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Peter Swire, law professor and one of the members of the President’s review group on the NSA, writes about intelligence reform and the USA FREEDOM Act.
EDITED TO ADD (6/28): Swire gave a talk on this at the Gardner Security Summit. Here are his slides.
Earlier this week, I was at the eighth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior.
This is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty people in the room include psychologists, computer security researchers, sociologists, behavioral economists, philosophers, political scientists, lawyers, biologists, anthropologists, business school professors, neuroscientists, and a smattering of others. It’s not just an interdisciplinary event; most of the people here are individually interdisciplinary.
I call this the most intellectually stimulating two days of my year. The goal is discussion amongst the group. We do that by putting everyone on panels, but only letting each person talk for 10 minutes. The rest of the 90-minute panel is left for discussion.
Ross Anderson liveblogged the talks. Bob Sullivan wrote a piece on some of the presentations on family surveillance.
Here are my posts on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh SHB workshops. Follow those links to find summaries, papers, and audio recordings of the workshops.
Interesting paper by Julie Cohen:
Abstract: The dialogue between law and Surveillance Studies has been complicated by a mutual misrecognition that is both theoretical and temperamental. Legal scholars are inclined to consider surveillance simply as the (potential) subject of regulation, while scholarship in Surveillance Studies often seems not to grapple with the ways in which legal processes and doctrines are sites of contestation over both the modalities and the limits of surveillance. Put differently, Surveillance Studies takes notice of what law does not—the relationship between surveillance and social shaping—but glosses over what legal scholarship rightly recognizes as essential—the processes of definition and compromise that regulators and other interested parties must navigate, and the ways that legal doctrines and constructs shape those processes. This article explores the fault lines between law and Surveillance Studies and considers the potential for more productive confrontation and dialogue in ways that leverage the strengths of each tradition.
Interesting research: “We Can Track You If You Take the Metro: Tracking Metro Riders Using Accelerometers on Smartphones“:
Abstract: Motion sensors (e.g., accelerometers) on smartphones have been demonstrated to be a powerful side channel for attackers to spy on users’ inputs on touchscreen. In this paper, we reveal another motion accelerometer-based attack which is particularly serious: when a person takes the metro, a malicious application on her smartphone can easily use accelerator readings to trace her. We first propose a basic attack that can automatically extract metro-related data from a large amount of mixed accelerator readings, and then use an ensemble interval classier built from supervised learning to infer the riding intervals of the user. While this attack is very effective, the supervised learning part requires the attacker to collect labeled training data for each station interval, which is a significant amount of effort. To improve the efficiency of our attack, we further propose a semi-supervised learning approach, which only requires the attacker to collect labeled data for a very small number of station intervals with obvious characteristics. We conduct real experiments on a metro line in a major city. The results show that the inferring accuracy could reach 89% and 92% if the user takes the metro for 4 and 6 stations, respectively.
The Internet of Things is the Internet of sensors. I’m sure all kinds of surveillance is possible from all kinds of sensing inputs.
Okay, maybe not so fun.
Quiz 1: “Just How Kafkaesque is the Court that Oversees NSA Spying?”
Quiz 2: “Can You Tell the Difference Between Bush and Obama on the Patriot Act?”
It’s been fourteen hours since a few provisions of the Patriot Act have expired, and the world hasn’t come to an end—at least so far.
The University of Adelaide is offering a new MOOC on “Cyberwar, Surveillance and Security.” Here’s a teaser video. I was interviewed for the class, and make a brief appearance in the teaser.
A man was arrested for drug dealing based on the IP address he used while querying the USPS package tracking website.
The ACLU’s Chris Soghoian explains (time 25:52-30:55) why the current debate over Section 215 of the Patriot Act is just a minor facet of a large and complex bulk collection program by the FBI and the NSA.
There were 180 orders authorized last year by the FISA Court under Section 215—180 orders issued by this court. Only five of those orders relate to the telephony metadata program. There are 175 orders about completely separate things. In six weeks, Congress will either reauthorize this statute or let it expire, and we’re having a debate—to the extent we’re even having a debate—but the debate that’s taking place is focused on five of the 180, and there’s no debate at all about the other 175 orders.
