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Paul Merrell

Tell Congress: My Phone Calls are My Business. Reform the NSA. | EFF Action Center - 0 views

act.eff.org/...are-my-business-reform-the-nsa

Patriot-Act sunset-section-215 EFF-email-campaign phone-records medical-records

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The USA PATRIOT Act granted the government powerful new spying capabilities that have grown out of control—but the provision that the FBI and NSA have been using to collect the phone records of millions of innocent people expires on June 1. Tell Congress: it’s time to rethink out-of-control spying. A vote to reauthorize Section 215 is a vote against the Constitution.
  • On June 5, 2013, the Guardian published a secret court order showing that the NSA has interpreted Section 215 to mean that, with the help of the FBI, it can collect the private calling records of millions of innocent people. The government could even try to use Section 215 for bulk collection of financial records. The NSA’s defenders argue that invading our privacy is the only way to keep us safe. But the White House itself, along with the President’s Review Board has said that the government can accomplish its goals without bulk telephone records collection. And the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board said, “We have not identified a single instance involving a threat to the United States in which [bulk collection under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act] made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.” Since June of 2013, we’ve continued to learn more about how out of control the NSA is. But what has not happened since June is legislative reform of the NSA. There have been myriad bipartisan proposals in Congress—some authentic and some not—but lawmakers didn’t pass anything. We need comprehensive reform that addresses all the ways the NSA has overstepped its authority and provides the NSA with appropriate and constitutional tools to keep America safe. In the meantime, tell Congress to take a stand. A vote against reauthorization of Section 215 is a vote for the Constitution.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 15
     
    EFF has launched an email campagin to press members of Congress not to renew sectiion 215 of the Patriot Act when it expires on June 1, 2015.   Sectjon 215 authorizes FBI officials to "make an application for an order requiring the production of *any tangible things* (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution." http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1861 The section has been abused to obtain bulk collecdtion of all telephone records for the NSA's storage and processing.But the section goes farther and lists as specific examples of records that can be obtained under section 215's authority, "library circulation records, library patron lists, book sales records, book customer lists, firearms sales records, tax return records, educational records, or medical records."  Think of the NSA's voracious appetite for new "haystacks" it can store  and search in its gigantic new data center in Utah. Then ask yourself, "do I want the NSA to obtain all of my personal data, store it, and search it at will?" If your anser is "no," you might consider visiting this page to send your Congress critters an email urging them to vote against renewal of section 215 and to vote for other NSA reforms listed in the EFF sample email text. Please do not procrastinate. Do it now, before you forget. Every voice counts. 
Paul Merrell

Campaign to End NSA Warrantless Surveillance Surges Past 500,000 Signers | Electronic F... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...nce-surges-past-500000-signers

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Over five hundred thousand people have signed onto the Stop Watching Us campaign, a nonpartisan, grassroots campaign opposing the dragnet surveillance programs of the National Security Agency (NSA).  Galvanized by newly surfaced evidence confirming the NSA’s surveillance of the phone records and Internet activity of individuals in the United States and abroad, the Stop Watching Us coalition is seeking public accountability and tangible reform to rein in unconstitutional surveillance. 
  • Yesterday, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, also added his support to the campaign.  He was joined by internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei. Other prominent supporters include Icelandic Parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir, author Cory Doctorow, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, and actor John Cusack.
  • "This campaign has been lightening-fast. Hundreds of thousands of people have now called on Congress to provide a full accounting of the National Security Agency’s powerful and frankly unsettling spying practices," said EFF Staff Attorney Mark Rumold, "Now all eyes are turned on Congress to see if they’ll do the right thing and be responsive to the will of the people." Every time a person signs onto the stopwatching.us site, emails opposing dragnet surveillance are sent to that individual’s elected officials or to the president. These emails call for a full investigation and public accounting of the National Security Agency’s spying practices, reform to the law to prevent such surveillance, and holding public officials accountable for the role they played. In addition to signing onto Stop Watching Us, individuals who oppose NSA spying can call their members of Congress using the dedicated call line 1-STOP-323-NSA (1-786-732-3672). Read more about contacting Congress, including more privacy-friendly ways of calling Congress. You can also visit stopwatching.us to add your name to the campaign.
Paul Merrell

