Via Amanda, MSNBC reports that the FCC is holding onto extremely useful cell phone usage data for fear it will aid terrorists:
Any time a carrier has an outage that affects 900,000 caller minutes–say a 30-minute outage impacting 30,000 customers–it must report it to the Network Outage Reporting System. In the beginning, the reports all were from “wire line” telephone providers and were available to the public. But in 2004, the commission ordered wireless firms to supply outage reports as well. But at the same time, it removed all outage reports from public view and exempted them from the Freedom of Information Act. The FCC took the action at the urging of the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that publication of the reports would “jeopardize our security efforts.”
As Amanda puts it:
It’s unclear how terrorists would use this information; perhaps with an appeal to the same magic force that would let them use an ounce of shampoo in an 8-ounce bottle to take down an airplane. But it sure is clear how this policy benefits the cellular companies.
Relatedly, Bram Cohen quotes a friend who says that information about power grid outages are no longer published for the same reason.
A friend sent me Sen. Leahy’s speech on his agenda for the upcoming Congress. I don’t agree with all of it, but it looks like it’s mostly positive. He wants to strengthen oversight of law enforcement agencies, strengthen the Freedom of Information Act, and defend the judicial independence. Here’s what he had to say on NSA spying:
For years, this Administration had hidden the “President’s program” of warrantless wiretapping of Americans. We are now beginning to learn that it was not just one program but many that have been hidden from Congress. We all support monitoring the communications of suspected terrorists. Doing that is basic to thwarting terrorism. It is essential, and it is permitted under existing law. It is also essential that when that monitoring impinges upon the rights of Americans, it needs to be done lawfully and with adequate checks and balances to prevent abuses. Initially the Administration stonewalled our inquiries and claimed unilateral power and a monopoly on deciding what needs to be done and how to do it. As we pressed for answers, their responses turned into a demand for sweeping legal authority without any independent judgment by Congress, or any meaningful answers about what they have been doing.
We came together in the days after 9/11. We worked together to provide new authority the Administration said it needed. But after White House unilateralism set in, they have claimed for themselves broad authority to violate the law and secretly eavesdrop on American phone and computer communications, without proper congressional or judicial review. That is a recipe for abuse. The reason we have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act–or FISA–in the first place is because of a period of earlier abuses of Americans’ rights and privacy.
With meaningful oversight and cooperation from this Administration we can achieve the right balance. We all have the same goal–protecting our country and its citizens. We have made more than a dozen changes to FISA since 9/11. If FISA needs more changes, then we should work together to achieve that in a responsible way, once Congress has a basis in knowledge that justifies further changes.
This sounds good, although I wouldn’t be shocked if Leahy caves to the administration the way Specter did. And Leahy mentioned patent reform:
Continue reading →
A poll out today from the Washington Post finds that two-thirds of Americans believe their government is spying on them. Specifically, the poll asked if the FBI and other agencies are “intruding on some Americans’ privacy rights” in terrorism investigations. 66% said YES, up from 58% in a poll taken in September 2003. The Post poll also found that “Support for intrusive tactics has dropped even more significantly during that time. A bare majority, 51 percent, feel the tactics are justified, down from 63 percent three years ago.” And you might recall that an earlier privacy poll conducted by CNN & Gallop in February of this year found that 21% of Americans think federal agents have listened in on their phone calls!
Are we Americans too paranoid? I don’t know, but I think it’s generally a good thing that so many people are skeptical about their government’s actions. Of course, I do not for one minute think that 21% of Americans actually have their phones tapped right now. Just do the math on that. In a nation of 300 million that would mean our government is tapping 63 million phones. I sincerely doubt our government is big enough or competent enough to tap 63 million phones at once and process all that information.
Regardless, it’s good that citizens are skeptical and vigilant about the liberty and privacy rights.
Well, here we go again. As I have said again and again and again and again and again and again, our public policy makers persist in the mistaken belief that the solution to the online predator problem is more Internet regulation instead of stiff sentences for offenders.
The non-solution du jour is an proposal that has been introduced both in Congress and now my home state of Virginia which would require sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses or IM address with the government. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) introduced a bill (S. 4089) in Congress last week that contains this provision. And, according to today’s Washington Post Virginia Attorney General Robert McConnell will soon be introducing a similar e-mail registration bill. In theory, after the federal or state government officials got the predator’s e-mail or IM address, they would give social networking sites like MySpace.com access to the database to cross-reference it with their users. Again, in theory, this would allow social networking sites to weed out the bad guys.
Except, of course, that there is nothing stopping the bad guys from simply signing up for a different e-mail address somewhere else! I mean, come on, this proposal doesn’t even pass the laugh test! I don’t know about you, but I have multiple e-mail accounts and often switch providers and change my address to evade spammers. A determined predator is going to do the same thing once this law is passed. In fact, they probably already have multiple accounts today to throw people off their trail.
