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Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers
- dangrossman 14y agoIs Google allowed to disclose the number of FISA requests it gets? I was under the impression NSLs were being used much less since the PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act (2005) weakened them, and were largely replaced by obtaining secret warrants from the FISA court. FISA is scarier. Under that law, secret surveillance can begin before a warrant is issued, warrants are issued by judges who keep no records of their opinions made in complete secret, and the surveillance can continue even during a challenge over and appeals of that warrant. When the EFF made a FOIA request for information about the FISA court, it got an ominous response: a letter saying there were documents they'd never see, zero court records, and a completely redacted version of an investigation into FISA's constitutionality. By completely redacted, I mean they returned pages where every word on every line was blanked. The only difference is that a FISA warrant has to be connected to a foreign person or body in some way. That can be as little as "we think by wiretapping this American, we'll learn something about this organization in another country". For those not living in the US, it means Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc. can be compelled to surveil your communication through their service secretly without an NSL.
- jonknee 14y agoYes. http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/03/transparency-report-shedding-more-light.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/03/transparency-... > Starting today, we’re now including data about NSLs in our Transparency Report. We’re thankful to U.S. government officials for working with us to provide greater insight into the use of NSLs.
- dangrossman 14y agoWhere does that say anything about FISA warrants?
- trotsky 14y agoIf you're a foreign national on foreign soil with data in us data centers held by us companies I don't believe it's common practice for these companies to require a warrant, fisa or otherwise, to share information with national services. Consider the case of the NSA warrantless wiretaps. The telcos were voluntarily providing bulk access, there was only a legal issue because US citizens on were involved.
- rdtsc 14y agoDidn't they get around that by deciding that copying the data and storing isn't considered "search", only when a person accesses and looks it when the Constitution starts to get in they of "business". I would pretty much guess that is the purpose of the data storage center NSA is building in Utah -- to just archive everything sent anywhere. It would also seem that when a warrant is obtained it is obtained for historical data and there is no window. So if you commit some act that is deemed dangerous enough to issue an warrant to search your history -- theoretically all your history since birth could be searched. Everything you ever did online that was recorded becomes game.
- kposehn 14y agoThis headline is quite misleading. Nowhere in it does Google actually state what the article claims in any way. If anything, what makes me happy is that Google can even disclose any of this at all. NSL's are a tool that has little oversight and a bit more awareness may help keep them from being abused.
- n3rdy 14y ago> This headline is quite misleading. Indeed, the FBI doesn't have customers either.
- gojomo 14y agoI'm happy Google has found a way to disclose this, too. The headline ("Google Says the FBI Is Secretly Spying on Some of Its Customers") seems fair to me. Google is reporting that it got more than 1 and less than 1,000 "National Security Letters", about more than 999 but less than 2,000 of Google's customers. Because the exact subjects of these letters can't be shared, the FBI's actions are being done "secretly". Because they allow the FBI to receive private information it wouldn't otherwise have without the subjects knowing, this activity fits the colloquial meaning of "spying". All the elements of the headline are supported by the reporting.
- dalke 14y agoWhat's the difference between "secretly spying" and "secretly investigating"? What's an example of a secret investigation which is not secret spying? Would these NSLs more appropriately be describe as investigation or spying? Why?
- gojomo 14y agoBoth are accurate enough for a headline. 'Spying' will often win as it's less than half the size (in letters and syllables). Also, usually when investigation requires crossing usual privacy boundaries, and perhaps compelling third-party disclosures, the subject gets to know, and even challenge the search/seizure. Or at the very least, some other impartial hearing occurs – for example, to get a search warrant. Not so with the 'National Security Letters'. So 'spying' is especially apt, compared to the normalcy and equitable procedures connoted by 'investigating'. There's a stronger case to be made that 'secretly' is redundant; it's already implied by 'spying'. But an oddity of the the NSL law is that you're not even supposed to reveal you've received one. Only now, many years later, are some fuzzy aggregate totals being revealed for prior years. So the extra heightening emphasis 'secretly spying' makes sense as well. Not only are the subjects unaware there online information is being collected, but the magnitude of the collection activity as a whole has been disguised.
