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'It's Time To End the NSA's Metadata Collection Program' (wired.com)
Jake Laperruque, Senior Counsel at The Constitution Project, where he is working on issues of government surveillance, national security and defending privacy rights in the digital age, argues via Wired that it's time to end the National Security Agency's metadata collection program, known as CDR. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt: In 2015, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act to reform Section 215 and prohibit the nationwide bulk collection of communications metadata, like who we make calls to and receive them from, when, and the call duration. The provision was replaced with a significantly slimmed-down call detail record program, known as CDR. Rather than collecting information in bulk, CDR collects communications metadata of surveillance targets as well as those of individuals up to two degrees of separation (commonly called "two hops") from the surveillance target. But this newer system appears to be no more effective than its predecessor and is highly damaging to constitutional rights. Given this combination, it's time for Congress to pull the plug and end the authority for the CDR program.
It's unsurprising that just last week a bipartisan group in Congress introduced a bill to do so. Last month, the New York Times reported that a highly placed congressional staffer had stated that the CDR program has been out of operation for months, and several days later, NSA Director Paul Nakasone issued comments responding to questions about the Times story by saying the NSA was deliberating the future of the program. If accurate, this news is major but not shocking; this large-scale-collection program has been fraught with problems. Last year, the NSA announced that technical problems had caused it to collect information it wasn't legally authorized to, and that in response, the agency had voluntarily deleted all the call detail records it had previously acquired through the CDR program -- without even waiting for a court order or trying to save some of the data -- indicating that the system was unwieldy and the data being collected was not important to the agency.
It's unsurprising that just last week a bipartisan group in Congress introduced a bill to do so. Last month, the New York Times reported that a highly placed congressional staffer had stated that the CDR program has been out of operation for months, and several days later, NSA Director Paul Nakasone issued comments responding to questions about the Times story by saying the NSA was deliberating the future of the program. If accurate, this news is major but not shocking; this large-scale-collection program has been fraught with problems. Last year, the NSA announced that technical problems had caused it to collect information it wasn't legally authorized to, and that in response, the agency had voluntarily deleted all the call detail records it had previously acquired through the CDR program -- without even waiting for a court order or trying to save some of the data -- indicating that the system was unwieldy and the data being collected was not important to the agency.
We went over this when the Snowden revelations hit.
Most people don't care. AT ALL. They "have nothing to hide". They still use non-encrypted services, they still vote for all the same representatives that put these programs in place, the same two political parties, they still give every minute detail of their lives to voluntary surveillance programs like Facebook and Google. They happily run malware and spyware on their phones if it gives them something "for free".
The marches to "protest" this were tiny and then they went away without any change. Did tens of millions of people rise up and demand a change? No. Did they demand those who lied about these programs under oath be brought to account? No. Did they demand the programs be shut down? No.
Mass surveillance? Nobody cares. It's over. Those of us who didn't want to live under the Stasi? We lost. We're not going to win. We're outnumbered too severely by the phombies.
It's an unpleasant reality, but a reality all the same.
Anyone who think that it was just metadata that the NSA was collecting is hopelessly naive. Intelligence agencies, which, by definition, are intended to run with limited oversight, are not capable of voluntarily self restricting their information collection. You build an apparatus that is capable of monitoring, it will fulfill its design intention. It's not a matter if if the information is being collected, it's only a matter of who is collecting it.
NSA probably now has access to the direct streams telecoms use to consolidate their billing and geolocatioon data, from taps on the underlying circuits. If it's encrypted then nudge nudge wink wink here's the key. So telecoms no longer need suffer the indignity and PR risk of transmitting the data.
NSA Warrantless Wiretapping is not just an invasion of privacy. They have actually claimed to Congress that they do NOT consider information intercepted and stored indefinitely... to be unlawful at all! Until or unless someone reads it. This subverts Freedom of Association too, since any future tyrant would have access to this cradle-to-grave data of our families and friends and (now! with super-cells!) movements.
To get up to speed quickly this whitepaper by Andrew Clement seems to cover all the bases. Look past the straw man 'Metadata Collection' within it for 'NSA splitter'. Or you might start as I did years ago with James Bamford's fascinating 1982 book Puzzle Palace. While most of it dwells on what is now history and goes on at length about NSA's Charter which explicitly forbid domestic intercepts, there was a single passage in this book that revealed something else. I will quote it because I believe Bamford intended it as a dire warning: "Another indication of NSA's "broadband sweeping of multi-circuited domestic telecommunications trunk lines," David L. Watters told the Senate Intelligence Committee [in 1978!] lies in the Agency's request for an amendment to the wiretap law that would permit NSA to engage in warrantless wiretapping "for the sole purpose of determining the capability of equipment" when such "test period shall be limited... to... ninety days." Continuing, he warned: "Let there be no misunderstanding here. There is only one category of wiretapping equipment or system which requires up to ninety days for test and adjustment, and that system is broadband electronic eavesdropping equipment, the vacuum-cleaner approach to intelligence gathering, the general search of microwave trunk lines. I make this assertion on the strength of actual experience in the electronic intelligence trade and on the strength of over twenty-five years' experience in the telecommunications profession. An ordinary, single-line wire tap requires only five minutes to adjust and test."
Sure this pre-Internet quote discusses microwave, which was the long-line 'broadband' of choice in those days... but NSA's intentions to dig in at places where American citizens speak with each other is clear. Since then, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney and Mark Klein have all come forward alleging domestic surveillance far exceeding 'telephone records'. Klein is of special note, for it is he who revealed the existence of secret Room 641A in the lawsuit Heptig vs AT&T that the Electronic Frontier Foundation took almost to the Supreme Court... who actually declined to hear the case on grounds that the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 protected AT&T from liability for involvement with any illegal activities. Sound normal? This was a law passed after the lawsuit was filed. In response to it, even. Oh.
That should make you a bit angry. We're not talking about telephone records here. We're talking about fiber splitting with drop-in access to the whole slurp. Which also contains voice these days. Any real despot who comes to power will discover that the United States is prepared to deliver real-time private communications and databases of activity for its citizens, cradle to grave, that had been collected with no 'probable cause' whatsoever.
Why the fuck would anyone want to build this thing
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>