Cyberprivacy

The Atlantic blogs on a report from the Brennan Center for Justice on "what the surveillance state does with our private data" as a strong synthesis of everything that's been revealed in recent months. Further, The Atlantic writes, "even though the people being spied on are often totally innocent, the government stores their information for a very long time."

The full report is here: http://www.brennancenter.org/publication/what-government-does-americans-...

Ladar Levison, founder of the now-shuttered secure Lavabit email service, is finally free to talk about the federal government's electronic pursuit of his most famous customer, leaker Edward Snowden, after a court unsealed documents in the case. Levinson told The New York Times that he closed down his business rather than cooperate because law enforcement didn't just want access to Snowden's communications but such broad access that they could have gotten to all of his patrons. According to The Times, "they wanted more, he said: the passwords, encryption keys and computer code that would essentially allow the government untrammeled access to the protected messages of all his customers. That, he said, was too much 'You don’t need to bug an entire city to bug one guy’s phone calls,'" Levison said.

Wired looks at how the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Smith v. Maryland has been used to justify the massive level of surveillance conducted of Americans. That 1979 decision started with a purse-snatcher whose obsession with the victim of his crime led police to use a pen register to track all of his phone calls, including the multitude of times he rang her. "Nobody is more surprised by the long-term ramifications of the case than the prosecutor who won it," Wired reports. "'It was a routine robbery case. The circumstances are radically different today. There wasn’t anything remotely [like] a massive surveillance of citizens’ phone calls or communications,' [Stephen] Sachs says. 'To extend it to what we now know as massive surveillance, in my personal view, is a bridge too far. It certainly wasn’t contemplated by those involved in Smith.”'

With the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, one UN event looked at the role the United Nations could have, if any, regarding ensuring privacy on the Internet from governmental spying.

A blogger for Ars Technica who was on the panel and who wrote about the event "pointed out that while anti-democratic countries may want legitimacy, their policies are already well in place. Surveillance capabilities are already being used, with or without the UN’s approval or disapproval, by democratic and anti-democratic governments."

Another interesting point from the panel was a Brazilian representative who "referred to the fact that President Barack Obama had recently defended the global American spying effort: 'I think it's important to recognize you can't have 100 percent security, and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.'" 

The Brazilian official said in light of the revelations of American spying on the Brazilian president and a major Brazilian energy company '“Brazil has 100 percent inconvenience, 0 percent security, and 0 percent privacy.”' 

The Wall Street Journal Digits Blog reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the level of trust that users of the social media network have in Facebook has diminished because of the NSA's surveillance. Zuckerberg was speaking at an event held at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., and sponsored by The Atlantic.

Zuckerberg also said that he has no plans to get into the news business as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is doing by acquiring The Washington Post, USA Today reported: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/18/mark-zuckerberg-...

Along with the development this week that Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff called off a state dinner in Washington over the National Security Agency's alleged spying on her and a Brazilian energy company, Brazil also is considering new Internet laws, the Wall Street Journal's Digits Blog reports. One of the proposals would require Internet firms to store data about Brazilians in Brazil, the blog reports, to give "the Brazilian government more control over Internet data, and Brazilian courts would more easily be able to issue orders for access to information about Brazilian users of services from foreign companies." Iit would be very difficult to enforce such a law in the globalized world in which people cross borders almost as easily as data does.

Tech firms, including Yahoo and Facebook, want to be able to disclose more on the requests they receive from the government for Internet surveillance of Americans. The reason for not doing more earlier, the Yahoo CEO said, was the risk of committing treason and being imprisoned for it. In court, Yahoo is arguing that not being allowed to engage in the dialogue on surveillance or respond on the specifics of what it has been asked to do is a  prior restraint on its free speech. Historically, governmental retraint on speech prior to publication or utterance has been extremely frowned upon and tends to get struck down by judges. That argument may be a stronger one for Yahoo to prosecute in the FISA court.