Stronger data privacy law may clash with law enforcement

April 30, 2013 by

Legislation expanding privacy for data stored in the cloud is heading to consideration by the U.S. senate, and while it enjoys general support of industry and senators, the U.S. Department of Justice has not endorsed or even addressed the measure.

Supporters are positioning the legislation as an attempt to ensure consistency in privacy and access practices. The Senate Judiciary Committee last week the bill, which brings privacy protections currently in place for personal systems to Web-based email and other digital communications.

Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), one of the authors of the bill, said the legislation is necessary to “better protect Americans’ digital privacy” and iron out some inconsistencies in the protections afforded to materials that are stored on a desktop computer and those that reside in the cloud.

Under the current statute, law enforcement authorities have been able to obtain access to emails stored with a cloud provider on the authority of a subpoena, rather than the warrant they would need to obtain those same communications stored locally on a personal computer.

“If you’ve got the same files in the cloud, you want to have the same sense of privacy,” Leahy says.

Tech trade groups endorse

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act Amendments Act, authored by Leahy and Utah Republican Mike Lee, would reform the 1986 ECPA statute, which Leahy helped draft, to harmonize the privacy protections for digital documents, doing away with the so-called 180-day rule that has provided easier access to older emails, among other provisions.

Several leading tech trade groups quickly hailed the advancement of the ECPA reform bill.

“There are some issues in Washington where there are profound disagreements about what needs to be done. This isn’t one of them,” Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of BSA, a software industry trade group, says in a statement. “There is broad bipartisan agreement and a groundswell of support for reform among industry and public interest groups. Everyone understands that law enforcement access and constitutional protections should be the same for online files and other digital records as they are for papers stored in a file cabinet.”

In approving the ECPA overhaul bill by a voice vote, the Judiciary Committee sends the measure to the Senate floor, where any debate will likely air objections from lawmakers sympathetic to the concerns of law-enforcement authorities who have warned that some of the reform provisions could hinder their investigations.

The Justice Department has gone on record with the view that some of the distinctions in the 27-year-old law have failed to keep pace with the ways that consumers are using technology to communicate.

“We agree, for example, that there is no principled basis to treat email less than 180 days old differently than email more than 180 days old. Similarly, it makes sense that the statute not accord lesser protection to open emails than it gives to emails that are unopened,” a DoJ official told a House subcommittee last month.

Legal issues of location-based data

But the DoJ has not endorsed Leahy’s bill or any other specific reform measure, and the department’s absence at another House hearing Thursday morning that focused on the law’s implications for location-based data was noted.

“While DoJ has briefed committee staff on ECPA and geolocation, the Obama administration has refused our request to testify in public,” says Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations. “This is unacceptable.”

At the Senate markup the same day, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “It’s disappointing that the DoJ hasn’t weighed in.”

The House hearing on ECPA and geolocation data highlighted the same underlying friction between personal privacy and the needs of law enforcement that has colored the broader debate over ECPA reform.

“Requiring probable cause to get basic, limited information about a person’s historical location could make it significantly more difficult for us in law enforcement to solve crimes and seek justice,” says Peter Modafferi, a veteran detective and chair of the Police Investigative Operations Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Leading online service providers like Google and Microsoft have thrown their lot in with civil liberties groups and privacy advocates in the debate, arguing that inconsistent privacy protections have created substantial uncertainty in the market and slowed the adoption of cloud computing.

Legal vs. privacy implications

Thursday’s activity on Capitol Hill involving ECPA comes about 15 months after the U.S. Supreme Court addressed the issue of location-based surveillance, ruling that law-enforcement authorities erred in not obtaining a warrant before attaching a GPS tracking device to the vehicle of a suspected D.C. drug kingpin. But that ruling was fairly narrow and stopped short of setting a broader precedent for law enforcement’s use of geolocation technology.

At Thursday’s House hearing, ACLU attorney Catherine Crump expressed support for the GPS Act, a bill pending before the subcommittee that would require investigators to obtain a warrant from a court before accessing a suspect’s phone location.

That measure has drawn predictable opposition from the law-enforcement community. But even as the civil liberties and law enforcement camps are far apart on the appropriate legal framework for lawful access to location information under ECPA, in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, they accept as a starting point that the legal issues in play remain unsettled.

