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How americans have viewed government surveillance and privacy since snowden leaks.

Five years ago this month, news organizations broke stories about federal government surveillance of phone calls and electronic communications of U.S. and foreign citizens, based on classified documents leaked by then-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The initial stories and subsequent coverage sparked a global debate about surveillance practices, data privacy and leaks.

Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of government information-gathering and surveillance, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys since the NSA revelations:

1 Americans were divided about the impact of the leaks immediately following Snowden’s disclosures, but a majority said the government should prosecute the leaker. About half of Americans (49%) said the release of the classified information served the public interest, while 44% said it harmed the public interest, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted days after the revelations. While adults younger than 30 were more likely than older Americans to say the leaks served the public interest (60%), there was no partisan divide in these views.

At the same time, 54% of the public said the government should pursue a criminal case against the person responsible for the leaks, a view more commonly held among Republicans and Democrats (59% each) than independents (48%). Snowden was charged with espionage in June 2013. He then fled the U.S. and continues to live in Russia under temporary asylum. 

2 Americans became somewhat more disapproving of the government surveillance program itself in the ensuing months , even after then-President Barack Obama outlined changes to NSA data collection . The share of Americans who disapproved of the government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts increased from 47% in the days after the initial disclosure to 53% the following January.

Other research by the Center also showed that a majority of adults (56%) did not think courts were providing adequate limits on the phone and internet data being collected. Moreover, 70% believed that the government was using surveillance data for purposes beyond anti-terror efforts. Some 27% said they thought the government listened to the actual contents of their calls or read their emails. (Similar figures emerged in a 2017 survey .)

On a different question, 34% of those who were aware of the government surveillance programs said they had taken at least one step to hide or shield their information from the government, such as by changing their privacy settings on social media.

6 The vast majority of Americans (93%) said that being in control of who can get information about them is important, according to a 2015 report . At the same time, a similarly large majority (90%) said that controlling what information is collected about them is important.

7 Some 49% said in 2016 that they were not confident in the federal government’s ability to protect their data . About three-in-ten Americans (28%) were not confident at all in the government’s ability to protect their personal records, while 21% were not too confident. Just 12% of Americans were very confident in the government’s ability to protect their data (49% were at least somewhat confident).

Americans had more confidence in other institutions, such as cellphone manufacturers and credit card companies, to protect their data. Around seven-in-ten cellphone owners were very (27%) or somewhat (43%) confident that cellphone manufacturers could keep their personal information safe. Similarly, around two-thirds of online adults were very (20%) or somewhat (46%) confident that email providers would keep their information safe and secure.

8 Roughly half of Americans (49%) said their personal data were less secure compared with five years prior , according to the 2016 survey . The Snowden revelations were followed in the ensuing months and years with accounts of major data breaches affecting the government and commercial firms. These vulnerabilities appear to have taken a toll. Americans ages 50 and older were particularly likely to express concerns over the safety of their data: 58% of these older Americans said their data were less secure than five years prior.  Younger adults were less concerned about their data being less secure; still, 41% of 18- to 49-year-olds felt their personal information was less secure than five years earlier.

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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Public Surveillance to Keep Us Healthy and Protect Our Privacy

Photo: CATHERINE LAI/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary by Glenn S. Gerstell

Published April 16, 2020

If the Black Death in 1348 and the Spanish Flu in 1918 accelerated existing but nascent societal trends, what developments will the Covid-19 pandemic jump-start? While some developments will be revealed only retrospectively, one is immediately manifest: public health requirements will force us to decide just how much technology-fueled surveillance we really want.

Pending an effective vaccine or cure for the new disease, it is inescapable that we will need at scale and speed at least two tools we do not currently have: (1) contact tracing, to track the interactions of infected individuals so as to reduce the spread of the disease, and (2) testing, to determine who is currently infected as well as who has been infected (and presumably has some immunity). This will require gathering information about individuals on a massive scale, analyzing the enormous amounts of data with the help of artificial intelligence, and reporting the results. 

The anodyne approach is to call these activities public health monitoring, but from the vantagepoint of someone who dealt every day with technology-enabled surveillance issues, it is crucial that we recognize it as surveillance, in order to not shy away from important policy questions. In any case, we would use surveillance to achieve actual public health outcomes—ranging from simply alerting someone that they were in contact with a disease carrier to reallocating ventilators and personal protective equipment to anticipated virus hot spots. It is by no means clear, however, that our society will embrace the full potential that current technology has to offer.

