Latest in Surveillance
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
In any discussion of cyber security, details matter.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has declassified its implementation report on Presidential Policy Directive 28: Signals Intelligence Activities (PPD-28). PPD-28 was signed by President Obama in January of 2014 and provides principles guiding “why, whether, when, and how the United States conducts signals intelligence activities.” The report was sent to Congress in early 2017.
On Sept. 13, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled that the United Kingdom’s bulk data-collection programs violate human-rights law by failing to incorporate adequate privacy safeguards and oversight—but that mass surveillance and intelligence sharing did not violate international law.
Last month, a divided chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (“ECHR”) (that is, a panel of seven judges from ECHR’s “First Section”) issued an opinion declaring several aspects of British surveillance law to be in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case is called, perhaps inevitably, Big Brother Watch and Others v. The United Kingdom. The opinion is ponderous, to say the least.
The White House recently released its National Cyber Strategy, and lawyers and privacy advocates alike should pay careful attention to its “priority actions” related to surveillance and criminal law reform.
According to Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley in Bloomberg Businessweek, China has recently engaged in bulk supply-chain sabotage, corrupting thousands of servers on computers that end up in the server rooms of major U.S. companies such as Amazon or Apple, government systems and other locations around the planet.
Chinese human rights practices are in the news again. The White House is reportedly weighing sanctions against Chinese officials and companies that are engaged in or facilitating the mass surveillance and detention of Uighurs in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit heard oral argument on Monday in United States v. Hasbajrami, which challenges the constitutionality of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The panel was composed of Judges Gerard Lynch, Christopher Droney, and Susan Carney. Listen below.
Professor Jennifer Daskal and Will Carter of the Center for Strategic and International Studies have written a terrific report, “Low-
The National Security Agency has announced a startling failure in the implementation of the USA Freedom Act of 2015. According to a public statement released by NSA on June 28, the call detail records that NSA has been receiving from telephone companies under the Act are infected with errors, NSA cannot isolate and correct those errors, and so it has decided to purge from its data repositories all of the CDRs ever received under the Act.