FISA Taken Out Behind Shed, Shot

Erin Simon — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:04:15 -0500

The unbelievably-named Protect America Act, which was rammed through both houses of Congress in the last hours of this year's legislative session, amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to give the government the legal ability to do just about everything it has so far been doing illegally.

The Act permits warrantless surveillance targeted at persons (even US citizens) reasonably believed to be located outside the US, which sounds like it legitimates what the government has been calling the Terrorist Surveillance Program. It also authorizes the government to secretly order communications service providers – phone companies, ISPs, email providers – to create back doors in their services to facilitate eavesdropping. Providers can appeal the orders to the secret FISA Court, but are immune from suit for participating. Those who refuse to comply can be held in contempt.

The Act also grandfathers in whatever current surveillance programs have received FISA Court approval. It's set to expire in six months, but programs authorized under the Act can last up to a year before needing re-authorization.

Plus, the person responsible for submitting a twice-yearly report on surveillance abuses is the Attorney General, the same Alberto Gonzales who has already lied under oath to Congress about the existence of surveillance abuses.

Democrats had prepared their own bill, featuring oversight and limits on domestic spying. President “30% Approval” Bush threatened to veto it and then blame Democrats for the lack of a bill. Facing Republican accusations that without this bill, Washington D.C. would be hit by a terrorist attack in August, the Democratically-controlled congress passed the bill.

Thumbnail photo courtesy nolifebeforecoffee.

Filesharing and National Security

Erin Simon — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:02:31 -0500

Filesharing may be dubiously legal (or maybe not so dubious), but until recently its only problem was IP infringement. That changed Tuesday at a hearing of the Government Reform Committee on inadvertent filesharing, where Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) said he was considering new laws to solve the threat P2P posed to homeland security. The threat? That government employees may accidentally share classified documents on their computers, making them available to terrists or organized crime. The problem with filesharing is that congressional staff are inept. Waxman said he didn't want to shut down the networks, but rather to strike “a balance that protects sensitive government, personal and corporate information and copyright laws.” The Committee had conducted searches on Limewire that turned up sensitive personal, corporate, and even military documents. From this and stories like the Department of Transportation official whose daughter installed a P2P program on the family computer and accidentally shared official DOT documents, the Committee concluded that national security was at risk.

Leaking classified documents is already a crime (unless, that is, you can un-classify them before people find out). To be sure, researchers have reported that sensitive personal information shows up on filesharing networks. Not everyone is privacy-savvy; spammers get some return on Nigerian Scam emails, too, but the solution isn't to ban email.

If your staff are too inept to keep their sensitive documents out of the folders they share on Limewire (what do they do, keep their Classified folder in their iTunes Library folder for safekeeping?), the problem isn't Limewire. The problem is your staff. It doesn't inspire a whole lot of confidence in Congress when they say government employees aren't smart enough to keep classified information classified; nor is it a confidence boost to hear that instead of prohibiting filesharing on government computers, the best solution they can think of is to outlaw it altogether.

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FISA Taken Out Behind Shed, Shot

Filesharing and National Security