Some Asian countries, with different cultures and government models, have been the most willing to utilize surveillance tools in aid of controlling the epidemic, but even Europe, with its strong privacy laws, has turned to technology to track individuals. Singapore does contact tracing through a government-sponsored smartphone app called TraceTogether; South Korea and Taiwan have aggressively monitored individual body temperatures in public spaces; parts of Italy are using phone geolocation data to track individual movements; and Germany and the United Kingdom are actively discussing the use of individual “immunity certificates” to determine who can go back to work. But the leader in relying on technology to make public health decisions in the pandemic is, not surprisingly, China, which (through an Alibaba affiliate) is assigning red, yellow, or green codes to its citizens, barring or entitling them to use public transportation or resume work, depending on whether they test positive or negative for Covid-19. 

Meanwhile, here in the United States, we are struggling with shortages of everything from testing kits to medical gear. But even belatedly, if we are to break free from current national stay-at-home rules, virtually every public health expert counsels us to undertake widespread monitoring and tracking coupled with effective utilization of the resulting data to curtail disease spread and to assist hospitals and their professionals. It remains to be seen whether the necessary surveillance will be in the form of cellphone Bluetooth contact tracking apps of the type recently proposed by Google and Apple; collection of resting heart rates from smartwatches and fitness bands (revealing incipient outbreaks of disease); detailed amassing of passengers’ air travel data; satellite-based or cellphone-generated tracking of individual and automobile movements to reveal shopping, commuting, or other patterns; or ubiquitous public testing with results centrally aggregated and analyzed. Technology is currently able to do all this, and more.

The goal here is not to prescribe or predict which types of monitoring and data collection would be best but to outline the challenges that will inevitably confront us and to offer possible solutions. The privacy and efficiency challenges include ensuring there is solid evidence that any surveillance and data analysis are effective, fair, and non-discriminatory, that there is no “mission creep” such that data ends up being used for other purposes, and that it complies with law. Using our decades-old and relatively refined set of principles governing surveillance for national security purposes, here are six interrelated considerations we must keep in mind for a new public health scheme: 

• The most obvious one of course is determining the scope of collection , which is not so much a function of technology as it is of ascertaining precisely which data will be most effective and available. Ideally, the collection could be narrowly tailored to only that data that will generate the operational outcome needed, for example, telling us who sat within three rows of an infected individual on an airplane. Presumably, to fulfil public health goals, there would be multiple types of collection of data, some of which would be used on a stand-alone basis and some of which would be combined for more powerful individualized analysis. Determining the extent to which anonymized mass data can be cross-analyzed and enriched to reveal individual identities, say, to warn a particular person that they were exposed to a virus carrier, will of course be a fundamental issue to be resolved.
• Who collects, analyzes, and maintains the data is an equally important issue and one which will in part turn on the type of collection. A threshold question is whether the government or private sector is doing the collecting, and the answer, explored further below, is likely to be both. We might well want Google and Apple to help us with cellphone data, and we might well want government to monitor individual body temperatures at airports. Collection is the easier part to decide since in most cases deciding what we want to surveil will tell us who has the ability to obtain that data. The more difficult question is who conducts the analysis and who keeps the data, and almost surely the answer should not be the collector.
• Determining who is permitted to have access to the data and what types of searches of the database may be allowed will also be critical, to prevent misuse. In the national security context, for example, there are detailed rules allowing some telephone data to be searched by special government analysts for only bona fide security purposes, not for checking up on the calls made by the analyst’s spouse.
• Getting rid of the data after it has served its original purpose, or perhaps moving it to highly restricted space for archival purposes if truly needed, will be important. Again, to use a national security example, almost all terrorist-related data the NSA collects is required by law to be deleted after a set period of time, in part to minimize the temptation to use it for other purposes.
• A combination of public reporting and independent oversight will be crucial to inspiring public confidence and trust in whatever surveillance mechanisms are adopted for public health purposes. Transparency will enable the public to understand exactly what is being collected and for what purpose and thus to accept the associated invasion of privacy (however it may be perceived). Oversight similarly instills confidence that the rules are being followed and, in this case, that overzealous efforts will not be made in the name of public health to uncover other information that we are not consciously consenting to revealing about our personal and business lives.
• Illustrating the interrelationship of all these considerations, the answers to the foregoing factors will enable us to determine what legal restrictions need to be met. Even though the private sector in the aggregate currently collects and analyzes far more data about individuals and businesses than the federal government does, there are relatively few legal restrictions on the private sector in that regard, as the United States does not have baseline national privacy laws—unlike Europe and Japan. Aside from a scattering of state laws, most of the meaningful privacy restrictions operating on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like are contractual (through user consent).

