Privacy Digest

Seeking Public Input for More Government Accountability - Via ACLU Blog - Civil Liberties News:

Sunshine Week is over, but Wired reports that the Sunlight Foundation just launched a new initiative to bring together all of the government transparency bills that have been proposed, but stalled one way or another in Congress, plus some new proposals, and ask for public comment on them. Sunlight is taking comments by putting the bill, called the Transparency in Government Act of 2008, on its site PublicMarkup.org. The act covers everything from faster responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, to access to Congressional Research Service reports, to improving Executive Branch Transparency.

As participants in the Sunshine Week campaign for open government, the ACLU encourages citizens to participate in this important exercise and give their comments on the PublicMarkup site. It's an unusual opportunity for members of the public to give their direct input into legislation that's pending in Congress.

Speaking of transparency in the Executive Branch, Public Citizen—the consumer advocacy nonprofit founded by Ralph Nader—established BushSecrecy.org to chronicle our current president's efforts to keep the public in dark about his administration's inner workings.

The site points out that government transparency laws were strengthened during the Clinton administration, but that all went to hell with a memo (PDF) sent by Bush's then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001.  read more »

FBI's $500 Million Wiretap Retrofitting Fund Empty - Via Threat Level:

The FBI has gone through nearly all of its $500 millon budget for making old telephone switches wiretap friendly, but an FBI survey showed that nearly 40 percent of the nation's switches still aren't up to federal wiretapping standards, according to a new report from the Justice Department's inspector general.

A 1994 law known as the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act or CALEA requires all telephone switches installed after 1995 to comply with detailed wiretapping rules, and Congress set aside a half billion dollars for the FBI to dole out to help carriers make older landline switches compliant.

Cell phone switches, however, are all compliant and nearly all FBI surveillance targets cell phones and pagers. In 2005, the feds got some 1800 criminal wiretap court orders, along with nearly 2,200 court orders for anti-terrorism and foreign intelligence wiretaps.

According to a redacted report (.pdf) from the DOJ's Inspector General, the FBI has only a little more than $5000 left in dedicated CALEA funds, which mostly went towards paying switch manufacturers to write wiretapping software and issue licenses to use that software for older switches.

The audit says it is not possible to tell if the money was well-spent, since neither the telecoms nor the switch makers are keen on sharing information.  read more »

The First Step Is Admitting You Have a Problem - Via ACLU Blog - Government Spying:

Last night, Mike German, Policy Counsel at our Washington Legislative Office, blogged on our DailyKos Diary about Thursday's release of the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Office of Inspector General's report on the FBI's misuse and abuse of National Security Letters (NSL). Mike discusses the First Amendment implications of this abuse, and describes how the DOJ office charged with oversight of the FBI's NSL use felt bullied by agents trying to get around constitutional safeguards. Mike writes:  read more »

FBI Tried to Cover Patriot Act Abuses With Flawed, Retroactive Subpoenas, Audit Finds - Via Threat Level:

FBI headquarters officials sought to cover their informal and possibly illegal acquisition of phone records on thousands of Americans from 2003 to 2005 by issuing 11 improper, retroactive "blanket" administrative subpoenas in 2006 to three phone companies that are under contract to the FBI, according to an audit  released Thursday.

Top officials at the FBI's counter-terrorism division signed the blanket subpoenas "retroactively to justify the FBI's acquisition of data through the exigent letters or or other informal requests," the Justice Department's Inspector General Glenn Fine found.

The revelations come in a follow-up report to Fine's 2007 finding that the FBI abused a key Patriot Act power, known as a National Security Letter. That first reports showed that FBI agents were routinely sloppy in using the self-issued subpoenas and issued hundreds that claimed fake emergencies.  read more »

Report: FCC Is a Massive Bureaucracy That Can't Handle Complaints Against Telcos - Via Threat Level:

The Federal Communications Commission does an appalling job of tracking complaints about telecommunications services and resolves only a tiny fraction of them, according to a new report released on Thursday from a congressional auditing agency.

"Limitations in FCC's current approach for collecting and analyzing enforcement data constitute the principal challenge FCC faces in providing complete and accurate information on its enforcement program," write the authors of the Government Accountability Office's progress report on the FCC's enforcement efforts between 2003 and 2006, the latest dates for which data was available.  read more »

Army $200 Billion Reboot Fizzles; Murtha Wants $20 Billion More - Via Wired News: Security Blanket:

The Army's gargantuan digital modernization plan has turned so rotten, a new congressional report says it's time to start thinking about killing off the effort, and looking for new alternatives. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania), the powerful head of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, has another plan: Pump another $20 billion into the sickly, $200 billion behemoth "Future Combat Systems" before it drops dead under its own weight.

Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the Army's effort to use software and computer networks to turn itself into a quicker, lighter, more-lethal force by 2017.  The vision is for fleets of new armored vehicles, ground robots and flying drones to be linked together by a wireless internet for combat, and by a common operating system. But FCS has been in trouble, almost since the day it began, with slipped deadlines, bloated budgets, unproven technologies and unrealistic expectations.   read more »

Shocking new revelation: Unchecked government powers get abused - Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald:

One year ago, the Inspector General's Office -- the independent audit arm of the DOJ -- issued a lengthy report (.pdf) detailing that the FBI, for the years 2003-2005, had used "National Security Letters" (NSLs) to gather information on thousands of Americans in violation of the law. Pursuant to the Patriot Act, "NSLs" permit the FBI and other federal agencies to obtain all sorts of invasive information from telecoms, Internet and email providers, even health care providers and the like without any judicial warrants or any other oversight of any kind.