As Crump put it: “We at least agree that the current situation is unclear and in a state of chaos.”

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , ,

Law Requiring Warrants for E-Mail Wins Senate Committee Approval

April 28, 2013 by

A Senate committee today backed sweeping privacy protections requiring the government, for the first time, to get a probable-cause warrant to obtain e-mail and other content stored in the cloud.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the package on a voice vote after about 30 minutes of debate, and sent the measure to the Senate floor, where it faces an uncertain future.

The legislation, (.pdf) sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), the committee’s chair, and Michael S. Lee (R-Utah) nullifies a provision of federal law allowing the authorities to acquire a suspect’s e-mail or other stored content from an internet service provider without showing probable cause that a crime was committed if the content is 180 days or older.

Under the current law, the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the government can obtain e-mail without a warrant as long as the data has been stored on a third-party server — the cloud — for 180 days or more. The government only needs to show, often via an administrative subpoena, that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful to an investigation.

Initially, ECPA provided privacy to users, but that privacy protection eroded as technology advanced and people began storing e-mail and documents on servers for longer periods, sometimes indefinitely. The act was adopted at a time when e-mail wasn’t stored on servers for a long time, but instead was held briefly on its way to the recipient’s inbox. E-mail more than 6 months old was assumed abandoned.

“I think Americans are very concerned about unwarranted intrusions into our cyber lives,” Leahy said ahead of the vote.

The bill enjoys backing from a wide range of lobbying interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Judiciary Committee approved a nearly identical version of the bill in November. But it died a quiet death and, in Washington fashion, mutated into a package granting the public the right to automatically display on their Facebook feeds what they’re watching on Netflix.

What the President Barack Obama administration thinks of the measure is a mixed bag. The Justice Department testified in March at House committee that the 180-day rule “no longer made sense.” (.pdf)

But that doesn’t mean the agency is on board with the change.

“The harder question is how to update those outdated rules and the statute in light of new and changing technologies while maintaining protections for privacy and adequately providing for public safety and other law enforcement imperatives,” said Elana Tyrangiel, an acting assistant attorney general.

And on Thursday, Mary Jo White, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new chair, wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bill’s passage would hinder the government’s “ability to protect investors.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) said Thursday that federal authorities may simply abandon terrorism cases if they have to spent time comporting with the Fourth Amendment.

“Terrorism cases,” he said during the committee hearing, “may never be followed up on just because of that burden.”

The measure allows the authorities to bypass the warrant requirement for national security issues and emergencies. It also demands that the targets of warrants be immediately notified about the warrant.

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera

April 10, 2013 by

HERE’S a fraught encounter: one police officer, one civilian and anger felt by one or both. Afterward, it may be hard to sort out who did what to whom.

Now, some police departments are using miniaturized video cameras and their microphones to capture, in full detail, officers’ interactions with civilians. The cameras are so small that they can be attached to a collar, a cap or even to the side of an officer’s sunglasses. High-capacity battery packs can last for an extended shift. And all of the videos are uploaded automatically to a central server that serves as a kind of digital evidence locker.

William A. Farrar, the police chief in Rialto, Calif., has been investigating whether officers’ use of video cameras can bring measurable benefits to relations between the police and civilians. Officers in Rialto, which has a population of about 100,000, already carry Taser weapons equipped with small video cameras that activate when the weapon is armed, and the officers have long worn digital audio recorders.

But when Mr. Farrar told his uniformed patrol officers of his plans to introduce the new, wearable video cameras, “it wasn’t the easiest sell,” he said, especially to some older officers who initially were “questioning why ‘big brother’ should see everything they do.”

He said he reminded them that civilians could use their cellphones to record interactions, “so instead of relying on somebody else’s partial picture of what occurred, why not have your own?” he asked. “In this way, you have the real one.”

Last year, Mr. Farrar used the new wearable video cameras to conduct a continuing experiment in his department, in collaboration with Barak Ariel, a visiting fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and an assistant professor at Hebrew University.

Half of Rialto’s uniformed patrol officers on each week’s schedule have been randomly assigned the cameras, also made by Taser International. Whenever officers wear the cameras, they are expected to activate them when they leave the patrol car to speak with a civilian.

