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Karen Petruska's List: NSA_Privacy

    • Google is preparing to ask the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it’s forced to give the government.
    • latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation

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    • The revelation, as reported by the Atlantic Wire, came during a Wednesday morning hearing during which Inglis said analysts look “two or three hops” — a full hop more than its previous statement of two hops — away from a target individual when investigating suspicious activity.
    • Why else would the NSA have developed a graph-processing system capable of handling more than 4 trillion nodes (e.g., names and phone numbers) and more than 70 trillion edges (the connections between all those nodes)?

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    • Repeat after me: Edward Snowden is not the story. The story is what he has revealed about the hidden wiring of our networked world. This insight seems to have escaped most of the world's mainstream media
    • The obvious explanations are: incorrigible ignorance; the imperative to personalise stories; or gullibility in swallowing US government spin, which brands Snowden as a spy rather than a whistleblower

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  • Aug 06, 13

    "While we still believe that the best first step is a modern Church Committee, an independent, public investigation and accounting of the government’s surveillance programs that affect Americans, members of Congress seem determined to try to enact fixes now."

    • here’s—in broad strokes—what we’d like to see
    • The starting point for NSA reform would be a definitive statement that court orders for bulk collection of information are not allowed and indeed are illegal.

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  • Aug 16, 13

    "Last week, Holt introduced the Surveillance State Repeal Act. A number of members of Congress have offered proposals to rein in domestic surveillance, but Holt’s bill may be the most ambitious. It would repeal the 2001 Patriot Act, which the NSA has cited as the legal basis for its phone records surveillance program. It would also repeal the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, the legal foundation for the government’s PRISM program. And it would extend whistleblower protections to cover employees of intelligence agencies."

    • Those bills were misguided in their specifics, and now seeing what various agencies have done to stretch the language of those bills to cover things that were never intended to be covered makes clear that they’ve got to go.
    • One of the things about your article that I particularly liked was that you pointed out that dogged questioning by reporters has shown that the role of these programs in preventing terrorism has been peripheral at best.

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  • Aug 16, 13

    "now that system is being forced to face what happened while it wasn’t looking— at itself. I will show you the problem by quoting four writers who have touched on it."

    • “That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television and elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”
    • Disclosure: I am not pro-Snowden or anti-Snowden, because to put it that way unnecessarily personalizes the issue. I am not “for” the National Security Agency or against it. As a U.S. citizen I am implicated in what the NSA does, and I want it to succeed in discovering those who would harm us. My concern, as a writer and journalism professor, is with another fight: the one for public knowledge, for sunlight, for the facts to come out so we know what’s going on
    • The backdoor-planting projects, known as “Bullrun” in the United States and “Edgehill” within the NSA’s British equivalent the GCHQ
    • The German newsweekly Der Spiegel wrote over the weekend that it had obtained NSA documents revealing that the agency has the ability to access a wide range of information stored on smartphones including iPhones, Blackberrys, and those running Google’s Android operating system.

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    • "Notice all the companies are using the exact same term ‘direct access.’ They might still give them some other type of access. There’s a cleverness to the wording."
    • the phone surveillance program, which does not have a catchy name yet, targets customers of major US-based phone companies like Verizon — including customers in the US — but it does not monitor the audio of phone calls themselves. Instead, it sweeps up all other data related to calls, known as "metadata," which includes phone numbers, the length of each call, device and customer ID numbers, and some geolocation data.

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  • Dec 19, 13

    "A panel appointed by President Obama to review the government’s surveillance activities has recommended that the National Security Agency no longer keep a database of virtually all Americans’ phone records, and that decisions to spy on foreign leaders be subjected to greater scrutiny."

    • Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, in a press conference.
    • Obama met Wednesday morning with the panel, whose suggestions are advisory only. The White House has said it will announce in January which recommendations it has chosen to adopt, as it concludes its own internal review of surveillance activities.

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    • EFF has been battling to ensure that evidence of the NSA surveillance program will be preserved as part of its two cases challenging the illegal government spying: Jewel v. NSA and First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles v. NSA.
    • he government made shocking new assertions, arguing that its obligation to preserve evidence was limited to aspects of the original Bush-era spying program

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