[LINK] Broad coalition seeks transparency on surveillance

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Broad coalition seeks transparency on surveillance


By James Temple  July 19, 2013
<http://www.sfchronicle.com/technology/dotcommentary/article/Broad-
coalition-seeks-transparency-on-surveillance-4673815.php?>


In the wake of the National Security Agency spying revelations, a broad 
coalition of technology companies, privacy groups and trade organizations 
is calling for greater transparency around government surveillance 
requests.

In a letter to President Obama and other U.S. officials on Thursday, 
companies including AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo said 
the government should allow companies that are subject to national security 
requests for online and telephone data to regularly report statistics that 
shed light on the frequency and scope of the demands.


It would be a solid first step. But the public and policymakers also need 
clearer insight into how the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance 
Court that approves these programs was interpreting the law, how the 
government was applying it and how the private information of Americans was 
affected in the process. Much remains murky.

A number of legislators have proposed new laws that would limit aspects of 
the PRISM program and a parallel effort to suck up and analyze metadata 
from U.S. customer phone records. But a broader reform of the FISA court - 
which was altering the meaning of law outside of the public view, with no 
adversarial process in place - is clearly required. And doing that properly 
first requires knowing what exactly was going on.

"Transparency is really issue No. 1," said Trevor Timm, activist with the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "We have to know what the 
court was doing."

PRISM participants

Each of the companies named above was a participant in PRISM, which came to 
light last month through reports in the Guardian and the Washington Post, 
both relying on materials from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The 
U.S. government has charged him with espionage, but he was also nominated 
for the Nobel Peace Prize. He remains in legal limbo in Russia.

The government issued broad and ongoing information demands to Google, 
Yahoo and the other huge hubs in the massive network of worldwide 
communications, as authorized by the FISA Court under Section 702 of the 
FISA Amendments Act.

That allows the government to issue loosely defined surveillance demands, 
so long as the intended target is a foreign citizen. But without question 
the dragnet has ensnared information about U.S. citizens - when, for 
instance, they were the second parties in e-mail correspondence.

The other major effort that came to light recently was the court order 
forcing Verizon to hand the government metadata records for all phone calls 
within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other nations. That massive 
surveillance effort, which included mining that data for hints of 
wrongdoing, appears to have relied on Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Verizon and the other major carriers were conspicuously absent among the 
signatories of the Thursday letter.

More data sought

Going forward, the Internet companies would like to reveal: the number of 
requests for information about users made under these specific legal 
statues; the number of individuals, accounts or devices covered by these 
requests; and the number of requests broken down by type of information 
sought.

In addition, the parties are calling on the government itself to step up 
disclosures, adding to the annual reporting it's already required to do. 
Added would be the total number of requests made under specific legal 
authorities and the number of individuals affected by each.

More than 50 parties signed the letter, including the ACLU, American 
Library Association, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Demand Progress, 
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Salesforce.com, 
Sonic.net, Twitter, Union Square Ventures and Y Combinator.

In addition to the president, the letter was addressed to Attorney General 
Eric Holder, NSA Director Keith Alexander, Director of National 
Intelligence James Clapper and a number of legislators.

The government has consistently defended the programs, arguing they were 
narrowly targeted, legal and necessary to ensure Americans' security in the 
face of terrorist threats. Obama said he welcomes a public debate on the 
issue - though clearly he didn't during the years these initiatives 
operated in the shadows.

Assessing trade-off

The disclosure of the PRISM program has thrust online companies, whose 
information services depend upon the faith of their users, into a difficult 
position. Each has insisted they were merely complying with legal 
government requests, although many questions have been raised about whether 
certain of the companies were overly cooperative.

Clearly the businesses hope that providing greater transparency about the 
requests they receive could help to rebuild or maintain a greater level of 
trust with users.

But the bigger issue for privacy advocates is that providing a sense of the 
scale of these efforts gives the general public more of the information it 
needs to properly evaluate whether an appropriate trade-off is being made 
between security and privacy.

"Without greater transparency, we can't have a meaningful public debate 
about the necessity or the legality of the government's sweeping 
surveillance program," said Alex Abdo, staff attorney for the ACLU's 
national security project. "We can't have that debate while the government 
continues to conceal the facts."

James Temple is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Dot-Commentary appears 
three days a week. E-mail: jtemple at sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jtemple

Cheers,
Stephen

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