NSA Update: “Collect it all.”

Some restrictions do apply.

About six months ago, I posted a long, long piece on the NSA and asked VA NOW members to contact their state and federal representatives to let them know that life in a surveillance state is not an American life. Since then, a few, little things, have changed for the better. However, that surveillance state is still intact.

 All oppressive authorities— political, religious, societal, parental— rely on this vital truth, using it as a principal tool to enforce orthodoxies, compel adherence, and quash dissent. It is in their interest to convey that nothing their subjects do will escape the knowledge of the authorities. Far more effectively than a police force, the deprivation of privacy will crush any temptation to deviate from rules and norms.*

Feminist activists do a great deal of dissenting and deviating. We dissent from the religious and culturally conservative agenda that is the current loudest defense of the age-old patriarchy and its values. We dissent from its enforcer, the rape culture. We dissent from those elements of capitalism that exhaust workers and families. We dissent from the classist assumption that basic good health is the province of the wealthy, and that the rest of us can just keep eating our corn-syrup infused everything, or just soda and chips. And many, many of us dissent vigorously from our government’s neo-conservative foreign policy, our sly expansion of empire, our
adventurous wars, and our combination of universal surveillance and extra-judicial killing of (anyone) American citizens. We dissent from a government that can, effectively, revoke our citizenship and maroon us in a no-woman’s land called Enemy Combatant from which country there is no known return.

Which means that, as feminists, we have a problem with the National Security Agency (and its partner agencies of HLS and cooperating internet companies) having the ability and the permission to observe us in ways that make our political associations and intentions manifestly clear before we even manifest them. This is what the collection of your meta-data means. With your meta-data, the NSA can tell who you called, when, and from all that figure out a lot about you.

 Listening in on a woman calling an abortion clinic might reveal nothing more than someone confirming an appointment with a generic-sounding establishment (“East Side Clinic” or “Dr. Jones’s office”). But the metadata would show far more than that: it would reveal the identity of those who were called. The same is true of calls to a dating service, a gay and lesbian center, a drug addiction clinic, an HIV specialist, or a suicide hotline. Metadata would likewise unmask a conversation between a human rights activist and an informant in a repressive regime, or a confidential source calling a journalist to reveal high-level wrongdoing.+

History has demonstrated again and again that just knowing that you live in a state that can record your life in this way, and threaten you with loss of citizen protections, cows most of the population into stupefied obedience and silences the most imaginative contributions to progress and human dignity. This kind of surveillance works, and works well, even if they never look at you. You begin to live and write and think as if they are looking at you, and you don’t want to be in that depth of trouble. Chapter 4 of No Place to Hide, from which I have been quoting, deals with this history, the methods of surveillance, and the normal psychological and behavioral responses humans have to them. They are dramatic.

 A prime justification for surveillance— that it’s for the benefit of the population— relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans’ growing concerns over the US government’s surveillance powers, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell , assured readers that “any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever.” **

Given the intense surveillance of civil rights and anti-war activists, we know that to have been a dead lie.

So, hurray!, the NSA has been ordered by Congress to stop collecting meta-data of phone calls made by and to US citizens. It’s the law.  This is a worthy revision to the powers granted by the PARIOT Act.

So it’s something, but it’s really nothing.

The UK newspaper, The Guardian (which has been challenging over-bearing governments for over 200 years), publishes most of the best work on the NSA because Glen Greenwald was a reporter with them when Edward Snowden contacted him. Two recent articles clarify the state of the surveillance state.

 By a substantial and bipartisan margin, 293 to 121, representatives moved to ban the NSA from searching warrantlessly through its troves of ostensibly foreign communications content for Americans’ data, the so-called “backdoor search” provision revealed in August by the Guardian thanks to leaks from Edward Snowden. ++

So, the NSA can’t look right at your meta-data, nor can it look at you just because you know someone who lives in Libiya.

But, it can still do even worse than that.

 But exactly one year on, the NSA’s greatest wound so far has been its PR difficulties. The agency, under public pressure, has divested itself of exactly one activity, the bulk collection of US phone data. Yet while the NSA will not itself continue to gather the data directly, the major post-Snowden legislative fix grants the agency wide berth in accessing and searching large volumes of phone records, and even wider latitude in collecting other kinds of data.

There are no other mandated reforms. President Obama in January added restrictions on the dissemination of non-Americans’ “personal information“, but that has not been codified in law. The coalition of large internet firms demanding greater safeguards around their customers’ email, browsing and search histories have received nothing from the government for their effort. A recent move to block the NSA from undermining commercial encryption and amassing a library of software vulnerabilities never received a legislative hearing. (Obama, in defiance of a government privacy board, permits the NSA to exploit some software flaws for national security purposes.) ***

The provisions that force software and internet companies to insert backdoors in their encryption and security systems (this includes your banking and health records), that even infiltrates anonymizers like Tor, yeah that’s still totally intact. NSA can still sneak around back that way, and with much less restriction than has recently been applied to your cell phone. These backdoors make your computer, and your bank, and our whole national security apparatus MORE VULNERABLE to malicious hackers because weakened encryption is weakened encryption. More deliberately, the NSA was aware of the Heartbleed bug, and used it to assist its own hacking operations for a couple of years.