A convenient feature of the camera is its “pre-event video buffer,” which continuously records and holds the most recent 30 seconds of video when the camera is off. In this way, the initial activity that prompts the officer to turn on the camera is more likely to be captured automatically, too.

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often — in 25 instances, compared with 61. When force was used, it was twice as likely to have been applied by the officers who weren’t wearing cameras during that shift, the study found. And, lest skeptics think that the officers with cameras are selective about which encounters they record, Mr. Farrar noted that those officers who apply force while wearing a camera have always captured the incident on video.

As small as the cameras are, they seem to be noticeable to civilians, he said. “When you look at an officer,” he said, “it kind of sticks out.” Citizens have sometimes asked officers, “Hey, are you wearing a camera?” and the officers say they are, he reported.

But what about the privacy implications? Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, says: “We don’t like the networks of police-run video cameras that are being set up in an increasing number of cities. We don’t think the government should be watching over the population en masse.” But requiring police officers to wear video cameras is different, he says: “When it comes to the citizenry watching the government, we like that.”

Mr. Stanley says that all parties stand to benefit — the public is protected from police misconduct, and officers are protected from bogus complaints. “There are many police officers who’ve had a cloud fall over them because of an unfounded accusation of abuse,” he said. “Now police officers won’t have to worry so much about that kind of thing.”

Mr. Farrar says officers have told him of cases when citizens arrived at a Rialto police station to file a complaint and the supervisor was able to retrieve and play on the spot the video of what had transpired. “The individuals left the station with basically no other things to say and have never come back,” he said.

The A.C.L.U. does have a few concerns about possible misuse of the recordings. Mr. Stanley says civilians shouldn’t have to worry that a video will be leaked and show up on CNN. Nor would he approve of the police storing years of videos and then using them for other purposes, like trolling for crimes with which to charge civilians. He suggests policies specifying that the videos be deleted after a certain short period.

A spokesman for Taser International said it had received orders from various police departments, including those in Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and Hartford, as well as Fort Worth, Tex.; Chesapeake, Va.; and Modesto, Calif. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the police department of BART, the transit system, has bought 210 cameras and is training its officers in their use, part of changes undertaken after a BART police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed man in 2009.

Before the cameras, “there were so many situations where it was ‘he said, she said,’ and juries tend to believe police officers over accused criminals,” Mr. Stanley says. “The technology really has the potential to level the playing field in any kind of controversy or allegation of abuse.”

Mr. Farrar recently completed a master’s degree in applied criminology and police management at the University of Cambridge. (It required only six weeks a year of residency in England.) And he wrote about the video-camera experiment in his thesis.

He says his goal is to equip all uniformed officers in his department with the video cameras. “Video is very transparent,” he said. “It’s the whole enchilada.”

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

U.S. government to fight for warrantless GPS tracking

March 19, 2013 by

The Obama Administration is headed to court today to argue that warrantless GPS tracking is just fine.

The administration will present its arguments before a federal appeals court today, despite the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruling that a warrant was needed to attach a GPS device to a suspected criminal’s vehicle. According to Wired, which first reported on the story, the government believes that the high court’s ruling does not account for all scenarios, and wants to see where its ruling should and shouldn’t be held up.

The Supreme Court’s ruling last year was not exhaustive, the government argues. And in many cases, exemptions exist in which a judge would not need to sign a warrant to monitor someone, including issues at the border and with people on probation and students, according to Wired.

The Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision last year that the Fourth Amendment protection of “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” would be violated if law enforcement agencies were allowed to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s vehicle without obtaining a warrant. The decision involved a case in which District of Columbia police placed a GPS tracking device on the car of suspected cocaine dealer Antoine Jones. Following a conviction, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2010 threw it out, saying a warrant was required to track Jones and fellow defendant Lawrence Maynard.

For the government, warrantless GPS tracking could prove to be an important law-enforcement tool, its attorneys have argued. In papers filed with the court, the government has said that because of the high court’s ruling, “law enforcement officers could not use GPS devices to gather information to establish probable cause, which is often the most productive use of such devices.”

