Microsoft: Talks with US gov't on surveillance transparency break down

Negotiations have broken down between two Internet giants and U.S. government representatives over the companies' requests to publish information on the surveillance requests they receive, a Microsoft executive said Friday.

Microsoft and Google both filed lawsuits in June asking that the companies be allowed to disclose more information about U.S. government surveillance requests they receive. The two companies agreed to extend the government's deadline to respond to the lawsuits during negotiations over recent weeks, but those negotiations have failed, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith wrote in a blog post.

"We hoped that these discussions would lead to an agreement acceptable to all," Smith wrote. "While we appreciate the good faith and earnest efforts by the capable Government lawyers with whom we negotiated, we are disappointed that these negotiations ended in failure."

The two companies requested that they be allowed to publish data about the number of surveillance requests they receive after former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the agency's widespread surveillance activities.

"We both remain concerned with the Government's continued unwillingness to permit us to publish sufficient data relating to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) orders," Smith wrote. "We believe we have a clear right under the U.S. Constitution to share more information with the public."

U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's announcement Thursday that his office would begin to publish the total number of national security requests each year was a "good start," Smith wrote. "But the public deserves and the Constitution guarantees more than this first step."

Microsoft wants to publish information showing the number of national security demands for user content, such as the text of an email, he said.

Microsoft and Google will move forward with their lawsuits after negotiations have broken down, Smith said. The U.S. Department of Justice has a late Friday deadline to respond to both Google's and Microsoft's lawsuits in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.


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Intelligence chief Clapper to set up US surveillance review group

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday launched a review of whether the country uses optimally advancements in technology to protect its national security while preventing unauthorized disclosure and maintaining public trust.

Surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency has been at the center of a privacy controversy after its former contractor, Edward Snowden, released in June certain documents that suggested large scale collection of phone metadata and information from the Internet by the agency.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been directed to form the new Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which is to brief Obama on its interim findings within 60 days of the establishment of the group. A final report and recommendations are to be submitted through Clapper to the president no later than Dec. 15.

The constitution of the body including the number of members it will have was not disclosed.

The review group "will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust," according to a memorandum on the White House website.

Obama said Friday that his administration will appoint an independent board to review the country's surveillance programs, and also add a privacy advocate to defend privacy in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when agencies ask the court for new surveillance orders. Obama also said he will work with the U.S. Congress to limit data collection by the NSA under the Patriot Act.

The U.S. National Security Agency "touches" about 1.6 percent of daily Internet traffic, of which only 0.025 percent is selected for review, the agency said in its defense in a brief on Friday.

Citing figures from an unnamed tech provider, the NSA said the Internet carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, of which the agency's analysts in effect look at 0.00004 percent or "less than one part in a million." The agency said its total collection added up to an area smaller than a dime in the standard basketball court of global communications.

U.S. telecommunications providers are compelled by court order to provide NSA with metadata about telephone calls to, from or within the country, NSA said in the brief. The purpose of the collection, under the NSA's Business Records FISA program, is to identify the "U.S. nexus of a foreign terrorist threat to the homeland." But the government "cannot conduct substantive queries of the bulk records for any purpose other than counterterrorism," it added.

NSA said it is authorized under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to target non-U.S. persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The controversial part, criticized by many rights groups, is that the communications of U.S. persons are sometimes incidentally acquired in targeting the foreign entities.

In those cases, approved minimization procedures, which control the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of any information of a U.S. person, are used to protect the privacy of that person, NSA said.

"We do not need to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security; both are integral to who we are as Americans," the unsigned document stated.

Verify people online. Backgroud checks, Criminal Histories, Marriage Records plus more. One Billion Records. Click Here

Bits Blog: The Rules of In-Store Surveillance

You can tell when a powerful new technology, like tracking people as they shop, is coming of age. It starts trying to persuade people it is a force for good, and it broadens its reach and capabilities. Take the the observation and data collection techniques used by online retailers that are now moving into the physical world.

