SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
metadata
Post-Orlando Senate Rejects Gun Control, Calls for More Spying Instead
Senate invokes Orlando shooting to justify expanding FBI's warrantless surveillance powers, just after rejecting four gun control measures
Jun 21, 2016
Reuters reports that the U.S. Senate is poised to vote on a bill that would expand the FBI's secret surveillance powers, including warrantless collection of browsing history.
Lawmakers will vote on the amendment, sponsored by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), no later than Wednesday.
If approved, the bill would expand the FBI's authority to use the so-called National Security Letters (NSL) to obtain Electronic Communication Transaction Records (ECTR) such as email time stamps, senders, and recipients, as well as browsing metadata such as history and location--all without a warrant.
Civil liberties groups have widely criticized the amendment, which McConnell attached to a criminal justice appropriations bill.
Digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) previously referred to the NSLs as "one of the most frightening and invasive" government surveillance powers that were expanded under the U.S. Patriot Act and noted that the FBI is guilty of "systemic abuse of this power."
NSL recipients are also subject to a gag order that prohibits them from ever revealing the letters' existence to anyone, from their coworkers to the public.
Fight for the Future launched a campaign calling on senators to vote it down, stating, "The information the FBI wants is too sensitive to remove oversight."
Opponents in the chamber agree. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), an outspoken critic of mass surveillance, said of a similar measure last month that it "takes a hatchet to important protections for Americans' liberty."
Republicans invoked the mass shooting in Orlando earlier this month as justification for the new amendment. McCain said in a statement, "In the wake of the tragic massacre in Orlando, it is important our law enforcement have the tools they need to conduct counterterrorism investigations."
However, as opponents noted, the amendment would have been unlikely to stop the attack. As national security expert Marcy Wheeler pointed out in a blog post on Tuesday, FBI director James Comey previously said that the agency had already obtained shooter Omar Mateen's ECTR. "So it is false to say this is a real response," she wrote.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly made the move late Monday--the same day that the Senate rejected four gun control measures also introduced as a response to the shooting.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass a bipartisan amendment limiting government surveillance powers by prohibiting warrantless collection of Americans' electronic communications and banning the government from forcing technology companies to install backdoors to encrypted devices.
One of that bill's sponsors, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), said the House amendment "doesn't take any tools away from those that want to investigate what happened in Orlando, none whatsoever."
"I think our citizens are fed up with being spied on by the government," Massie said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Greenwald, Snowden Joint Address on Surveillance & Erosion of Rights
Whistleblower and journalist speak to crowd at Amnesty International Human Rights Conference
Apr 06, 2014
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald made a joint appearance on Saturday in which they discussed how the "products of surveillance" include the accumulation of metadata as well as drone strikes.
The two were speaking via separate video streams at a session of Amnesty International USA's annual human rights conference taking place at a hotel in downtown Chicago.
According to Reuters' reporting on the event, Snowden and Greenwald
cautioned that government monitoring of "metadata" is more intrusive than directly listening to phone calls or reading emails and stressed the importance of a free press willing to scrutinize government activity. [..]
"Metadata is what allows an actual enumerated understanding, a precise record of all the private activities in all of our lives. It shows our associations, our political affiliations and our actual activities," said Snowden [...]
"My hope and my belief is that as we do more of that reporting and as people see the scope of the abuse as opposed to just the scope of the surveillance they will start to care more," [Greenwald] said.
YouTube user Dori Kenyon captured some of the event, which can be seen below. In the video, the Intercept journalist describes his response to a supporter who wanted him to move away from covering NSA stories and get back to issues like drones, Guantanamo and indefinite detention. Greenwald explains how they are not separate issues, but inextricably linked.
"The premise that underlies the system of mass surveillance," Greenwald said, "is really the same principle and part of the same system -- the idea that the government can do whatever it wants without even notifying its own citizens in any meaningful way that it's doing it, and can completely disregard the rights of its own citizens but even more so the rights of anybody who's not a citizen in order to exert dominion and control."
"One way it does that is through invasions. Another way is through torture. Another way is indefinite detention or drones. Another way is through mass surveillance," Greenwald said.
Snowden added, "When you think about drones, how does NSA, how does the U.S. military, how does the CIA [not clear] its targets? They're not targeting humans. Humans don't have GPS... It's the cell phones we're carrying around."
Snowden said the people in Guantanamo might have been captured over some call they made, and asked how the CIA knows where a specific target for a drone strike might be. "These are all products of surveillance."
"What we are seeing today is a renegotiation" of what the public is allowed to know and what the government is deciding for us behind closed doors," Snowden said.
Glenn Greenwald and Edward SnowdenAmnesty AGM 2014 Conversation on Surveillance I wish the video of Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden was better. They were ...
Some at the conference took to Twitter to share the event as well:
"It takes solidarity." Snowden delivering real talk at #Amnesty2014. We MUST stand in solidarity.
-- Jessica Wehby (@JessWehby) April 5, 2014
Keep ReadingShow Less
Think Metadata Isn't Intrusive? Read This
MIT Students Show the Enormously Intrusive Nature of Metadata
Jan 08, 2014
You've probably heard politicians or pundits say that "metadata doesn't matter." They argue that police and intelligence agencies shouldn't need probable cause warrants to collect information about our communications. Metadata isn't all that revealing, they say, it's just numbers.
But the digital metadata trails you leave behind every day say more about you than you can imagine. Now, thanks to two MIT students, you don't have to imagine--at least with respect to your email.
Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov's Immersion program maps your life, using your email account. After you give the researchers access to your email metadata--not the content, just the time and date stamps, and "To" and "Cc" fields--they'll return to you a series of maps and graphs that will blow your mind. The program will remind you of former loves, illustrate the changing dynamics of your professional and personal networks over time, mark deaths and transitions in your life, and more. You'll probably learn something new about yourself, if you study it closely enough. (The students say they delete your data on your command.)
Whether or not you grant the program access to your data, watch the video embedded below to see Jagdish and Smilkov show illustrations from Immersion and talk about what they discerned about themselves from looking at their own metadata maps. While you're watching, remember that while the NSA and FBI are collecting our phone records in bulk, and using advanced computer algorithms to make meaning from them, state and local government officials can often also get this information without a warrant.
The Power of Metadata: Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov at TEDxCambridge 2013MIT Media Lab graduate students Deepak Jagdish and Daniel Smilkov share some surprising insights from Immersion, a tool they ...
When President Obama said that the phone surveillance program "isn't about" "listening to your telephone calls," he was deflecting attention from the terrifying fact that there's nothing currently stopping the government from amassing and data-mining every scrap of metadata in the world about us. He made it sound like metadata spying isn't a big deal, when it's pretty much the golden ticket.
Metadata surveillance is extremely powerful, and we are all subject to it, constantly. If you want to see something resembling what the NSA sees when it looks at your data, give Jagdish and Smilkov's program a try. Then tell the government: get a warrant.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular