U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms

SAUER · Jun 14, 2013

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc (GOOG). and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that dont involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.

Along with the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency (0112917D), the Federal Bureau of Investigation and branches of the U.S. military have agreements with such companies to gather data that might seem innocuous but could be highly useful in the hands of U.S. intelligence or cyber warfare units, according to the people, who have either worked for the government or are in companies that have these accords.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-to-swap-data-with-thousands-of-firms.html

waltky · Jun 15, 2013

Sometimes it feels like, somebody's watchin' me...

All the ways youre being watched
June 14, 2013 WASHINGTON Someone is watching you.

What you spend. Where you eat. Whom you call. Where you travel. What you Google. What you give to charity. Recent reports of government access to records from phone companies, Internet providers and credit card companies raise anew questions of just how much other people can know about you, especially in the age of the Internet and high technology. They watch from the air, from cameras, from computers. And you help them, volunteering vast amounts of information about yourself in the magnetic stripe on the back of your credit card, the SIM card in your phone, the sites you visit on the Internet. The government has access to some of it. And might have access to more from the vast corporations that compile it.

U.S. officials insist they only tap into information that points at suspected terrorists and that there are plenty of safeguards to make sure they dont snoop on good guys. I want the American people to know that were trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy but also the security of this country, Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, told Congress on Wednesday. He also acknowledged that the government could look at such things as phone records and what site someone Googled. All of it alarms civil libertarians. We dont want to live in a world where anytime you do anything you have to stop and ask yourself, Could this come back to hurt me if somebody found out about it? said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union. Because absolutely nothing we do is private. Indeed. Here are just some of the ways Americans can be watched.

Internet

A quick Google search for a lunch spot? Theres a record of that. Arranging a vacation? Someone knows where youre planning to go. Check in with Facebook? It tracks all the sites you visit that have like buttons or allow you to sign in with Facebook pretty much all of them. If those Internet giants can record so much about you, who can look at this electronic diary? The government can access any emails, chats, searches, events, locations, videos, photos, log-ins and any information people post online with a warrant, which the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant secretly.

And the revelation of PRISM, a secret government program for mining major Internet companies, suggests the government could have direct access to Internet companies data without a warrant. Every company reportedly impacted Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk and AOL denied knowing about the program or giving any direct access to their servers.

Email
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Challenges to phone records face legal obstacles
June 12, 2013 WASHINGTON The government's massive collection of Americans' phone records is drawing protests and lawsuits from civil liberties groups, but major legal obstacles stand in the way. Among them are government claims that national security secrets will be revealed if the cases are allowed to proceed, and Supreme Court rulings that telephone records, as opposed to conversations, are not private to begin with.

Justices have written recently about the complex issues of privacy in the digital age, and the high court could have the last word on challenges filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others. The Obama administration has said the collection of phone records telephone numbers and the time and length of calls is necessary to protect Americans from terrorism and that it does not trample on their privacy. The National Security Agency collects millions of phone records from the United States each day, but says it only accesses them if there is a known connection to terrorism.

The ACLU this week filed the most significant lawsuit against the phone record collection program so far. The suit demands that the courts put an end to the program and order the administration to purge the records it has collected. Conservative lawyer Larry Klayman also has filed suit over the program. Before either suit gets a full-blown court hearing, the administration could try to employ two powerful legal tools it has used in the past to block challenges to closely held surveillance programs.

In February, the Supreme Court shot down an effort by U.S. citizens to challenge the expansion of a surveillance law used to monitor conversations of foreign spies and terrorist suspects by finding that the Americans could not show that the government would eavesdrop on their conversations. In legal terms, they did not have standing to sue, the justices said in a 5-4 decision. The ACLU and Klayman both say they are or were customers of Verizon, which was identified last week as a phone company the government had ordered to turn over daily records of calls made by all its customers. In so doing, they said it is a simple matter of fact that records of their calls have been seized by the government. "We meet even the standard the government has been foisting upon the courts for the past decade," said the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer.

But American University law professor Steven Vladeck said the challengers might face a different problem. "They're not suing Verizon. They're suing the government for something a third party did. And so the issue is not their ability to prove that their communications were involved. It's how they can object to a third party's cooperation with the government in a suit against the government, rather than the third party," Vladeck said. Another issue the administration could try to use to derail the suits is the jeopardy to national security that would result from allowing them to proceed, the so-called state secrets doctrine.

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SAUER · Jun 15, 2013

waltky said: ↑

Sometimes it feels like, somebody's watchin' me...

All the ways you’re being watched
June 14, 2013 WASHINGTON — Someone is watching you.

See also:

Challenges to phone records face legal obstacles
June 12, 2013 WASHINGTON — The government's massive collection of Americans' phone records is drawing protests and lawsuits from civil liberties groups, but major legal obstacles stand in the way. Among them are government claims that national security secrets will be revealed if the cases are allowed to proceed, and Supreme Court rulings that telephone records, as opposed to conversations, are not private to begin with.
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big bro permanently perfects his skill

waltky · Jun 15, 2013

Granny been wantin' to know what dey got on her onna interweb?...

Web companies begin releasing surveillance information after U.S. deal
15 June`13 - Facebook and Microsoft have struck agreements with the U.S. government to release limited information about the number of surveillance requests they receive, a modest victory for the companies as they struggle with the fallout from disclosures about a secret government data-collection program.

Facebook on Friday became the first to release aggregate numbers of requests, saying in a blog post that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 U.S. requests for user data in the second half of 2012, covering 18,000 to 19,000 of its users' accounts. Facebook has more than 1.1 billion users worldwide. The majority of those requests are routine police inquiries, a person familiar with the company said, but under the terms of the deal with Justice Department, Facebook is precluded from saying how many were secret orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Until now, all information about requests under FISA, including their existence, were deemed secret.

Microsoft said it had received requests of all types for information on about 31,000 consumer accounts in the second half of 2012. In a "transparency report" Microsoft published earlier this year without including national security matters, it said it had received criminal requests involving 24,565 accounts for all of 2012. If half of those requests came in the second part of the year, the intelligence requests constitute the bulk of government inquiries. Microsoft did not dispute that conclusion. Google said late Friday that it was negotiating with the government and that the sticking point was whether it could only publish a combined figure for all requests. It said that would be "a step back for users," because it already breaks out criminal requests and National Security Letters, another type of intelligence inquiry.

Facebook, Google and Microsoft had all publicly urged the U.S. authorities to allow them to reveal the number and scope of the surveillance requests after documents leaked to the Washington Post and the Guardian suggested they had given the government "direct access" to their computers as part of a National Security Agency program called Prism. The disclosures about Prism, and related revelations about broad-based collection of telephone records, have triggered widespread concern and congressional hearings about the scope and extent of the information-gathering.

The big Internet companies in particular have been torn by the need to obey U.S. laws that forbid virtually any discussion of foreign intelligence requests and the need to assuage customers. "We hope this helps put into perspective the numbers involved and lays to rest some of the hyperbolic and false assertions in some recent press accounts about the frequency and scope of the data requests that we receive," Facebook wrote on its site. Facebook said it would continue to press to divulge more information. The person familiar with the company said that it at least partially complied with U.S. legal requests 79 percent of the time, and that it usually turned over just the user's email address and Internet Protocol address and name, rather than the content of the person's postings or messages. It is believed that FISA requests typically seek much more information. But it remains unclear how broad the FISA orders might be.

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U.S. Agencies Said to Swap Data With Thousands of Firms

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