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , ,

Child Identity Theft

March 6, 2013 by

A child’s Social Security number can be used by identity thieves to apply for government benefits, open bank and credit card accounts, apply for a loan or utility service, or rent a place to live. Check for a credit report to see if your child’s information is being misused. Take immediate action if it is.

Many school forms require personal and, sometimes, sensitive information. Find out how your child’s information is collected, used, stored, and thrown away. Your child’s personal information is protected by law. Asking schools and other organizations to safeguard your child’s information can help minimize your child’s risk of identity theft.

Read More

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , ,

U.S. leads the world in requests for users’ Google data

January 23, 2013 by

The latest Transparency Report from Google shows requests from U.S. authorities steadily growing, plus a breakdown — subpoena vs. search warrant, and so on.

The number of official requests Google receives for information about its users is steadily increasing — particularly in the United States, which between July and December once again outpaced the world.

In the second half of 2012, Google received 8,438 requests for information, up 6 percent from the first half of 2012. Globally, Google received 21,389 requests for information, up 2 percent from the first half 2012. The number of requests went up even as the number of users affected went down — a 9 percent decrease in the United States, and 3 percent globally.

The countries making the most requests in the second half of the year were:

-United States (8,438 requests for information about 14,791 users)
-India (2,431 requests for information about 4,106 users)
-France (1,693 requests for information about 2,063 users)
-Germany (1,550 requests for information about 1,944 users)
-United Kingdom (1,458 Brazil requests for information about 1,918 users)
-Brazil (1,211 requests for information about 2,526 users)

With this report, Google is beginning to break down the kinds of legal processes that governments are using when making these requests. In the period covered by the report, 68 percent of requests that Google received came from subpoenas, 22 percent came from search warrants issued through the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and 10 percent came from other processes, such as court orders.

The full report can be found here. Unlike previous reports it does not include information about requests for content removal; the company has decided to report those separately from now on.

“We’ll keep looking for more ways to inform you about government requests and how we handle them,” said Richard Salgado, Google’s legal director for law enforcement and information security, in a blog post. “We hope more companies and governments themselves join us in this effort by releasing similar kinds of data.”

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Children’s privacy law catches on to apps, social networks

December 24, 2012 by

The FTC updates rules tied to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, but the changes won’t really affect companies like Apple or Facebook.

The Federal Trade Commission today moved to make a key children’s online privacy law more up-to-date in a world of smartphones and social networks.

The agency has approved amendments to the regulations implementing the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, that would require apps and Web sites that target children to obtain parental consent before collecting geo-location information, or photos, videos or audio files that include a child’s image or voice. The law was also expanded to cover services that track kids’ online activity — namely, which sites they visit — and then give the information to third-parties, like advertisers.

“The Commission takes seriously its mandate to protect children’s online privacy in this ever-changing technological landscape,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz in a statement. “I am confident that the amendments to the COPPA Rule strike the right balance between protecting innovation that will provide rich and engaging content for children, and ensuring that parents are informed and involved in their children’s online activities.”

But Apple and Facebook, the biggest companies associated with apps and social media, may not feel much of an effect at all.

The changes, the first since the law took effect in 1998, apply only to sites that specifically target children. They don’t apply to third-party plug-ins — such Facebook’s “Like” button — or ad networks, unless the companies behind them have “actual knowledge” that they are collecting information from a service that’s specifically for children.

The commission defines those who have “actual knowledge” as a third-party that has been told directly its plug-in or advertisement is on a site for children, or if the third-party company recognizes that the site is specifically for kids, according to the updated rules (PDF).

Then there are app platforms like Apple’s App Store, the largest single source of apps in world. Platforms like Apple’s won’t have to make sure they sell apps that follow the new law. But apps made available there are hardly untouchable. On Monday, for instance, Nickelodeon removed a SpongeBob app from the Apple App Store after an an advocacy group filed a complaint with the FTC alleging that the game violated children’s online privacy rights by collecting their e-mail addresses without parents’ permission.

And the rule changes themselves may prove vulnerable to challenge in court or in Congress. “I believe a core provision of the amendments exceeds the scope of the authority granted us by Congress in COPPA, the statute that underlies and authorizes the rule,” commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen wrote in her dissenting statement. “I do not believe that the fact that a child-directed site or online service receives any kind of benefit from using a plug-in is equivalent to the collection of personal information by the third-party plug-in on behalf of the child-directed site or online service.”