Last year's IG report documented thousands of cases where the FBI abused the extraordinary power of NSLs -- the FBI made false statements to obtain the information, did so where the information had nothing to do with any pending investigations, obtained far more data than even The Patriot Act allows, etc. The Report emphasized that there were likely many more abuses it was unable to document because the FBI had failed to comply with Congressional record-keeping and reporting requirements (requirements which President Bush, in a signing statement issued when he signed the Patriot Act, declared he had no obligation to follow). The information about Americans obtained by the FBI through these NSLs is stored permanently on vast federal data bases which tens of thousands of people both in the public and private sector can access.

A new report to be released this week by the IG, as confirmed yesterday by FBI Director Robert Mueller, details that these abuses continued unabated throughout 2006 as well. It seems there are a few brand new lessons that we can perhaps draw from these revelations:  read more »

U.S. Terror Watch List Surpasses 900,000 Names, ACLU Estimates - Via Threat Level:

The government's centralized terrorist watch list passed the 900,000 name mark this month, according to the ACLU, which estimated the new total by relying on Congressional testimony from the fall that the sprawling list was growing by 20,000 names a month.

The report the ACLU relied on to create its Watch List Counter included the following chart demonstrating the clear growth trajectory of the nation's centralized watch lists over the last several years.  read more »

GAO Report Says Machines Likely Not Responsible for Florida CD-13 Election Mishap - Via Threat Level:

The Government Accountability Office is expected to release a final report on Friday covering its investigation into the controversial 13th Congressional District race in Sarasota, Florida, in 2006.

The report concludes that while investigators can't provide "absolute assurance" that the voting machines didn't play a role in the excessive number of undervotes that appeared in that race, the GAO's testing "significantly reduced the possibility" that the machines were responsible.  read more »

860,000 Name Long Terror Watch List Scrutinizes Americans Most: "

The nation's centralized watch list has grown to include 755,000 names suspected of having terrorist ties, resulting in nearly 20,000 positive matches of persons against the list in 2006, according to a new report from Congress's investigative reporting arm. Since the list is now used in nearly all routine police stops and for domestic airline travel, Americans made up the bulk of those matches.

The Government Accountablity Office's report'was presented in a hearing to the Senate's Homeland Security Committee Wednesday, causing senators to express concern about the size and effectiveness of the list.

Editor: Interesting graphic removed. Go to original site for that [...]

The GAO'report (full pdf, html summary) included a few new details about the list's size and operation but much of this was reported by Wired months ago.  read more »

ACLU Calls for Stricter Oversight of Terrorist Watch Lists: "Washington, DC - Today the Senate Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on terror watch lists, an issue that the American Civil Liberties Union has been carefully observing since September 11, 2001. This comes on the heels of a GAO report that was released today detailing the progress of the Terrorist Screening Centers. The ACLU noted that though the report states some progress was achieved, that progress is still heavily outweighed by major concerns regarding privacy and efficiency."

(Read Original Article - Via American Civil Liberties Union.)

Who's Watching the Watch List?: "The good folks at the FBI's Terrorism Screening Center are doing a bang-up job: they keep identifying more and more terrorists among us. Don't believe me? Just look at the number of records the TSC has added to the terrorist watch list: From 158,374 in June 2004 to 754,960 last May, and likely above 860,000 at the rate it's growing. These numbers don't lie. Clearly, terrorists stand poised to replace suckers in P.T. Barnum's old adage, ‘there's one born every minute.’

Or…not. What testimony in the Senate Homeland Security Committee and a corresponding report by the Government Accountability Office revealed today is something we at the ACLU have been saying for the last six years: The terrorist watch lists are a mess. Treating so many individuals, the vast majority of them innocent, as permanent suspects not only harms civil liberties, it's hopelessly inefficient as a security measure.  read more »

GAO Wants to Test Controversial Florida Voting Machines: The Government Accountability Office, which has been looking into what happened to about 18,000 votes in a controversial Florida election, released a preliminary report today saying it can't exclude the possibility that voting machines were responsible for the undervotes in that race. The GAO says that initial tests on the voting machines conducted by Florida election officials after the election were insufficient and that the GAO needs to conduct more tests. Though the GAO also said that such tests may not be able to provide absolute assurance that the machines were or were not at fault.

'Absolute assurance is impossible to achieve because we are unable to recreate the conditions of the election in which the undervote occurred,' the report notes. But further tests could 'reduce the possibility that the iVotronic DREs were the cause of the undervote and shift attention to the possibilities that the
undervote was the result of intentional actions by the voter or voters that did not properly cast their votes on the voting system.'  read more »

FCW.com News - GAO: VA data still at risk: Some sensitive data of veterans remains at risk even though the Veterans Affairs Department has begun improvements to improve information security, according to the latest report from the Government Accountability Office.

VA still has not fully put in place most previous GAO recommendations and the department’s inspector general to strengthen information technology security, according to the report.  read more »

DHS Scraps ADVISE Data-Mining Software: "

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS's) ADVISE has followed a familiar pattern. Just like Total Information Awareness (TIA) and CAPPS II before it, ADVISE was once touted as an essential tool in protecting national security, only to fall from grace once serious mistakes and privacy abuses were revealed. But dead programs in a National Security state never quite die — they are often just re-shuffed and re-named.

Since 2003, the DHS has spent $42 million developing ADVISE software, which is intended to identify patterns hidden in vast stores of data that could reveal suspicious behavior. But the program was suspended in March after the Government Accountability Office warned that the program could lead to individuals being falsely linked to criminal or terrorist activities. Subsequent investigations from the DHS Privacy Office and the DHS Inspector General found that live data, including personal information from real individuals, was used to test the software, creating ‘unnecessary privacy risks.’

Now DHS has announced it is unceremoniously dumping the program, noting that ‘new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE.’  read more »