Quotulatiousness

June 21, 2013

“Nobody is listening to your calls” … because the metadata is far more useful

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

John Naughton explains why the calming statement that “nobody is listening to your calls” is far from re-assuring:

‘To be remembered after we are dead,” wrote Hazlitt, “is but poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living.” Cue President “George W” Obama in the matter of telephone surveillance by his National Security Agency. The fact that for the past seven years the agency has been collecting details of every telephone call placed in the United States without a warrant was, he intoned, no reason for Americans to be alarmed. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” he cooed. The torch was then passed to Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, who was likewise on bromide-dispensing duty. “This is just metadata,” she burbled, “there is no content involved.”

At which point the thought uppermost in one’s mind is: what kind of idiots do they take us for? Of course there’s no content involved, for the simple reason that content is a pain in the butt from the point of view of modern surveillance. First, you have to listen to the damned recordings, and that requires people (because even today, computers are not great at understanding everyday conversation) and time. And although Senator Feinstein let slip that the FBI already employs 10,000 people “doing intelligence on counter-terrorism”, even that Stasi-scale mob isn’t a match for the torrent of voice recordings that Verizon and co could cough up daily for the spooks.

So in this business at least, content isn’t king. It’s the metadata — the call logs showing who called whom, from which location and for how long — that you want. Why? Because that’s the stuff that is machine-readable, and therefore searchable. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an NSA operative in Fort Meade, Maryland. You have a telephone number of someone you regard as potentially “interesting”. Type the number into a search box and up comes a list of every handset that has ever called, or been called by, it. After that, it’s a matter of seconds before you have a network graph of second-, third- or fourth-degree connections to that original number. Map those on to electronic directories to get names and addresses, obtain a secret authorisation from the Fisa court (which has 11 federal judges so that it can sit round the clock, seven days a week), then dispatch a Prism subpoena to Facebook and co and make some coffee while waiting for the results. Repeat the process with the resulting email contact lists and — bingo! — you have a mass surveillance programme as good as anything Vladimir Putin could put together. And you’ve never had to sully your hands — or your conscience — with that precious “content” that civil libertarians get so worked up about.

June 17, 2013

QotD: Demands for less US control over the internet will get much more insistent

Filed under: Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Writing about the new Internet nationalism, I talked about the ITU meeting in Dubai last fall, and the attempt of some countries to wrest control of the Internet from the US. That movement just got a huge PR boost. Now, when countries like Russia and Iran say the US is simply too untrustworthy to manage the Internet, no one will be able to argue.

We can’t fight for Internet freedom around the world, then turn around and destroy it back home. Even if we don’t see the contradiction, the rest of the world does.

Bruce Schneier, “Blowback from the NSA Surveillance”, Schneier on Security, 2013-06-17

June 16, 2013

Emmanuel Goldstein? Isn’t that some C-list celebrity from the 70s?

Filed under: Books, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Maclean’s, Colin Horgan says it’s the Huxley dystopia we’ve actually fallen into, rather than the Orwellian:

Over at the New Yorker, Ian Crouch wondered this week whether we really are living in some version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems like a perpetual question, but it has renewed relevance now, both in light of the revelations last week from the Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian that the National Security Association is, apparently, mining internet data from users (whether guilty or not), without their knowledge or consent, and because in the subsequent days, sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four skyrocketed.

But, as Crouch asked, are we living in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Not quite. It all looks pretty bad, and the nightmare scenario Orwell depicted is, technically speaking, quite possible but, Crouch noted, “all but the most outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell’s imagination.” Surely, though, this is not what was envisioned – even when the Patriot Act was debated back at the turn of the century, few (if any) could have envisioned that the laws might be one day stretched quite as far as they appear to have been under the Obama administration. So, if not Nineteen Eighty-Four then when? What time is this?

[. . .]

There are two ways for a culture to die, Neil Postman wrote back in the 1980s: One is Orwellian, “where culture becomes a prison,” and the second is Huxleyan, where “culture becomes a burlesque.” To answer Crouch’s question, we are living the second reality more than the first. Big Brother does not watch us by his choice; rather, as Postman put it, we watch him by ours. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance,” Postman wrote.

