Senate Approves Bill to Rein in N.S.A. Surveillance
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> the Senate voted on Tuesday to curtail the federal government’s sweeping surveillance
> the passage... will lead to the reinstatement of government surveillance efforts
Did we stop the surveillance? Did we continue it? Is this really going to do anything at all to change the culture of mass collection? Who is counting this as a win? Who is against this and who is for this?
Unfortunately, more aggressive reforms -- like the Surveillance State Repeal Act -- weren't on the table; and there was a lot of concern that the Senate would further weaken it. So given the makeup of the House and Senate, passing the House version unmodified after a sunset was probably the best outcome. ACLU's Jameel Jaffer says "This is the most important surveillance reform bill since 1978, and its passage is an indication that Americans are no longer willing to give the intelligence agencies a blank check."
While the sunset doesn't actually have any long-term effect, IMHO it's still symbolically important: it meant that the usual tactics of "engineer a last-minute crisis" didn't work this time. And because of Rand Paul, it's actually going to be an issue in the GOP Presidential campaign -- which is huge. [Sanders voted against it as well, saying it was too weak.]
So on the whole I'd say it's a win for reformers ... a small win, admittedly, and tinged with disappointment that even after Snowden we couldn't do better. Still, it's a long term battle. And frankly it's been a while since we've had even a small win.
I'd be okay with mass collection of metadata, as long as searches through that data had to be limited, audited, and focused on a specific topic for a specific active investigation. And if there were a trustworthy access control and auditing process to make sure there were no more LOVINT leaks, and none of that bullshit that the FBI pulled on MLK jr.
However, I don't think I would trust any agency to not find a way around that, in time. The power is too great, it's too tempting, and administrations change. Therefore, in our real world, I don't support mass un-targeted perpetual data collection, at all.
Although that said, they read ALL emails, and have said [0] that they require no authorization or warrant to listen to your calls, read your text messages, and read your email. So no, without explicit reigning in, those things the GP lists are not all as they once were.
[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-spying-flap-extends-to-contents...
From 1946: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement "For example, the British newspaper The Independent reported back in 1996 that the U.S. National Security Agency "taps UK phones" at the request of the British intelligence agency MI5, thus allowing British agents to evade restrictive limitations on domestic telephone tapping.[53]"
Note the actual judgement is linked on the bottom.
I believe you that the NSA might provide intelligence to its partners about foreign nationals that those partners could not lawfully collect themselves.
I'm wondering if NSA can actually procure intelligence about US citizens from its partners.
Beyond that point, I have no idea if there is some exemption that lets them request specific information.
Instead it appears that NSA had gathered data relating to UK citizens (under NSA's existing legal authorities) and that the GCHQ then asked for that data to be shared with it.
UK law is incredibly surveillance-friendly compared to the USA so I'd be surprised if there were even a reason for GCHQ to ask NSA to do surveillance on GCHQ's behalf; GCHQ could much more easily do it directly.
But NSA-sourced data could still be useful for GCHQ, which would make sense that GCHQ asks for it when it's been collected, for the same reason Germany's BND was found to be sharing data with NSA (in BND's case, because they wanted NSA to share their own data with BND).
Which uses 53 as its source. "US spy base `taps UK phones for MI5'" which may or may not be credible. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/us-spy-base-t....
However, my second posts links to a court case which suggests they overstepped some bounds.
No data should be collected without a warrant, this look so much like how communist countries during cold war were spying on its own citizens. What makes it even worse is that thanks to advanced technology far more information can be collected about us.
In your world, are police officers allowed to call in license plate numbers to see if the car of the person they just pulled over is registered to an escaped armed criminal? May the government tune radios to public airwaves? Or is it just electronic communications which are special?
Oh, so the solution is easy then; just make tapping phones legal for everybody again! It might also make those guys with their police scanners happy.
While we're at it, they can bring back party lines for landline telephone use and save some money, or let weev out of prison, and in the meantime the NSA and FBI can gobble up all of our communications.
License plates? That's why they are for, you register your car with DMV or similar institution in your country for the sole purpose of matching you with the car.
So keeping database of all license plates that match drivers, perfectly ok, but scanning automatically license plates and building map of your daily routes, that is going too far. Where I frequent is my private business.