The FTC has the support of at least one key figure on Capitol Hill. Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, issued a statement today saying that the changes were “long overdue,” and necessary for a world filled with smartphones, apps and social network. He said he would “determine if Congress should act to make further changes in the law” –

The new rule puts all online companies on notice, no matter who they are, that they are required to comply with the law. Under the new rule, when a children’s website or application allows third-parties to collect information from children, those websites and apps will be liable under COPPA.

Furthermore, those third-parties will also be held liable if they know they are collecting information on websites or apps directed toward children.

The changes come after the FTC released a report last week slamming the app industry for not providing parents enough information about privacy. The report encouraged app companies to develop best practices to ensure parents were educated on privacy options.

The new rules are set to go into effect July 1, 2013.

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Time to send an SOS over Instagram’s TOS

December 21, 2012 by

More Facebook/Instagram follies raise uneasy questions why a policy change morphed into such a mess

Maybe Mark Zuckerberg is busy out hunting for his own food. The company’s No. 2, Sheryl Sandberg, might be tied up putting the finishing touches on her soon-to-be-published memoir. And so we’re left with poor — not financially poor, obviously — Kevin Systrom to explain one of the most bizarre weeks in Facebook’s young history.

On Monday, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, announced changes to its terms of service that opened the way for the company to use people’s photos in advertisements without needing permission. That triggered the predictable storm of controversy, with privacy advocates screaming bloody murder and outraged users bolting the service entirely.

By Wednesday, Facebook-Instagram apologized for the confusing language, essentially blaming the mess on inexact grammar and sought to qualm fears that filthy lucre would trump the concerns of users. But in blog post, Instagram head Kevin Systrom promised “updated language” but still hinted that something was in the offing that would result in “meaningful ways to help you discover new and interesting accounts and content while building a self-sustaining business at the same time.” Whatever that meant.

So it was that late Thursday, Systrom, who must have whiplash by now, put out yet another missive announcing that Instagram was returning to the original terms of service which accompanied the launch of the service in October 2010. Why? Here’s Systrom:

Earlier this week, we introduced a set of updates to our privacy policy and terms of service to help our users better understand our service. In the days since, it became clear that we failed to fulfill what I consider one of our most important responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly. I am sorry for that, and I am focused on making it right.

The concerns we heard about from you the most focused on advertising, and what our changes might mean for you and your photos. There was confusion and real concern about what our possible advertising products could look like and how they would work.

Because of the feedback we have heard from you, we are reverting this advertising section to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010.

Paging General Custer: Debacles anyone? Even if Zuckerberg and Sandberg weren’t involved in what should have been a routine policy decision that normally winds up routed to a company’s middle managers, they are now. The Mickey Mouse way this issue has been handled raises new questions about managerial judgment. It’s reached the point where the embarrassment requires a full rethink and so it’s back to the future with the original TOS until they can figure out how to do this in a way that doesn’t trigger a thermonuclear reaction among users.

Going forward, rather than obtain permission from you to introduce possible advertising products we have not yet developed, we are going to take the time to complete our plans, and then come back to our users and explain how we would like for our advertising business to work.

That’s touching but somebody’s head is on the block — or it ought to be. This is basic blocking and tackling. The privacy crowd can look back upon the events of the last week and say they struck a blow for user rights and the effectiveness of mobilizing user outrage but Facebook/Instagram can’t allow a repeat performance. Especially not as a publicly-traded corporation.

You also had deep concerns about whether under our new terms, Instagram had any plans to sell your content. I want to be really clear: Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do.

Finally, there was also confusion about how widely shared and distributed your photos are through our service. The distribution of your content and photos is governed by our privacy policy, and always has been. We have made a small change to our terms to make that as clear as possible.

Next time some minor Einstein decides to muck around with terms of service, this decision needs to get fully vetted and checked better for the possible implications. This is user data — photos, in this case — that we’re talking about and big companies like Facebook have no interest in inflaming the passions of the folks who made them successful. If the wording is not crystal clear, then don’t hit the “publish” button before the terms are understandable to a 10-year-old.

