Surveillance

A CA-based First Amendment group is suing the Justice Department in federal court over the agency's seizure of phone and email records from Ali Watkins, a reporter at The New York Times. In a lawsuit filed Sept 19 in US District Court for the Northern District of California, First Amendment Coalition (FAC) alleged that the Justice Department had violated the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by withholding documents related to the seizure of Watkins's email and phone records. Watkins, at the time, covered national security for the Times.

The United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ’s) methods in carrying out bulk interception of online communications violated privacy and failed to provide sufficient surveillance safeguards, the European court of human rights (ECHR) has ruled in a test case judgment. But the Strasbourg court found that GCHQ’s regime for sharing sensitive digital intelligence with foreign governments was not illegal.

In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a single command center. Two years later, the NYPD announced that the command center, known as the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, had integrated cutting-edge video analytics software into select cameras across the city.

Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR) has sent a letter to the Department of Justice concerning disruptions to 911 emergency services caused by law enforcement’s use of cell-site simulators (CSS, also known as IMSI catchers or Stingrays). In the letter, Sen Wyden states that: "Senior officials from the Harris Corporation—the manufacturer of the cell-site simulators used most frequently by U.S. law enforcement agencies—have confirmed to my office that Harris’ cell-site simulators completely disrupt the communications of targeted phones for as long as the surveillance is ongoing.

The FBI is asking a federal judge in CA to force Facebook to break the encryption on its Messenger app so investigators can listen in on an alleged MS-13 gang member's voice conversations. The case, which remains under seal, raises some of the same privacy concerns as the FBI’s unsuccessful effort to force Apple to engineer a way into the encrypted iPhone of one of the San Bernardino (CA) mass shooters. But the FBI’s request in the Facebook case could have a broader impact, since the bureau reportedly wants to intercept communications in real time.

Facebook is caught in a secret legal fight with the FBI. The fight, which centers on an alleged MS-13 gang member in Fresno (CA), has been kept out of public court records, but Reuters broke the story on Aug 17. Apparently, prosecutors are looking to listen in on all Messenger voice calls from the target, similar to a conventional phone wiretap. Facebook says it’s impossible to comply because of the service’s end-to-end encryption, and the company is risking contempt charges to prove it.

How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate, civil activism, and electoral feedback? Hu Jintao, China’s leader from 2002 to 2012, had attempted to solve this problem by permitting a modest democratic thaw, allowing avenues for grievances to reach the ruling class. His successor, Xi Jinping, has reversed that trend.

In 2018, a federal judge signed a search warrant for a windfall of private information to help find the robber responsible for a string of crimes in southern Maine. Authorities were seeking a large amount of sensitive user data — including names, addresses and locations — of anyone who had been in the vicinity of at least two of the nine robbery locations, within 30 minutes of the crime.

Alastair Mactaggart has became the most improbable, and perhaps the most important, privacy activist in America. Almost by accident, though, Mactaggart had thrust himself into the greatest resource grab of the 21st century. To Silicon Valley, personal information had become a kind of limitless natural deposit, formed in the digital ether by ordinary people as they browsed, used apps and messaged their friends.

We always assumed technology and the naked transparency of social media would feed people’s taste for freedom and thirst for democracy. Right now, that assumption looks flawed -- technology might actually solidify the standing of despots and provide them with a new way to exert their power. Ian Bremmer — political scientist, president and founder of Eurasia Group, and author of "Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism" — recently unpacked this issue in a letter to clients.