EFF Statement on Passage of Massie-Lofgren Amendment Regarding NSA Backdoors | Electron... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...ofgren-amendment-passing-house

surveillance state NSA-reform legislation Defense-spending

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Today, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill designed to cut funding for NSA backdoors. The amendment passed overwhelmingly with strong bipartisan support: 293 ayes, 123 nays, and 1 present. Currently, the NSA collects emails, browsing and chat history under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and searches this information without a warrant for the communications of Americans—a practice known as "backdoor searches." The amendment would block the NSA from using any of its funding from this Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct such warrantless searches. In addition, the amendment would prohibit the NSA from using its budget to mandate or request that private companies and organizations add backdoors to the encryption standards that are meant to keep you safe on the web. Mark Rumold, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, stated:
  • Tonight, the House of Representatives took an important first step in reining in the NSA. The House voted overwhelmingly to cut funding for two of the NSA's invasive surveillance practices: the warrantless searching of Americans' international communications, and the practice of requiring companies to install vulnerabilities in communications products or services. We applaud the House for taking this important first step, and we look forward to other elected officials standing up for our right to privacy. Digital rights organizations, including EFF, strongly supported the amendment. We and other organizations—including Free Press, Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and Taskforce.is—helped to organize a grassroots campaign to promote the amendment. The day before the vote, we urged friends and members to call their members of Congress through the website ShuttheBackDoor.net. Thousands responded to the call to action. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone who spoke out on this issue. This is a great day in the fight to rein in NSA surveillance abuses, and we hope Congress will work to ensure this amendment is in the final version of the appropriations bill that is enacted.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14
     
    Big majority in the House and it's in the Defense Spending act. That puts a lot of pressure on the Senate and if sustained in the Senate, makes it all but veto-proof.  
Paul Merrell

It's Time to Rewrite the Internet to Give Us Better Privacy, and Security - The Daily B... - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...tter-privacy-and-security.html

surveillance state lessig surveillance-blocking

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Almost 15 years ago, as I was just finishing a book about the relationship between the Net (we called it “cyberspace” then) and civil liberties, a few ideas seemed so obvious as to be banal: First, life would move to the Net. Second, the Net would change as it did so. Gone would be simple privacy, the relatively anonymous default infrastructure for unmonitored communication; in its place would be a perpetually monitored, perfectly traceable system supporting both commerce and the government. That, at least, was the future that then seemed most likely, as business raced to make commerce possible and government scrambled to protect us (or our kids) from pornographers, and then pirates, and now terrorists. But another future was also possible, and this was my third, and only important point: Recognizing these obvious trends, we just might get smart about how code (my shorthand for the technology of the Internet) regulates us, and just possibly might begin thinking smartly about how we could embed in that code the protections that the Constitution guarantees us. Because—and here was the punchline, the single slogan that all 724 people who read that book remember—code is law. And if code is law, then we need to be as smart about how code regulates us as we are about how the law does so.
  • There is, after all, something hopeful about a future that was smart about encoding our civil liberties. It could, in theory at least, be better. Better at protecting us from future Nixons, better at securing privacy, and better at identifying those keen to commit crime.
  • But what astonishes me is that today, more than a decade into the 21st century, the world has remained mostly oblivious to these obvious points about the relationship between law and code. That’s the bit in the Edward Snowden interview that is, to me, the most shocking. As he explained to Glenn Greenwald: The NSA specially targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest and the most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends ... Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authority to wiretap anyone—from you [the reporter, Glenn Greenwald], to your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email. We don’t know yet whether Snowden is telling the truth. Lots of people have denied specifics, and though his interview is compelling, just now, we literally don’t know. But what we do know are the questions that ought to be asked in response to his claims. And specifically, this: Is it really the case that the government has entrusted our privacy to the good judgment of private analysts? Are there really no code-based controls for assuring that specific surveillance is specifically justified? And what is the technology for assuring that rogues paid by our government can’t use data collected by our government for purposes that none within our government would openly and publicly defend?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Because the fact is that there is technology that could be deployed that would give many the confidence that none of us now have. “Trust us” does not compute. But trust and verify, with high-quality encryption, could. And there are companies, such as Palantir, developing technologies that could give us, and more importantly, reviewing courts, a very high level of confidence that data collected or surveilled was not collected or used in an improper way. Think of it as a massive audit log, recording how and who used what data for what purpose. We could code the Net in a string of obvious ways to give us even better privacy, while also enabling better security. But we don’t, or haven’t, obviously. Maybe because of stupidity. How many congressmen could even describe how encryption works? Maybe because of cupidity. Who within our system can resist large and lucrative contracts to private companies, especially when bundled with generous campaign funding packages? Or maybe because the “permanent war” that Obama told us we were not in has actually convinced all within government that old ideas are dead and we just need to “get over it”—ideas like privacy, and due process, and fundamental proportionality. These ideas may be dead, for now. And they will stay dead, in the future. At least until we finally learn how liberty can live in the digital age. And here’s the hint: not through law alone, but through law that demands code that even the Electronic Frontier Foundation could trust.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Jun 13
     
    As the most prominent among law professors concerned with online civil liberties and now specializing in government corruption, if Lawrence Lessig says there are technical solutions for protecting us from online government snooping, I'm all years. He directs attention to technology being developed by Palantir, http://www.palantir.com/
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