House votes to renew surveillance powers revealed by Snowden

The vote gives the NSA the power to continue collecting information sent over the internet by foreigners outside the US.

by Laura Hautala  |  CNET
January 11, 2018 8:59 AM PST

The US House of Representatives gave a boost to the government's surveillance powers.

Lawmakers voted 256-164 on Thursday to extend NSA programs that collect communications over the internet for national security purposes.

The law that authorized the surveillance programs is set to expire on Jan. 19.


That law, Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, was passed in 2008. Under it, a court that hears secret national security matters decides whether to let the National Security Agency collect emails, documents and other internet communications in government surveillance programs known as Prism and Upstream.

The Prism program collects communications from internet services directly. The Upstream program collects data as it travels across the internet. The programs target people outside the US, but do collect the communications of Americans who communicate with the targets of spies overseas.
Details of those programs became public in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed them to journalists, who published stories in the Guardian and The Washington Post. After those disclosures, the government declassified information about the programs and began publishing annual transparency reports about the use of the surveillance tools.


The original deadline to renew the surveillance powers passed on Dec. 31 without a debate on the floor of either house on potential reforms. Congress voted to extend the programs temporarily until Jan. 19. The Senate must also now vote to renew the powers before the programs can be extended further.


US intelligence agencies have pressed lawmakers to preserve the programs. In a letter to Congress signed by US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the heads of the NSA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, officials said losing the authority to run these surveillance programs would put the country's national security in danger. "Section 702 has been instrumental in preventing attacks on the homeland and removing terrorists from the battlefield," the letter said.


The biggest sticking point for privacy advocates, including the ACLU, has been a policy allowing the FBI to bypass getting a warrant before accessing emails and other communications of Americans collected by the NSA under these programs.


An amendment that would have required the FBI to obtain a warrant to access information in the NSA's database failed in the House on Thursday. The bill extending the surveillance programs does require the FBI to get a warrant by arguing they have probable cause to search the NSA's database in open investigations that don't involve national security or terrorism. That requirement doesn't extend to open FBI investigations of terrorism and national security cases.


Demand Progress, a civil-liberties focused advocacy group, condemned the House for voting down the amendment. "By failing to close the backdoor search loophole in this bill, which exposes millions of innocent Americans to warrantless government surveillance, members of Congress have ceded incredible domestic spying powers to the executive branch," the organization said in a statement.

More on surveillance

• Snowden, privacy groups oppose new surveillance bill
• NSA collected 151M phone records in 2016, despite law change
• Hacked NSA tools could put some Windows users at risk

In debate on the amendment, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican from Virginia, argued that putting in place the warrant requirement would hinder the FBI's efforts to prevent terrorism attacks in the US.
"This amendment, plain and simple, would disable 702, our most important national security tool," he said.


His arguments echoed concerns that requiring a warrant even in cases directly related to national security -- rather than other types of criminal investigations -- would put up dangerous barriers to communication between US intelligence agencies. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the intelligence community came under scrutiny for failing to share information with each other about the alleged perpetrators before the attacks.


In December, Snowden chimed in on what he and privacy advocates call a "back door" given to other intelligence agencies. He joined ACLU lawyers to answer questions on a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" forum and highlighted the issue of incidentally collected emails and other communications.


"These 'incidentally collected' communications of Americans can then be kept and searched at any time, without a warrant. Does that sound right to you?" Snowden said.

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Big Data Is Watching You: The hidden price of Google, Twitter and Facebook.

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Big Data Is Watching You

The hidden price of Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Mar14 Posted by DJ Apollo

CULTURE » MARCH 12, 2015

BY JOANNA SCUTTS

Your decision to click—and even the amount of time you spend reading or watching—is a piece of data for which the advertiser will pay good money.

What are we prepared to give up in the name of convenience? ThroughoutJacob Silverman’s capacious study of the world we’re in and the world we’re making—or rather, allowing tech companies to make for us—it’s demonstrated repeatedly that billions of us are happy to surrender our privacy to save a few keystrokes. Why not log in to that other website with your Facebook or Twitter or Google ID? Why not use your real identity and photograph, with a record of your movements, all across the web? You have it on Google’s word that they’re not “evil”; what could be the harm?


Silverman’s new book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, does a thorough, if sometimes long-winded, job of explaining what the harm is and what it could become.
He begins with an analysis of the philosophy, variously termed “techno-utopianism” or “cyber-libertarianism,” that drives the major social media companies. The ideology should be familiar in essence, if not in name—we’ve been soaking in it for the past decade. Media theorists, long before the advent of Facebook, were calling it “the Californian ideology.” It’s what happens when youthful rebelliousness and a countercultural, anti-authoritarian spirit meets gobs of cash and untrammeled power. It’s the myth—tirelessly peddled by optimistic tech, business and culture reporters and embraced by the customers who line up for new gadgets—that a corporation that calls its headquarters a “campus” and equips its offices with slides, snacks and free daycare is something other than a capitalist entity, with motives other than profit.


To be fair, the big tech companies—Google and Facebook are the stars here, with Twitter, Tumblr and LinkedIn singing backup—do have goals beyond their bottom line. They want to do the kinds of things that beauty-pageant contestants want to do: cure diseases, end terrorism, go to the moon. They share a disdain for government—Mark Zuckerberg is committed to the idea of “companies over countries”—but also share a zeal for surveillance.