You really do have to wonder about the ethical code driving this organization: collect it all, by any means necessary.

It’s change without change.

The NSA is still doing all manner of bulk surveillance of whole national populations. More the rule for over-riding this new restriction is as low as “reasonable suspicion” which is nothing near as strong as the “probable cause” that comes to mind when we think of “search and seizure.” As Greenwald puts it in No Place to Hide, let’s say your pizza deliverer is new immigrant to the US from a nation that harbors, or just can’t kick out, known terrorist groups or radical clerics. Say his mosque in the US is giving money to Boko Haram, but he doesn’t know that, and you don’t know that, and the NSA does. But, he gets lost on the way to your house and calls you from his cell phone for directions. Boom. You are now, and possibly forever, captured in the two-degrees net, the collection system just automatically logging your call activity for the foreseeable future. There is almost no way for you, innocent citizen, to know which of your business or social interactions might get you swept up in the data dragnet.

And, if any of that pattern is interpreted by an algorithm or a human to constitute “reasonable suspicion” that you are up to some kind of dissent/no-good, a warrant can be gained that allows the NSA to put a “tap” on your phones, your computer, and your computer’s or phone’s camera and microphones and use all that to observe you whether you are using the machines or not, and whether you turn the machines on or not. The NSA can – I am not making this up – turn your cameras on and watch and listen to you whenever they like once they have that warrant. The PowerPoint slides in Greenwald’s chapter 3 are fascinating.

But, you know, not to worry really. BECAUSE IT DOESN’T EVEN WORK (as a method of terror prevention, as advertised). CBS DC reported in January 2014 on a study by the New America Foundation that found:

 … the bulk collection methods used by the NSA under Section 215 of the Patriot Act appear to have played an identifiable role in, at most, 1.8 percent of the terrorism investigations.

 “Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group,” reads the report.

NROL-39 is a surveillance satellite.

The only result toward which this kind of surveillance is effective is to coerce as many people (on Earth) as possible to leave the status quo and the agendas of the elite and power    roll along without our pesky interference. So, Virginia NOW is asking you to keep these issues in mind. Check in with The Guardian from time to time. Their US edition has  devoted a whole department to the NSA. The Atlantic and Salon have also done some excellent original reporting on issues of security and surveillance.

We also ask that you consider, again, writing to your representatives. You can find their contact information on our Represent page (click here, scroll down). Writing your own letter, in your own words, is the most effective way to get the staff’s attention and get your opinion counted.

Only imagine this: a future in which a conservative as tenacious and aggressive and paranoid as Representative Issa or J. Edgar Hoover is the POTUS, and she or he decides that,  say, pro-choice organizations need to be observed more closely because liberals are notoriously tolerant of Muslims. Sadly, that is the level of reasoning many conservatives display lately. The level of reasoning that had the FBI watching Ernest Hemingway, a surveillance program that is now seen as helping to drive the Nobel Prize winner to suicide in 1969. Now imagine that a largely conservative Intelligence Committee agrees with that POTUS. Is that impossible? No, not at all. Is it the most American thing in the world to assure ourselves and future generations that it does not happen? Yes, yes it is.

Just this week, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the local police need a real, written, signed warrant to search your cell phone in the event of your arrest or suspicion. This decision, now this might eventually have some meaningful impact on surveillance. But, that is yet to be seen.

Feminism and feminists do mean to change the world in deep and permanent ways. The State is not fond of that idea, and will use both surveillance and force (as we saw with Occupy) to prevent it. Act up. Speak out.

Carry on, people!

Dr. Simone Roberts

Web Editor / Historian

Virginia NOW

 

Sources

*Greenwald, Glenn. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Kindle Locations 2346-2349). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

+Greenwald, Glenn. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Kindle Locations 2039-2043). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

**Greenwald, Glenn. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Kindle Locations 2492-2498). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

++ Ackerman, Spencer. House of Representatives moves to ban NSA’s ‘backdoor search’ provision TheGuardian.com, Friday 20 June 2014.

*** Ackerman, Spencer. Edward Snowden, a year on: reformers frustrated as NSA preserves its power.TheGuardian.com, Thursday 5 June 2014.

Virginia NOW Wants You to Help Rein in the NSA

Simone Roberts and Paradise Kendra

Why should a women’s organization work on surveillance issues?

