Home » Posts tagged 'Jenna McLaughlin'
Tag Archives: Jenna McLaughlin
New Film Tells the Story of Edward Snowden; Here Are the Surveillance Programs He Helped Expose
OLIVER STONE’S LATEST film, “Snowden,” bills itself as a dramatized version of the life of Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed the global extent of U.S. surveillance capabilities.
Stone’s rendering of Snowden’s life combines facts with Hollywood invention, covering Snowden being discharged from the military after an injury in basic training, meeting his girlfriend, and training in the CIA with fictitious mentors (including Nicolas Cage’s character, most likely a composite of whistleblowers like Thomas Drake and Bill Binney). Snowden then goes undercover, only to see an op turn ugly; becomes a contractor for the CIA and NSA; and finally chooses to leave the intelligence community and disclose its vast surveillance apparatus, some of which he helped develop.
The movie hits key points in Snowden’s story, including his growing interest in constitutional law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, some of the U.S. surveillance programs he eventually unmasked, and parts of his furtive meetings in Hong Kong with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras (co-founders of The Intercept), as well as The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill.
There are doses of artistic license — for example, a Rubik’s Cube hiding the drive where he stored the documents, and Snowden’s CIA mentor spying on his girlfriend through her webcam. In hazier focus are the global questions his revelations raised, including the legal and moral implications of the U.S. government collecting data on foreigners and Americans with relative impunity, and the very real stories born of Snowden’s massive disclosures.
So here’s a retrospective of sorts for moviegoers and others interested in the journalism Edward Snowden made possible through his decision to become a whistleblower: In all, over 150 articles from 23 news organizations worldwide have incorporated documents provided by Snowden, and The Intercept and other outlets continue to mine the archive for stories of social and political significance.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ex-White House Officials Criticize Vague Rules Around Disclosure of Hacking Tools
WHEN U.S. GOVERNMENT officials discover a new vulnerability they can use to hack into people’s computers, they have a decision to make: Should they keep it to themselves? Or should they warn the world?
Exactly how they make that decision is a mystery.
Now, two top former White House cybersecurity officials are recommending in a report that the administration be more transparent about how it deals with those vulnerabilities when it discovers them or buys tools to exploit them from the private sector.
“The principles guiding these decisions, as well as a high-level map of the process that will be used to make such decisions, can and should be public,” wrote Ari Schwartz and Robert Knake in a new report for Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Members of the intelligence community have an obvious incentive to hold on to undiscovered cyber flaws so they can keep using them to hack their targets. But failing to tell a company about a flaw in its product — so it can be fixed — puts users at risk from other hackers.
The White House’s continued refusal to explain how it balances the priorities of intelligence versus cybersecurity for Americans is leading to a lack of public trust, the authors suggest.
In 2015, White House officials begrudgingly released heavily redacted guidelines for disclosing cyber threats, which they call the Vulnerabilities Equities Process, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They also issued a vague White House blog post.
But as the public becomes more aware of the government’s ability to go on the technological offensive — hacking against adversaries — consumer advocates are asking how that capability is regulated.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Secret Text in Senate Bill Would Give FBI Warrantless Access to Email Records
A PROVISION SNUCK INTO the still-secret text of the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization would give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.
If passed, the change would expand the reach of the FBI’s already highly controversial national security letters. The FBI is currently allowed to get certain types of information with NSLs — most commonly, information about the name, address, and call data associated with a phone number or details about a bank account.
Since a 2008 Justice Department legal opinion, the FBI has not been allowed to use NSLs to demand “electronic communication transactional records,” such as email subject lines and other metadata, or URLs visited.
The spy bill passed the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, with the provision in it. The lone no vote came from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who wrote in a statement that one of the bill’s provisions “would allow any FBI field office to demand email records without a court order, a major expansion of federal surveillance powers.”
Wyden did not disclose exactly what the provision would allow, but his spokesperson suggested it might go beyond email records to things like web-surfing histories and other information about online behavior. “Senator Wyden is concerned it could be read that way,” Keith Chu said.
It’s unclear how or when the provision was added, although Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., — the committee’s chairman — and Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have both offered bills in the past that would address what the FBI calls a gap and privacy advocates consider a serious threat to civil liberties.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Intelligence Community Olive Branch on Data Sharing Greeted With Skepticism
TOP INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY lawyer Robert Litt has offfered a rare olive branch to privacy advocates on Wednesday, in the form of information.
