Secure Liberties Newsletter
TOP LINE
You need to know about this: CBP surveilling travel, family of Members, Congressional staff, and journalists. How we know: Yahoo News released this incredible investigation into a rogue CBP unit with apparently no limits or guidelines. Agent Jeffrey Rambo (no joke), with the support of his boss and access to extremely sensitive intelligence databases, effectively tried to blackmail reporter Ali Watkins as part of an out-of-control leak investigation unrelated to the unit’s mission. There’s too much to summarize — this is simply one of those pieces you must read. A bottle of Whistle Pig to whomever spots the parallel construction red flag first.
Not all bad news on the surveillance front, though: “Utility giants agree to no longer allow sensitive records to be shared with ICE,” per WaPo. This is huge news — in February, Sen. Wyden revealed that the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange was giving information from utility companies to Equifax, which in turn sold it to Thomson Reuters for its CLEAR database. Agencies and law enforcement, including ICE, then used it to find people, never obtaining a court order. Data from before October remains available, however. House Homeland Security Chair Bennie Thompson called the news “deeply disturbing,” while Senate Finance Chair (which oversees CBP) said the agency “Flagrantly abused government surveillance powers to target journalists and elected officials under the flimsiest of pretenses.” 171 million people just regained some privacy. More below.
Majority of Senate Dems vote to block arms sale to Saudi Arabia. That’s the glass half full framing for the effort’s champions, at least. The joint resolution of disapproval (JRD), led by Senators Paul, Sanders, and Lee, to block the $650 million in missile sales to the Kingdom ended up failing 30-67 last Tuesday. But the fact that the majority of the president’s party in the Senate voted to block the sale is significant, considering that the White House heavily lobbied against the measure and the foreign policy blob’s heavy insistence that the sale was defensive in nature (despite sound arguments to the contrary). But the vote is still far off from what voters want – a recent Data for Progress poll found 64% of likely voters opposed the arms sale. Further reading: Sara Sirota and Austin Ahlman’s piece in The Intercept takes a critical look at how Democrats, especially Sen. Murphy, failed to vote for the JRD and discusses the broader congressional fight on Yemen.
ABROAD
This is the end, not so beautiful friend — NDAA finally headed for Biden’s desk. We’re pretty relieved that the NDAA’s Senate saga is over for now, though we can’t necessarily be happy (the process ultimately dodged a number of important issues, after all). To make matters worse, many of the promising provisions we were watching out, even basic language prohibiting US support for Saudi’s offensive operations in Yemen or repealing the 2002 AUMF, never received a vote or were stripped out (you can see the compromise bill report here). Here’s a fun (horrible) fact though: House members who voted for the NDAA took almost 3 times the amount of cash from military contractors than those that voted no.
Iran and IAEA strike deal on surveillance of nuclear facility as pessimism abounds over latest JCPOA talks. Yesterday Iran announced it would voluntarily replace cameras at the Karaj nuclear facility, which were damaged after a sabotage attack on the facility in June. This will allow for IAEA inspections to continue, which will hopefully have some positive effect in moving the JCPOA talks. Last week they didn’t end in a good place (we’ll save you the nitty gritty, but you can find some updates and explainers here, here, here, and here). The clock is beginning to run out, with Iran attempting to increase its leverage by enriching more uranium, and US and Israel discussing ‘alternatives’ if talks fail – like military intervention. A lot is on the line, and as Ryan Costello writes in Inkstick, “Negotiation is the Only Good Option for the US and Iran.”
NPR suing Pentagon over civilian deaths in al-Baghdadi raid. Last year, NPR reported that helicopter fire killed two civilians and maimed a third during the raid that killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria. It prompted a DoD investigation that later cleared troops of wrongdoing, saying that the casualties were ‘enemy combatants.’ NPR wants them to back that up with evidence, and is filing suit to demand that Central Command release all records and documents on the operation and investigation. They also want to know if any relatives of the deceased and wounded are eligible for condolence payments.
More light shed on the shadowy strike cell Talon Anvil. We recommend a new report by the New York Times, on the small special operations force that played an outsized role in the US campaign against ISIS between 2014 and 2019. The group, Talon Anvil (which officially never existed) was responsible for a whopping 112,000 bombs and missiles launched in the campaign, and played extremely loose with safeguards meant to protect civilians, killing many non-combatants.