Public airwaves? Yes, the keyword is "public", assuming the communication is not encrypted. If it is encrypted then it means it should be private.
Criminals can use encryption? Doesn't matter, it is still private. If we allow to go that route, next thing you know we will have implants in our heads transmitting what we are thinking.
“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” -- Benjamin Franklin
Fine, just don't complain when it turns out that your expectation of what is normal doesn't match up with the population.
> thanks to advanced technology far more information can be collected
Advanced technology also provides the tools to defend against mass surveillance.
As far as the landscape of intelligence. That's a very good question. The NSA is an incredibly large organization with a wide variety of projects. I think for the most part the organization's mission is pretty noble. I just also happen to think that they went off the rails at some point and started doing misguided, counterproductive things that should be illegal.
I don't have an entire plan drawn out for the restructuring of the NSA, but I do think that Bruce Schneier made some very sensible suggestions for true reform.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/02/breaking_up_t...
That being said, I think that the FBI needs some work as well.
By the way the same question applies to the intelligence agencies. What level of freedom is acceptable in their opinion. I've heard a number of easily disprovable talking points in favor of continued expansion of this full-employment-act for intelligence "analysts," but what would people's ability to freely express themselves look like if the intelligence community had its way?
Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.
It’s no secret that we wanted more ...
Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA....
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/usa-freedom-act-passes...
Not directed at you; just a general thought.
If that is true then it's most disappointing. Couldn't the House members have done something about that (just calling for a replacement of the Committee members, I guess?). The House Committee doing something like that sounds quite undemocratic, because the House Representatives passed a significantly different bill and then these "middle-men" intervened to kill it.
This year, the House Intelligence Committee worked with the administration, the intelligence community, and privacy advocates to come up with a compromise "USA Freedom" that everybody could live with. The House Judiciary Committee wanted to strengthen it but was concerned that would lead to the compromise falling apart and so didn't amend. The House then passed it, fairly overwhelmingly (although 50ish representatives who voted against wrote a letter to the Senate saying it should be stronger). All the amendments failed in the Senate, so they passed it as well.
And yeah, it's really disappointing. The leadership in both the House and Senate has a huge amount of control over what bills make it to the floor, and they defer to the Intelligence committees (who tend to overwhelmingly support the NSA) so the cards are strongly stacked against reformers. And this isn't just a party-line issue; when the Democrats were in control, it was a very similar dynamic.
It also shifts the legal liability, which I believe was the purpose. I don't know if I would call this a win.
https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/05/01/and_then_i_told_them.jpg?x...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
Nothing was even curtailed, the only difference is that now the NSA has some massive permanent power to get the exact same meta data as before but now it puts the burden on telecoms to keep it.
Zero of the existing programs that Snowden revealed to the world have been ended as a result of this bill passing.
the program as-is was ruled to be illegal by the supreme court, saying "congress didn't clearly authorize this level of surveillance."
with this bill, congress has clearly authorized this level of surveillance.
It is a very nice arrangement. Google/Facebook/telcos/etc get an official justification to continue their piracy of personal data ("we are only saving what the government requires us to save"). Meanwhile, the government gets to get all the data they want without a warrant: they simply give the appropriate corporation a wink and nudge and corporation volunteers the data.
The compelling part is that the existing surveillance programs have yet to have a significant impact on fighting terrorism; while the pro-surveillance folks flail about on "well that's taken out of context blah blah blah", I think that alone is starting to make lawmakers wonder "well, if it's not actually preventing terrorism, then why does it exist?".
Continued. Now companies just have to hand over their data to companies like fireye who will have legal immunity to handle our data and hand it off to the NSA.
http://www.lawfareblog.com/2015/05/so-whats-in-the-new-usa-f...
The substantive part of the post starts at the header "Bulk Collection Under Section 215"
Ironically they are going to restart the program because of the USA Freedom Act [1], which allows for a 180 day window within which to transition over to the new requirements.