In a post on one of their favorite blogs on Wednesday, Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, outlined new intelligence data-sharing guidelines that he said will be released soon.
The post, on Just Security, was essentially a response to reporting last month from the New York Times’s Charlie Savage that the NSA would soon be sharing with other government agencies the raw, unfiltered intelligence from the depths of its massive overseas spying programs.
“There has been a lot of speculation about the content of proposed procedures that are being drafted to authorize the sharing of unevaluated signals intelligence,” Litt wrote.
The New York Times story raised concerns that the data, which inevitably includes information about Americans, would become too easily accessible by intelligence agencies including the FBI, potentially leading to fishing expeditions.
Litt provided his assurances that “these procedures are not about law enforcement, but about improving our intelligence capabilities.”
He also emphasized that there would be no additional collection of information—and that all the same privacy protections that currently exist will apply.
Privacy advocates and policy analysts interviewed by The Intercept were pleased Litt made the effort to reach out, noting some positive features of his announcement—like the possible restriction on sharing intelligence with state and local law enforcers.
Nathan White, senior legislative manager for digital rights organization Access Now, had entreated the intelligence community just the day before for more information on how the FBI would get access. “I hope that Litt replied to my op-ed means they’re taking these concerns seriously,” White wrote in a message to The Intercept.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The FBI vs. Apple Debate Just Got Less White
The letter focused on potential civil rights abuses, should the FBI gain the power to conscript a technology company into undermining its own users’ security.
“One need only look to the days of J. Edgar Hoover and wiretapping of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to recognize the FBI has not always respected the right to privacy for groups it did not agree with,” wrote the signatories, including arts and music nonprofit Beats, Rhymes & Relief, the Center for Media Justice, The Gathering for Justice, Justice League NYC, activist and writer Shaun King, and Black Lives Matter co-founder and Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi.
Those tactics haven’t ended, they argue. “Many of us, as civil rights advocates, have become targets of government surveillance for no reason beyond our advocacy or provision of social services for the underrepresented.”
In Washington and Silicon Valley, the debate over unbreakable encryption has an aura of elite, educated, mostly male whiteness — from the government representatives who condemn it to the experts who explain why it’s necessary.
But the main targets of law enforcement surveillance have historically been African American and Muslim communities.
Malkia Cyril, the co-founder of Center for Media Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, gave a speech at one of several nationwide protests outside Apple stores two weeks ago, supporting the tech giant and pointing out the FBI’s history of surveilling black activists. “In the context of white supremacy and police violence, Black people need encryption,” she wrote in a tweet.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
FBI vs. Apple Establishes a New Phase of the Crypto Wars
After the 2013 Snowden revelations, as mainstream technology companies started spreading encryption by putting it in popular consumer products, the wars erupted again. Law enforcement officials, led by FBI Director James Comey, loudly insisted that U.S. companies should build backdoors to break the encryption just for them.
That won’t happen because what these law enforcement officials are asking for isn’t possible (any backdoor can be used by hackers, too) and wouldn’t be effective (because encryption is widely available globally now). They’ve succeeded in slowing the spread of unbreakable encryption by intimidating tech companies that might otherwise be rolling it out faster, but not much else.
Indeed, as almost everyone else acknowledges, unbreakable encryption is here to stay.
Tech privacy advocates continue to remain vigilant about encryption, actively pointing out the inadequacies and impossibilities of the anti-encryption movement, and jumping on any sign of backsliding.
But even as they have stayed focused on defending encryption, the government has been shifting its focus to something else.
The ongoing, very public dispute between Apple and the FBI, in fact, marks a key inflection point — at least as far as the public’s understanding of the issue.
You might say we’re entering the Post-Crypto phase of the Crypto Wars.
Think about it: The more we learn about the FBI’s demand that Apple help it hack into a password-protected iPhone, the more it looks like part of a concerted, long-term effort by the government to find new ways around unbreakable encryption — rather than try to break it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
New Safe Harbor Data “Deal” May Be More Politicking Than Surveillance Reform
Lobbyists, government officials, and technology executives celebrated newsfrom Strasbourg on Tuesday morning that the European Commission and the United States had reached an agreement to reinstate the free flow of massive amounts of data between companies in the United States and the European Union, safeguarding users’ privacy at a new level.
