Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Sorry for the Wired-heavy morning, but they’ve had a lot of great stuff on electronic privacy and security lately. Check out this summary of the FBI’s eavesdropping network. This is the network the FBI built after Congress passed CALEA in 1994. The information came to light thanks to a FOIA request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Ryan Singel at Threat Level crunches the numbers on the time required to complete FISA warrants:
The Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told an El Paso reporter that the nation’s spy laws needed to be loosened because it takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant for the special spy court. In 2006, the government filed 2,181 such applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. The court approved 2,176. 2006 FISA Warrant Applications. That means government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence wiretaps in 2006. That’s 53,275 workdays. Let’s assume dedicated government employees work 40 hours a week with two weeks off a year. That means there were 218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.
Singel characterizes this as “a lot of monkeys,” but it doesn’t strike me as a very big number. If each employee costs the government $200,000/year, then that means complying with FISA cost the federal government less than $50 million. You could increase the volume of FISA requests by a factor of 20, bringing the cost to $1 billion, and it would still be only about 2 percent of the intelligence budget. So even assuming McConnell is telling the truth about the paperwork burden, it hardly seems like an unreasonable burden on the intelligence community.
Erstwhile roommate and recent podcast guest Julian Sanchez will be on a panel at the Center for American Progress today at 10:30. If you’re not in the DC area, you can apparently catch it on C-SPAN II.
One of the things I love about the geek community is that they’re absolutely fanatical about civil liberties. Take my new story at Ars about Mike McConnell’s ham-fisted demagoguery:
McConnell charged that as a result of press reports and Congressional debates regarding surveillance activities, “some Americans are going to die.” That’s because disclosures about surveillance activities will tip off terrorists to the existence of American surveillance programs and prompt them to use alternate communication methods, making it more difficult for the authorities to stop terrorist attacks before they occur.
This annoyed me enough that I took the liberty of editorializing in the very next paragraph:
McConnell didn’t elaborate on which specific revelations undermined anti-terrorism efforts. It can hardly have been a surprise to Al Qaeda that the U.S. government was spying on them or that they were using American voice and data networks to do it. Still, fear of terrorism is a potent force in American politics, and so McConnell’s charges, however dubious, may persuade some members of Congress to support the administration’s position.
But Ars readers, who were almost unanimous in their reactions, had a had some much better retorts. This one is my favorite:
Thousands of Americans already did die to secure us in our persons, houses, papers and effects. McConnell is pissing on their graves.
If only the general public had that kind of moral clarity! I think I’ve linked to this before, but Paul Graham’s essay on hackers offers a theory about why geeks get so excited about civil liberties issues.
In the Q&A after his speech Tuesday night at PFF’s Aspen Summit, one of the questions with which Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was clearly most voluble and at ease dealt with the market for advertising. He rightly touted how Google has paid out billions of dollars to small and medium-size businesses, users of Google’s AdSense program. (Full disclosure: A project of mine, WashingtonWatch.com, is one.) And, without giving away the Google playbook, he discussed some of the directions Google’s advertising efforts will be going.
Along with newspaper advertising, he spent a good deal of time discussing location-based advertising. He enthused about the possibility of all those mobile computers people carry (still often called “phones”) helping people find the things they need as they move from place to place.
For example, Schmidt talked about how he could be driving down the street and get directions for all the places to eat in a given area. Because he had eaten pizza the night before, his phone might direct him to a burger joint. And then, Schmidt hastily added, he would turn off his phone.
My boss Tom Lenard of PFF penned an editorial for the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the Google-DoubleClick deal. The essay was co-authored by Paul Rubin, a PFF adjunct fellow and a professor of economics and law at Emory University. Lenard and Rubin argue that the fears about the Google-DoubleClick deal have been overstated:
Those who complain about Google’s purchase of DoubleClick make two claims. Both are flawed. The first argument is that, since both firms have a large market share of their respective spheres, a merger would be monopolistic. The flaw is that the two companies undertake activities that don’t overlap. Google places text ads mainly on its own Web sites and search-result screens. DoubleClick delivers display ads from advertisers to Web sites. It creates no ads and controls no Web sites. Even if we believe that Internet advertising is a distinct market (debatable, since it comprises only about 5% of all advertising) the combined firms will not gain any market power since they do not have any business in common. The second argument comes from privacy advocates who have filed a brief with the FTC. They say the merger “could impact the privacy interests of 233 million Internet users in North America.” The FTC’s antitrust function and its consumer protection function are fundamentally different. Indeed, the more information markets have, the more competitive they are. If “privacy” advocates have their way, there would be less information and markets would not work as well. Marketers use information. Some people have a cockeyed notion that if this information benefits marketers, it is to the detriment of consumers. Wrong. Consumers benefit when marketers provide them with information about products, especially new products, that they may want. A free flow of information enabling more efficient “targeting” of consumers is to their advantage.
