Google Asks Permission To Publish Info About FISA Requests

By artappraiser on Tue, 06/11/2013 - 4:15pm |

By Bill Chappell, The Two Way @ npr.org, June 11, 2013

As Google and other large tech companies cope with the aftermath of recent reports that the National Security Agency has had broad access to their users' data, the search giant is asking the U.S. government for permission to publish the number of national security requests it receives, including those made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

In a , Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said that government nondisclosure obligations are keeping the company from being able to ease public concerns about the privacy and security of users' data.

Noting that the search and advertising company "has worked tremendously hard over the past fifteen years to earn our users' trust," [....]

Somewhat related Ad Age article:

Microsoft: 'Your Privacy Is Our Priority.' NSA: LOL!

Five thoughts about the NSA Prism Scandal

By Simon Dumenco, June 7, 2013

URL:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/06/11/190723995/google-asks-permission-to-publish-info-about-fisa-requests

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Google chief wrote about 'terrifying' surveillance months before NSA leaks
By John Hudson, Passport @ ForeignPolicy.com,June 11, 2013

Before defending the U.S. government's surveillance apparatus -- as he did last week -- Eric Schmidt wasn't so blasé about government snooping.

In an overlooked chapter of his recently released book The New Digital Age, Google's executive chairman described the battle for Internet privacy as a "long, important struggle" and depicted the emergence of Big Data surveillance tactics as a threat to a free society.

"Governments operating surveillance platforms will surely violate restrictions placed on them (by legislation or legal ruling) eventually," he wrote in a chapter on the future of terrorism. "The potential for misuse of this power is terrifyingly high, to say nothing of the dangers introduced by human error, data-driven false positives and simple curiosity."

Sounds like a familiar problem, right? [....]

Now, Schmidt maintains that the media got PRISM wrong in terms of its scale and structural makeup. "Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data,'" he tweeted Friday. And other journalists have also disputed reports by the Guardian and Washington Post that PRISM offers the NSA "direct access" to the servers of Internet companies.

But while a definitive anatomy of PRISM remains elusive, what we can gather from the contradictory reporting is that -- at a minimum -- Google closely cooperates with the NSA within legal boundaries [....]

by artappraiser on Tue, 06/11/2013 - 10:39pm

The academic paper that predicted the NSA scandal
By Joshua Keating, ForeignPolicy.com, June 11, 2013

If you've been following the fallout from last week's NSA surveillance revelations, you may have seen repeated reference to a certain "recent MIT study." "Unique in the Crowd: The Privacy Bounds of Human Mobility," published in Nature's Scientific Reports last year, has been cited by multiple media sources, including this one, as evidence for why -- contra Dianne Feinstein -- your metadata matters. Indeed, re-examined in light of the current headlines, the concerns raised by the study seem quite prescient [....]

"We use the analogy of the fingerprint," said de Montjoye in a phone interview today. "In the 1930s, Edmond Locard, one of the first forensic science pioneers, showed that each fingerprint is unique, and you need 12 points to identify it. So here what we did is we took a large-scale database of mobility traces and basically computed the number of points so that 95 percent of people would be unique in the dataset."

Hidalgo says that because phone companies like Verizon need to keep this kind of data for billing and customer service purposes, it seemed inevitable that it would sooner or later be put to questionable use. "It felt quite natural that something like this was taking place, but the scale was certainly surprising," he said.

The authors have an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor today arguing that consumers should be granted more control over and more information about how much of their data is being stored and for what purpose [....]

by artappraiser on Tue, 06/11/2013 - 10:46pm

Facebook & Microsoft too:

Google, Facebook and Microsoft seek data request transparency,
BBC News, 11 June, 2013

In addition:

A.C.L.U. Files Lawsuit Seeking to Stop the Collection of Domestic Phone Logs
By Charlie Savage, New York Times, June 11, 2013

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed last week by a former National Security Agency contractor — is illegal and asking a judge to stop it and order the records purged.

The lawsuit could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters revealed by Edward J. Snowden [....]

In other lawsuits against national security policies, the government has often persuaded courts to dismiss them without ruling on the merits by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and so lacked standing in court.

This case may be different. The government has now declassified the existence of the program. And the A.C.L.U. is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services — the recipient of a leaked secret court order for all its domestic calling records — which it says gives it standing. [....]

by artappraiser on Tue, 06/11/2013 - 11:12pm

Nice follow-up on what's happening with the Microsoft, Facebook and Google requests:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/06/facebook-microsoft-releas...

by artappraiser on Sat, 06/15/2013 - 12:35am

Google Asks Permission To Publish Info About FISA Requests

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