We believe that women and women’s organizations have several priority interests in restricting NSA surveillance of US citizens. If the following concerns seem out-sized to you, please read the sources in the Background section below.

 1.       Intelligence gathered through the NSA’s methods could potentially be used by the FBI and local law enforcement to interfere with or prevent rallies, protests, and acts of civil disobedience organized by VA NOW and similar groups.  (First Amendment)

 2.       Women’s medical privacy, in deeply red states like Kansas for instance, could potentially be violated by anti-choice state administrations to learn the identities of women who have had/planned to have abortions. (Fourteenth Amendment)

3.      Stalking. NSA analysts have already been found to be staking past, present, and desired romantic partners. While the NSA has responded to most of these cases appropriately (click), the room for abuse is a real concern. You have to get caught to get punished.

We also have interests in this problem as citizens:

• current NSA practices NSA continue the erosion of individual/civil liberties begun with the PATRIOT Act

• dangers of human fallibility in the misinterpretation or abuse of collected data

• possible observation of or interference with legitimate community and political grassroots organizations in the US

Mostly what we’re worried about is:  Mistakes. It’s a lot of data  (nearly all of it) and you might not even know that you’re four degrees of separation from someone who’s one or two degrees of separation from a person of interest, suspect, or criminal —  but that’s close enough for a mistake to happen because the computers watching us are searching for patterns of connection and relation in addition to red-flag words and phrases.

And, lastly, this is just bad for a republic. Total surveillance and democracy cannot exist together. Both James Madison and Thomas Payne could agree on that.

What’s the difference  between the NSA tracking me and an internet company or advertiser?

Simply put, Google can’t hold you in indefinite detention as a material witness. Reebok can’t accidently arrest you as an unlawful combatant.

That may sound hyperbolic or stark, but think back to all the perfectly innocent citizens who found themselves on the No Fly List by mistake, or worse who were actually detained, and then could not get the mistake corrected. Sometimes, even with the best intentions, security agencies overdo it.

When the NSA makes a mistake — maybe by misunderstanding a conversation you had last year on the phone and don’t remember — the consequences can at the least destroy your reputation. “I’m worried about Jason. He’s so unhappy with the situation, and I think he’s reaching for comforts that are dangerous.” “Well, converting to Islam is not a sign that you’re unhappy or unreasonable.”

The fact is that metadata describes you, your whole life, and your state of mind in shocking detail (click).

          Here’s what we’re asking you to do.

1. Promote campaigns by these two organizations through your social media. These two organizations, in addition to the ACLU, are working to end NSA data dragnets and to bring intelligence efforts back into reasonable and constitutional boundaries:

Demand Progress is a petition campaign site largely interested in internet/activism issues (copyright, surveillance, harassment of whistleblowers, grassroots work).  Here is a sample petition for their anti-NSA campaign (click).

Fight for the Future is a similar organization, duplicating many of the campaigns of Demand Progress, but puts visitors in direct contact with their federal representatives.

2. Do the same thing for the ACLU’s efforts. Their petition is here (click). Details of their suit against the NSA are in this WaPo article.  Their work on this issues is outstanding.

3. Write a letter. Seriously. Petitions are nice and all, but petitions and form emails don’t get nearly the attention that personally written letters and phone calls do. It’s the effort factor. Each phone call and letter is often extrapolated by politicians and their staff to represent many hundreds or a thousand people who agree with you.

You might write your federal representatives to say that you want them to vote for one or both of these bills:

Rep. Rush Holt (D NJ): HR 2818 Surveillance State Repeal Act: Would repeal the PATRIOT Act and prevent the NSA from installing “backdoors” to most internet encryption, thus allowing private citizens to actually protect the data they want to protect, like their bank transactions (click).

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D VT): S 1599 USA Freedom Act: There is no summary of this bill at present, but basically it would end generalized eavesdropping on cell phone communications and the internet dragnet. It would force more careful FISA review.

Contact for VA House Reps                Contact for VA Senators

You might write to your state representatives to ask them to draft legislation for the state that restricts surveillance along the lines of the federal bills, or modeled on legislation being considered in Wisconsin and California, and to a lesser degree in Texas.

Contact for VA State Legislators

In your letter you could ask for the following, in your own words:

• Demand a clear and limited definition of “national security,” a term that presently means just about anything at all.

• Limit both foreign and domestic surveillance to legitimate terrorist tracking and triangulation, not surveillance of entire populations or governments.

• Limit use of encryption backdoors.

• Limit legal use so that no data collected by NSA can be used in non-terror related criminal or civil cases against US citizens, or as leverage in other actions.

• Impose immediate loss of security clearance and prosecution of any government official who uses collected data against other citizens for personal, financial, or political gain or influence.

• Forbid any use of NSA tracking methods to restrict political organizing, action or civil disobedience.

• Protect whistleblowers from  intimidation and over-prosecution.

