law School and Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild – will speak on government surveillance and corporate attacks on privacy rights.
Contact: Michael Briggs (202) 224-5141
The Full Report
You can read the full report here.
A few items from their summary follow, with some emphasis thrown in.
1. End the program of collecting phone data on Americans.
“The Section 215 bulk telephone records program lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value. As a result, the Board recommends that the government end the program.”
2. Don’t outsource it to private companies.
“Without the current Section 215 program, the government would still be able to seek telephone records directly from communications providers through other existing legal authorities. The Board does not recommend that the government impose data retention requirements on providers in order to facilitate any system of seeking records directly from private databases.”
3. Get rid of everything you’ve collected so far.
“Once the Section 215 bulk collection program has ended, the government should purge the database of telephone records that have been collected and stored during the program’s operation, subject to limits on purging data that may arise under federal law or as a result of any pending litigation.”
4. Don’t listen to Rogers or Feinstein Don’t create ways to codify the existing (bad) program.
“The Board also recommends against the enactment of legislation that would merely codify the existing program or any other program that collects bulk data on such a massive scale regarding individuals with no suspected ties to terrorism or criminal activity. Moreover, the Board’s constitutional analysis should provide a message of caution, and as a policy matter, given the significant privacy and civil liberties interests at stake, if Congress seeks to provide legal authority for any new program, it should seek the least intrusive alternative and should not legislate to the outer boundary of its authority.”
5. Create safeguards for privacy.
“The government should immediately implement additional privacy safeguards in operating the Section 215 bulk collection program.”
6. Allow FISC judges to hear from people other than the NSA.
“Congress should enact legislation enabling the FISC to hear independent views, in addition to the government’s views, on novel and significant applications and in other matters in which a FISC judge determines that consideration of the issue would merit such additional views.”
7. Allow citizens access to the court opinions.
They encourage the government to release versions of new decisions with minimal redactions, and to declassify older opinions
8. Allow companies to disclose FISA orders for data.
9. Develop principles and criteria for transparency.
10. The scope of surveillance affecting Americans should be public.
….
I found it interesting that Obama decided to give his views before this report was issued. He knew it was scheduled to be released, but couldn’t wait a couple of days to read what privacy folks had to say.
Earlier in the year I posed the question of whether Obama was ignorant or intentionally misleading. It has to be the second option.
The Day We Fight Back - Feb 11 2014
Whistle-blower Ed Snowden shared this link at the end of an online Q&A today:
https://thedaywefightback.org/
Quite the line-up of organizations concerned about mass surveillance! This effort is being undertaken in memory of Aaron Swartz. May the release of today’s report and efforts like “the day we fight back” serve to awaken more people.
Not bad
Republican Party leadership says bulk collection is unconstitutional and must end.
I agree.
Cynical me...
Decided to post this here because frankly, I think strong statements by Sen Sanders are more effective at waking up folks than anything Sen Leahy will say or do. With all due respect, the latter has caved too many times for progressives to pay much attention to what he says these days and if the HuffPo opinion piece to which I linked the other day is true, we shouldn’t get our hopes up about Sen Leahy going too far beyond what he has put forth to date — even in light of any significant new revelations. Just sayin’. Excuse the cynicism but I started writing to Sen Leahy about my concerns about mass surveillance in 2006 and here we are eight years later with what result?
In any case, what follows is an excerpt once again from my fave blogger, Marcy Wheeler. I’ve been reading her daily for more than five years and her hunches/”wildass guesses” almost always have proven to be spot on. One thing I like about her blog is the comments section – she has some pretty sharp folks as intimately familiar with all the primary source documents related to mass surveillance as Marcy is. VERY little chaff. In the last several weeks, I’ve noticed occasional comments from new folks in positions to verify, clarify, negate Marcy’s posts – IOW Federal employees/former employees with both consciences & relevant technical experience. Medarestothink more and more whistleblowers are going to be coming forth…
Here’s the link to Marcy’s most recent post for anyone interested:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2014/01/25/the-corporate-store-where-nsa-goes-to-shop-your-content-and-your-lifestyle/
==================
The Corporate Store: Where NSA Goes to Shop Your Content and Your Lifestyle
By: emptywheel Saturday January 25, 2014 3:06 pm
I’m increasingly convinced that for seven months, we’ve been distracted by a shiny object, the phone dragnet, the database recording all or almost all of the phone-based relationships in the US over the last five years. We were never wrong to discuss the dangers of the dragnet. It is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, just waiting to go off. But I’m quite certain the NatSec establishment decided in the days after Edward Snowden’s leaks to intensify focus on the actual construction of the dragnet — the collection of phone records and the limits on access to the initial database (what they call the collection store) of them — to distract us away from the true family jewels.