[. . .]

To paraphrase Postman, we have not been ruined by what we hate, but instead, as Huxley predicted, by what we love. We are prisoners to our own egoism and passivity, drowning in a sea of irrelevant streaming data, presented not in with any hierarchy or inherent importance, but as equal and unweighted. The Harlem Shake and Nyan Cat are just as relevant as a civil war in Syria or a democratic nation spying on its own citizens, just as being watched by millions of strangers via webcam or TV broadcast feels just the same as being watched by the government. And, as Huxley thought we might, we have convinced ourselves that is freedom.

June 15, 2013

Cory Doctorow explains why you should care about PRISM

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow spells out a few good reasons why you should be bothered by PRISM and other governmental data-trawling efforts:

The revelations about Prism and other forms of NSA dragnet surveillance has got some people wondering what all the fuss is. When William Hague tells us that the innocent have nothing to fear from involuntary disclosure, it raises questions about exactly what harms might come about from being spied upon. Here are some reasons you should care about privacy, disclosure and surveillance.

We’re bad at privacy because the consequences of privacy disclosures are separated by a lot of time and space from the disclosures themselves. It’s like trying to get good at cricket by swinging the bat, closing your eyes before you see where the ball is headed, and then being told, months later, somewhere else, where the ball went. So of course we’re bad at privacy: almost all our privacy disclosures do no harm, and some of them cause grotesque harm, but when this happens, it happens so far away from the disclosure that we can’t learn from it.

You should care about privacy because privacy isn’t secrecy. I know what you do in the toilet, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to close the door when you go in the stall.

You should care about privacy because if the data says you’ve done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light. Naked Citizens, a short, free documentary, documents several horrifying cases of police being told by computers that someone might be up to something suspicious, and thereafter interpreting everything they learn about that suspect as evidence of wrongdoing. For example, when a computer programmer named David Mery entered a tube station wearing a jacket in warm weather, an algorithm monitoring the CCTV brought him to the attention of a human operator as someone suspicious. When Mery let a train go by without boarding, the operator decided it was alarming behaviour. The police arrested him, searched him, asked him to explain every scrap of paper in his flat. A doodle consisting of random scribbles was characterised as a map of the tube station. Though he was never convicted of a crime, Mery is still on file as a potential terrorist eight years later, and can’t get a visa to travel abroad. Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person’s life becomes sinister and inexplicable.

Hiding your data in plain sight

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Ronald Bailey gathers up some resources you might want to investigate if you’d prefer not to have the NSA or other government agencies watching your online activities:

First, consider not putting so much stuff out there in the first place. Wuergler devised a program he calls Stalker that can siphon off nearly all of your digital information to put together an amazingly complete portrait of your life and pretty much find out where you are at all times. Use Facebook if you must, but realize you’re making it easy for the government to track and find you when they choose to do so.

A second step toward increased privacy is to use a browser like DuckDuckGo, which does not collect the sort of information — say, your IP address — that can identify you with your Internet searches. Thus, if the government bangs on their doors to find out what you’ve been up to, DuckDuckGo has nothing to hand over. I have decided to make DuckDuckGo my default for general browsing, turning to Google only for items such as breaking news and scholarly articles. (Presumably, the NSA would be able to tap into my searches on DuckDuckGo in real time.)

Third, TOR offers free software and a network of relays that can shield your location from prying eyes. TOR operates by bouncing your emails and files around the Internet through encrypted relays. Anyone intercepting your message once it exits a TOR relay cannot trace it back to your computer and your physical location. TOR is used by dissidents and journalists around the world. On the downside, in my experience it operates more slowly than, say, Google.

Fourth, there is encryption. An intriguing one-stop encryption solution is Silent Circle. Developed by Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption system, Silent Circle enables users to encrypt their text messages, video, and phone calls, as well as their emails. Zimmerman and his colleagues claim that they, or anyone else, cannot decrypt our messages across their network, period. As Wuergler warned, this security doesn’t come free. Silent Circle charges $10 per month for its encryption services.