Again, when will our government do the right thing and put these scumbags who hurt children behind bars for a long, long time? Instead, our lawmakers now just give them a slap on the wrist and let them walk after just a few years of hard time, meaning they are out on the streets and behind keyboards again too soon. This 2003 Department of Justice study reported that the average sentence for child molesters was approximately seven years and, on average, they were released after serving just three of those seven years.
That is outrageous, and until we get serious about bringing bad guys to justice and locking them up for a long, long time, we’re never going to get this problem under control.
That’s the quickest summary of a paper the Cato Institute issued today, which I co-wrote with Jeff Jonas, distinguished engineer and chief scientist with IBM’s Entity Analytic Solutions Group.
Data mining is the effort to gain knowledge from patterns in data. A retailer can use data mining to sift through past customer interactions and learn more about potential new customers, but it can’t figure out which customers will actually come into a new store. Terrorism is so rare in society that there are no patterns to search for. Data mining has no capability to ferret out terrorists.
It appears that the Automated Targeting System, which made news last week (because of its previously unknown focus on American travelers), uses data mining. It sifts through information about border crossers to assign them a “risk score.”
In a National Journal article published last week, Secretary of Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff discussed ATS, revealing the need for government officials to get more clear about what they are doing, what works, and what doesn’t work. According to NJ, Chertoff called ATS “the process by which we collect that information and analyze it to see what are the patterns and the relationships that tell us, for example, that a particular telephone number is associated with a terrorist, or something of that sort.”
Comparing the number of a traveler to phone numbers of terrorists is data matching and it is not what ATS does – or at least not the interesting part of what ATS does. Data matching, link analysis, or “pulling strings” is a proven investigative method and, as we discuss in our paper, it’s what could have prevented the attacks of 9/11.
There should be forthright public discussion about whether a program like ATS, or any data mining program, can catch terrorists. Such a program might help turn up ordinary crime, about which there may be suitable patterns to discover. Whether the public would countenance mass surveillance for ordinary crime control is a different question than whether it would accept such methods to prevent terrorism.
I’ve written at Cato@Liberty before about how Web 2.0 business models, particularly Google’s, are in conflict with current Supreme Court privacy cases denying people a Fourth Amendment interest in information they have entrusted to third parties.
Now comes a very interesting Information Week report on last month’s Web 2.0 Summit:
None other than Google–which has profited enormously from the data users submit to its services and from the data its users generate through use of its services–is thinking seriously about how to give users more control over their data. Though stopping short of a complete data emancipation proclamation at the Web 2.0 Summit, CEO Eric Schmidt said, “The more we can let people move their data around . . . the better off we’ll be.”
And the better off users’ privacy will be.
I’m a happy user of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit. It’s an add-on for iPods that tracks your running: how far, how long, pace, calories burned, etc. It also lets you track your progress toward a goal or challenge other Nike+iPod users to races. It works by paring a radio receiver attached to your iPod and a radio transmitter placed in your shoe.
However, as those of us who follow such things know, there’s nothing that perks up the ears of privacy activists more than the words “radio transmitter” and “shoe” in the same sentence. Their ears must be at their perkiest as researchers at the University of Washington have issued a report claiming that the Nike+iPod kit can be used to track its wearer. Wired News reports in its usual alarmed tone,
If you enhance your workout with the new Nike+iPod Sport Kit, you may be making yourself a surveillance target.
A report from four University of Washington researchers to be released Thursday reveals that security flaws in the new RFID-powered device from Nike and Apple make it easy for tech-savvy stalkers, thieves and corporations to track your movements. With just a few hundred dollars and a little know-how, someone could even plot your running routes on a Google map without your knowledge.
Below the fold I’ll explain why there are no security “flaws” and you shouldn’t be worried if you own one of these devices.
Continue reading →
Via Jim Lippard (who’s a GC employee), here’s a story about Global Crossing’s criticism of the FCC’s decision to extend the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act to IP-based networks:
The agency also plans to stand firm with the May 2007 deadline, he said. In fact, the days of “endless” extensions for achieving CALEA compliance are effectively over for any broadband or voice-over Internet protocol company, he said, because most deployed their equipment after October 1998, thereby exempting them from relief.
Kouroupas and Global Crossing aren’t alone in balking at the mandate. A group of organizations and companies that included Sun Microsystems, Pulver.com, the American Association of Community Colleges, the Association of American Universities and the American Library Association lodged an appeal against the rules last fall. But a divided appeals court panel upheld the FCC’s rules, dismissing the group’s argument that Congress never intended CALEA to force broadband providers–and networks at corporations and universities–to build in surveillance hubs for the police.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.