A shiny object.
All that time, I increasingly believe, we should have been talking about the corporate store, the database where queries from the collection store are kept for an undisclosed (and possibly indefinite) period of time. Once records get put in that database, I’ve noted repeatedly, they are subject to “the full range of [NSA’s] analytic tradecraft.”
We don’t know precisely when that tradecraft gets applied or to how many of the phone identifiers collected in any given query. But we know that tradecraft includes matching individuals’ various communication identifiers (which can include phone number, handset identifier, email address, IP address, cookies from various websites) — a process the NSA suggests may not be all that accurate, but whatever! Once NSA links all those identities, NSA can pull together both network maps and additional lifestyle information.
The agency was authorized to conduct “large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness” of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said.
[snip]
The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such “enrichment” data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.
That analysis might even include tracking a person’s online sex habits, if the government deems you a “radicalizer” for opposing unchecked US power, even if you’re a US person.
Such profiles are not the only thing included in NSA’s “full range of analytic tradecraft.”
We also know — because James Clapper told us this very early on in this process – the metadata helps the NSA pick and locate which content to read. The head of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Division, Theresa Shea, said this more plainly in court filings last year.
Section 215 bulk telephony metadata complements other counterterrorist-related collection sources by serving as a significant enabler for NSA intelligence analysis. It assists the NSA in applying limited linguistic resources available to the counterterrorism mission against links that have the highest probability of connection to terrorist targets. Put another way, while Section 215 does not contain content, analysis of the Section 215 metadata can help the NSA prioritize for content analysis communications of non-U.S. persons which it acquires under other authorities. Such persons are of heightened interest if they are in a communication network with persons located in the U.S. Thus, Section 215 metadata can provide the means for steering and applying content analysis so that the U.S. Government gains the best possible understanding of terrorist target actions and intentions. [my emphasis]
The NSA prioritizes reading the content that involves US persons. And the NSA finds it, and decides what to read, using the queries that get dumped into the corporate store (presumably, they do some analytical tradecraft to narrow down which particular conversations involving US persons they want to read).
And there are several different kinds of content this might involve: content (phone or Internet) of a specific targeted individual — perhaps the identifier NSA conducted the RAS query with in the first place — already sitting on some NSA server, Internet and in some cases phone content the NSA can go get from providers after having decided it might be interesting, or content the NSA collects in bulk from upstream collections that was never targeted at a particular user.
The NSA is not only permitted to access all of this to see what Americans are saying, but in all but the domestically collected upstream content, it can go access the content by searching on the US person identifier, not the foreign interlocutor, without establishing even Reasonable Articulable Suspicion that it pertains to terrorism (though the analyst does have to claim it serves foreign intelligence purpose). That’s important because lots of this content-collection is not tied to a specific terrorist suspect (it can be tied to a geographical area, for example), so the NSA can hypothetically get to US person content without ever having reason to believe it has any tie to terrorism.
In other words, all the things NSA’s defenders have been insisting the dragnet doesn’t do — it doesn’t provide content, it doesn’t allow unaudited searches, NSA doesn’t know identities, NSA doesn’t data mine it, NSA doesn’t develop dossiers on it, even James Clapper’s claim that NSA doesn’t voyeuristically troll through people’s porn habits — every single one is potentially true for the results of queries run three hops off an identifier with just Reasonable Articulable Suspicion of some time to terrorism (or Iran). Everything the defenders say the phone dragnet is not, the corporate store is.
All the phone contacts of all the phone contacts of all the phone contacts of someone subjected to the equivalent of a digital stop-and-frisk are potentially subject to all the things NSA’s defenders assure us the dragnet is not subject to.
Link to Snowden Interview
Edward Snowden gave a rare TV interview that broadcast on German TV the other night. Here’s a link to the English version for anyone interested:
https://archive.org/details/snowden_interview_en