From the BBC:
Plans to give local councils and other public bodies the power to monitor e-mail and internet traffic have been branded a "snoopers' charter".The government wants to make it mandatory for phone and internet companies to store all information on personal web use for 12 months.
From the New York Times:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.
F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.
The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.
From the New York Times:
A federal judge on Thursday authorized the F.B.I. to search two public library computers used late last month by Bruce E. Ivins, the Maryland scientist blamed in the 2001 anthrax killings, to read about the investigation into the attacks. . .. . . Library officials turned over the computers voluntarily to the F.B.I. last week. The Justice Department said it believed it needed a search warrant to examine the contents, and two warrants were approved Thursday by Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District Court for the District of Columbia.
From the Mercury News:
A congressional committee wants the nation's largest telecommunications and Internet companies to explain whether they target online advertising based on consumers' search queries and Web surfing habits.In an expanding inquiry into the state of consumer privacy on the Internet, House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders sent letters Friday to more than 30 companies, demanding to know whether they track where their users go online and use that information to deliver personalized advertising.
Among the companies receiving the letters were Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AT&T, Comcast, Qwest Communications International, Verizon Communications, Time Warner's AOL unit and Time Warner Cable. The companies were given a week to respond.
From the New York Times:
Want to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.
Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: “practical obscurity.” Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.
Well, not anymore. The information on CriminalSearches.com is available to all comers.
From Daniel Drezner's blog, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University:
There’s not a lot to laugh about the politicization of civil service hires at the Justice Department.OK, I lied. There is one thing that seems pretty funny to me.
If Al Gore invented the Internet, then it appears that the Bush administration has invented the concept of searching the Internet. . .
. . . The text of the [DOJ] report provides more detail. Apparently, White House liaison Jan Williams deployed (and then relayed to Monica Goodling) the following string for Nexis searches for DOJ candidates:
[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
You've got to hand it to them. It's quite a search string.
From the Guardian UK:
The information commissioner today expressed concern at a proposed government database recording the entire country's telephone and internet use, calling it "a step too far for the British way of life".Richard Thomas, who heads the government's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), said there was a grave danger of the police and security services prying into "more and more aspects of our private lives".
From the New York Times:
The Senate gave final approval on Wednesday to a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.
From the BBC:
Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act, broadly expanding the president's warrantless surveillance authority and unconstitutionally granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president's illegal domestic wiretapping program. The House of Representatives passed the same bill last month, and President Bush is expected to sign the legislation into law shortly.
From The Hill:
The bipartisan housing bill currently being debated in the Senate contains an unrelated amendment that will burden innovative Internet companies and threaten the civil liberties of every American. Without any discussion, Senators added a provision to H.R. 3221 (The American Housing Rescue and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008) requiring electronic payment services to collect, aggregate, and transmit details of every sale to the federal government.
From Secrecy News:
Secrecy News was removed from the distribution list for the U.S. State Department history publication “Foreign Relations of the United States” (FRUS) after we reported on errors in several FRUS volumes on March 24 and 26, 2008.A spokesman for the State Department Historian’s Office confirmed that officials had ordered the removal of Secrecy News from the FRUS mailing list in response to our critical coverage.
From the Mercury News:
The House today easily approved a compromise bill setting new electronic surveillance rules that effectively shield telecommunications companies from lawsuits arising from the government's terrorism-era warrantless eavesdropping on phone and computer lines in this country.The bill, which was passed on a 293-129 vote, does more than just protect the telecoms. The update to the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is an attempt to balance privacy rights with the government's responsibility to protect the country against attack, taking into account changes in telecommunications technologies.
From the BBC:
Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.The country's intelligence bureau will be able to scan international calls, faxes and e-mails.
The measure was passed by a narrow majority after a heated debate in the Stockholm parliament.
Critics say it threatens civil liberties and represents Europe's most far-reaching eavesdropping plan.
From the the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Congress is widely reported to have struck a deal on legislation to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that includes immunity for telecommunications companies that helped the government illegally spy on millions of ordinary Americans. Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) held a press conference with the ACLU to emphasize that this much-touted "compromise" is a sham aimed at letting both the government and the telecoms off the hook for violating the law and the Constitution.
From Wired:
Does the FBI track cellphone users' physical movements without a warrant? Does the Bureau store recordings of innocent Americans caught up in wiretaps in a searchable database? Does the FBI's wiretap equipment store information like voicemail passwords and bank account numbers without legal authorization to do so?That's what the nation's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court wanted to know, in a series of secret inquiries in 2005 and 2006 into the bureau's counterterrorism electronic surveillance efforts, revealed for the first time in newly declassified documents.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The latest Republican proposal to amend foreign intelligence surveillance law was announced yesterday by Senator Kit Bond , and included a purported "compromise" on the issue of whether telephone companies that illegally assisted in the government's warrantless wiretapping program should be granted immunity from lawsuits such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) lawsuit against AT&T."The purported immunity 'compromise' announced on Thursday by Senator Bond is a pure sham that's even worse than the original immunity provision passed by the Senate," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "The stacked-deck immunity determination to be made by the court apparently still doesn't include any meaningful review of the telecoms' conduct or the legality of their cooperation with the NSA, simply a review of whether the companies got a piece of paper saying that the president authorized the surveillance. And the deck would be stacked even more by the proposed transfer to the FISA court -- the most conservative and secretive federal court in the nation. Bottom line: it's still immunity, and this so-called compromise concedes nothing."