Now, Senator Wyden has said there are other bulk collection programs targeted at Americans that the public would be shocked to learn about. We don’t know, for example, how the government collects records from Internet providers. We don’t know how they get bulk metadata from tech companies about Americans. We don’t know how the American government gets calling card records.
If we take General Hayden at face value—and I think you’re an honest guy—if the purpose of the 215 program is to identify people who are calling Yemen and Pakistan and Somalia, where one end is in the United States, your average Somali-American is not calling Somalia from their land line phone or their cell phone for the simple reason that AT&T will charge them $7.00 a minute in long distance fees. The way that people in the diaspora call home—the way that people in the Somali or Yemeni community call their family and friends back home—they walk into convenience stores and they buy prepaid calling cards. That is how regular people make international long distance calls.
So the 215 program that has been disclosed publicly, the 215 program that is being debated publicly, is about records to major carriers like AT&T and Verizon. We have not had a debate about surveillance requests, bulk orders to calling card companies, to Skype, to voice over Internet protocol companies. Now, if NSA isn’t collecting those records, they’re not doing their job. I actually think that that’s where the most useful data is. But why are we having this debate about these records that don’t contain a lot of calls to Somalia when we should be having a debate about the records that do contain calls to Somalia and do contain records of e-mails and instant messages and searches and people posting inflammatory videos to YouTube?
Certainly the government is collecting that data, but we don’t know how they’re doing it, we don’t know at what scale they’re doing it, and we don’t know with which authority they’re doing it. And I think it is a farce to say that we’re having a debate about the surveillance authority when really, we’re just debating this very narrow usage of the statute.
Further underscoring this point, yesterday the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General released a redacted version of its internal audit of the FBI’s use of Section 215: “A Review of the FBI’s Use of Section 215 Orders: Assessment of Progress in Implementing Recommendations and Examination of Use in 2007 through 2009,” following the reports of the statute’s use from 2002-2005 and 2006. (Remember that the FBI and the NSA are inexorably connected here. The order to Verizon was from the FBI, requiring it to turn data over to the NSA.)
Details about legal justifications are all in the report (see here for an important point about minimization), but detailed data on exactly what the FBI is collecting—whether targeted or bulk—is left out. We read that the FBI demanded “customer information” (p. 36), “medical and educational records” (p. 39) “account information and electronic communications transactional records” (p. 41), “information regarding other cyber activity” (p. 42). Some of this was undoubtedly targeted against individuals; some of it was undoubtedly bulk.
I believe bulk collection is discussed in detail in Chapter VI. The chapter title is redacted, as well as the introduction (p. 46). Section A is “Bulk Telephony Metadata.” Section B (pp. 59-63) is completely redacted, including the section title. There’s a summary in the Introduction (p. 3): “In Section VI, we update the information about the uses of Section 215 authority described [redacted word] Classified Appendices to our last report. These appendices described the FBI’s use of Section 215 authority on behalf of the NSA to obtain bulk collections of telephony metadata [long redacted clause].” Sounds like a comprehensive discussion of bulk collection under Section 215.
What’s in there? As Soghoian says, certainly other communications systems like prepaid calling cards, Skype, text messaging systems, and e-mails. Search history and browser logs? Financial transactions? The “medical and educational records” mentioned above? Probably all of them—and the data is in the report, redacted (p. 29)—but there’s nothing public.
The problem is that those are the pages Congress should be debating, and not the telephony metadata program exposed by Snowden.
EDITED TO ADD: Marcy Wheeler is going through the document line by line.
This is interesting:
The surveys find that Americans feel privacy is important in their daily lives in a number of essential ways. Yet, they have a pervasive sense that they are under surveillance when in public and very few feel they have a great deal of control over the data that is collected about them and how it is used. Adding to earlier Pew Research reports that have documented low levels of trust in sectors that Americans associate with data collection and monitoring, the new findings show Americans also have exceedingly low levels of confidence in the privacy and security of the records that are maintained by a variety of institutions in the digital age.
While some Americans have taken modest steps to stem the tide of data collection, few have adopted advanced privacy-enhancing measures. However, majorities of Americans expect that a wide array of organizations should have limits on the length of time that they can retain records of their activities and communications. At the same time, Americans continue to express the belief that there should be greater limits on government surveillance programs. Additionally, they say it is important to preserve the ability to be anonymous for certain online activities.
Lots of detail in the reports.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.