- sigzero 14y agoI would be surprised if they were not "secretly spying".
- jasonjei 14y agoI don't know about you, but the article points out those complying with NSL demands blindly even wrote NSLs for the FBI. That's pretty scary.
- riazrizvi 14y agoIt's headlines like this that make me wonder if my Give-a-fuck isn't just broken.
- GHFigs 14y ago"Google says some of its customers are the target of authorized FBI investigations, but we've got to sex it up for Threat Level"
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- kevinalexbrown 14y agoThe scary part about surveillance is that we built it, the government didn't. Instead of the government mandating some Orwellian telescreen that nefariously records everything you write, or a national registry that lists who your friends are, where you went to school, and where you log in from, we built schemes that would record everything anyway for other purposes, like facebook and gmail, and then handed the keys over. Evgeny Morozov pointed this out when he mentioned that the KGB used to torture people for this information. But we've voluntarily built and submitted to it! I don't dispute the need for surveillance, so what can be done? The best I can think of is a throwback to Bill Gates' emphasis on measurement. Transparency is important precisely because if you can't observe something, you don't have any clue what it is. I know this sounds too political, but the very systems we're worried about are ones that several people who frequent this place helped build, for different purposes. There's no way to know exactly how something you build will be used, but there is a way to monitor it, and that requires transparency almost by definition.
- trotsky 14y agoThis is worth watching if you're thinking about these issues: Blackhat 2010 - Changing Threats to Privacy Moxie Marlinspike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JKqJ7gt5yk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JKqJ7gt5yk It's a very interesting analysis of opt-in surveillance. I think he makes a credible argument that many of these technologies are being at least partially prompted or shaped by state interests.
- rdtsc 14y agoIt is also worth pointing out that there is active harassment of people like Moxie, Jacob Appelbaum, wikileaks founder is in some embassy hiding, Aaron is gone. It goes from interrogations on border crossings, confiscation of electronic devices, drummed up charges (didn't DoJ admit Aaron was hounded down mostly because of his political views?). There is a price paid. Yes I know, those who live(ed) in totalitarian regimes might laugh -- "what is confiscation of a cell phone compared to the disappearance of my family?" On an absolute scale yes, true, but if you look at it from another way we are already comparing this country to brutal totalitarian regimes, that says something too perhaps.
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- pohl 14y agoThe FBI may be spying on some of Google's users, but the odds that they are spying on Google's customers is pretty slim.
- bherms 14y agoWhy don't we stop working on petitions to the whitehouse to let us have more fun with our cellphones and start putting more effort into holding our politicians accountable for things like: 1) letting massive bank fraud slide at the expense of the taxpayer 2) murdering innocent civilians through massive amounts of drone strikes 3) allowing indefinite detention of American citizens 4) spying on all of us via internet and soon to come drones 5) all of the other countless civil liberty and constitutional violations happening We're the people who affect the most change in our country right now, but we often focus more on the easy issues that benefit us directly and immediately while glossing over the ones that slowly eat away at the principles our country was founded upon. edit: wanted to continue this rant a little more... I far more often hear stuff like "OMG, I can't believe Instagram changed their user policy and now they technically have a right to use a photo I uploaded in an ad for their company! This is ludicrous and they should be ashamed!" than I do ones akin to "I can't believe the government murdered an teenage American citizen without trial or due process because they believed he might be connected to terrorism." It's a bit sad, this echo chamber we live in.
- javert 14y agoWhy? Because our moral and political culture, as a society, is in the shitter. It's probably too late.
- dntrkv 14y agoWhen was the moral and political culture not in the shitter? edit: And when was it not "too late"?
- notdrunkatall 14y agoThe sky is always falling, and we're always digging deeper holes to prevent ourselves from being crushed.
- javert 14y agoBefore the destruction of the Enlightenment by philosophers like Immanuel Kant.