This isn’t rocket science and so it’s amazing that the supposedly smart set running Facebook/Instagram are finding it so hard to get this right.

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , ,

‘Jesus,’ ‘welcome’ join list of worst passwords

October 24, 2012 by

Internet users continue to use many of the same weak passwords used a year ago, according to a new list compiled from password files released by hackers.

Despite the vulnerability presented by weak passwords, many Internet users continue to put their security at risk by using common words or number sequences that are easily guessable.

Unchanged from last year, the three most popular passwords for 2012 were “password,” “123456,” and “12345678,” according to SplashData’s annual “25 Worst Passwords of the Year” list. The list was compiled from files containing millions of stolen passwords posted online by hackers.

But that isn’t to say that our choices have stagnated; new entries to the list this year include “welcome,” “Jesus,” “ninja,” “mustang,” and “password1.”

In a year punctuated by high-profile hacks that leaked millions of passwords, SplashData hopes the lists highlights the importance of choosing a robust password.

“We’re hoping that with more publicity about how risky it is to use weak passwords, more people will start taking simple steps to protect themselves by using stronger passwords and using different passwords for different Web sites,” SplashData CEO Morgan Slain said in a statement. “Just a little bit more effort in choosing better passwords will go a long way toward making you safer online.”

A security breach revealed in July at Yahoo yielded nearly a half million login credentials stored in plain text. Other password thefts at LinkedIn, eHarmony, and Last.fm contributed to approximately 8 million passwords posted in two separate lists to hacker sites in early June.

SplashData’s list, including changes in ranking from last year’s list:

password (unchanged)
123456 (unchanged)
12345678 (unchanged)
abc123 (up 1)
qwerty (down 1)
monkey (unchanged)
letmein (up 1)
dragon (up 2)
111111 (up 3)
baseball (up 1)
iloveyou (up 2)
trustno1 (down 3)
1234567 (down 6)
sunshine (up 1)
master (down 1)
123123 (up 4)
welcome (new)
shadow (up 1)
ashley (down 3)
football (up 5)
Jesus (new)
michael (up 2)
ninja (new)
mustang (new)
password1 (new)

Security experts suggest picking long passwords (the longer, the better) that include as many different characters as possible while excluding anything that can be personally linked, such as birthdates or names of relatives. Choosing passwords that include words found in common dictionaries is also discouraged.

View Source

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , ,

Talk of drones patrolling US skies spawns anxiety

June 19, 2012 by

The prospect that thousands of drones could be patrolling U.S. skies by the end of this decade is raising the specter of a Big Brother government that peers into backyards and bedrooms.

The worries began mostly on the political margins, but there are signs that ordinary people are starting to fret that unmanned aircraft could soon be circling overhead.

Jeff Landry, a freshman Republican congressman from Louisiana’s coastal bayou country, said constituents have stopped him while shopping at Walmart to talk about it.

“There is a distrust amongst the people who have come and discussed this issue with me about our government,” Landry said. “It’s raising an alarm with the American public.”

Another GOP freshman, Rep. Austin Scott, said he first learned of the issue when someone shouted out a question about drones at a Republican Party meeting in his Georgia congressional district two months ago.

An American Civil Liberties Union lobbyist, Chris Calabrese, said that when he speaks to audiences about privacy issues generally, drones are what “everybody just perks up over.”

“People are interested in the technology, they are interested in the implications and they worry about being under surveillance from the skies,” he said.

The level of apprehension is especially high in the conservative blogosphere, where headlines blare “30,000 Armed Drones to be Used Against Americans” and “Government Drones Set to Spy on Farms in the United States.”

When Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, suggested during an interview on Washington radio station WTOP last month that drones be used by police domestically since they’ve done such a good job on foreign battlefields, the political backlash was swift. NetRightDaily complained: “This seems like something a fascist would do. … McDonnell isn’t pro-Big Government, he is pro-HUGE Government.”

John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Va., which provides legal assistance in support of civil liberties and conservative causes, warned the governor, “America is not a battlefield, and the citizens of this nation are not insurgents in need of vanquishing.”

