Entries Tagged "courts"

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Uber Uses Ubiquitous Surveillance to Identify and Block Regulators

The New York Times reports that Uber developed apps that identified and blocked government regulators using the app to find evidence of illegal behavior:

Yet using its app to identify and sidestep authorities in places where regulators said the company was breaking the law goes further in skirting ethical lines—and potentially legal ones, too. Inside Uber, some of those who knew about the VTOS program and how the Greyball tool was being used were troubled by it.

[…]

One method involved drawing a digital perimeter, or “geofence,” around authorities’ offices on a digital map of the city that Uber monitored. The company watched which people frequently opened and closed the app—a process internally called “eyeballing”—around that location, which signified that the user might be associated with city agencies.

Other techniques included looking at the user’s credit card information and whether that card was tied directly to an institution like a police credit union.

Enforcement officials involved in large-scale sting operations to catch Uber drivers also sometimes bought dozens of cellphones to create different accounts. To circumvent that tactic, Uber employees went to that city’s local electronics stores to look up device numbers of the cheapest mobile phones on sale, which were often the ones bought by city officials, whose budgets were not sizable.

In all, there were at least a dozen or so signifiers in the VTOS program that Uber employees could use to assess whether users were new riders or very likely city officials.

If those clues were not enough to confirm a user’s identity, Uber employees would search social media profiles and other available information online. Once a user was identified as law enforcement, Uber Greyballed him or her, tagging the user with a small piece of code that read Greyball followed by a string of numbers.

When Edward Snowden exposed the fact that the NSA does this sort of thing, I commented that the technologies will eventually become cheap enough for corporations to do it. Now, it has.

One discussion we need to have is whether or not this behavior is legal. But another, more important, discussion is whether or not it is ethical. Do we want to live in a society where corporations wield this sort of power against government? Against individuals? Because if we don’t align government against this kind of behavior, it’ll become the norm.

Posted on March 6, 2017 at 6:24 AM • View Comments

The NSA and "Intelligence Legalism"

Interesting law journal paper: “Intelligence Legalism and the National Security Agency’s Civil Liberties Gap,” by Margo Schlanger:

Abstract: This paper examines the National Security Agency, its compliance with legal constraints and its respect for civil liberties. But even if perfect compliance could be achieved, it is too paltry a goal. A good oversight system needs its institutions not just to support and enforce compliance but also to design good rules. Yet as will become evident, the offices that make up the NSA’s compliance system are nearly entirely compliance offices, not policy offices; they work to improve compliance with existing rules, but not to consider the pros and cons of more individually-protective rules and try to increase privacy or civil liberties where the cost of doing so is acceptable. The NSA and the administration in which it sits have thought of civil liberties and privacy only in compliance terms. That is, they have asked only “Can we (legally) do X?” and not “Should we do X?” This preference for the can question over the should question is part and parcel, I argue, of a phenomenon I label “intelligence legalism,” whose three crucial and simultaneous features are imposition of substantive rules given the status of law rather than policy; some limited court enforcement of those rules; and empowerment of lawyers. Intelligence legalism has been a useful corrective to the lawlessness that characterized surveillance prior to intelligence reform, in the late 1970s. But I argue that it gives systematically insufficient weight to individual liberty, and that its relentless focus on rights, and compliance, and law has obscured the absence of what should be an additional focus on interests, or balancing, or policy. More is needed; additional attention should be directed both within the NSA and by its overseers to surveillance policy, weighing the security gains from surveillance against the privacy and civil liberties risks and costs. That attention will not be a panacea, but it can play a useful role in filling the civil liberties gap intelligence legalism creates.

This is similar to what I wrote in Data and Goliath:

There are two levels of oversight. The first is strategic: are the rules we’re imposing the correct ones? For example, the NSA can implement its own procedures to ensure that it’s following the rules, but it should not get to decide what rules it should follow….

The other kind of oversight is tactical: are the rules being followed? Mechanisms for this kind of oversight include procedures, audits, approvals, troubleshooting protocols, and so on. The NSA, for example, trains its analysts in the regulations governing their work, audits systems to ensure that those regulations are actually followed, and has instituted reporting and disciplinary procedures for occasions when they’re not.

It’s not enough that the NSA makes sure there is a plausible legal interpretation that authorizes what they do. We need to make sure that their understanding of the law is shared with the outside world, and that what they’re doing is a good idea.

EDITED TO ADD: The paper is from 2014. Also worth reading are these two related essays.

Posted on July 27, 2016 at 6:47 AM • View Comments

Visiting a Website against the Owner's Wishes Is Now a Federal Crime

While we’re on the subject of terrible 9th Circuit Court rulings:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has handed down a very important decision on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act…. Its reasoning appears to be very broad. If I’m reading it correctly, it says that if you tell people not to visit your website, and they do it anyway knowing you disapprove, they’re committing a federal crime of accessing your computer without authorization.

Posted on July 13, 2016 at 2:10 PM • View Comments

Password Sharing Is Now a Crime

In a truly terrible ruling, the US 9th Circuit Court ruled that using someone else’s password with their permission but without the permission of the site owner is a federal crime.