- btilly 14y agoNone of this is a surprise. Google does business in the USA, and is forced to follow US law. Which it does. Despite the USA not being nearly the country that I wish it was on these matters, on the whole the USA is not horrible either. See http://communications-media.lawyers.com/privacy-law/Your-Email-isnt-as-Private-As-You-May-Think-It-Is.html http://communications-media.lawyers.com/privacy-law/Your-Ema... for a glance at what is and isn't protected here. See this article for an idea of how tiny the affected numbers are in the USA. What is far more troubling is that Google also has to follow the law in other countries that it does business in. Many of those countries have different laws and corruption levels than the USA. While Google did choose to stand up to China, they don't in many, many other countries. In fact I am personally aware of an HN user outside of the USA who was physically tracked down through information coughed up by Google in response to bogus legal requests. (I will not confirm or deny any information about this case beyond what I just said, so don't bother asking.) My non-US social circle isn't that big, so if I'm personally aware of it happening, how many people does it happen to that I don't hear about? Frankly the non-US situation scares me more than the US one.
- ajross 14y agoIndeed. Also on the "bright side interpretation" is the fact that only about a thousand of these NSLs are issued per year (and given Google's size, that's probably a good guess at the total number of such investigations). A thousand isn't small, but at the same time it's only a tiny fraction of the number of law enforcement investigations. At least this is proof the NSL mechanism isn't being used for blanket surveillance state activity. That's something.
- olefoo 14y agoWhat if the questions being asked are more along the lines of, please give us the full account archive of everyone who's ever emailed an address in a .ir domain? Or, here is a semantic filter that you must apply to all mail that transits your system, hand over everything related to any account sending or receiving mail that it evaluates as a match. Given the lack of transparency, and the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the National Security Letters infrastructure. It would be a good idea if we had a list of the sorts of things. Personally, I'm comfortable with a few civil liberties being trampled in pursuit of loose nukes and engineered plagues; but I'm much less sympathetic to a policeman who wants updated intel on what a bunch of hippies are planning to write on their signs at the next Occupy protest.
- gabeio 14y agoAnyone else notice that the United states is more than every other country in data request and 14* in user accounts. The percentage of data produced being almost 100% is just scary beyond belief.
- will_brown 14y agoI tend to think these National Security Letters violate the 4th Amendment by authorizing warrant-less searches and seizures - but is it really a secret the US government is doing that? Wireless searches of phone calls, Internet activity (Web, e-mail, etc.), text messaging, and other communication has been public knowledge since Attorney General Alberto Gonzales confirmed the existence of the program, first reported in a December 16, 2005, article in The New York Times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co... In 2006 EFF filed lawsuit against AT&T after the US government installed monitoring equipment in an AT&T's switch room. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T Warrantless searches and seizures and monitoring? Please that is so...1984. On August 30, 2010, the CCR and ACLU filed a "targeted killing" lawsuit, naming President Barack Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as defendants. They sought an injunction preventing targeted killing of US citizens, and also sought to require the government to disclose the standards under which U.S. citizens may be "targeted for death". Judge John D. Bates dismissed the lawsuit, holding the claims were judicially unreviewable under the political question doctrine inasmuch as he was questioning a decision that the U.S. Constitution committed to the political branches. Back to the OP the only thing that shocks me is that Google and/or the individual employees, who are being personally slapped with a non-court ordered gag-order, have not sued the US Government. I am sure the EFF or ACLU would join as co-counsel to defer some of the resources, and if Google keeps complying maybe they will sue Google like EFF sued AT&T.
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- pavs 14y agoAnother reason why you should self-host everything. Its not easy and can sometimes be a pain in the neck. But its worth knowing that you are in charge of your own information. http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/ http://www.slashgeek.net/2013/02/17/self-host-everything/
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- walshemj 14y agoSo are Google saying that there should be ZERO ability for law enforcement or TLA's to enforce the equivalents of HOW's (home office warrants) on their customers. If you don't like the heat don't run gmail G+ and get out of the phone biz.
- rossjudson 14y agoYeah, and I heard that the government used to get these things called wiretaps to listen in on people's conversations, and THEY DIDN'T EVEN TELL THE PEOPLE THEY WERE LISTENING IN. Imagine that. Google is doing the right thing by publishing information that allows us to see the scope of the activity by the government. If part of an active investigation, then there's no need for anything further.