surveillance

Another disclosure as a result of the Edward Snowden leaks: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court signed off on the National Security Agency's interception of information about every foreign government but Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Washington Post reports. The certfication also "permitted the agency to gather intelligence about entities such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others," the Post reports. The NSA did not necessarily target every country or organization it had legal permission to surveill, the Post adds.

The surveillance could cover reporters or attorney-client communications, The Post also notes.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that police officers may not search the cellphones of people they arrest without warrants yesterday. As The Washington Post's Craig Timberg writes, even though the National Security Agency is not mentioned in the opinion, the court's ruling could impact the future of government surveillance and the contours of digital-age privacy. Legal scholars noted that the opinion was unanimous and that the language was forceful that "the vast troves of information police can find in modern cellphones are no less worthy of constitutional protection than the private papers that Founding Fathers once kept locked in wooden file cabinets inside their homes," Timberg reports.

The Seventh Circuit has overturned a "landmark order requiring the government to show defense lawyers foreign-intelligence-related surveillance on how a terrorism investigation developed," Politico's Josh Gerstein reports. Judge Richard Posner reasoned that "'the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is an attempt to strike a balance between the interest in full openness of legal proceedings and the interest in national security, which requires a degree of secrecy concerning the government’s efforts to protect the nation,'" according to Politico's report.

ProPublica's Julia Angwin reported this week on how marketers' tracking of customers is getting more intrusive: "Online marketers are increasingly seeking to track users offline, as well, by collecting data about people's offline habits—such as recent purchases, where you live, how many kids you have, and what kind of car you drive."

Angwin goes on to explain how it works: after sharing your e-mail address with a store, a marketer locates customers online when they use their email addresses to log into websites, then a marketer tags customers' computers with a tracker, and then when customers arrive at the website of the same story they will see a site customized to them.

A federal judge in Idaho, while upholding the National Security Agency's surveillance program of telephone records because of legal precedent, urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that the surveillance is unconstitutional, the Wall Street Journal reported: Judge B. Lynn "Winmill said there is a 'looming gulf'' between a 1979 Supreme Court precedent that allowed the government to gather the phone records of a single suspect, and the NSA program that collects millions of phone records of Americans to build a searchable database, including the time, duration, and numbers dialed. The program doesn't gather the content of calls."

Sprint, the country's third-largest wireless provider, was the only cellphone company to receive "the secret legal basis of a then-classified program that collected Americans’ phone records by the billions for counterterrorism purposes" because it was the only company to demand access to that legal rationale before the program was revealed last year by Edward Snowden's leaks, the Washington Post reports. After receiving the rationale, Sprint continued to turn over phone call records to the NSA, the Post also reports.

President Barack Obama plans to get the National Security Agency out of the business of collecting phone call records in bulk, The New York Times' Charlie Savage reports: "Under the proposal, they said, the N.S.A. would end its systematic collection of data about Americans’ calling habits. The bulk records would stay in the hands of phone companies, which would not be required to retain the data for any longer than they normally would. And the N.S.A. could obtain specific records only with permission from a judge, using a new kind of court order." A House Intelligence Committee would allow the NSA to issue subpoenas for specific phone records without judicial approval, The Times also reports.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reversed course on allowing the National Security Agency to retain phone call metadata for longer than five years in order to preserve evidence in civil lawsuits over governmental surveillance, The Hill reports. A "federal judge in San Francisco said the government could not destroy phone records after the five-year retention period expired," setting up a conflict with a prior ruling by F.I.S.C., The Hill further reports. Judge Reggie Walton said he was reversing course because the conflicting directions from the federal courts "'put the government in an untenable position and are likely to lead to uncertainty and confusion,'" according to The Hill.

The New York Times' Charlie Savage and Laura Poitras report on the evolution of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court since the 9/11 attacks. Files leaked by Edward Snowden "help explain how the court evolved from its original task — approving wiretap requests — to engaging in complex analysis of the law to justify activities like the bulk collection of data about Americans’ emails and phone calls," they write. The court transformed from an adjudicator of surveillance applications to an interpreter of the law, Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, commented to The Times.

Among other revelations is that "the newly disclosed documents also refer to a decision by the court called Large Content FISA, a term that has not been publicly revealed before. Several current and former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Large Content FISA referred to sweeping but short-lived orders issued on Jan. 10, 2007, that authorized the Bush administration to continue its warrantless wiretapping program."

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of the Northern District of California blocked the federal government from destroying the telephone metadata collected by the National Security Agency, The Recorder's Julia Love reports. The move is just a temporary one until the court decides if the data must be preserved after full briefing and argument.

The emergency motion was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Justice Department said it was going to begin clearing records today that were more than five-years-old, The Recorder said.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act previously ruled that governmental lawyers were under no obligation to hold telephone metadata beyond the current five-year limit. The FISA court reasoned: "The government can be sanctioned for destruction of evidence only if it is established that it had an obligation to preserve it at the time it was destroyed, that the records were destroyed 'with a culpable state of mind,' and the destroyed evidence was relevant to the party's claim or defense," according to a report in Computer World.