However, your mobile phone is a beacon that can’t be easily masked or hidden:

Now for some bad news. Telephone metadata of the sort the NSA acquired from Verizon is hard — read: impossible — to hide. As the ACLU’s Soghoian notes, you can’t violate the laws of physics: In order to connect your mobile phone, the phone company necessarily needs to know where you are located. Of course, you can avoid being tracked through your cell phone by removing its batteries (unless you have an iPhone), but once you slot it back in, there you are.

For lots more information on how to you might be able to baffle government monitoring agencies, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Web pages.

June 14, 2013

Reason.tv – Tap It: The NSA Slow Jam

Filed under: Government, Humour, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:07

June 11, 2013

“Who hired this goofball?”

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

Jim Geraghty talks about Edward Snowden and the NSA:

Everybody’s going to have an opinion on Edward Snowden, today the world’s most famous leaker.

In the coming days, you’re going to see a lot of people talking past each other, conflating two issues: one, did he do the right thing by disclosing all these details of the vast NSA system to gather data on Americans? And two, should he be prosecuted for it?

Of course, you can do the right thing and still break the law.

[. . .]

This may be a story with no heroes. A government system designed to protect the citizens starts collecting all kinds of information on people who have done nothing wrong; it gets exposed, in violation of oaths and laws, by a young man who doesn’t recognize the full ramifications of his actions. The same government that will insist he’s the villain will glide right past the question of how they came to trust a guy like him with our most sensitive secrets. Who within our national security apparatus made the epic mistake of looking him over — completing his background check and/or psychological evaluation — and concluding, “yup, looks like a nice kid?”

Watching the interview with Snowden, the first thing that is quite clear is that his mild-mannered demeanor inadequately masks a huge ego — one of the big motivations of spies. (Counterintelligence instructors have long offered the mnemonic MICE, for money, ideology, compromise, ego; others throw in nationalism and sex.)

Snowden feels he has an understanding of what’s going on well beyond most of his colleagues:

    When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for the sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee and because of that you see things that may be disturbing but over the course of a normal person’s career you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.

What’s more, he feels that no one listens to his concerns or takes them seriously:

    And when you talk to people about them in a place like this where this is the normal state of business people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about. And the more you talk about the more you’re ignored. The more you’re told its not a problem until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.”

My God, he must have been an insufferable co-worker.

    ‘Look, you guys just don’t understand, okay? You just can’t grasp the moral complexities of what I’m being asked to do here! Nobody here really gets what’s going on, or can see the big picture when you ask me to do something like that!’

    ‘Ed, I just asked if you could put a new bottle on the water cooler when you get a chance.’

Update: Politico put together a fact sheet on what we know about Edward Snowden. It’s best summed up by Iowahawk:

Federal government denies collecting electronic data on Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

Oh, well, if the government denies doing something I guess they pretty much have to be telling the truth, right? Unfortunately, the photo accompanying this Toronto Star article doesn’t show if Peter MacKay is crossing the fingers on his left hand:

The Conservative government flatly denies Canadian spy agencies are conducting any unauthorized electronic snooping operations.

After facing questions from the NDP Opposition about how far he has authorized Ottawa’s top secret eavesdropping spy agency to go, a terse Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay left the Commons, telling the Star: “We don’t target Canadians, okay.”

A former Liberal solicitor general says that doesn’t mean other allied spy agencies don’t collect information on Canadians and share it with the Canadian spying establishment.

Liberal MP Wayne Easter, who was minister responsible for the spy agency CSIS in 2002-03, told the Star that in the post-9/11 era a decade ago it was common for Canada’s allies to pass on information about Canadians that they were authorized to gather but Ottawa wasn’t.

The practice was, in effect, a back-door way for sensitive national security information to be shared, not with the government, but Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and, if necessary, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSEC is a new bit of alphabet soup in the public sphere … I’d never heard of the organization until yesterday. Tonda MacCharles explains what the agency is empowered to do:

The CSEC, an agency that is rarely in the public eye, has far-reaching national security powers to monitor and map electronic communication signals around the globe.