The USA Freedom Act does a few things to prevent the NSA from doing what they have been doing:
Firstly, it modifies the part of the Patriot Act that allowed for free and unfettered access to business and personal documents (the "library records" provision") by changing FISA to only allow for a warrant to be granted if:
(i) there are reasonable grounds to
believe that the call detail records sought
to be produced based on the specific selection
term required under subparagraph (A) are relevant
to such investigation; and
(ii) there are facts giving rise to a
reasonable, articulable suspicion that such
specific selection term is associated with a
foreign power or an agent of a foreign power
It also makes sure that the NSA can't go on a fishing expedition - they have to have actual grounds to capture the information. They can't grab every single record now, because the requirement is now that the warrant has to show that they are only "using call detail records with a direct connection to such specific selection term as the basis for production of a second set of call detail records".
It's worse for the NSA now, because they said that they needed the records in perpetuity for data mining, because of the Act now says that they have to adopt "minimization procedures that require the prompt destruction of all call detail records produced under the order that the Government determines are not foreign intelligence information", and and they must "destroy all call detail records produced under the order as prescribed by such procedures."
There's more awesome stuff in the Act, but I gotta get to work.
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/02/nsa-surveillance-co...
Or am I just being paranoid? I don't really know anything about this.
This bill codifies the bulk collection of metadata for the first time. It gives power to the deeply corrupt telecoms, and is very similar to CISPA in its philosophy.
But there's one important point: even though this reform is a complete and utter falsehood, it was caused by the programs Snowden brought to light.
If Snowden hadn't come forward as a whistleblower, none of this would have happened. So while this bill is a failure, it is a massive vindication for Snowden.
This bill demonstrates the massive need for whistleblower reform. This fight isn't over. But we can still win it.
It's true. Congress is putting on a kabuki theater show for the benefit of those who don't understand that they're lying.
But the fact that they had to is a triumph, however small.
Snowden revealed an illegal program. And he forced the government to pretend that they fixed it. He should be pardoned and welcomed back.
At the very least, we should take steps to ensure whistleblowers are able to step forward in the future.
In the meantime, we should also take steps to ensure that whistleblowers understand the difference between whistleblowing and holding the voting and non-voting public hostage just to advance their own political agenda.
There certainly has.
One might argue over whether the direction of that reform was desirable, but that's a different question.
- Feinstein supported it; need I say more? - It's called FREEDOM, and we all know that means its anything but, just like PATRIOT. - Rand Paul was the only one opposing it. - The NSA was fine with PATRIOT expiring and FREEDOM being enacted. - "(2) SPECIFIC SELECTION TERM- The term 'specific selection term' means a discrete term, such as a term specifically identifying a person, entity, account, address, or device, used by the Government to limit the scope of the information or tangible things sought pursuant to the statute authorizing the provision of such information or tangible things to the Government.'." - (2) UNITED STATES PERSON- The term `United States person' has the meaning given that term in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801).
From FISA/50 U.S.C. 1801: (i) “United States person” means a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as defined in section 1101 (a)(20) of title 8), an unincorporated association a substantial number of members of which are citizens of the United States or aliens lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or a corporation which is incorporated in the United States, but does not include a corporation or an association which is a foreign power, as defined in subsection (a)(1), (2), or (3) of this section.
Get it now? Jesus, people are thick. All USA FREEDOM does is expand their powers with the illusion of reducing them. All the FREEDOM act supporters are tripping fucking balls, including the EFF. I will never again donate money to the EFF. I was surprised to see an enemy in an organization whom I thought was an ally.
Up is down, black is white, we've always been at war with Eastasia.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_Freedom_Act
"According to supporters of the USA Freedom Act, the USA Freedom Act was meant to end the bulk collection of Americans' metadata by the NSA, end the secret laws created by the FISA court, and introduce a "Special Advocate" to represent public and privacy matters."
"The USA Freedom Act is perceived as containing several concessions to pro-surveillance legislators meant to facilitate its passage, such as extending the Patriot Act powers until 2019."
I'm so confused. Is this bill a good thing or a bad thing?
I find it particularly amusing that you want somebody to make that judgement for you, while being obviously pro civil activism.
If you are pro civil activism, take the time and effort and learn how to read documents. Otherwise you are just lying to yourself so you can feel warm and fuzzy.
AIUI, there's still no need for a warrant, and there's still no need for a specific individual as target.
Nothing was reined in, it was just shuffled around a bit.
The obstacle to the NSA running amok is that this bill drastically reduces what's covered by a specific selection term. It means the NSA can request things like "records for people living in this one house" or "any records pertaining to this one person" but can't request things like "all call records from New York", which is what they had a week ago.
