Surveillance

The United States and the European Union are aligning rules to help crime-fighters access suspects’ emails, text messages, photos and other data, despite simmering trans-Atlantic tensions.

The Department of Homeland Security wants to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents, and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.” It’s seeking a contractor that can help it monitor traditional news sources as well as social media and identify “any and all” coverage related to the agency or a particular event, according to a request for information released April 3.

[Commentary] If you think Facebook’s “Cambridge Analytica problem” is bad, just wait until Comcast and Verizon are able to do the same thing. Facebook isn’t the only company that amasses troves of data about people and leaves it vulnerable to exploitation and misuse.

The architecture and offerings of the Internet developed without much steering by governments, much less operations by militaries. That made talk of “cyberwar” exaggerated, except in very limited instances. Today that is no longer true: States and their militaries see the value not only of controlling networks for surveillance or to deny access to adversaries, but also of subtle propaganda campaigns launched through a small number of wildly popular worldwide platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

For the first time, the US government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington (DC) of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages.  The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, but American intelligence and law enforcement agencies — which use such eavesdropping equipment themselves — have been silent on the issue until now.

Want to visit the United States in a non-immigrant capacity? Should the State Department get its way, your application to enter the country may soon hinge on coughing up five years of your online history. The Department of State's proposal would expand this request, which is currently required to apply for an immigrant visa.

Now that Congress has made clear that a US search warrant covers emails stored overseas, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to moot a case involving a data demand issued to Microsoft for a drug-trafficking suspect’s emails held in Ireland. The case, argued in February 2018, centered on whether a US tech firm must comply with a court order to produce emails even if they are stored abroad — in this instance, in a Dublin server. On March 23, Congress passed, and President Trump signed, the Cloud Act.

The Justice Department’s inspector general, facing increasing political pressure from Republicans in Congress and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said that his office would investigate the surveillance of a former Trump campaign official. The inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, said he would examine whether law enforcement officials complied with the law and departmental policies in seeking permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap the former campaign adviser, Carter Page.

Can a US technology company refuse to honor a court-ordered US search warrant seeking information that is stored at a facility outside the United States? Oral arguments in a pending case took place at the Supreme Court in February 2018, and they did not go well for Microsoft, the tech giant that is challenging a warrant for information stored at its facility in Ireland.