There’s concern as well among liberal civil liberties advocates that government and private-sector drones will be used to gather information on Americans without their knowledge. A lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of San Francisco, whose motto is “defending your rights in the digital world,” forced the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this year to disclose the names of dozens of public universities, police departments and other government agencies that have been awarded permission to fly drones in civilian airspace on an experimental basis.

Giving drones greater access to U.S. skies moves the nation closer to “a surveillance society in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded and scrutinized by the authorities,” the ACLU warned last December in a report.

The anxiety has spilled over into Congress, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers have been meeting to discuss legislation that would broadly address the civil-liberty issues raised by drones. A Landry provision in a defense spending bill would prohibit information gathered by military drones without a warrant from being used as evidence in court. A provision that Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., added to another bill would prohibit the Homeland Security Department from arming its drones, including ones used to patrol the border.

Scott and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have introduced identical bills to prohibit any government agency from using a drone to “gather evidence or other information pertaining to criminal conduct or conduct in violation of a regulation” without a warrant.

“I just don’t like the concept of drones flying over barbecues in New York to see whether you have a Big Gulp in your backyard or whether you are separating out your recyclables according to the city mandates,” Paul said in an interview, referring to a New York City ban on supersized soft drinks.

He acknowledged that is an “extreme example,” but added: “They might just say we’d be safer from muggings if we had constant surveillance crisscrossing the street all the time. But then the question becomes, what about jaywalking? What about eating too many donuts? What about putting mayonnaise on your hamburger? Where does it stop?”

Calabrese, the ACLU lobbyist, called Paul’s office as soon as he heard about the bill.

“I told them we think they are starting from the right place,” Calabrese said. “You should need some kind of basis before you use a drone to spy on someone.”

In a Congress noted for its political polarization, legislation to check drone use has the potential to forge “a left-right consensus,” he said. “It bothers us for a lot of the same reasons it bothers conservatives.”

The backlash has drone makers concerned. The drone market is expected to nearly double over the next 10 years, from current worldwide expenditures of nearly $6 billion annually to more than $11 billion, with police departments accounting for a significant part of that growth.

“We go into this with every expectation that the laws governing public safety and personal privacy will not be administered any differently for (drones) than they are for any other law enforcement tool,” said Dan Elwell, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association.

Discussion of the issue has been colored by exaggerated drone tales spread largely by conservative media and bloggers.

Scott said he was prompted to introduce his bill in part by news reports that the Environmental Protection Agency has been using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska. The agency has indeed been searching for illegal dumping of waste into streams but is doing it the old-fashioned way, with piloted planes.

In another case, a forecast of 30,000 drones in U.S. skies by 2020 has been widely attributed to the FAA. But FAA spokeswoman Brie Sachse said the agency has no idea where the figure came from. It may be a mangled version of an aerospace industry forecast that there could be nearly 30,000 drones worldwide by 2018, with the United States accounting for half of them.

Fear that some drones may be armed has been fueled in part by a county sheriff’s office in Texas that used a homeland security grant to buy a $300,000, 50-pound ShadowHawk helicopter drone for its SWAT team. The drone can be equipped with a 40mm grenade launcher and a 12-gauge shotgun. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, told The Associated Press earlier this year his office had no plans to arm the drone, but he left open the possibility the agency may decide to adapt the drone to fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.

Earlier this year Congress, under pressure from the Defense Department and the drone manufacturers, ordered the FAA to give drones greater access to civilian airspace by 2015. Besides the military, the mandate applies to drones operated by the private sector and civilian government agencies, including federal, state and local law enforcement.

Reps. Ed Markey, D-Mass, and Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairs of a congressional privacy caucus, asked the FAA in April how it plans to protect privacy as it develops regulations for integrating drones into airspace now exclusively used by aircraft with human pilots. There’s been no response so far, but Acting FAA Administrator Michael Huerta will probably be asked about it when he testifies at a Senate hearing Thursday.

Even if the FAA were to establish privacy rules, it’s primarily a safety agency and wouldn’t have the expertise or regulatory structure to enforce them, civil liberties advocates said. But no other government agency is addressing the issue, either, they said.

Read more

Filed Under: Featured News Tagged With: , , , , ,
«Older Posts