From Information World Review:
New government proposals for a database to store details of all phone and VoIP calls, emails and internet usage by UK citizens could force firms to look at their corporate communications policies more closely, according to experts.The proposals are part of the draft Communications Data Bill which has yet to be fully released, and would extend the current requirement for telcos and service providers to store details of phone calls and text messages for 12 months.
From the Center for Democracy & Technology:
Widespread errors in the use of National Security Letters requires legislative action, says a CDT paper released today. The documents are used by the FBI when seeking records containing sensitive personal information. Successive Inspector General reports have uncovered abuses and mistakes by the FBI in issuing the NSLs. The CDT Policy Post says that FBI self-policing doesn't work. CDT believes there should be a more exacting standard for issuing NSLs and that prior judicial authorization should be required when sensitive personal information is sought.
CDT Policy Post 14.5: National Security Letters May 14, 2008
From Wired:
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is asking FBI head Robert Mueller to explain why the feds sought records from the Internet Archive, a digital library, using a controversial administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which is intended for a communications service providers.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.
For the newly unsealed documents (still partially redacted): http://www.eff.org/cases/archive-v-mukasey?docs
For more information about this case: http://www.eff.org/cases/archive-v-mukasey
From the Center for Democracy & Technology:
A federal appellate court ruled that the government can freely search and save the files travelers maintain on their laptops when coming back to the U.S. from an out of country trip. The case, United States v. Arnold, No. 06-50581, 2008 U.S. App. LEXIS 8590 (9th Cir., April 21, 2008) has put business travelers in a tizzy and may pique the attention of members of Congress. . .. . . Arnold’s case was about what officials can do at the border when they have no reasonable suspicion. Should they be able to download everything on a computer hard drive? The court reasoned that because the search of the computer’s contents occurred at the border, the same doctrine that permits CBP to search your suitcase permits its agents to cull through your computer or go trolling on your Treo or iPhone or whatever handheld electronic device you may be carrying.
From The Bookseller:
Police forces are requesting information on the library borrowing records of individuals under police surveillance, librarians have reported.The requests are understood to centre on areas with a high Muslim population. John Pateman, head of libraries in Lincolnshire, criticised the development, saying it went against library ethics and could damage community cohesion. “It concerns me. Public libraries are one of the last public spaces where people don’t have to justify themselves,” he said.
From the Electronic Privacy Information Center:
According to the 2007 FISA report, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,370 application to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches in the United States in 2007, up from 2,176 applications approved in 2006. For the first time, the report includes information regarding the total number of requests made by the Department of Justice with National Security Letter authority for information concerning U.S. persons. in 2006, the government made approximately 12,583 NSL requests for information concerning 4,790 U.S. persons. The 2007 NSL statistics are expected later this year.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which claims that National Security Letters (NSLs) take too long and that it needs the authority to conduct surveillance without judicial oversight, delayed its own investigation of a student suspected of links to terrorism by employing an improper NSL to seek information on the suspect, at the direction of FBI Headquarters. The FBI failed to report the misuse for almost two years.
From the Washington Post:
When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect's telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.The circuits -- little-known electronic connections between telecom firms and FBI monitoring personnel around the country -- are used to tell the government who is calling whom, along with the time and duration of a conversation and even the locations of those involved.
Recently, three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.), sent a letter to colleagues citing privacy concerns over one of the Quantico circuits and demanding more information about it. Anxieties about whether such electronic links are too intrusive form a backdrop to the continuing congressional debate over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal surveillance.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won another battle against the government Friday over the release of information about a campaign to change federal surveillance law.A federal judge ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to provide to EFF by April 21, 2008, records about telecom industry lobbying of their offices.
From Wired:
A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers."Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.
This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.
Lt. Commander Marc Boyd, a U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman, says the report was merely an academic exercise.
From Deutsche Welle:
In a blow to Berlin's efforts to boost anti-terrorism measures, Germany's highest court on Wednesday, March 19 blocked parts of a sweeping data-collection law that had prompted large protests by civil liberties.Germany's constitutional court on Wednesday severely curbed parts of a wide-reaching and highly controversial data collection law that requires telecom companies to store telephone and Internet data for up to six months, dealing a setback to government efforts to fight terrorism.
The law which went into effect in January gave the federal government broad access to data including e-mail addresses, length of call and numbers dialed and in the case of mobile phones, the location calls are made from.
From Information World Review:
Organisations and individuals using Google's applications suite have no right to data privacy, a case in arbitration has shown.Lakehead University in Canada was one of the first large-scale adopters of Google applications, but a storm has broken out after staff were told not to use it for personal or sensitive information.