By contrast, for the federal government, electronic surveillance is subject to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which in essence requires that the surveillance not be “unreasonable.” Applying a constitutional amendment adopted in 1792 to today’s technology involves considerable intellectual leaps, as was illustrated by the Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement in this area, in the Carpenter case of 2018, which said that it was unreasonable for government (in the absence of a search warrant) to acquire more than seven days’ worth of cellphone geolocation data on a particular individual. Left unsaid was what other types or durations of surveillance might be reasonable. Suffice it to say that, at least on an anonymized or mass level, the general collection and analysis of data for public health purposes will not run afoul of the Constitution; and even if individual data were involved, it should be possible to construct a constitutionally permissible scheme. A clearly defined statute authorizing government surveillance with appropriate safeguards, especially when balanced against critical public safety needs, will go a long way to assuring constitutional reasonableness.

The resolution of most of these considerations will hinge on what type of data is being collected, and it is thus not possible to supply one answer to address all possibilities. On the other hand, the question of “who” can be preliminarily addressed before we sort out the other details. That question is equally important and will be the deciding factor in how effective the endeavor will be and how much public confidence it will enjoy.

We will need a solution that is seen as effective and legitimate and thus worthy of public compliance and trust. Only government can furnish the needed sense of authority and legitimacy, and yet the private sector clearly has a vital role to play, both in collecting and in offsetting concerns over too much government involvement. Within government, while our spy agencies such as the NSA and CIA have experience in dealing with electronic surveillance, they manifestly should not have (and do not want to have) anything to do with the completely separate public health mission. At most, they, along with entities such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, might supply technical expertise in narrow channels to whatever entity is chosen to handle the data, assisting in system design and the role of artificial intelligence, for example. While there will be multiple streams of collection and resultant data, to be effective it should be analyzed in one central entity so that information from one source can inform the others, producing better public health decisions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite some initial missteps in the pandemic, is well-versed in dealing with large quantities of public health data and thus will continue to have a leading voice. Some broader entity, however, should knit together the public and private roles and help achieve all the disparate goals. 

One such institution might be the universally respected National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which is already active in Covid-19 research. The congressionally chartered umbrella organization, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which traces its history to legislation signed by President Lincoln, is not an operating entity of the federal government. Nonetheless, with some limited statutory modifications, it could be in a position to serve as an oversight board of directors or advisers to whatever entity becomes the central operator of the public health monitoring and analytic regime. There will be a temptation to install current members of Congress directly in a supervisory function. But, as in the case of national security surveillance—which instead is directly overseen by the judiciary and various entities in the executive branch—it makes more sense to rely on Congress for general oversight powers.

Another understandable temptation to be resisted as we seek a public health surveillance system is to address public health deficiencies comprehensively. More likely to be successful, however, is specific legislation to deal with the immediate monitoring need. The history of our response to the 9/11 attacks and, more recently, cybersecurity threats, shows us that it is easier to tailor legislation to address specific, current requirements and much more difficult to restructure government, due to turf wars within the executive branch and the dispersal of authority among congressional committees. These are the issues that should be, and undoubtedly will be, grappled with by one or more national commissions, which are better suited to handle these political and policy issues.

We should put politics aside as much as possible, accept an independent entity such as the NAS to play a critical role in overseeing a true public-private partnership, and start to make the smart decisions needed to quickly adopt the type of surveillance needed for our nation’s public health.

Glenn S. Gerstell is a senior adviser (non-resident) with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and served as the general counsel of the National Security Agency and Central Security Service from 2015 to 2020.

Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).

© 2020 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.

Glenn S. Gerstell

Programs & projects.

The Ethics of Surveillance

Introduction to surveillance.

Surveillance is, simply put, the observation and/or monitoring of a person. Coming from the French word for "looking upon," the term encompasses not only visual observation but also the scrutiny of all behavior, speech, and actions. Prominent examples of surveillance include surveillance cameras, wiretaps, GPS tracking, and internet surveillance.

One-way observation is in some ways an expression of control. Just as having a stranger stare at you for an extended period of time can be uncomfortable and hostile, it is no different from being under constant surveillance, except that surveillance is often done surreptitiously and at the behest of some authority.