For Silverman, the harm of social media is both specific and philosophical. It turns journalism into a clickbait race, for instance, but it also radically changes our concepts of privacy and identity. He considers the fate of those who are chewed up and spat out by the Internet’s nano-fame cycle (nobody gets 15 minutes anymore), whose embarrassing or self-aggrandizing antics, captured on video, do the rounds and attract a quick, overwhelming torrent of derision or rage. But while we might shrug our shoulders at the fate of an Antoine Dodson or a Taylor Chapman (respectively a viral hero and villain), Silverman argues that we should be aware of the numbing and alienating consequences of the viral instinct. Not only does it frequently make clowns of those who are seriously disadvantaged, and destroy reputations and careers, it also molds the larger media world in its own image. Hate-watching a two-minute video of a reality show contestant’s racist rant is a sign that you’ll give attention to this kind of content—and the site that hosts the video, beholden to its advertisers, traffics in your attention, not your intelligence or humanity.


Headlines have always been composed to grab attention, but now they can gather intelligence too. Your decision to click—and even the amount of time you spend reading or watching—is a piece of data for which the advertiser will pay good money. As Silverman describes it, the urge to gather endless data about all of us—from our spending habits to the pace of our heartbeats—is a huge, lucrative industry, driven by the fantasy that correlation is causation, that because you did X activity, you’ll buy Y product.


It may be foolhardy to make predictions about the fast-evolving tech world, but Silverman offers some chilling evidence that the world of “big data” is beginning to affect the choices available to us. Some healthcare companies will lower your premiums if you use a fitness-tracking app (and share that data, of course). Data about what you eat and buy is increasingly being used like your credit score, to determine if you are worthy of that job, that car or that home.


So what? A good citizen who eats her greens and pays her bills has nothing to fear! And if she worries that some misstep—glancing at an unsavory website, running a red light, suffering a computer hack—will damage her, she can just pay protection money to one of several companies that exist to safeguard their clients’ online reputations. Silverman has no solution to these linked problems, of course, since there is far too much money driving this brave new world and far too little government will to resist. Mass surveillance is the present and the future. But if information—meaning data points—is corporate power, then knowledge and critical thinking may be citizen power.


Silverman is too cautious and self-conscious a thinker to inspire a revolution. Instead, he advocates a kind of lowlevel “social-media rebellion”—messing with, rather than rejecting, the digitally networked world in which we live. Putting up a cartoon monkey as your online avatar might not feel like much of a blow to the Facebook assault on privacy, but it’s an annoyance to the booming facial- recognition industry—and perhaps a few million determined annoyances can disrupt the techno-utopia in favor of the common good.

Joanna Scutts is a freelance writer based in Queens, NY, and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, the New Yorker Online, The Nation, The Wall Street Journal and several other publications. You can follow her on Twitter @life_savour.


http://inthesetimes.com/article/17734/big-data-is-watching-you

Snowden Leaks Have Changed How Americans See Their Privacy

Rena Schild/Shutterstock

By Arik Hesseldahl @ahess247

March 16, 2015, 7:00 AM PDT

The revelations about National Security Agency surveillance programs by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have started to affect how Americans view their right to privacy and the actions they take to try to protect it, a new survey has found.


The survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that nearly one-third of American adults have taken steps to protect their information from government surveillance programs that monitor phone and digital communications.


More than one-fifth — 22 percent — say they have changed their use of various technology tools “a great deal” or “somewhat” since first learning about the Snowden leaks, which began in 2013.
The survey also found that most Americans — 87 percent — have heard about the surveillance programs. And a majority — 57 percent — say it’s unacceptable for the government to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens, while roughly the same percentage — 54 percent — say it’s acceptable to monitor the communications of people from other countries.


The Pew Center’s Internet, Science and Technology research unit surveyed 475 adults who are members of the GfK Knowledge Panel between late November and early January. (GfK is a big consumer research company.) It also conducted a series of six focus groups with 59 adults during December and January.


What’s interesting is how people said they had changed their behavior. For instance, 18 percent of those surveyed said they’ve changed how they use email “a great deal,” while another 17 percent said that since the Snowden disclosures, they’ve changed how they use search engines. Another 15 percent have changed both the way they use Twitter and Facebook and their mobile phones habits. Forty-one percent of those in the survey group said they had changed at least one activity since learning about the Snowden leaks. And even more interestingly, the reaction was consistent across political party lines.


The survey doesn’t get specific about what actions the respondents took to protect their privacy, but there’s some evidence about what they haven’t done: Taken steps to make it much more technically difficult for the government to read their email or watch which websites they visit. For instance, 46 percent had not adopted or had not even considered adopting email encryption technology like PGP or GPG. Another 40 percent haven’t bothered to try Tor, the anonymous browsing tool, and at least 39 percent didn’t even know what it is.


Snowden’s disclosures began in 2013 with the revelation of a program called PRISM, which, according to slides from once-classified presentations, focused on the collection of communications data from several Internet companies. The disclosures triggered a long and still unresolved debate in Washington and Silicon Valley about the nature of consumer data privacy and the role Internet companies play in protecting it.

• Contact Arik Hesseldahl:
• @ahess247