• Include an exoneration clause that assures well-publicized public apologies to citizens if the program targets them and investigations/detentions/arrests follow a mistaken identification of a “potential terrorist.”

It’s kind of a lot to take in, but give it a day or so. Think about how you really feel about Homeland Security and the NSA collecting the record of every electronic thing you do: phone call, email, on-line purchase, Netflix rental, bank transaction, charitable donation, Facebook post, listserv discussion, browsing through Pinterest, your conversations with your Muslim and Middle Eastern friends.

You may want to write a letter broad enough to cover everything, or focused on some key concerns that matter more to you. But write. And, if you want to, send a copy of your letter to info@vanow.org  (subject line: My NSA Letter). We’ll collect and post them on our Facebook page to encourage more action.

BACKGROUND

How dedicated is our security state to gathering every byte of information about all citizens, seemingly everywhere in the world (France, Germany, and Brazil got the most media attention)?

The NSA describes its data collection center as 1.5 million square feet, and will consume 65 megawatts of electricity costing $1 million per month. It’s in Nevada, and the water needed to keep all those servers cool will be about 1.7 million gallons (6500 tons) of water per day — in Nevada (click) and (click). It is meant to store everything, possibly forever. The word “Exabyte” was coined for a memory capacity equal to 100,000 times the total holdings of the Library of Congress. How  much is that?  It’s this much:

The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 155.3 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 35 million books and other print materials, 3.4 million recordings, 13.6 million photographs, 5.4 million maps, 6.5 million pieces of sheet music and 68 million manuscripts. (click)

Multiplied by 100,000. The facility  is also having some significant technical problems with electrical overloads and failures (and the gods only know what effect that could have on the data accuracy) (click).  The room for error here  goes beyond  mistakes in human interpretation or logarithm design, but includes the random electrical  arc scrambling some data. And given the stakes here, those are unacceptable errors.

Rumors that the report published by the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies will “roll back” the security state’s powers are hopeful, but false. The recommendations are far more conservative than most civil liberties organizations would like, as summarized in this op-ed by Michael Morell, one of the report’s authors (click).

Who’s resisting besides Edward Snowden and Anonymous?

VA NOW would be joining a trend. Several large tech companies (AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter,  and LinkedIn) are insisting on five points of reform for current surveillance laws (click). Though these companies are direct competitors, they have come together to demand these reforms so that the internet, essential to the success of all, becomes a trustworthy space once again.

Lawmakers in some states and in the federal government are trying many avenues to restrict surveillance powers to something that will catch bad actors and let the rest of us enjoy our rights and liberties. Terrorists are criminals, they behave like any kind of criminal, and standard forensic procedures can catch them.

Some leading intellectuals and writers are letting their voices be heard. Five hundred writers, from many nations, have signed a public letter demanding a “digital bill of rights” be established in the UN. (click)

Your letter would not place you on the fringe, but right in the stream of national and international efforts to reign in the NSA. Have you seen the logo for the new spy satellite going into orbit? (click)  No, we did not make that up. You thought we made that up, didn’t you? Nope.

From Wired Magazine: “The legislation has support from Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate, and from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and National Rifle Association. But the USA FREEDOM Act’s passage into law remains uncertain.

“It is time for serious and meaningful reforms so we can restore confidence in our intelligence community,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont and one of the bill’s chief sponsors. Today’s proposal is a radical revamp of the Patriot Act, legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks. In 2006, lawmakers amended the act to allow the bulk collection program under the disguise of Section 215 of the Patriot Act — which allows the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize broad warrants for most any type of “tangible” records, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies”. (click)

From NYT: “We pay them to spy,” Mr. Holt said. “But if in the process they degrade the security of the encryption we all use, it’s a net national disservice.”

Mr. Holt, whose Surveillance State Repeal Act would eliminate much of the escalation in the government’s spying powers undertaken after the 2001 terrorist attacks, was responding to news reports about N.S.A. documents showing that the agency has spent billions of dollars over the last decade in an effort to defeat or bypass encryption. The reports, by The New York Times, ProPublica and The Guardian, were posted online on Thursday.” (click)

From Reason Magazine: “The USA FREEDOM Act, which aims to rein in the National Security Agency (NSA), has a growing coalition of bipartisan support that includes Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.).

The full title—“Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ending Eavesdropping, Dragnet-collection, and Online-Monitoring Act”—is a mouthful. But it aims to do exactly what it says. If passed, the bill could end bulk meta-data collection, require the attorney general to make certain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court decisions public, and allow Internet and telephone companies to disclose some information about FISA court orders they receive. Additionally, it would create a position within the FISA court of a “special advocate” to act “zealous and effective…in defense of civil liberties.” (click)

Freedom and justice for all,
Dr. Simone Roberts
Web Editor / Historian
Virginia NOW