It is forbidden by law to target or direct its spying on Canadians regardless of their location anywhere in the world, or at any person in Canada regardless of their nationality.

The National Defence Act says CSE may, however, unintentionally intercept Canadians’ communications, but must protect their privacy in the use and retention of such “intercepted information.” The agency’s “use” of the information is also restricted to cases where it is “essential to international affairs, defence or security.”

CSEC’s job is to aid federal law enforcement and security agencies, including the military, in highly sensitive operations. It was a key component of Canadian operations in Afghanistan, for example.

June 10, 2013

No surprise here – there’s also a maple-flavoured PRISM

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

In the Globe and Mail, Colin Freeze covers the Canadian data collection program that was approved by the Martin government in 2005 and “renewed” by the Harper government in 2011:

Defence Minister Peter MacKay approved a secret electronic eavesdropping program that scours global telephone records and Internet data trails — including those of Canadians — for patterns of suspicious activity.

Mr. MacKay signed a ministerial directive formally renewing the government’s “metadata” surveillance program on Nov. 21, 2011, according to records obtained by The Globe and Mail. The program had been placed on a lengthy hiatus, according to the documents, after a federal watchdog agency raised concerns that it could lead to warrantless surveillance of Canadians.

There is little public information about the program, which is the subject of Access to Information requests that have returned hundreds of pages of records, with many passages blacked out on grounds of national security.

It was first explicitly approved in a secret decree signed in 2005 by Bill Graham, defence minister in Paul Martin’s Liberal government.

It is illegal for most Western espionage agencies to spy on their citizens without judicial authorization. But rising fears about foreign terrorist networks, coupled with the explosion of digital communications, have shifted the mandates of secretive electronic-eavesdropping agencies that were created by military bureaucracies to spy on Soviet states during the Cold War.

The Canadian surveillance program is operated by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), an arm of the Department of National Defence.

Daniel Ellsberg on rolling back an “executive coup” against the US constitution

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

In the Guardian, Daniel Ellsberg explains why the Snowden leak is so important:

In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material — and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden’s whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an “executive coup” against the US constitution.

Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended.

The government claims it has a court warrant under Fisa — but that unconstitutionally sweeping warrant is from a secret court, shielded from effective oversight, almost totally deferential to executive requests. As Russell Tice, a former National Security Agency analyst, put it: “It is a kangaroo court with a rubber stamp.”

For the president then to say that there is judicial oversight is nonsense — as is the alleged oversight function of the intelligence committees in Congress. Not for the first time — as with issues of torture, kidnapping, detention, assassination by drones and death squads — they have shown themselves to be thoroughly co-opted by the agencies they supposedly monitor. They are also black holes for information that the public needs to know.

The fact that congressional leaders were “briefed” on this and went along with it, without any open debate, hearings, staff analysis, or any real chance for effective dissent, only shows how broken the system of checks and balances is in this country.

Edward Snowden is “one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

The identity of the NSA whistleblower is revealed by the Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world’s most secretive organisations — the NSA.

[. . .]

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates, and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears, he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added: “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

June 9, 2013

Original author of the Patriot Act decries its current abuse

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:20

In the Guardian, Jim Sensenbrenner demands to see the current misuse of the Patriot Act brought to an end:

Last week, the Guardian reported that the Obama administration is collecting records of every call made to, from or within the US, as well as records of many digital communications. President Obama has tried to deflect criticism by claiming “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.” While some members of Congress were briefed — particularly those on the intelligence committees — most, including myself, were not.

The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can. I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.

I was the chairman of the House judiciary committee when the US was attacked on 11 September 2001. Five days later, the Justice Department delivered its proposal for new legislation. Although I, along with every other American, knew we had to strengthen our ability to combat those targeting our country, this version went too far. I believed then and now that we can defend our country and our liberty at the same time.

[. . .]

In his press conference on Friday, President Obama described the massive collection of phone and digital records as “two programs that were originally authorized by Congress, have been repeatedly authorized by Congress”. But Congress has never specifically authorized these programs, and the Patriot Act was never intended to allow the daily spying the Obama administration is conducting.

