J.R.McHale

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

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).

“[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

How much of an article or news report can an aggregator or clipping service copy under fair use? There’s no precise answer, but under the recent Meltwater ruling from a federal district court in the Southern District of New York, the answer in some cases may be “not much”. At PaidContent.org: AP wins big: Why a Court Said Clipping Content is Not Fair Use. The defendant Meltwater monitored the internett and ran a clipping service for its clients, sending newsletter alerts to its clients about articles in which they appeared. Meltwater included the relevant headline, lede and sentences in which keywords relevant to the client appeared. Key to the court’s decision was that Meltwater, by copying the headlines and ledes acted as a substitute to the underlying articles, rather than driving readers to the original article as a search engine might. As noted by PaidContent: “Cote’s rejection of Meltwater’s search engine argument was based in part on the ‘click-through’ rate of its stories. Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent …” The impact of the ruling outside the federal courts Second Circuit is unclear, but the result should be troubling for companies that scrape significant amounts of content from other sites in reliance on “fair use”.

The EFF’s critical take on the decision. The court’s decision (pdf).

FBI 2013 priority: obtaining new powers to surveil internet and cloud services in real time (Slate).

At ArsTechnica, news of new data transmission research: Fiber cables made of air move data at 99.7 percent the speed of light

TechDirt: Court Tosses Lawsuit That Said MMS Was An Illegal File Sharing Network”

Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do … They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions … They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction. For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don’t think it can.

ArsTechnica: Judge Estimates 30,000 Secret Surveillance Orders Approved Each Year