Privacy Digest

Ominous Signs of a Forthcoming "Compromise" on Telco Immunity - Tell the House To Stand Firm - Via EFF: Deep Links:

This morning, CongressDaily reported that Senator Jay Rockefeller is now privately circulating a new "compromise" proposal on surveillance legislation, only a day after it was reported that the telecoms themselves have begun shopping their own "compromise" proposals around the Hill. You may remember Sen. Rockefeller as the force behind the surveillance bill passed by the Senate in February, which included blanket retroactive immunity for phone companies like AT&T that are alleged to have participated in the National Security Agency's illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Although the details of the Rockefeller proposal are still unclear, indications are that the so-called "compromise" on telco immunity may well be nearly identical to the original Senate immunity provision, with only a few cosmetic changes.  read more »

A New Look at the Hub of AT&T's Spying Program - Via EFF: Deep Links:

Our class action lawsuit against AT&T for collaborating with the National Security Agency in the massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications includes powerful evidence of a secret room in San Francisco.

But the hub of the spying program may be just outside of St. Louis, in a Missouri town called Bridgeton. A special report from local station KMOV puts the pieces together in a comprehensive and disturbing story about this dragnet surveillance, with the help of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein. Watch the video on the KMOV site for a fresh look at a key piece of this spying puzzle.

(Read Original Article - Via EFF: Deep Links.)

Declassified NSA Document Reveals the Secret History of TEMPEST - Via Threat Level:

It was 1943, and an engineer with Bell Telephone was working on one of the U.S. government's most sensitive and important pieces of wartime machinery, a Bell Telephone model 131-B2. It was a top secret encrypted teletype terminal used by the Army and Navy to transmit wartime communications that could defy German and Japanese cryptanalysis.

Then he noticed something odd.

Far across the lab, a freestanding oscilloscope had developed a habit of spiking every time the teletype encrypted a letter. Upon closer inspection, the spikes could actually be translated into the plain message the machine was processing. Though he likely didn't know it at the time, the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether.  read more »

NSA-Spied-On Lawyers Get Day in Court and New Yorker Profile - Via Threat Level:

First the Feds investigate a Saudi charity in Oregon, wiretap the director and two of the group's lawyers, try to designate it a terrorist group and accidentally give the group proof of the wiretapping. Then years later when Al Haramain's American lawyers sue, claiming they were wiretapped without warrants, the feds seek to bury the case with a nearly all powerful litigation tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege, raising profound questions about whether the president is accountable to the law.

In short, if lawyers with documents proving that government secretly wiretapped their conversations with a client can't get their day in court, is it even accurate to think that any law applies to the president during terror-time?  read more »

Which Gov Agency Should Be Your Computer's Firewall? - Via Threat Level:

First the NSA says it needs to examine every search and email on the internet to prevent an e-9/11 attack, then President Bush signs a secret cyber-security Presidential Directive to make that possible, while the Air Force has set up a cyber warfare division where cyber-security is played like a game of Space Invaders.

Not to be left out on the cybarmegeddon! action, the Department of Homeland Security plans to spearhead a "Manhattan Project" attempt to secure the internet. But there's no way FBI chief Robert Mueller is gonna let DHS honcho Michael Chertoff have all the bits, so this week he told a House committee that G-Men need to be living in the tubes, too.  read more »

Annals of Surveillance: State Secrets - Via Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

One Friday afternoon in August, 2004, a Washington, D.C., attorney named Lynne Bernabei received a package from the Department of the Treasury. The government was investigating one of her clients, the American branch of a Saudi charity called the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which had been active in fifty countries. Al Haramain had come under scrutiny, as had many other Islamic charities, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Treasury Department investigators believed that Al Haramain’s American branch, which was based in Oregon, had connections to Al Qaeda. In response to a request from Bernabei for evidence against her client, the government had turned over two sets of documents, primarily media reports that referred to other branches of Al Haramain. None of the materials demonstrated a direct connection between the Oregon branch and Al Qaeda.  read more »

Senate Proposal To Clarify 'State Secrets' Doctrine - Via Slashdot:

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and other lawmakers are pushing legislation to limit the power of the state secrets doctrine in blocking lawsuits. The doctrine has been used as a 'get out of jail free' card in cases like the EFF's warrantless wiretapping lawsuit. This new legislation would make it harder for the administration to invoke the doctrine, and provide new allowances, such as using attorneys with security clearances to enable the lawsuits to go forward even when the issue is appropriately raised." --- Update: 04/28 16:58 GMT by KD : The New Yorker is running a detailed piece, State Secrets, by Patrick Radden Keefe, about how the use of the state secrets doctrine is playing out in one particular case.

(Read Original Article - Via Slashdot.)

