November 2015

[Commentary] After 9/11, US political leaders of all stripes demanded better intelligence and a greater ability to “connect the dots.” Such a terrorist attack had to be prevented from happening again. Well, it has happened again, of course, repeatedly, in Paris, as well as in London, Madrid and, indeed, in Boston and nearly in Times Square. But until the recent brutality of the Islamic State, the pendulum of our response, naturally enough, had swung back toward privacy and away from national security. We must now rethink how far we want — and need — our government to go to keep us safe from people who unequivocally want to kill as many of us as cruelly as they can. In hindsight, our country’s handling of the putative trade-off between national security and privacy after Sept. 11 has actually been reasonably reassuring.

There is no need to trade privacy for security. Rather, the post-9/11 record demonstrates that we can monitor aggressively if we also remain equally committed to the compensating system of checks, balances, oversight and other safeguards that can prevent abuses and excesses that would offend the values that make us Americans. Let’s be sure we keep it that way.

[Alan Charles Raul, a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin, was vice chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board from 2006 to 2008]

On police TV dramas, cellphones allow cops to do seemingly miraculous things. GPS can track kidnapping victims from a cellphone stashed in the trunk of a moving car, or pinpoint a call to a single creepy basement. But in reality, figuring out the exact location of a cellphone -- and accurately transmitting that location to an operator -- is nearly impossible. In most cases, that doesn’t make a difference. Most people who call 911 know where they are, and can communicate it clearly to the operator. But every so often callers don’t know where they’re located, or they’re in a situation where they can’t communicate their location out loud, forcing operators to spend precious seconds or minutes figuring out where they are.

“It’s costing you time,” says Jamie Barnett, former chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, now the director of Find Me 911, an organization set up to lobby the FCC to adapt better location technology. “You go there and you say: Where is this person? I can’t see them; I can’t find them.”

An encrypted communications app called Telegram has been in the news a lot recently, amid fears that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has adopted it as its preferred platform for messaging. On Nov 18, Telegram reportedly banned 78 ISIS-related channels, “disturbed” to learn how popular the app had become among extremists. Those extremists had used the app both to spread propaganda, according to an October report, and to crowdfund money for guns and rockets, according to Vocativ.

Telegram makes an obvious choice for both activities: In media interviews and on his Web site, the app’s founder -- Pavel Durov, often called the “Zuckerberg of Russia” -- has boasted that Telegram is technologically and ideologically unsurveillable. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, however, questions have begun to emerge about how trustworthy Telegram actually is. Multiple cryptologists and security experts have claimed that Telegram is actually not all that secure: a flaw that may reflect the fact that Telegram wasn’t initially conceived as an encrypted messaging platform. On top of that, while Telegram is typically described as a highly principled, Berlin-based nonprofit, that hasn’t always been the case: Up until about a year ago, Telegram was an opaque web of for-profit shell companies -- mired in conflict and managed, in large part, from the United States.