Todays technological capabilities take surveillance to new levels; no longer are spyglasses and "dropping" from the eaves of a roof necessary to observe individuals - the government can and does utilize methods to observe all the behavior and actions of people without the need for a spy to be physically present. Clearly, these advances in technology have a profound impact with regards to the ethics of placing individual under surveillance&emdash;in our modern society, where so many of our actions are observable, recorded, searchable, and traceable, close surveillance is much more intrusive than it has been in the past.

Surveillance and Physical Searches

Particularly interesting about government surveillance is that in the United States surveillance is not held to the same standards of accountability&emdash;as the Constitution protects American citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures, physical searches of individuals may not be conducted without a warrant issued by a judge. However, after the passage of FISA and subsequent laws, citizens have not been given the same protection with regards to electronic surveillance. As there have been massive changes in technology and lifestyle since the 1970s, electronic surveillance could be considered much more invasive than a physical search, yet as has been made clear in the legal section of this website, it is in fact much easier for government agents to perform surveillance. Why there is such disparity between these standards to us a matter of serious concern.

"If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear."

This is a typical argument used by governments and other groups to justify their spying activities. Upon cursory inspection, it seems to make sense&emdash;as most people are law-abiding citizens, most ostensibly will not be targeted for surveillance and it will not impact their lives, while making their lives more comfortable and safer through the elimination of criminals. Thus, the government's use of closed-circuit television cameras in public spaces, warrantless wiretapping, and library record checks have the potential to save lives from criminals and terrorists with only minimal invasion of its citizens' privacy.

First, as a mental exercise, we ask that the reader consider that these arguments could easily be applied to asking all citizens to carry location tracking devices&emdash;it would make tracing criminal acts much easier, and that it could easily be argued that people refusing to carry these devices only do so because they have something to hide. It is a matter of course that most people in our society would object to this solution, not because they wish to commit any wrongdoings, but because it is invasive and prone to abuse. Now consider that, given current technology, the government already has the ability to track a known target's movements to a reasonable degree, and has easy access to information such as one's purchasing habits, online activities, phone conversations, and mail. Though implementing mandatory location tracking devices for the whole population is certainly more invasive than the above, we argue that current practices are analogous, extreme, and equally unacceptable.

Next, this argument fails to take into consideration a number of important issues when collecting personally identifiable data or recordings&emdash;first, that such practices create an archive of information that is vulnerable to abuse by trusted insiders; one example emerged in September of 2007 when Benjamin Robinson, a special agent of the Department of Commerce, was indicted for using a government database called the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS) for tracking the travel patterns of an ex-girlfriend and her family. Records show that he used the system illegally at least 163 times before he was caught (Mark 2007). With the expansion of surveillance, such abuses could become more numerous and more egregious as the amount of personal data collected increases.

In addition, allowing surreptitious surveillance of one form, even limited in scope and for a particular contingency, encourages government to expand such surveillance programs in the future. It is our view that the danger of a "slippery slope" scenario cannot be dismissed as paranoia - as a prominent example, the collection of biometric has expanded immensely in the past several years. Many schools in the UK collect fingerprints of children as young as six without parental consent (Doward 2006), and fingerprinting in American schools has been widespread since the mid-eighties (NYT National Desk 1983). Now, the discussion has shifted towards DNA collection&emdash;British police are now pushing for the DNA collection of children who "exhibit behavior indicating they may become criminals in later life" (Townsend and Asthana 2008), while former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani has encouraged the collection of DNA data of newborns (Lambert 1998).

When data is collected, whether such data remains used for its stated purpose after its collection has been called into question, even by government officials: the European Data Protection Supervisor has acknowledged that even when two databases of information are created for specific, distinct purposes, in a phenomenon known as 'function creep' they could be combined with one another to form a third with a purpose for which the first two were not built (eGov Monitor Weekly 2006). This non-uniqueness and immutability of information provides great potential for abuse by individuals and institutions.

When is surveillance appropriate?

A. the means.

Harm: does the technique cause unwarranted physical or psychological harm?

Boundary: does the technique cross a personal boundary without permission (whether involving coercion or deception or a body, relational or spatial border)?

Trust: does the technique violate assumptions that are made about how personal information will be treated such as no secret recordings?

Personal relationships: is the tactic applied in a personal or impersonal setting?

Invalidity: does the technique produce invalid results?

B. The Data Collection Context

Awareness: are individuals aware that personal information is being collected, who seeks it and why?

Consent: do individuals consent to the data collection?

Golden rule: would those responsbile for the surveillance (both the decision to apply it and its actual application) agree to be its subjects under the conditions in which they apply it to others?