Follow-up: Pentagon absolves US troops responsible for killing 10 civilians in Kabul. We’ve followed this story in our previous issues, which has come to it’s unfortunate but unsurprising end. Defense Secretary Austin deferred the decision to two generals on whether to formally punish the troops who killed 10 civilians in an airstrike as US forces were withdrawing from Afghanistan in August. The verdict: not even a slap on the wrist. We are still awaiting details on whether the families of the victims will be relocated or receive any sort of monetary compensation.
Long looks into the mirror lacking at Summit for Democracy. Last week, the Biden admin virtually hosted more than 100 countries at the inaugural ‘Summit for Democracy,’ which supposedly tackled the themes of “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.” There was no formal qualifying criteria for invited countries, some of which observers would hardly call democratic. Perhaps the bigger issue with the conference was the lack of self-recognition on part of the convening country’s role in supporting anti-democratic regimes across the world: about 3/4ths of them, actually (shout out to the earlier story on the Saudi arms sales). Branko Milanovic issues a scathing but insightful critique of the summit’s Cold Warish overtones at his substack.
New Costs of War report expands understanding of 2001 AUMF usage and other justifications. The report, by Stephanie Savell, offers a deeper look into the use of the 2001 AUMF to justify U.S. counterterrorism activities, finding a significant lack of government transparency and oversight, especially in its reports to Congress. It also looks into other sources of executive branch justification for operations, including Section 1202 and 127(e). All of these justification combined account for US military engagement in over 85 countries. Spencer Ackerman provides a great write up on the report.
AT HOME
More on utility data: Sen. Wyden wrote the CFPB to urge them “to prevent credit agencies from selling Americans’ personal data for purposes entirely unrelated to consumers’ credit or financial decisions, including to law enforcement, via data brokers.” But that’s not all — his letter revealed, among other things, that: credit companies are selling this sensitive data, including social security numbers, “in bulk;” the NCTUE (an exchange run by energy, cable, and phone companies) literally gave Equifax this data in exchange for Equifax operating the exchange’s credit reporting at no cost; the data relates to 171 million people; the exchange’s “board had no idea that their customers’ data was being sold;” and “the companies’ privacy lawyers learned about this practice for the first time when they were contact by my office.” Oh — plus “the big three credit agencies also sell credit-header data from the records they receive from banks,” which means we should all stay tuned to this space.
Popular family safety app Life360 is selling precise location data on tens of millions of users, according to this extraordinary piece by The Markup (which would be in the Top Line in most editions). The battle around checkbook surveillance continues to heat up as civil society investigators unearth more apps selling more data. Life360 is “used by 33 million people worldwide” and “has been marketed as a great way for parents to track their children’s movements using their cellphones.” The question now: how many parents will care that they aren’t the only ones tracking their kids?
U.S. lawmakers call for sanctions against Israel’s NSO Group and other spyware firms, per Reuters. The lawmakers notably include both HPSCI Chair Schiff and SSCI Member Wyden, as well as 14 other Democrats, who make the case that “[t]hese surveillance mercenaries” (in Wyden’s words) facilitated “disappearance, torture and murder of human rights activists and journalists” (in the letter’s words). This comes after Commerce added NSO to its list of banned entities in November.
MIT Technology Review: Data on the mess that is the China Initiative. In the first reporting of it’s kind, MIT Technology Review reports three key findings (but the whole thing is worth the read): The DOJ “has no definition of what constitutes a China Initiative case;” the effort has “increasingly charged academics with ‘research integrity’ issues,” rather than economic espionage (which is the mission of the effort); and “nearly 90% of the defendants charged are of Chinese heritage.”
WHAT’S HAPPENING?
Today @ 12:00 PM ET – Debate: Should the U.S. Seek to Contain China? Hosted by the Quincy Institute.
RELEVANT, TOO
Center for Democracy & Technology new report: Legal Loopholes and Data for Dollars: How Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies Are Buying Your Data from Brokers
Biden to Pentagon: Keep the War Machine Running (Jeremy Scahill on the administration’s Global Posture Review)
From Freddy Martinez at Open The Government: Checking in on my FOIA at DHS’s portal (which handles HALF of the entire load across the entire federal government) and their TLS certificate is expired
BOTTOM LINE
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