Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
This is why I’ve been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the US government. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we’re protecting you against criminals, not our own government.
The US government should be the champion for the internet, not a threat. They need to be much more transparent about what they’re doing, or otherwise people will believe the worst.
I’ve called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.
So it’s up to us — all of us — to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I‘m committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.
– Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in a post last week
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made headlines by posting about how he called President Barack Obama to express outrage and shock about the government’s spying activities. Of course, anyone familiar with Facebook and what is going on generally between private tech behemoths and U.S. intelligence agencies knew right away that his statement was one gigantic heap of stinking bullshit. Well now we have the proof.
Earlier today, the senior lawyer for the NSA made it completely clear that U.S. tech companies were fully aware of all the spying going on, including the PRISM program (on that note read my recent post: The Most Evil and Disturbing NSA Spy Practices To-Date Have Just Been Revealed).
So stop the acting all of you Silicon Valley CEOs. We know you are fully on board with extraordinary violations of your fellow citizens’ civil liberties. We know full well that you have been too cowardly to stand up for the values this country was founded on. We know you and your companies are compromised. Stop pretending, stop bullshitting. You’ve done enough harm.
From The Guardian:
The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting month of angry denials from the firms.
Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under a 2008 surveillance law occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the internet collection program known as Prism and for the so-called “upstream” collection of communications moving across the internet.
Asked during at a Wednesday hearing of the US government’s institutional privacy watchdog if collection under the law, known as Section 702 or the Fisa Amendments Act, occurred with the “full knowledge and assistance of any company from which information is obtained,” De replied: “Yes.”
When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke the Prism story in June, thanks to documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, nearly all the companies listed as participating in the program – Yahoo, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL –claimed they did not know about a surveillance practice described as giving NSA vast access to their customers’ data. Some, like Apple, said they had “never heard” the term Prism.
The disclosure of Prism resulted in a cataclysm in technology circles, with tech giants launching extensive PR campaigns to reassure their customers of data security and successfully pressing the Obama administration to allow them greater leeway to disclose the volume and type of data requests served to them by the government.
The NSA’s Wednesday comments contradicting the tech companies about the firms’ knowledge of Prism risk entrenching tensions with the firms NSA relies on for an effort that Robert Litt, general counsel for the director of national intelligence, told the board was “one of the most valuable collection tools that we have.”
Move along serfs, move along.
Full article here.
Oh, I am shocked, shocked I tell you.
The US government is the biggest threat to everything on earth.
They’re like the Daleks on Doctor Who.
Try not to blow a gasket… try.
What’s That Cow Doing There?: Google Animates Warrant Requests
This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. Google has Lego-ized the thorny, complex and controversial practice of government requesting user data for its investigations.
No Batman. No oversized Lego skyscrapers. No especially clever “Lego Movie”-style asides aimed at the adults in the crowd. But there appears to be a cow. I think it signifies Facebook.
Best to see this one for yourself. Half a million others already have.
The video “Way of a Warrant” outlines the process Google claims it follows upon receiving a government request for user information, with a clear tilt towards user protection. The video dramatizes a small army of internal barriers between the government and your data, including screeners who prioritize requests, and producers who actually negotiate with the government to narrow requests and determine what information to provide.
The iconography of the narrative is worth exploring on its own. The process is depicted as a board game — looks like the game of Life to me. The government is represented at best by a Blues Brother, at worst one of the Men in Black. Our main Google rep is a woman with sensible hair in pink. Yeah — Mom.
The process is depicted as one fraught with potential error, everything from illegible requests for the wrong person to overly broad queries for all of a user’s data when the purported violation is relevant to only a slice of time or information. The gameboard motif of course neutralizes sinister tones by reducing privacy threats and government overreaching to Gumby-style alligators and circling shark fins.
Also missing from this cartoon version of government data warrants is how many of the requests Google get are handled with this level of interaction and critical scrutiny. The company says that government warrants have increased steadily to about 28,000 requests in the past year, involving more than 42,000 accounts. The share of warrants that have resulted in data actually given to investigators has declined slightly, from 75% in 2010 to 64% in 2013, suggesting without actually demonstrating that Google is pushing back more aggressively on requests. A country-by-country breakdown shows the U.S. has the highest percentage of data produced to requests (83%) than anywhere else in the world, and that our country is responsible for more than a third of worldwide requests. Google is either considerably more deferential to U.S. investigators or much less successful in challenging its requests.
“Way of a Warrant,” the Lego version, is a quaint attempt by Google to get ahead of the next branding challenge: data governance. As even this cartoon version suggests, the tension among government/legal interests, private companies, and the protection of civil liberty and unfair search and seizure puts the digital media company in the middle. Or is it the consumer/citizen stuck in limbo? I come out of this video feeling as if two institutions are bartering over my data with little to no input from me, aside from being notified of the process. It’s entirely unclear to me that either my government or my Google are invested in protecting me — so much as protecting themselves.