Tag: Wiretapping
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NSA, the FISA Court, and Risks of Tech Summaries
Yesterday the U.S. government released a previously-secret 2011 opinion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), finding certain NSA surveillance and analysis activities to be illegal. The opinion, despite some redactions, gives us a window into the interactions between the NSA and the court that oversees its activities—including why oversight and compliance of surveillance are…
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Revisiting the potential hazards of the 'Protect America' act
In light of recent news reports about NSA wiretapping of U.S. Internet communications, folks may be interested in some background on the ‘warrantless wiretapping’ provisions of the Protect America act, and the potential security risks such wiretapping systems can introduce. Here’s a 2007 article a group of us wrote entitled “Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards…
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CALEA II: Risks of wiretap modifications to endpoints
Today I joined a group of twenty computer scientists in issuing a report criticizing an FBI plan to require makers of secure communication tools to redesign their systems to make wiretapping easy. We argue that the plan would endanger the security of U.S. users and the competitiveness of U.S. companies, without making it much harder…
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A Free Internet, If We Can Keep It
“We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. ” These two sentences, from Secretary of State Clinton’s groundbreaking speech on Internet freedom, sum up beautifully the challenge facing our…
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Soghoian: 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight
If you’re interested at all in surveillance policy, go and read Chris Soghoian’s long and impassioned post today. Chris drops several bombshells into the debate, including an audio recording of a closed-door talk by Sprint/NexTel’s Electronic Surveillance Manager, bragging about how easy the company has made it for law enforcement to get customers’ location data…
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Counterfeits, Trojan Horses, and shady distributors
Last Friday, the New York Times published an article about counterfeit Cisco products that have been sold as if they were genuine and are widely used throughout the U.S. government. The article also raised the concern that these counterfeits could well be engineered with malicious intent, but that this appears not to have been the…
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Economics of Eavesdropping For Pay
Following up on Andrew’s post about eavesdropping as a profit center for telecom companies, let’s take a quick look at the economics of eavesdropping for money. We’ll assume for the sake of argument that (1) telecom (i.e. transporting bits) is a commodity so competition forces providers to sell it essentially at cost, (2) the government…
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Eavesdropping as a Telecom Profit Center
In 1980 AT&T was a powerful institution with a lucrative monopoly on transporting long-distance voice communications, but forbidden by law from permitting the government to eavesdrop without a warrant. Then in 1981 Judge Greene took its voice monopoly away, and in the 1980s and 90s the Internet ate the rest of its lunch. By 1996,…
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AT&T Explains Guilt by Association
According to government documents studied by The New York Times, the FBI asked several phone companies to analyze phone-call patterns of Americans using a technology called “communities of interest”. Verizon refused, saying that it didn’t have any such technology. AT&T, famously, did not refuse. What is the “communities of interest” technology? It’s spelled out very…
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Email Protected by 4th Amendment, Court Says
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday, in Warshak v. U.S., that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their email, so that the government needs a search warrant or similar process to access it. The Court’s decision was swayed by amicus briefs submitted by EFF and a group of law professors. When…