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Paul Merrell

PATRIOT Act spying programs on death watch - Seung Min Kim and Kate Tummarello - POLITICO - 0 views

www.politico.com/...ct-spying-programs-117976.html

surveillance state NSA 502-program legislation must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 May 15 - No Cached
  • With only days left to act and Rand Paul threatening a filibuster, Senate Republicans remain deeply divided over the future of the PATRIOT Act and have no clear path to keep key government spying authorities from expiring at the end of the month. Crucial parts of the PATRIOT Act, including a provision authorizing the government’s controversial bulk collection of American phone records, first revealed by Edward Snowden, are due to lapse May 31. That means Congress has barely a week to figure out a fix before before lawmakers leave town for Memorial Day recess at the end of the next week. Story Continued Below The prospects of a deal look grim: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Thursday night proposed just a two-month extension of expiring PATRIOT Act provisions to give the two sides more time to negotiate, but even that was immediately dismissed by critics of the program.
  • Paul Merrell on 15 May 15
     
    A must-read. The major danger is that the the Senate could pass the USA Freedom Act, which has already been passed by the House. Passage of that Act, despite its name, would be bad news for civil liberties.  Now is the time to let your Congress critters know that you want them to fight to the Patriot Act provisions expire on May 31, without any replacement legislation.  Keep in mind that Section 502 does not apply just to telephone metadata. It authorizes the FBI to gather without notice to their victims "any tangible thing", specifically including as examples "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records containing information that would identify a person." The breadth of the section is illustrated by telephone metadata not even being mentioned in the section.  NSA going after your medical records souand far fetched? Former NSA technical director William Binney says they're already doing it: "Binney alludes to even more extreme intelligence practices that are not yet public knowledge, including the collection of Americans' medical data, the collection and use of client-attorney conversations, and law enforcement agencies' "direct access," without oversight, to NSA databases." https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/05/seeing-the-stasi-through-nsa-eyes/ So please, contact your Congress critters right now and tell them to sunset the Patriot Act NOW. This will be decided in the next few days so the sooner you contact them the better. 
Paul Merrell

Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments - 0 views

theintercept.com/...he-u-s-and-israeli-governments

OpenWeb censorship Facebook Instagram Israel U.S.

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In September of last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country. The predictable results of those meetings are now clear and well-documented. Ever since, Facebook has been on a censorship rampage against Palestinian activists who protest the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation, all directed and determined by Israeli officials. Indeed, Israeli officials have been publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders
  • Facebook now seems to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government.
  • What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced? As the ACLU’s Jennifer Granick told the Times: It’s not a law that appears to be written or designed to deal with the special situations where it’s lawful or appropriate to repress speech. … This sanctions law is being used to suppress speech with little consideration of the free expression values and the special risks of blocking speech, as opposed to blocking commerce or funds as the sanctions was designed to do. That’s really problematic.
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  • As is always true of censorship, there is one, and only one, principle driving all of this: power. Facebook will submit to and obey the censorship demands of governments and officials who actually wield power over it, while ignoring those who do not. That’s why declared enemies of the U.S. and Israeli governments are vulnerable to censorship measures by Facebook, whereas U.S and Israeli officials (and their most tyrannical and repressive allies) are not
  • All of this illustrates that the same severe dangers from state censorship are raised at least as much by the pleas for Silicon Valley giants to more actively censor “bad speech.” Calls for state censorship may often be well-intentioned — a desire to protect marginalized groups from damaging “hate speech” — yet, predictably, they are far more often used against marginalized groups: to censor them rather than protect them. One need merely look at how hate speech laws are used in Europe, or on U.S. college campuses, to see that the censorship victims are often critics of European wars, or activists against Israeli occupation, or advocates for minority rights.
  • It’s hard to believe that anyone’s ideal view of the internet entails vesting power in the U.S. government, the Israeli government, and other world powers to decide who may be heard on it and who must be suppressed. But increasingly, in the name of pleading with internet companies to protect us, that’s exactly what is happening.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

EU high court strikes down metadata collection law | Ars Technica - 1 views

arstechnica.com/...s-down-metadata-collection-law

court strikes down metadata collection law Europe legas precedent set

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 08 Apr 14
     
    "Citizens made to feel that they "are the subject of constant surveillance." by Cyrus Farivar - Apr 8 2014, 4:25pm CEST"
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Apr 14
     
    Just finished reading the court's opinion. I can only wish that the U.S. government had such fine-tuned respect for civil rights Not quoted in the linked article, but opinion paragraph 68 is very bad news for U.S. service providers: "In the second place, it should be added that that directive does not require the data in question to be retained within the European Union, with the result that it cannot be held that the control, explicitly required by Article 8(3) of the Charter, by an independent authority of compliance with the requirements of protection and security, as referred to in the two previous paragraphs, is fully ensured. Such a control, carried out on the basis of EU law, is an essential component of the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data (see, to that effect, Case C-614/10 Commission v Austria EU:C:2012:631, paragraph 37).". The Court is holding, in other words, that an E.U. network *must* be created that can prevent user's data from being transported outside the E.U., that user's data retained for law enforcement or national defense purposes cannot be transmitted or stored outside the E.U. It will take awhile for this to be transposed into national laws. But this is very good news for folks in the E.U. and for civil libertarians globally.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Report: Facebook tracks all visitors, even if you're not a user and opted out | Ars Tec... - 1 views

arstechnica.com/...youre-not-a-user-and-opted-out

report facebook tracks visitors outside without consent against EU privacy law e-Privacy directive bad bys

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 01 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 01 Apr 15
     
    "In the EU, where free and informed prior consent is required, there could be an issue. by Glyn Moody - Mar 31, 2015 8:10pm CEST"
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 01 Apr 15
     
    "In the EU, where free and informed prior consent is required, there could be an issue. by Glyn Moody - Mar 31, 2015 8:10pm CEST"
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