Secure Liberties Newsletter
Covering War, Peace, Militarism and Everything in Between
TOP LINE
The New York Times confirmed that Section 215 of the Patriot Act has been used to put a dragnet around a website. Why does it matter? As we previously covered, this exact question — asked by civil society, dozens of Representatives, and former Sen./SSCI member Udall and former HJC Chair Goodlatte — was key to the firestorm around the cratered USA Freedom Reauthorization Act last year. Section 215 has been sunset since, as this and other big questions linger. Two important additional details covered below.
New Saudi Arms Sale: The Trump Administration announced it will be selling $500 million of US arms to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, adding to more than $8 billion sold in July 2019. Congress has until January 21 to oppose the deal. This comes on the heels of a $23 billion dollar arms sale to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December. The two led the brutal war in Yemen, using US weaponry and logistics to arm militias, and implement bombing campaigns that have killed civilians amid the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis.
WaPo: Huawei “tested facial recognition software that could send automated ‘Uighur alarms’ to government authorities when its camera systems identify members of the oppressed minority group, according to an internal document that provides further details about China’s artificial-intelligence surveillance regime.” The news comes as facial recognition in the US continues to spin out in front of Congress’s eyes.
Is “going dark” going away? Susan Landau, one of the US’s foremost cybersecurity experts, argues here that a new report from Upturn concludes the debate between law enforcement access and encryption: “Law enforcement is not going dark, not while it has MDFTs,” and that now is the time to ask who can afford these proliferating phone-cracking tools.
ARMS, INTEL, and NDAA
The Intercept has uncovered more evidence of CIA-backed death squads operating in Afghanistan, detailing harrowing stories of previously unknown massacres. Many of the victims were children. In October 2019, Human Rights Watch published a report on the CIA’s use of similar forces to conduct raids resulting in grave rights abuses and civilian deaths. The issue of CIA officers and personnel remaining in Afghanistan has come up as a sticking point in peace negotiations, which have resumed this week, to end the two-decades-long war.
“Likely Russian in origin”: The SolarWinds hack, affecting 18,000+ private and government customers, continues to ripple forward. Yesterday, a group composed of the FBI, NSA, CISA, and ODNI announced it was probably Russia.
Trump’s NDAA veto: overridden, 81-13 in the Senate, and 322-87 in the House.
Some 1033 reforms made it into the NDAA, after enormous efforts on- and off-the-Hill put a spotlight on police militarization. Per Sen. Schatz: “These reforms will help take weapons of war — including bayonets and grenades — out of our communities.”
Tensions continue to mount with Iran one year after the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, with Trump reversing acting Secretary of Defense Miller’s decision to withdraw a US aircraft carrier from the region, among other hostile actions. Iran, in return, has raised their uranium enrichment cap to pre-JCPOA levels and seized a South Korean-flagged tanker for alleged “oil pollution” of the Persian Gulf.
But the door to diplomacy still appears to be open: In December, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei signaled publicly for the first time that he would accept immediately returning to JCPOA-compliance without preconditions if the US returns to their obligations by lifting sanctions in violation of the agreement, echoing President Rouhani’s public position.
A suspected intelligence operative, who returned to China in 2015, was accused of using “fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships with at least two Midwestern mayors” to “gain proximity to political power,” per Axios. However, “officials do not believe Fang received or passed on classified information.”
SURVEILLANCE
Does the Times story reveal that DOJ has been misleading the DNI? In fact, it’s probably what produced the story. This subtle detail stood out to us and could be the next Clapper moment: the Director of National Intelligence answered a letter from Sen. Wyden by saying Section 215 wasn’t used for browsing information in 2019 — but in fact the DNI was repeating a lie apparently originating from DOJ. Note that there are specific concerns about secret interpretations of surveillance laws emanating from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel.
DNI Ratcliffe said he’d look into further “corrective action,” while Wyden underscored that the DNI offered “no guarantee” that this dragnet application couldn’t be used to acquire Americans’ browsing information in the future. Schiff, meanwhile, told the Times his “efforts were not based on preserving any specific program or use.” We need to know what happened before 2019, too.
Didn’t work on the Patriot Act in 2020? Here’s a pretty good video explainer from Roll Call, and here are a number of Section 215 materials from Demand Progress Education Fund and the FreedomWorks Foundation.
Apple and Google banned the intermediary data broker, X-Mode, after the government was caught buying location data surreptitiously scraped off people’s phones. The many apps in question included games, weather apps, measurement apps, as well as a Muslim prayer app downloaded by over 98 million people.
Companies, from Texas to Israel, are reportedly rushing toward this legal exploit, however, with one service promising “mass collection of all internet users in a country.”
Meanwhile, Canada’s intelligence watchdog just revealed that “Canadian Security and Intelligence Service’s use of publicly available geolocation data without a warrant may have broken the law” — specifically the Canadian counterpart to the Fourth Amendment.
The Celtics called out Mass. Gov. Baker for opposition to facial recognition ban, in an ongoing debate over whether to include the provision in a major police reform bill.
Remember the Baltimore spy planes? You know, the planes that were secretly flown over the city for months, specifically because the planes, designed for war, were capable of recording the individual movements of everyone in view? Well the Baltimore PD is threatening the company (Persistent Surveillance Systems) for talking to media too much, while the ACLU is suing BPD because, per Vice, they “liked about almost every aspect” of the program.
RELEVANT, TOO
New Office of Legal Counsel research demonstrates that “OLC opinions do not merely provide legal guidance to the executive branch but also actually influence the outcomes of those [inter-branch] conflicts. More specifically, they place a thumb on the scale in the executive’s favor, making it harder for Congress to access the information it seeks.” Here’s the law review article, which also just won the Levin Center’s Excellence in Oversight Research Award.
BOTTOM LINE
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