They go on to conclude that: “Both the antitrust and the consumer protection branches of the FTC should leave this acquisition alone. It will create benefits with no increase in market power and no harmful reduction of privacy.” Read the entire piece here.
Yglesias points to yet another silly TSA rule: extra scrutiny for people wearing headgear. He’s not impressed:
People tend to forget this, but pre-9/11, American airplanes were almost never hijacked. Since 9/11, we’ve re-enforced cockpit doors, which would have been sufficient to foil the 9/11 plot. We’ve also gotten more careful about handing out silverware that can be used as a weapon, which would have been sufficient to foil the 9/11 plot, and about letting people take knives on planes more generally. What’s more, passengers now know that they should resist hijacking attempts. The three successful 9/11 hijackings succeeded because up until that day passengers were told not to attempt to resist hijackers. The one time passengers did resist, their resistance was successful. At this point, you’ve got to figure that even without all this crap about taking your shoes off and not carrying liquids on the plane, that airplanes have become relatively unattractive targets for terrorists. You could blow up a train or a bus, open fire on a crowded subway station, try to hijack a truck carrying deadly chemicals, or do any number of additional things. Endlessly piling on more and more security measures to air travel is pointless, especially when you consider how much safer it is to travel by plane than by car in terms of accidents.
Well said.
Geoffrey Stone offers some worthwhile perspective on the state of civil liberties today:
The fact is that fear-mongering has played a critical role in every major wartime episode in American history. In 1798, the Federalists used a largely trumped-up threat of French invasion to enact the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime for any person to criticise the president, the Congress, or the government. During the civil war, President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus on eight separate occasions and Congress rushed headlong to approved his actions. During the first world war, President Wilson stampeded Congress into enacting the Sedition Act of1918, which made it a crime for any person to criticise the war, the draft, the military, the flag, the uniform, or the government. During the second world war, Congress blithely ratified President Roosevelt’s internment of almost 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. And at the height of the McCarthy era during the cold war, a frantic Congress hastily enacted the McCarran Act of 1950, one of the most grievous assaults on freedom of speech and association in American history. So, we should consider recent events in context. The legislation amending FISA is unwarranted, reckless and possibly unconstitutional. Nonetheless, the overall state of civil liberties in the US, viewed in historical perspective, is surprisingly strong.
There’s certainly something to this, and Stone is certainly right to credit civil liberties groups for keeping public attention on these issues and discouraging elected officials from proposing truly egregious restrictions on civil liberties like those of past eras. However, I think there are a couple of crucial differences between the encroachments of civil liberties we see today and the problems we saw in past eras.
Julian explains just how unhinged (or mendacious) you have to be to believe that the FISA bill was “nothing more than the preservation of the original effect of FISA.”
As Julian points out, not only is that false, but it’s so obviously false that the guy who wrote it is either an idiot or a liar. Before the bill passed, the Bush administration was required to get a warrant that named the specific individuals or facilities that would be monitored. Now, the administration only needs to submit an after-the-fact report describing the general contours of its monitoring program, but not naming specific targets. If that’s not a complete abandonment of the principles behind FISA, it’s hard to imagine what would be.
Julian has more on the lies people are telling in defense of this legislation.
Wired‘s excellent Threat Level blog has a blow-by-blow description of the proceedings in the EFF/AT&T spying case (which was heard in conjunction with the Al-Haramain case). It sounds like the judges are at least sympathetic to allowing the cases go forward.
The government and AT&T’s argument strikes me as proving a little bit too much:
AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg (right, entering the courthouse) has taken the podium, and, not surprisingly, insists the case has to be dismissed. He says AT&T customers have no actual proof or direct knowledge that their communications were forwarded to the government without warrants. “The government has said that whatever AT&T is doing with the government is a state secret,” Kellogg says. He adds, “As a consequence, no evidence can come in whether the individuals’ communications were ever accepted or whether we played any role in it.” (Back at Wired, THREAT LEVEL’s head just exploded –klp)
So if I’m understanding this correctly, a judge is obligated to dismiss a case as soon as the government asserts a state secrets privilege, because any inquiry into whether the information in question is actually a state secret could itself reveal state secrets. Which, in practice, would mean that “state secret” is a magic incantation that allows the government to do whatever it wants with no court scrutiny whatsoever. Somehow, I don’t think that’s what the founders had in mind when they wrote the Fourth Amendment.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