On top of that, any FISA decisions that attempt to redefine what a specific selection term is have to be declassified now.
It was my understanding that no amendments were allowed to USA FREEDOM, which still leaves the barn doors open. But perhaps I misunderstood something about the version of USA FREEDOM that was current at the time of the vote, so I'd like to read more about it.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/new-usa-freedom-act-st...
All bills have a unique identifier (a bill number combined with the Congress in which it is introduced.)
However, its very common for them to have, as part of the content of the bill, language providing a title, which -- especially with controversial bills -- is often, for bills with controversial subject matter, itself a brand name designed to make the bill sound warm and fluffy.
The Unique IDs are hardly memorable and hard to keep straight which applies to which substance, so the titles are convenient and useful in most cases (and the convenience encourages the use, which is then exploited in the controversial cases.)
==
See Downsize DC's One Subject at a Time Act (OSTA) which does almost exactly what you ask[0] in addition to eliminating riders. I have heard that what the bill wants to accomplish would require a constitutional amendment due to legislative entrenchment (the current congress cannot bind a future congress) but I do not know what the truth of the situation is.
Downsize DC's Agenda page has a list of all of their bills[1]. OSTA is the one I think has the best chance of being implemented. Some others with good ideas include:
* Read The Bills Act: 'Yea' votes require that the congressperson has read/heard the bill (no more "I didn't know that was in there!"), mandatory 7-day public review period of final bill text. I think that the additional requirement of a mandatory reading of a bill's text before a quorum will keep this one from being considered though.
* Enumerated Powers Act: Congress must cite the constitutional authority on which any proposed bill rests. The full text of OSTA[3] includes this citation.
I don't view Downsize DC as a very effective organization (don't sign up for their newsletter unless you like poorly-formatted rants), so I would love to see other orgs throw their weight behind OSTA and RTBA. It seems to me that it's something EFF or ACLU could support, for example, because so many of the things they fight against were enacted using sneaky riders.
[0]https://downsizedc.org/etp/one-subject [1]https://downsizedc.org/agenda
[3]https://downsizedc.org/blog-content/the-one-subject-at-a-tim...
This is pretty universally accepted as true among everyone I've heard discuss this kind of issue, including (especially) legal and constitutional scholars. Anything Congress can put it a law purporting to constrain what laws it can pass, it can undo with any new law, simply by passing a law that conflicts with it.
> * Read The Bills Act: 'Yea' votes require that the congressperson has read/heard the bill (no more "I didn't know that was in there!"), mandatory 7-day public review period of final bill text. I think that the additional requirement of a mandatory reading of a bill's text before a quorum will keep this one from being considered though.
Like OSTA, this is an attempt to legislate a fixed element of the rules of the houses of Congress, and would therefore seem to require a Constitutional amendment, for the same reason.
> Enumerated Powers Act: Congress must cite the constitutional authority on which any proposed bill rests. The full text of OSTA[3] includes this citation.
If framed properly (as a dictate to the judiciary on how they are to apply federal law, and particularly that they are to consider only the cited powers when deciding on the Constitutionality of a challenged federal law), this is perhaps one that can be done without a Constitutional Amendment. (OTOH, what will quickly happen if it is passed is that every provision of the Constitution for which there is a colorable claim that it grants any authority to Congress will be cited in every piece of legislation as a source of authority.)
Huh, I just went to Wikipedia to read up on that and discovered that in 2013, a super PAC was registered to push for "an Article V Convention for the limited purpose of proposing an amendment to provide every law enacted by Congress shall embrace only one subject which shall be clearly expressed in the bill's title"[0]. I also did not know that 41 states already have single subject provisions in their constitutions.
So, GP, scratch all that Downsize DC stuff and instead get the word out about the Single Subject Amendment PAC[1]! With a majority of states already using them for state law it seems like we ought to be able to convince people that it's a good idea to subject Congress to the same rule.
Out of curiosity, did anyone here already know about this PAC? I've been making noises about DownsizeDC's proposals since 2013 and this never hit my radar until now. I'm switching tactics to drum up support for this immediately; I only wish I'd known sooner.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendment...
