Latest in Surveillance
Last week, reports surfaced from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that the NSA may be shutting down the Section 215 program accessing domestic call detail records (CDRs).
An apparent disclosure from a congressional staffer on the Lawfare Podcast has generated considerable buzz regarding the fate of a part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that currently
This is part of a series of essays from the Crypto 2018 Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance.
In August 2018, the leading international academic conference on cryptography hosted a Workshop on Encryption and Surveillance. The workshop explored both legal and technical aspects of the ongoing debate over the impact of strong encryption and law enforcement surveillance capabilities. The workshop was co-chaired by Tim Edgar (Brown University), Joan Feigenbaum (Yale University), and me. As we described it at the time:
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.
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).