End of the NSA's bulk phone collection program?

Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports that the Obama administration will unveil a "far reaching overhaul" of the NSA's bulk phone records program, also known as the 215 program for the section of the Patriot Act ostensibly that authorizes it.  Instead of bulk collection by the agency, the records would remain with the phone companies.  The NSA would be required to obtain a court order to retrieve specific records.

Georgetown professor David Cole, writing at justsecurity.org, is cautiously optimistic about the proposal. He point to the lessons we can draw from this development:

Two lessons seem critical to draw at this juncture. First, there is no substitute for transparency in a democracy. The much-lauded three branches of government did nothing to rein in this program as long as it remained a secret (and at least one member of the executive branch, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress about the program to keep it secret). And second, once surveillance is subject to public review and assessment, as it must be in any healthy democracy, dragnet surveillance is not likely to last long. By definition, such surveillance implicates us all. The only way to keep it in place is to keep it secret.

Should the government be able to deceive about activity that is legal?

Glenn Greenwald responds to critics who argue that NSA actions that are deemed legal should not be reported:

Mere legality is insufficient to shield a program from justifiable transparency; conversely, exposure of illegality is not the only form of valid reporting. Take the classic whistleblowing case of the Pentagon Papers: those documents really did not reveal illegality as much as they revealed government deceit, systematic lying to the American people about the Vietnam War. The fact that such official lying may have been legal hardly means that it should have remained concealed.

The fact is that American law imposes almost no restrictions on what the US Government is permitted to do to non-Americans, but that does not mean that all such conduct should be off-limits from media reporting just because it has been legalized. Drone strikes that kill innocent people are arguably legal because Congress has approved them, and are often concealed from the public through an abuse of secrecy rules: does that mean journalists should refrain from reporting them? After all, such reporting “exposes [arguably] lawful conduct deemed in the national interest by the democratically elected representatives of the people.”

Having the US government subject the entire world to a system of suspicionless collect-it-all surveillance goes far beyond what was known or expected or approved; it goes far beyond what is common. It has profound implications for all sorts of critical values. The fact that American law does not prohibit it does not remotely mean that citizens should be kept ignorant that it is happening. Independently, the notion that the US Government should be permitted by journalists to deceive its citizenry – by, for instance, pretending that it is China rather than itself engaging in this form of industrial espionage – simply because such deceit is “legal” is entirely noxious to the most basic tenets of what journalism should be.

 Via The Intercept

"Face Madness", Kim Byungkwan

"Everything there is out there in this world, more or less, provides familiar vision.

This familiar vision can be replaced as habit. This habitual vision which every object gives us and creates comfort. However it shuts down all the other possibilities.  The habitual vision or visual habit makes us go by the routine ways. It stops us from having adventure and checking out the wonders out there.

My work is trying to destroy, tear up, and reconstruct this habitual vision so that our vision can be expended to other images."

Kim Byungkwan is an artist based in Seoul, South Korea.  More of Byungkwan's work at the link, via PICDIT

Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, stepping down

Yesterday, Ryerson University announced that Dr. Cavoukian would be stepping down as Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner and take the position of Executive Director of the Ryerson University Institute for Privacy and Big Data.

Over the last 15 years as commissioner, Dr. Cavoukian has been at the forefront of reconciling the right to privacy with and increasingly networked and digital world.  She has been the chief promoter of the concept of Privacy by Design, "an approach to protecting privacy by embedding it into the design specifications of technologies, business practices, and physical infrastructures."

I look forward to more great work form Dr. Cavoukian in the future.

Myths and Propaganda: The Martyrdom of Hypatia

In this well sourced and informative look at the murder of Hypatia, the fourth century Greek Alexandrine Neoplatonist philosopher, Youtuber CoryTheRaven deconstructs the modern myths surrounding her death. 

In her book, Hypatia of Alexandria, Maria Dzielska illustrates how Hypatia became a powerful symbol of the persecution of science by the religious:

Long before the first scholarly attempts to reconstruct an accurate image of Hypatia, her life—marked by the dramatic circumstances of her death—had been imbued with legend. Artistically embellished, distorted by emotions and ideological biases, the legend has enjoyed wide popularity for centuries, obstructing scholarly endeavors to present Hypatia’s life impartially, and it persists to this day. Ask who Hypatia was, and you will probably be told: ‘‘She was that beautiful young pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces by monks (or, more generally, by Christians) in Alexandria in 415.’’ This pat answer would be based not on ancient sources, but on a mass of belletristic and historical literature, a representative sample of which is surveyed in this chapter. Most of these works present Hypatia as an innocent victim of the fanaticism of nascent Christianity, and her murder as marking the banishment of freedom of inquiry along with the Greek gods.

For a comprehensive scholarly review of the limited sources available on Hypatia's life and death, and the complex Alexandrian politics that surrounded her, read Dzielska's accessible and short book.

"Our Lady of Grace", Montreal

h/t Proteon at imgur.  Click here for original link.

The power of metadata

One of the documents disclosed by Edward Snowden was a FISA court order, issued under section 215 of the Patriot Act, mandating that Verizon provide records for all “communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” This data included information on the identities of the sender and the receiver, the date, time, duration, location and other unique identifiers of the communications such as IMSI and IMEI numbers.

NSA and Obama administration officials have defended this collection as reasonable and limited because it does not include the content of the calls. A recent study on the "sensitivity" of telephone metadata, how easy it is to draw sensitive inferences from metadata, provides evidence that contradict the administration's claims:

We used crowd sourced data to arrive at empirical answers. Since November, we have been conducting a study of phone metadata privacy. Participants run the MetaPhone app on their Android smartphone; it submits device logs and social network information for analysis. In previous posts, we have used the MetaPhone dataset to spot relationships, understand call graph interconnectivity, and estimate the identifiability of phone numbers. 

At the outset of this study, we shared the same hypothesis as our computer science colleagues—we thought phone metadata could be very sensitive. We did not anticipate finding much evidence one way or the other, however, since the MetaPhone participant population is small and participants only provide a few months of phone activity on average. 

We were wrong. We found that phone metadata is unambiguously sensitive, even in a small population and over a short time window. We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership, and more, using solely phone metadata.

It is also important to remember that the metadata collection program is only one of many different NSA programs that have been released.  When President Obama claims that there is no collection of content, he is saying that this particular program does not collect content.  The Wikipedia page on the global surveillance disclosures from 2013 to present is breathless in scope.  

On 18 March, for example, Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani of the Washington Post reported that the NSA "has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place"