But while some cheered the new agreement, dubbed the “Privacy Shield,” and thanked negotiators for providing “certainty” to businesspeople who deal in big data, many were quite a bit more skeptical of its success and said they would reserve final judgment until the agreement is formally spelled out on paper, which could take weeks or months.
The Article 29 Working Party — a data protection authority set up the European Parliament — said on Wednesday morning that it was pleased an agreement had been reached, but expressed concerns about the commitment of the United States — especially regarding the scope of its surveillance activities and relevant legal remedies available to all people. The party said it would not formally weigh in until the text of the agreement surfaces, and assigned a new deadline to release it: the end of February.
The scramble to come up with a new data-sharing arrangement kicked off when the European Court of Justice (CJEU), the top court of the European Union, ruled on October 6 that the NSA’s indiscriminate overseas surveillance interfered with the “fundamental rights” of its citizens, whose data it has the responsibility to protect. The Safe Harbor agreement — the early 2000s principles agreed upon to guarantee U.S. companies were respecting European digital rights when transferring data overseas — was deemed invalid.
Austrian law student Max Schrems brought the issue to the attention of the CJEU after suing Facebook for ignoring European privacy laws when it transferred his personal data to the U.S., where he argued it was subject to collection by the NSA.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Congressional Hearings on Surveillance Programs to Kick Off — in Secret
But, to the great consternation of 26 government accountability groups who wrote an angry letter to committee leaders on Wednesday, the public is not invited. The entire hearing is classified, and closed.
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008, which has been cited as the legal authority for those two programs, lapses next year.
The debate over whether to reauthorize it is expected to be the most substantive public examination of the NSA’s surveillance regime since Congress’s decision to end NSA’s collection of bulk metadata of U.S. phone calls.
Kicking off that debate with a closed hearing sets the wrong tone, groups including openthegovernment.org and the ACLU wrote in their letter. “It continues the excessive secrecy that has contributed to the surveillance abuses we have seen in recent years and to their adverse effects upon both our civil liberties and economic growth.”
The authors of the letter reminded the committee that discussions over the original passage of the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 “happened largely in open session,” and that matters of national security are often discussed in open hearings, with classified briefings reserved for specific questions.
Specifically, they wrote, “In the case of Section 702 implementation oversight, a completely closed hearing is unnecessary to provide members with an adequate understanding of how the law is currently implemented by the executive branch and whether that exceeds Congress’s original intent.”
The two programs that run under Section 702 vacuum up hundreds of millions of online messages and voice communications, including emails, Skype calls, and Facebook messages, that involve “targeted” suspects overseas and the people they talk to.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How a Small Company in Switzerland Is Fighting a Surveillance Law — And Winning
A small email provider and its customers have almost single-handedly forced the Swiss government to put its new invasive surveillance law up for a public vote in a national referendum in June.
“This law was approved in September, and after the Paris attacks, we assumed privacy was dead at that point,” said Andy Yen, co-founder of ProtonMail, when I spoke with him on the phone. He was referring to the Nachrichtendienstgesetzt (NDG), a mouthful of a name for a bill that gave Swiss intelligence authorities more clout to spy on private communications, hack into citizens’ computers, and sweep up their cellphone information.
The climate of fear and terrorism, he said, felt too overwhelming to get people to care about constitutional rights when people first started organizing to fight the NDG law. Governments around the world, not to mention cable news networks, have taken advantage of tragedy to expand their reach under the guise of protecting people, even in classically neutral Switzerland — without much transparency or public debate on whether or not increased surveillance would help solve the problem.
But thanks to the way Swiss law works — if you get together 50,000 signatures within three months of the law passing — you can force a nationwide referendum where every citizen gets a say.
“In Switzerland, and overseas, no one really thought to ask the people,” Yen said. “The public opinion, especially from the young people, has shifted to pro-privacy.”
By gathering its users and teaming up with political groups including the Green and Pirate parties, as well as technological and privacy advocates including Chaos Computer Club Switzerland and Digitale Gesellschaft Switzerland, ProtonMail was able to collect over 70,000 signatures before the deadline.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