Europeans: U.S. is Spying on You, Too! - Via ACLU Blog - Privacy & Technology:

Last week, Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Project, wrote a letter to the Article 29 Working Party of the European Commission. Article 29 specifically addresses personal data protection issues, and how data is used in our current information society.  read more »

Feds Use Phone Bills to Get Journo's Sources on NSA Spy Program - Via Threat Level:

Federal investigators are using phone records to figure out which federal officials talked with New York Times reporters about the government's secret wiretapping of Americans without court orders.

 In the leak investigation, Justice Department officials are using phone records in an Arlington, Va. federal grand jury proceeding to ferret out James Risen's sources, according to the New York Times.

One presumes the government is using subpoenas or National Security Letters to get Risen or his suspected sources' phone records, then hauling former government officials in front of the grand jury.  read more »

FISA News Roundup - Via EFF: Deep Links:

FISA has been missing from the front pages of the nation's newspapers for a while, but behind the scenes and on the editorial pages, the story is still very much alive. The Hill recently reported that Congressional Republicans are changing focus away from FISA and towards economic issues:

Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is expected to announce Thursday that the House GOP floor emphasis will transition away from passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and earmark reform to “stop the tax hike.”

Supporters of immunity for telecoms may have simply realized that there are more pressing issues for the country to address than protecting the President’s warrantless wiretapping program from judicial scrutiny. Or was all the chest pounding of weeks past, the dire claims of impending disaster, just empty manipulative rhetoric? Either way, it appears that the old fail-safe tactics of scaring the public into supporting expanded executive powers are no longer as reliable as they once were—although it won’t surprise us if the rhetoric ramps up again in late July or early August, a year after the Protect America Act passed.

Glenn Greenwald says it was ever thus:  read more »

State Secrets Claim Should Not Bury Important Surveillance Lawsuit - Via EFF: Breaking News:

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal judge Monday to allow an important government surveillance lawsuit to have its day in court, despite the government's attempt to bury the case using the state secrets privilege.

The case is Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Bush, which alleges that federal agents illegally wiretapped calls between the charity and its lawyers. The government has asked U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to dismiss the case, contending that the litigation jeopardizes state secrets. But in an amicus brief filed Monday, EFF argues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was written to allow cases like this one to proceed with appropriate security precautions.  read more »

Wiretapping Powers Debate Still Unsettled - Via Threat Level:

In a interconnected, packet-based global telecommunications world, just how far should the nation's spooks be allowed to live inside the nation's communication tubes in order to root out communications of spies and terrorists and how much should they be supervised by courts?

Those were the questions tackled by a keynote panel at the RSA 2008 conference Wednesday that moderated by New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau, who shared the Pulitizer Prize for disclosing the existence of part of the government's warrantless wiretapping program in 2005.

Predicatably, the panel was just as dividede as Congress, which is still deadlocked over immunity for the telecoms that helped wiretap Americans without warrants,  read more »

Did Mukasey Lie About the 9/11 Call? - Via ACLU Blog:

Salon's Glenn Greenwald has been chasing down the story behind the comments Attorney General Michael Mukasey made in a speech in San Francisco last week. In the speech, Mukasey claimed that a pre-9/11 call from an "Afghan safe house" to a number somewhere in the U.S. wasn't intercepted because of the intelligence community's inadequate wiretapping capabilities under FISA. Mukasey implied that 9/11 could have been prevented if that call had been intercepted. Greenwald writes:  read more »

U.S. Has Launched a Cyber Security 'Manhattan Project,' Homeland Security Chief Claims - Via Threat Level:

SAN FRANCISCO -- The federal government has launched a cyber security "Manhattan Project," U.S. homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said Tuesday, because online attacks can be a form of "devastating warfare", and equivalent in damage to "physical destruction of the worst kind."

Speaking to hundreds of security professionals at the RSA security conference, Chertoff cited last year's denial-of-service attacks against Estonia, and hypothetical hack attacks on financial networks and air traffic control systems, as proof that a federal strategy was needed.

"Imagine, if you will, a sophisticated attack on our financial systems that caused them to be paralyzed," Chertoff said. "It would shake the foundation of trust on which our financial system works."  read more »

U.S. To Pitch 'Phase One' of Net Monitoring Plan at RSA - Via Threat Level:

Just how dangerous is the online world?

That question draws some 15,000 security professionals and IT bigwigs to San Francisco each year for the RSA Conference, taking place this week. There they learn about the newest threat to corporate networks, and are wooed by the makers of the newest flavor of corporate firewalls, intrusion detection devices and biometric doo-dads.

The answer they always get, not surprisingly, is that the online world is pretty darn dangerous, unless you use our products and services. What's new this year is that the U.S. government is joining the party with much the same pitch.  The nation's intelligence and anti-terror agencies are newly determined to take a more active role in protecting the United States from cyberattack, and they're seeking new authority to monitor the internet in order to save it.

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is traveling Tuesday to the conference to pitch a program the Bush administration calls the Cyber Initiative. Slated for $154 millio