The argument McKeown made is that the employee who shared the password with Nosal “had no authority from Korn/Ferry to provide her password to former employees.”

At issue is language in the CFAA that makes it illegal to access a computer system “without authorization.” McKeown said that “without authorization” is “an unambiguous, non-technical term that, given its plain and ordinary meaning, means accessing a protected computer without permission.” The question that legal scholars, groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and dissenting judge Stephen Reinhardt ask is an important one: Authorization from who?

Reinhardt argues that Nosal’s use of the database was unauthorized by the firm, but was authorized by the former employee who shared it with him. For you and me, this case means that unless Netflix specifically authorizes you to share your password with your friend, you’re breaking federal law.

The EFF:

While the majority opinion said that the facts of this case “bear little resemblance” to the kind of password sharing that people often do, Judge Reinhardt’s dissent notes that it fails to provide an explanation of why that is. Using an analogy in which a woman uses her husband’s user credentials to access his bank account to pay bills, Judge Reinhardt noted: “So long as the wife knows that the bank does not give her permission to access its servers in any manner, she is in the same position as Nosal and his associates.” As a result, although the majority says otherwise, the court turned anyone who has ever used someone else’s password without the approval of the computer owner into a potential felon.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been a disaster for many reasons, this being one of them. There will be an appeal of this ruling.

Posted on July 13, 2016 at 11:07 AM • View Comments

Anonymization and the Law

Interesting paper: “Anonymization and Risk,” by Ira S. Rubinstein and Woodrow Hartzog:

Abstract: Perfect anonymization of data sets has failed. But the process of protecting data subjects in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy. While the deidentification debate has been vigorous and productive, there is no clear direction for policy. As a result, the law has been slow to adapt a holistic approach to protecting data subjects when data sets are released to others. Currently, the law is focused on whether an individual can be identified within a given set. We argue that the better locus of data release policy is on the process of minimizing the risk of reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure. Process-based data release policy, which resembles the law of data security, will help us move past the limitations of focusing on whether data sets have been “anonymized.” It draws upon different tactics to protect the privacy of data subjects, including accurate deidentification rhetoric, contracts prohibiting reidentification and sensitive attribute disclosure, data enclaves, and query-based strategies to match required protections with the level of risk. By focusing on process, data release policy can better balance privacy and utility where nearly all data exchanges carry some risk.

Posted on July 11, 2016 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

Julian Sanchez on the Feinstein-Burr Bill

Two excellent posts.

It’s such a badly written bill that I wonder if it’s just there to anchor us to an extreme, so we’re relieved when the actual bill comes along. Me:

“This is the most braindead piece of legislation I’ve ever seen,” Schneier—who has just been appointed a Fellow of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard—told The Reg. “The person who wrote this either has no idea how technology works or just doesn’t care.”

Posted on May 3, 2016 at 1:10 PM • View Comments

Companies Handing Source Code Over to Governments

ZDNet has an article on US government pressure on software companies to hand over copies of their source code. There’s no details because no one is talking on the record, but I also believe that this is happening.

When asked, a spokesperson for the Justice Dept. acknowledged that the department has demanded source code and private encryption keys before.

These orders would probably come from the FISA Court:

These orders are so highly classified that simply acknowledging an order’s existence is illegal, even a company’s chief executive or members of the board may not be told. Only those who are necessary to execute the order would know, and would be subject to the same secrecy provisions.

Given that Federighi heads the division, it would be almost impossible to keep from him the existence of a FISA order demanding the company’s source code.

It would not be the first time that the US government has reportedly used proprietary code and technology from American companies to further its surveillance efforts.

Top secret NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, reported in German magazine Der Spiegel in late-2013, have suggested some hardware and software makers were compelled to hand over source code to assist in government surveillance.

The NSA’s catalog of implants and software backdoors suggest that some companies, including Dell, Huawei, and Juniper—which was publicly linked to an “unauthorized” backdoor—had their servers and firewall products targeted and attacked through various exploits. Other exploits were able to infiltrate firmware of hard drives manufactured by Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, and Samsung.

Last year, antivirus maker and security firm Kaspersky later found evidence that the NSA had obtained source code from a number of prominent hard drive makers—a claim the NSA denied—to quietly install software used to eavesdrop on the majority of the world’s computers.

“There is zero chance that someone could rewrite the [hard drive] operating system using public information,” said one of the researchers.

The problem is, of course, is that any company forced by the US to hand over their source code would also be forbidden from talking about it.

It’s the sort of thing China does:

For most computing and networking equipment, the chart says, source code must be turned over to Chinese officials. But many foreign companies would be unwilling to disclose code because of concerns about intellectual property, security and, in some cases, United States export law.

The chart also calls for companies that want to sell to banks to set up research and development centers in China, obtain permits for workers servicing technology equipment and build “ports” to allow Chinese officials to manage and monitor data processed by their hardware.

The draft antiterrorism law pushes even further, calling for companies to store all data related to Chinese users on servers in China, create methods for monitoring content for terror threats and provide keys to encryption to public security authorities.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on March 18, 2016 at 11:27 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.