To obtain a business records order like the one the administration obtained, the Patriot Act requires the government to prove to a special federal court, known as a Fisa court, that it is complying with specific guidelines set by the attorney general and that the information sought is relevant to an authorized investigation. Intentionally targeting US citizens is prohibited.

Technically, the administration’s actions were lawful insofar as they were done pursuant to an order from the Fisa court. But based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the Fisa court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended.

June 8, 2013

Don’t put too much faith in denials from Verizon and other companies…

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

As Mic Wright points out, the companies named in the Prism leaks may not be acting as free agents:

Pastor Niemoller’s “First they came…” poem is over-quoted but with good reason. It is far too easy to be complacent. Addicted and reliant as many of us are on free web services, it’s more convenient to just accept the companies outright denials that they have been complicit with the NSA’s programme. But look closely at those statements and things become rather less clear, as Michael Arrington pointed out.

The tech industry’s denials have been carefully drafted and similarly worded. It is not unfeasible to imagine that those companies have turned over users’ personal information to the NSA in another fashion. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s statement was one of the strongest: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers. We have never received a blanket request or court order from any government agency asking for information…”

Zuckerberg’s words are reassuring until you consider that any company that receives an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act — the legislation the Obama administration is using to justify the broad surveillance — is forbidden from disclosing they have received it or disclosing any information about it. It’s not surprising that no mea culpas have emerged from major tech firms or that Palantir — the big data surveillance company with the $5 billion valuation and CIA funding — denies any connection with the project. The NSA has been a Palantir client and one of the company’s co-founders, billionaire investor Peter Thiel, also sits on Facebook’s board.

Feingold was right, back in 2001

Filed under: Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Former US senator Russ Feingold was the only member of the senate to vote against the original Patriot Act:

He took a stand against the legislation because it increased the federal government’s authority exponentially and didn’t require enough judicial oversight.

Now here we are more than a decade later and it has been revealed that the U.S. government has been collecting massive amounts of data on millions of Americans every single day, using provisions found in the Patriot Act as justification.

Through the secret “PRISM” surveillance program and court orders compelling at least Verizon to provide records on all its customers, the FBI and NSA have enjoyed access to unthinkable amounts of Americans’ data, all without ever informing the public of alarming domestic surveillance.

In his address on the Senate floor in 2001, Former Sen. Feingold seemingly warned the U.S. about the exact thing so many Americans are outraged over today.

[. . .]

“In 2001, I first voted against the PATRIOT Act because much of it was simply an FBI wish list that included provisions allowing our government to go on fishing expeditions that collect information on virtually anyone,” the statement read. “Today’s report indicates that the government could be using FISA in an indiscriminate way that does not balance our legitimate concerns of national security with the necessity to preserve our fundamental civil rights.”

“This is deeply troubling. I hope today’s news will renew a serious conversation about how to protect the country while ensuring that the rights of law-abiding Americans are not violated,” he added.

June 7, 2013

Who is Glenn Greenwald?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:14

The New York Times profiles Glenn Greenwald:

After writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance and the prosecution of journalists, Glenn Greenwald has suddenly put himself directly at the intersection of those two issues, and perhaps in the cross hairs of federal prosecutors.

Late Wednesday, Mr. Greenwald, a lawyer and longtime blogger, published an article in the British newspaper The Guardian about the existence of a top-secret court order allowing the National Security Agency to monitor millions of telephone logs. The article, which included a link to the order, is expected to attract an investigation from the Justice Department, which has aggressively pursued leakers.

On Thursday night, he followed up with an article written with a Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, that exposed an N.S.A. program, Prism, that has gathered information from the nation’s largest Internet companies going back nearly six years.

“The N.S.A. is kind of the crown jewel in government secrecy. I expect them to react even more extremely,” Mr. Greenwald said in a telephone interview. He said that he had been advised by lawyer friends that “he should be worried,” but he had decided that “what I am doing is exactly what the Constitution is about and I am not worried about it.”

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