[All the amendments they voted on would have weakened the protections. Paul and Wyden weren't allowed to introduce their amendments to strengthen it.]
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/usa-freedom-act-passes...
"Technology users everywhere should celebrate, knowing that the NSA will be a little more hampered in its surveillance overreach, and both the NSA and the FISA court will be more transparent and accountable than it was before the USA Freedom Act.
It’s no secret that we wanted more.
...
Even so, we’re celebrating. We’re celebrating because, however small, this bill marks a day that some said could never happen—a day when the NSA saw its surveillance power reduced by Congress. And we’re hoping that this could be a turning point in the fight to rein in the NSA."
Make sure you let your legislators know this via a phone call or written (not email) comunication. Might not change things overnight, but it's pretty easy to do.
http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fil...
Compared to May 30th, it is a slight contraction of surveillance authority.
Isn't this, on some level, a subsidy to ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint?
"Hey $ATT_EXECUTIVE - see what happened to [Qwest's CEO] Joe Nacchio? Good. Now go splice me some fiber or you'll be joining him."
What the heck does this mean? Should the title of the article read "Senate votes to keep the NSA doing almost exactly the same thing?"
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/let-the-snooping-...
They get articles trumpeting that they "did away" with Section 215, they get articles claiming they "reigned in" Surveillance by passing a new bill.
The reality is nothing changed for all this theater, its just been dressed up in different clothes to put the bad publicity behind them.
As to our brief respite from one small part of tyranny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9642843
Hah. I wish. In reality, it's more of a modular monolith than a proper microkernel.
The only way our government could possibly be described as a "microkernel" is if it's a microkernel a la AmigaOS, where memory protection is virtually nonexistent (at least in the early versions).
> legislators would ... not have a direct influence on kernel-space policies
They don't. The kernel is not the federal government, which is but one group of (albeit somewhat privileged) processes. The kernel is economic control, which is why I pointed out that most of your daily life is shaped by non-government processes.
If we stick to the former case, though, then it's not accurate to say that the economy is the kernel of this hypothetical operating system. The federal government very much is; just because it's susceptible to a multitude of security-related bugs doesn't mean that it's no longer the kernel, much like how just because the NT kernel is susceptible to a multitude of security-related bugs doesn't mean that it's no longer the kernel.
It's like someone used a security bug in NT to load a hypervisor. You could say that NT was still "the kernel", but most of the important stuff goes on outside of it.
From take action with Google: "Senator * said YES to USA Freedom. Say thank you and show your support." "Thank your Senator now for saying YES to the USA Freedom Act."
Freedom Act (Patriot Act v 2.0.. Same author: Rep. Sensenbrenner) must be vetoed... Someone please start a change.org thing, or whatever.
Freedom Act is going to require everyone to keep records for the NSA... Simple fix for the no funding problem... "No datacenter, no problem; we'll use yours"
Do not sacrifice your privacy for security.
Note that "security" is (or ought to be) in massive finger-quotes here. Bulk data collection like this is actually a liability in terms of data security, not an asset, due to being a large target for attack.
Anyway, just read ArsTechnica reporting:
* Let the snooping resume: Senate revives Patriot Act surveillance measures http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/let-the-snooping-...
* How the end of Patriot Act provisions changes NSA surveillance http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/how-the-end-of-pa...
Section regarding bulk collection: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?c113:4:./temp/~c113LpL...:
In fact, the only reason the Section 215 even had a sunset clause was because the legislature was so uncertain about the legislation that they wanted to put in an escape clause.
"Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Senator Leahy made it clear after passage that curtailing the phone sweeps might be only the beginning. The two are collaborating on legislation to undo a provision in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 that allows the government to read the contents of email over six months old. House members and senators from both parties are already eyeing a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that they say has also been abused by the government.
"But opponents of the law said they imagined further fights going forward for their positions, too. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she and others would continue to seek reforms and oversight.
"'It’s not the end,' she said."
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/2/8714651/senate-passes-usa-f...
which links to a great table explaining the difference between the house and senate bills: https://cdt.org/insight/comparison-of-house-senate-versions-...
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_FBI_SURVEILLANCE_F...
The FBI also spies, but it is not taking over the NSA's spy role.
They both spy. Neither is decreasing.
If it hadn't been approved, I doubt the real outcome would've been different.