Cellphone signals, special apps and our movements tracked by software-enhanced cameras in stores are the equivalent of the tracking cookies in Internet browsers. Most people don’t seem to mind being tracked online, if the low percentage of people who disable cookies is any indication. (Studies suggest the number is below 10 percent.) Offline tracking, though, still seems to be a concern. Nordstrom discontinued using one mobile phone tracking system, produced by Euclid Analytics, after shoppers complained. That may be because the systems are new, and some people see more harm than benefit from the surveillance.
 Euclid Analytics’ tools show how rich the data from tracking people’s behaviors can be.

  On Tuesday, several companies involved in offline tracking announced that they would be working with a Washington-based research group, the Future of Privacy Forum, to develop a series of “best practices” for privacy controls for what it called “retail location analytics,” or tracking.

Euclid was among the sponsors, along with WirelessWerx, Mexia Interactive and ShopperTrak.
The Future of Privacy Forum is primarily supported by corporations, with extensive financing from the technology sector. According to Jules Polonetsky, its director and co-chairman, the organization also has an advisory board that includes “chief privacy officers, privacy academics and privacy advocates.”

On Thursday, Euclid also announced it was producing a series of analytics tools for specialty retailers, which it said would help stores make better decisions about things like operating hours and inventory. The product, which is primarily a comparison tool, also shows how rich the data from tracking people online can be.
“We’re offering benchmarking, so we can say ‘Your customer capture rate is 8 percent, and this week the average for your sector is 10 percent,’” said Will Smith, the chief executive of Euclid. “The question is not whether something is good or bad, but what something means.”

Mr. Smith would not provide specifics, but said his company’s product was now in hundreds of malls across the United States, and had captured information on thousands of shoppers at dozens of retailers. “We can tell if someone has visited multiple outlets of a store on the same day, which indicates they couldn’t find the product they wanted at the first one,” he said. “You can assume a lot of others went to a competitor.”
Mr. Smith emphasized that the data Euclid supplied to retailers was made anonymous and delivered in aggregated forms, which he said made it unsuited to personally identifying customers. But the data gathered by the company, which Mr. Smith founded with the former head of Google Analytics, can be used to determine things like whether a Starbucks’ customer with a loyalty card stays longer at the coffee shop, or how often a store is acquiring repeat shoppers.

Over time, it is likely that at least some customers will accept tracking, particularly if offered incentives like free mall parking in exchange for visiting a specific store. “People became used to Web analytics,” Mr. Smith said, “Amazon’s customer experience is 10 times better because of the data it gathers on people. Shorter lines and good in-store service can also come from data.”

Report Indicates More Extensive Cooperation by Microsoft on Surveillance

Quoting classified internal N.S.A. newsletters obtained from Mr. Snowden, The Guardian newspaper reported that Microsoft had helped the security agency find ways to circumvent its encryption on its Outlook.com portal’s encrypted Web chat function, and that the agency was given what The Guardian described as “pre-encryption stage” access to e-mail on Outlook, including Hotmail e-mail.

The Guardian, which did not release the N.S.A. documents that it quoted, said that Microsoft had also provided the F.B.I. with access to its SkyDrive service, a cloud storage service with millions of users.

Microsoft, according to The Guardian, also worked with the F.B.I. to study how Outlook allowed users to create e-mail aliases, while Skype, now owned by Microsoft, worked with the government to help it collect both the video and audio of conversations. It also reported that information collected through the N.S.A. program code-named Prism was shared with both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

Microsoft said in a statement that it only provided access to its systems when required to do so by court orders.

“We only ever comply with orders about specific accounts or identifiers, and we would not respond to the kind of blanket orders discussed in the press over the past few weeks,” the company said in its statement. “To be clear, Microsoft does not provide any government with blanket or direct access to SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Skype or any Microsoft product. Finally, when we upgrade or update products legal obligations may in some circumstances require that we maintain the ability to provide information in response to a law enforcement or national security request.”

The latest disclosure from documents leaked by Mr. Snowden underscores the increasingly close ties between the N.S.A. and the high-tech community. Microsoft, Facebook and other companies have already been forced to address questions about their cooperation with the agency following Mr. Snowden’s disclosure of the Prism surveillance program.

