J.R.McHale

NSA = J. Edgar Hoover On Steroids – The Big Picture:

“With a few hundred cable probes and computerized decryption, the NSA can now capture the kind of gritty details of private life that J. Edgar Hoover so treasured and provide the sort of comprehensive coverage of populations once epitomized by secret police like East Germany’s Stasi. And yet, such comparisons only go so far. After all . . . . J. Edgar Hoover still only knew about the inner-workings of the elite in one city: Washington, D.C. To gain the same intimate detail for an entire country, the Stasi had to employ one police informer for every six East Germans — an unsustainable allocation of human resources. By contrast, the marriage of the NSA’s technology to the Internet’s data hubs now allows the agency’s 37,000 employees a similarly close coverage of the entire globe with just one operative for every 200,000 people on the planet. In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover’s FBI once did.”

Read the whole thing. Domestic bulk data collected by the NSA conveys immense power on those with access to this information and will be prone to political (and financial) abuse. History demonstrates that the lure of such data for improper purposes likely will be irresistible. Hoover stayed in office for decades, aided in large part by the information the the FBI had collected on politicians of the day. Imagine what could be done with the data collected by the NSA.

“The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission — protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies — has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era . . . . The result is an agency that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that’s increasingly putting us all at risk. It’s time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.” Bruce Schneier at CNN.Opinion with practical suggestions for reform.

“Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End.” New York Times

Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s “Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court” (pdf; 238 pages). Also separate statements of Board members Elisebeth Collins Cook (pdf; 6 pages) and Rachel Brand (pdf; 8 pages)

Some additional background:

“Liberty and Security in a Changing World – December 12, 2013 Report and Recommendations of The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies” (pdf; 308 pages)

Supplemental Chapter on NSA from Professor James Grimmelmann’s “Internet Law: Cases and Problems” (downloadable pdf; 37 pages) offered on freemium basis.

No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A.: New York Times

The Case for NSA Reform – by Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner:

“[W]e were the primary authors of the USA PATRIOT Act . . . . [W]e strongly agree that the dragnet collection of millions of Americans’ phone records every day — whether they have any connection at all to terrorism — goes far beyond what Congress envisioned or intended to authorize. More important, we agree it must stop. [Today] we will introduce bicameral, bipartisan legislation that will put an end to the National Security Agency’s indiscriminate collection of personal information. Our proposal, the USA FREEDOM Act, provides stronger privacy safeguards with respect to a range of government surveillance programs. While the USA FREEDOM Act ends the dragnet collection of telephone records, it preserves the intelligence community’s ability to gather information in a more focused way, as was the original intent of the PATRIOT Act. Our bill also ensures that this program will not simply be restarted under other legal authorities, and includes new oversight, auditing and public reporting requirements. No longer will the government be able to employ a carte-blanche approach to records collection or enact secret laws by covertly reinterpreting congressional intent. And to further promote privacy interests, our legislation establishes a special advocate to provide a counterweight to the surveillance interests in the FISA Court’s closed-door proceedings.”

The USA Freedom Act: pdf

See also:

The White House on Spying: New York Times Editorial Board

Spycraft: how do we fix a broken NSA? – Reformers are still struggling to imagine an NSA that doesn’t overstep the constitution: Russell Brandon at The Verge.

Counterpoint: We Need an Invasive NSA by Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith

Georgetown law professor, Laura Donohue’s Bulk Metadata Collection: Statutory and Constitutional Considerations (link is to the pdf; caution: it’s long – 86 pages), which is forthcoming in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. A brief overview of the topics covered in her paper appears today at Just Security.

Cyber Law, Tech and Policy

• Google Unveils Tools to Access Web From Repressive Countries and Defend Websites: (1) uProxy, a browser extension that uses p2p technology to enable people to provide others with a trusted internet connection, (2) Project Shield, to help human-rights activists, NGOs, and news organizations defend their websites from distributed denial of service (DDos) attacks, (3) and Digital Attack Map, a live data visualization, displaying DDoS attacks in real time. In addition to those Google-related tools, the Freedom of the Press Foundation recently launched a confidential, open-source submission platform for whistleblowers: SecureDrop.
  

• DOJ Argues No One Has Standing To Challenge Metadata Collection Even As It Says Government Can Legally Collect Everyone’s – TechDirt.

• But: Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretaps – New York Times.
  

General Interest

• Taking Flight From Asia – Joel Kotkin at New Geography on the latest wave of emigration from Asia to parts of the U.S. and Canada.

• Breaking Through Cancer’s Shield – New York Times. Are we seeing the dawn of a new era in cancer fighting based upon immunotherapies?

• Now We are Five – At the New Yorker, David Sedaris on the death of his youngest sister.
  

Cyber Law, Tech and Policy

• How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?: Richard Stallman at Wired. Also recently by Stallman: Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before.

• Want to Evade NSA Spying? Don’t Connect to the Internet: Bruce Schneier at Wired. Key takeaway: it’s hard to avoid the NSA (or, perhaps more accurately, it’s very, very inconvenient).

• Special Report: The Obama Administration and the Press – Leak Investigations and Surveillance in post-9/11 America: CPJ (Committee to Protect Journalists).

Time to Tame the NSA Behemoth Trampling our Rights by Yochai Benkler at The Guardian.

The Secret FISA Court Must Go by law professors Christopher Sprigman and Jennifer Granick at The Daily Beast.

The U.S. Government has Betrayed the Internet – We Need to Take it Back by Bruce Schneier at The Guardian.

“[A] structural approach, which focuses on preserving an overall balance between state control and citizen autonomy, seems to me more appropriate for evaluating mass surveillance programs such as the NSA’s … . [T]he appropriate question is whether the creation of a system of surveillance perilously alters that balance too far in the direction of government control, whether or not we have problems with the current use of that system. We might imagine a system of compulsory cameras installed in homes, activated only by warrant, being used with scrupulous respect for the law over many years. The problem is that such an architecture of surveillance, once established, would be difficult to dismantle, and prove too potent a tool of control if it ever fell into the hands of people who—whether through panic, malice, or a misguided confidence in their own ability to secretly judge the public good—would seek to use it against us.”

—   Julian Sanchez: A Reply to Epstein & Pilon on NSA’s Metadata Program