Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Entertaining stories, but here’s what really caught my eye:
A few weeks ago I [sat] next to a US Senator on a commercial coast-to-coast flight. While I read up on the FISA debate, he played a pong-like game on his phone almost the entire time. Hello?No need to read the whole thing.
I’ve documented a couple of times my frustration with organizations that try to collect a Social Security Number for payments that don’t require it. The IRS does not require reporting of expense reimbursements, which are not income, and income of under $600 (total in a year) is also not subject to reporting. Small payments and reimbursements do not require an SSN.
I’m happy to report that a multinational media conglomerate that initially refused to reimburse my travel expenses for a conference at which I spoke has relented. They reimbursed my travel expenses without collecting my SSN.
It took a lot of patience. I had to speak to three or four different people in the organization, each of whom believed that their corporate policy should naturally trump my personal policy. But I suspect that my persistence and courtesy caused someone to pick up the phone to someone else and say, “Oh, just pay him, will ya’?”
This kind of thing is a good exercise because the next person will have an easier time of it. Do yourself and your neighbor a favor and refuse sharing your SSN when it’s not needed, mkay?
Some recent reporting by the Washington Post reveals some of the hardball tactics that the federal government may have used in support of mass surveillance programs, even preceding the attacks of September 11, 2001. In an article published last Saturday, Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen report that Qwest’s Joe Nacchio sought to have the cancellation of government contracts introduced in his trial on insider trading charges. He alleges that he fully expected the contracts to make up for losses the company would otherwise suffer, which would contradict the allegation that he sold his shares knowing of an imminent drop in price. The contracts were canceled in retribution for Qwest refusing to go along with the government’s surveillance demands, he says.
Because so much is cloaked in secrecy, one must speculate about where those machinations are today, but a Statement of Administration Policy (veto threat) issued yesterday laid down a notable marker: Congress must retroactively immunize telecom firms for past law violations in any FISA amendment or the President will veto it.
The common rap on this is that the Bush Administration wants to help out its buddies in the telecom industry. But Joe Nacchio was a buddy – he was chairman of the president’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee – and the administration threw him right under the bus. There is probably more than the standard corruptions of government involved.
My guess is that the telecoms have the Bush administration by the short hairs because they have information about yet more egregious surveillance activities. They’ve probably signaled that if they don’t get immunity in a FISA amendment, they’ll spill the beans and really bring it down on the administration.
This, again, is speculation, but it best explains the administration’s excessive commitment to immunizing the telecom firms that violated the law.
A reader points me to another example of the administration’s bogus talking points on FISA. The usual contention is that these wiretapping powers are needed in the heightened post-9/11 security environment. I didn’t exactly buy that rationale in the first place, but now a Qwest executive is claiming that he was approached way back in February 2001 with a request to participate in a legally dubious wiretapping scheme. Evidently, the NSA’s cavalier attitude toward judicial oversight predates the September 11 attack.
Also, the Qwest exec in question claims that the government dangled government contracts in front of telecom companies to entice them to cooperate. I think this is one of the most crucial reasons not to give telecom companies blanket immunity for their actions. Qwest did the right thing and took a financial hit as a result. It would be extremely unfair to allow AT&T and Verizon walk away unscathed, with extra money from those government contracts in its pockets. Even if you don’t think telecom companies should be punished for breaking the law, they certainly shouldn’t be financially rewarded.
Ryan Singel at the always-excellent Threat Level blog debunks the latest lies about wiretapping laws getting Americans killed in Iraq. The story claims that it took soldiers in Iraq 10 hours to get the necessary legal permission to wiretap the cell phones of terrorists who had kidnapped American soldiers.