Many of the companies have repeatedly denied that they agree to blanket collection requests from the government, despite evidence that the government has for years collected huge amounts of phone and Internet data from American citizens. An N.S.A. Internet metadata collection program revealed by Mr. Snowden, for example, was halted in 2011 only after two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee began to question its value.

Fearing a negative public response to their cooperation, some Silicon Valley companies are beginning to openly push back against the security agency. Yahoo, for example, is now asking the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that rules on data collection requests by the government, to allow it to make public the record of its 2008 challenge to the constitutionality of the law requiring it to provide its customer data to the agency.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said Thursday that the company was “seeking permission from the FISA court to unseal the arguments and orders from the 2008 case.”

Yahoo said in a public filing with the FISA court this week that releasing documents about the 2008 case would allow it “ to demonstrate that it objected strenuously to the directives that are now the subject of debate, and objected at every stage of the proceeding, but that these objections were overruled and its request for a stay was denied.”

Signs of a popular backlash against the security agency’s large-scale collection of the personal data of Americans have convinced a leading privacy advocate in Congress that the Obama administration may soon begin to back away from the most aggressive components of the agency’s domestic surveillance programs.

The advocate, Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in an interview Thursday that he believed that the security agency might soon abandon the bulk collection of the telephone calling data of millions of Americans.

The current controversy over the agency’s surveillance policies was first set off after Mr. Snowden leaked a secret FISA court order telling Verizon to turn over calling data from all of its customers. Mr. Wyden now believes that the White House is beginning to recognize that the program raises so many privacy concerns that it is willing to drop it.

“I have a feeling that the administration is getting concerned about the bulk phone records collection, and that they are thinking about whether to move administratively to stop it,” he said. He added he believed that the continuing controversy prompted by Mr. Snowden had changed the political calculus in Congress over the balance between security and civil liberties, which has been heavily weighted toward security since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“I think we are making a comeback,” Mr. Wyden said, referring to privacy and civil liberties advocates.

How to hide text from NSA's automated surveillance

Thanks to Edward Snowden and others, we know that the National Security Agency is listening. But what if we spoke in a language we could understand but they couldn’t? What if we wrote in a typeface we could read but would look like gibberish to the NSA’s massive supercomputers?

That’s the puzzle Sang Mun set out to solve. During his two years in the Sourth Korean military, Mun worked as a contractor for the NSA, extracting information from intelligence intercepts. He’s also a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. So Mung designed a typeface that can be deciphered by humans, but not by the optical character recognition software employed by spy agencies to rapidly scan billions of documents as they fly across the InterWebs.

The typeface, called ZXX, inserts artifacts and extraneous bits of information that our brains can easily filter out, but machines can’t (at least, not yet). Some versions of ZXX can be scanned by OCR, some can’t. For example, the text at the top of the graphic at the left is composed in ZXX Combination and not computer readable. The text immediately below is written in ZXX Bold, which can be read by machines and humans alike.

Walker Art Center/The GradientThe top text is composed in ZXX Combination and not computer readable; below, the text is in ZXX Bold, readable by OCR and people.

Of course, if the spooks really want to read documents written using one of ZXX’s machine-unfriendly variants, they will open them up and look at them. ZXX isn’t a form of encryption so much as a kind of political commentary. (See also "How to protect your PC from Prism surveillance.")

On his blog Mun writes:

ZXX is a call to action, both practically and symbolically, to raise questions about privacy. But it represents a broader urgency: How can design be used politically and socially for the codification and de-codification of people’s thoughts? What is a graphic design that is inherently secretive? How can graphic design reinforce privacy? And, really, how can the process of design engender a proactive attitude towards the future — and our present for that matter?

If we cannot loosen the grip of the industrial surveillance complex (and given the state of our courts and our congress, what hope is there of that?) we can make it work that much harder. Resistance isn’t futile; it’s the last best hope we have.

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and others plan July 4 protest against NSA surveillance

A large coalition of civil rights and privacy groups and potentially thousands of websites will stage protests on the Fourth of July to protest surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency.