The problem arises because the information is stored on Google's servers in the US where authorities have the right to read everything Google stores under the Patriot Act.
From the Associated Press:
At least four State Department workers pried into the supposedly secure passport files of presidential contenders Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain, abashed officials admitted Friday in a revelation that had Condoleezza Rice promising a full investigation and telephoning the candidates to apologize personally.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) along with the National Security Archive urged a federal appeals court Wednesday to strike down the National Security Letter (NSL) provision of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
From the DOJ:
The OIG's first report on the FBI's use of NSLs, issued on March 9, 2007, covered calendar years 2003 through 2005. This is the OIG's second report on the FBI's use of NSLs. In this report we describe and assess the response by the FBI and the Department to the serious misuse of NSL authorities that our first report described. In addition, as required by the Patriot Reauthorization Act, this report describes the FBI's use of NSLs in calendar year 2006.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The central role the NSA has come to occupy in domestic intelligence gathering has never been publicly disclosed. But an inquiry reveals that its efforts have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
From CNN:
The FBI continued in 2006 to badly mishandle letters that it uses to obtain personal records without a court order, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.The new report cites "issuance of NSLs [national security letters] without proper authorization, improper requests and unauthorized collection of telephone or Internet e-mail records due to FBI errors or mistakes made by NSL recipients."
But a top department official said significant progress has been made in the past year toward correcting those errors.
From the Mercury News:
The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and Internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies.The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested.
From the New York Times:
Steve Marshall is an English travel agent. He lives in Spain, and he sells trips to Europeans who want to go to sunny places, including Cuba. In October, about 80 of his Web sites stopped working, thanks to the United States government.
From News.com:
A new Bush administration plan to capture and analyze traffic on all federal government networks in real time is generating privacy worries from congressional Democrats and Republicans alike.At a hearing convened here Thursday by the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, politicians directed pointed questions to Department of Homeland Security officials about their plans to expand an existing "intrusion detection" system known as Einstein. Among other things, the system will monitor visits from Americans--and foreigners--visiting .gov Web sites.
More from the Washington Post: House Lawmakers Question Privacy in Cyber-Security Plan
House lawmakers yesterday raised concerns about the privacy implications of a Bush administration effort to secure federal computer networks from hackers and foreign adversaries, as new details emerged about the largely classified program.The unclassified portions of the project, known as the "cyber initiative," focus on drastically reducing the number of connections between federal agency networks and the Internet, and more closely monitoring those networks for malicious activity. Slightly more than half of all agencies have deployed the Department of Homeland Security's program.
But administration officials have not said how far monitoring would go, and whether oversight would extend to networks operated by state, local, and private sector entities, including government defense contractors.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of "Alias," right?Unfortunately, the scenario isn't fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information. That means that without your knowledge or consent, an act you assume is private could become public. A communication tool you're using in everyday life could become a tool for government surveillance. And what's worse, there are no laws to prevent abuse.
From the New York Times:
A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.
From the Center for Democracy and Technology:
The Supreme Court today turned aside a legal challenge to the Administration's warrantless wiretaps, declining to review a lower court decision dismissing the case because the names of those being spied on are secret. "The Court's decision allows the government to avoid accountability for its actions, making it less likely that we'll ever get a legal ruling on whether the government's warrantless wiretapping program broke the law," said Gregory T. Nojeim, director of CDT's Project on Freedom, Security & Technology. "It's all the more critical now that Congress tighten the law to make sure judicial orders are required for surveillance in the future.
From Wired:
The Bush administration has failed to nominate any candidates to a newly empowered privacy and civil-liberties commission. This leaves the board without any members, even as Congress prepares to give the Bush administration extraordinary powers to wiretap without warrants inside the United States.
From the Washington Post:
The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
From News.com:
Congress won't decide until next year whether to pass a complex law that would let telephone and Internet companies off the hook from lawsuits alleging illicit cooperation with federal government spies.After a day of back-and-forth on the Senate floor, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged on Monday evening and announced he would postpone debate on the so-called FISA Amendments Act. That bill, which has already been approved in a closed-door meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would grant such corporate immunity and make it easier for the feds to snoop on phone calls and e-mails involving foreigners and Americans without a warrant, drawing rampant criticism from civil liberties groups.
From the New York Times:
Will privacy sell?Ask.com is betting it will. The fourth-largest search engine company will begin a service today called AskEraser, which allows users to make their searches more private.
Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Late Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won the speedy release of telecom lobbying records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).The agency was ordered to comply with a new December 10 deadline -- in time for the documents to play a role in the congressional debate over granting amnesty for telecommunications companies taking part in illegal electronic surveillance. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston vacates a hearing on the matter previously scheduled for Friday.
From News.com:
A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to divulge documents related to immunizing telecommunications companies from lawsuits, saying they illegally opened their networks to the National Security Agency.U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco gave the Office of the Director of National Intelligence until November 30 (Friday) to turn over documents relating to conversations it had with Congress and telecommunications carriers about how to rewrite wiretapping laws.