As Singel points out, there are a bunch of problems with this story. In the first place, the military doesn’t need any court approval to do wiretaps physically outside of the United States, so if they had taps on cell phone towers in Iraq (and as Singel points out, if we don’t have wiretaps on the Iraqi cell phone network, “we all deserve tax refunds”), no approval would have been necessary. Secondly, the issue never reached the FISA court, as the executive branch determined it had the authority to conduct the search without a new court order. Third, most of the delay came not from the NSA’s doing paperwork required to determine if they needed a warrant, but from delays at the DOJ, which sat on the NSA’s request for seven hours. A timeline from Rep. Reyes tells the story:
At 10:00 a.m., key U.S. agencies met to discuss and develop various options for collecting additional intelligence relating to the kidnapping by accessing certain communications At 10:52 a.m., the NSA notified the Department of Justice (DOJ) of its desire to collect some communications that require a FISA order. It was determined that some FISA coverage already existed. At 12:53 p.m., the NSA General Counsel agreed that all of the requirements for an emergency FISA authorization had been met for the remaining collection of the communications inside the U.S. Collection could have started immediately – the requirements of the statute were satisfied. As James Baker, head of the FISA office has testified to Congress, emergency authorization can take place in minutes and can be granted orally.
However, the NSA played it safe and waited for the Justice Department to give the go ahead. How long could that take?
Matt links to a Post op-ed that rightly criticizes the Bush administration for insisting on completely unfettered wiretapping powers, but otherwise misses the boat on the details of the dispute between the White House and the Democratic leadership. The argument has two major problems. First, we’ve got this:
The administration says that FISA wasn’t intended to cover the collection of intelligence information overseas. That is correct, but many of the communications are being intercepted in the United States and, more important, may involve U.S. citizens. In that situation, and with telephone and e-mail communications between the U.S. and foreign countries far more common than when FISA was enacted in 1978, it is reasonable to bring the court into the picture. The measure strikes an appropriate balance between the demands of some civil liberties groups for individualized warrants and the administration’s desire for sweeping authority.
The phrase “bring the courts into the picture” makes it sound like court oversight for domestic-to-foreign communication is a new idea. But in fact it’s not—it’s the way FISA has worked since it was enacted. If you wanted to install a wiretap on American soil, you had to get a FISA warrant, regardless of whether the other end of the line was overseas or not. The question isn’t whether we should “bring the courts into the picture.” The question is whether we should cut the courts out of the oversight role they’ve played successfully for the last 30 years.
I was a little surprised that Cindy Cohn at EFF all but endorsed the Restore Act, although they “remain deeply concerned about its embrace of so-called “blanket warrants.'” I imagine they place a high priority on ensuring their lawsuit against AT&T can go forward, so they’re willing to embrace legislation that’s not egregious in other respects as long as a “get out of jail free” card for AT&T isn’t in the package.
I’ve also got a new roundup of the FISA debate at Ars.
Here’s a satellite photo of Dick Cheney’s house, which I learned about on the Daily Show. He’s obviously very concerned about protecting his home from prying eyes. I’m sure he’s equally zealous in his defense of the privacy rights of ordinary Americans.
Update: One of Matt’s commenters notes that Mapquest doesn’t blur the observatory circle. Also, one of our commenters claims that although this is the vice president’s official residence, his family doesn’t actually live there. Still, I think it’s a safe bet that somebody from the government asked Google to blur the observatory circle. And I rather doubt they’d be so helpful if I asked them to blur my neighborhood.
Threat Level has an absolutely fascinating article about the topology of the worldwide data network and how it has given the NSA a windfall of easy surveillance access:
While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. “Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it’s) cheaper than crossing their international borders.”
This is just appalling. You cannot win a PR battle from a defensive crouch.
A top Democratic leader opened the door Tuesday to granting U.S. telecommunications companies retroactive legal immunity for helping the government conduct electronic surveillance without court orders, but said the Bush administration must first detail what those companies did. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said providing the immunity will likely be the price of getting President Bush to sign into law new legislation extending the government’s surveillance authority. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws. Democrats introduced a draft version of the new law Tuesday without the immunity language.
If Congress passes legislation giving the president expanded wiretapping authority, and he vetoes it because it doesn’t include a get out of jail card for AT&T, that should be a PR disaster for the Republicans. The Democrats should be thrilled to go on the campaign trail saying “Mr. President, we passed legislation giving you the authority you requested. It’s not our fault you chose to put the interests of your friends in the telecom industry ahead of protecting American lives.”
Yet for some reason, the Democratic leadership seems to have chosen a strategy of preemptive surrender, where they announce in advance that they’re so terrified of a veto that they’ll give the president basically whatever he wants as long as he promises to sign it. Under those circumstances, the president obviously isn’t going to budge an inch.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