As part of the Restore the Fourth campaign, many website members of the 30,000-member Internet Defense League plan to display a protest of NSA surveillance and the text of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Websites participating include Reddit, where Restore the Fourth originated, WordPress, 4chan, Mozilla, Fark, and Cheezburger.com.

Organizers of Restore the Fourth are also planning live protests in dozens of U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Houston and Atlanta.

"How long do we expect rational people to accept using terrorism to justify and excuse endless executive and state power?" actor John Cusack said during a press conference announcing the protests. "Why are so many in our government, our press, our intellectual class afraid of an informed public?"

Representatives of the NSA and the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence didn't immediately respond to requests for comments on the planned protests.

The protests come after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about widespread NSA surveillance of U.S. residents and other people to media outlets, with the first details published last month. Snowden, said to be holed up in a Russian airport, is seeking political asylum in several countries. He faces charges in the U.S. of theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.

StopWatching.us, a website set up three weeks ago, has collected more than 531,000 signatures of people opposing the NSA surveillance programs.

Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, complained that many defenders of the NSA surveillance programs are focusing on supposed character flaws of Snowden and the journalists who broke the story instead of on the surveillance itself and questions about its legality.

The spotlight on Snowden is a "big distraction to avoid focusing on the invasions that have actually been occurring," added Harvey Anderson, senior vice president business and legal affairs at Mozilla. The lack of transparency about the surveillance programs "undermines the openness of the Internet," he added.

Efforts to downplay the surveillance and suggest that the U.S. public doesn't care won't work, added Craig Aaron, president and CEO of digital rights group Free Press. "As we learn every week about the unchecked surveillance and corporate collusion, the outcry is only going to grow louder and louder," he said.

NSA Surveillance Leaks Prompt Legislation

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other lawmakers today introduced legislation they say would provide more accountability and oversight of laws bolstering recently disclosed surveillance programs.

 

The proposal is not designed to halt the spying disclosed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

 

“The recent public revelations about two classified data collection programs have brought renewed attention to the use of government surveillance powers, which deserve close scrutiny by Congress,” Leahy said in a statement. A Leahy spokeswoman declined comment.

 

Many lawmakers, however, already knew of the spying programs Snowden had leaked to the Guardian newspaper. A bi-partisan group of senators are also sponsoring the package, including Mike Lee (R-Utah), Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Jon Tester (D-Montana).

 

“Particularly where Congress has authorized broad surveillance programs that implicate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights, oversight and transparency are essential,” Lee said.

 

The proposal comes weeks after the Guardian disclosed that a secretive U.S. court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, issued a sweeping order under the Patriot Act requiring Verizon Business Services to give the National Security Agency a feed of metadata on all calls within the United States and between the United States and foreign countries on an “ongoing, daily basis” for three months — orders that have been issued for years and likely to all carriers.

 

One of the most controversial provisions of the Patriot Act — Section 215 — allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize broad warrants for most any type of records, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies. Lawmakers have repeatedly voted to prevent the act from expiring. The government only needs to show that the information pertains to an “authorized investigation.” No connection to a terrorist or spy is required.

 

Under today’s proposal, the act would be amended to require “the government to show relevance to an authorized investigation and a link to one of three categories of a foreign agent, power, or group.” Another provision would demand the government “to provide a statement of the facts and circumstances” to the court to justify the surveillance, lawmakers said.

 

Among other things, the measure would also demand the government to produce an unclassified report on the “impact” the surveillance programs has “on the privacy of United States persons.” It would also allow recipients of National Security Letters to challenge non-disclosure orders at any time, instead of a year’s period.

 

Inspector General auditing would also be required, as would the formulation of methods for “minimization procedures for data collected under Section 215.”

 

What’s more, the proposal would require the FISA Amendments Act to expire in June 2015, instead of December 2017, when it is slated to sunset.

 

That FISA Amendments Act is relevant to Snowden’s leak on the PRISM program. The act authorizes the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans’ phone calls and electronic communications without a probable-cause warrant so long as one of the parties to the communication is believed outside the United States. The communications may be intercepted “to acquire foreign intelligence information.”

