Latest in Surveillance
As Bobby and others have already noted, the NSA announced Friday that it is ending “about” collection under Section 702’s upstream component. I want to inject into the discussion a few issues that I haven’t yet seen broached elsewhere.
As Quinta has already flagged, the New York Times has reported that NSA has stopped the practice of “about” collection under Section 702 of FISA. NSA has now released a set of statements.
According to a New York Times report by Charlie Savage, the National Security Agency is ceasing to conduct "about" collection under Section 702 due to difficulty in complying with regulations imposed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Patterns of conduct permitted by the rules on unmasking might nonetheless raise legitimate concerns—particularly during the sensitive inter-party transition period.
Yesterday morning, Microsoft released, along with its most recent biannual transparency reports, a 2014 National Security Letter (NSL) from the FBI which sought “data belonging to belonging to a customer of our consumer services,” according to the company’s press release on the matter.
An op-ed primer on the basics of unmasking.
A handy FAQ-style overview of the easily-confused issues associated with the surveillance side of the controversy surrounding HPSCI Chair Devin Nunes.
The U.S. intelligence community is on the verge of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy it has not experienced since the 1970s.
Given all the public hoohah recently over incidental collection, I'd actually like to take a moment to thank the FBI for a recent incident of what appears to be incidental collection of communications about, well, me.
A few days, ago, I wrote this post exploring a 1945 memo from TJAG Myron Cramer regarding various legal issues surrounding the program that evolved into Operation Shamrock (as well as various other, more-conventional, collection activities). At the time I didn't feel free to provide a PDF of the memo itself, since I'd gotten it through the (for-pay) ProQuest database.