 

The act generally requires the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to rubber-stamp electronic surveillance requests. The government does not have to identify the target or facility to be monitored. The court’s approval lasts for up to a year.

 

Snowden claimed that, under PRISM, the NSA had direct access into the servers of nine internet companies, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, and it was collecting large volumes of data with the cooperation of these firms, including e-mail and audio and video traffic as well as documents.

 

The internet companies strongly denied that the NSA had direct connections to their servers or that they provided any data that was not part of a court order.

 

David Kravets is a senior staff writer for Wired.com and founder of the fake news site TheYellowDailyNews.com. He's a dad of two boys and has been a reporter since the manual typewriter days.

 

 

Civil liberties advocates call for more oversight of NSA surveillance

Congress should press for privacy protections and more information about surveillance programs at the National Security Agency, some technology and civil liberties activists said Friday.

After recent news leaks about two broad surveillance programs at the NSA, it’s clear that congressional and court oversight of the agency is lacking, representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told congressional staffers during a briefing on the NSA programs.

Oversight of the surveillance programs by the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees has been “pretty feeble,” Julian Sanchez, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said at a surveillance forum hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.

The limited number of lawmakers and the judges that are supposed to check the NSA programs appear to have fallen victim to a form of a governmental phenomenon called “regulatory capture,” when a body that is supposed to regulate an industry begins to “serve its interests,” Sanchez said.

Lawmakers outside the intelligence committees need to provide oversight of the programs, added Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel.

“So far, Congress has allowed the intelligence committees to do secret oversight of secret programs allowed under secret court orders, and it has led to the collection of every American’s phone calls,” she said. “This cannot continue. The secret oversight is not working.”

Representatives of both intelligence committees didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the criticism from Sanchez and Richardson.

When the Federal Bureau of Investigation asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a broad swath of U.S. telephone records, there’s no opposing attorney, Richardson said.

“No one is representing the interests of the people whose records are collected,” Richardson added. “It is just the government before a secret court, and no one is representing the other side.”

Richardson and other speakers at the event called on Congress to add transparency to the surveillance court process.

The mass collection of data on U.S. phone calls and Internet communications under the two programs represents a “dangerous shift” in the way the government views the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution protecting U.S. residents from unreasonable searches and seizures, Sanchez said. There appear to be fewer prohibitions on the government collecting data and more mass collection, with some restrictions on how intelligence agencies can access the data they have collected, he said.

“Analysts themselves have the discretion to select which things are going to be queried for search,” he added. “Back-end restrictions on what you do [with the collected data] last only until you decide to change them, and the record so far suggests we won’t necessarily know if they decide to change them.”

While four of the five speakers at the event said they were troubled by the surveillance programs, lawyer Michael Vatis, a former official at the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice, said he wasn’t overly concerned about reports of the NSA collecting Internet communications from nine Web service providers.

The Prism collection program, as described, appears to give the NSA little new surveillance power than it has always had, said Vatis, now a partner in the Steptoe & Johnson law firm. The NSA’s longtime mission is to provide surveillance on overseas communications, and the Prism program appears to be an extension of that, he said. The NSA is targeting U.S. Web companies because much of the Internet’s traffic routes through the U.S., he said.

Vatis said he had some concerns about the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records, but he takes some comfort that the agency is collecting phone numbers and not the content of phone calls.

If the NSA and DOJ have strong procedures in place to protect privacy, as they say, then the data collection can help protect U.S. residents, Vatis added. “In the worst-case scenario, when an individual brings a suitcase nuke onto Wall Street and detonates it, the questions are going to be, ‘The government had this technical capability to keep track of people, but didn’t use it,’” he said. “That will be the scandal.”

Critics of the data collection were surprised about the “breadth of the order” allowing the NSA to collect all Verizon phone traffic, countered Alan Davidson, a visiting scholar in the Technology and Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former public policy director at Google.

The data collection raises not only civil liberties and privacy concerns but also business concerns, Davidson added. “If people don’t trust these services, they’re not going to use them,” he said.

Vatis discounted the business concern. “Have many people stopped using Gmail or Yahoo?” he said.