Minimization: does a principle of minimization apply?

Public decision-making: was the decision to use a tactic arrived at through some public discussion and decision making process?

Human review: is there human review of machine generated results?

Right of inspection: are people aware of the findings and how they were created?

Right to challenge and express a grievance: are there procedures for challenging the results, or for entering alternative data or interpretations into the record?

Redress and sanctions: if the individual has been treated unfairly and procedures violated, are there appropriate means of redress? Are there means for discovering violations and penalties to encourage responsible surveillant behavior?

Adequate data stewardship and protection: can the security of the data be adequately protected?

Equality-inequality regarding availability and application: a) is the means widely available or restricted to only the most wealthy, powerful or technologically sophisticated? b) within a setting is the tactic broadly applied to all people or only to those less powerful or unable to resist c) if there are means of resisting the provision of personal information are these equally available, or restricted to the most privileged?

The symbolic meaning of a method: what does the use of a method communicate more generally?

The creation of unwanted precedents: is it likely to create precedents that will lead to its application in undesirable ways?

Negative effects on surveillors and third parties: are there negative effects on those beyond the subject?

Beneficiary: does application of the tactic serve broad community goals, the goals of the object of surveillance or the personal goals of the data collector?

Proportionality: is there an appropriate balance between the importance of the goal and the cost of the means?

Alternative means: are other less costly means available?

Consequences of inaction: where the means are very costly, what are the consequences of taking no surveillance action?

Protections: are adequate steps taken to minimize costs and risk?

Appropriate vs. inappropriate goals: are the goals of the data collection legitimate?

The goodness of fit between the means and the goal: is there a clear link between the information collected and the goal sought?

Information used for original vs. other unrelated purposes: is the personal information used for the reasons offered for its collection and for which consent may have been given and does the data stay with the original collector, or does it migrate elsewhere?

Failure to share secondary gains from the information: is the personal data collected used for profit without permission from, or benefit to, the person who provided it?

Unfair disadvantage: is the information used in such a way as to cause unwarranted harm or disadvantage to its subject?

In general, we feel that surveillance can be ethical, but that there have to exist reasonable, publicly accessible records and accountability for those approving and performing the surveillance in question.

The Dangers of Surveillance

• Neil M. Richards
• Addressing the Harm of Total Surveillance: A Reply to Professor Neil Richards  by  Danielle Keats Citron , David Gray
• See full issue

From the Fourth Amendment to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , and from the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to films like Minority Report and The Lives of Others , our law and culture are full of warnings about state scrutiny of our lives. These warnings are commonplace, but they are rarely very specific. Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad and why we should be wary of it. To the extent that the answer has something to do with “privacy,” we lack an understanding of what “privacy” means in this context and why it matters. We’ve been able to live with this state of affairs largely because the threat of constant surveillance has been relegated to the realms of science fiction and failed totalitarian states.

But these warnings are no longer science fiction. The digital technologies that have revolutionized our daily lives have also created minutely detailed records of those lives. In an age of terror, our government has shown a keen willingness to acquire this data and use it for unknown purposes. We know that governments have been buying and borrowing private-sector databases, and we recently learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been building a massive data and supercomputing center in Utah, apparently with the goal of intercepting and storing much of the world’s Internet communications for decryption and analysis.

Although we have laws that protect us against government surveillance, secret government programs cannot be challenged until they are discovered. And even when they are, our law of surveillance provides only minimal protections. Courts frequently dismiss challenges to such programs for lack of standing, under the theory that mere surveillance creates no harms. The Supreme Court recently reversed the only major case to hold to the contrary, in Clapper v. Amnesty International USA , finding that the respondents’ claim that their communications were likely being monitored was “too speculative.”

But the important point is that our society lacks an understanding of why (and when) government surveillance is harmful. Existing attempts to identify the dangers of surveillance are often unconvincing, and they generally fail to speak in terms that are likely to influence the law. In this Article, I try to explain the harms of government surveillance. Drawing on law, history, literature, and the work of scholars in the emerging interdisciplinary field of “surveillance studies,” I offer an account of what those harms are and why they matter. I will move beyond the vagueness of current theories of surveillance to articulate a more coherent understanding and a more workable approach.

At the level of theory, I will explain why and when surveillance is particularly dangerous and when it is not. First, surveillance is harmful because it can chill the exercise of our civil liberties. With respect to civil liberties, consider surveillance of people when they are thinking, reading, and communicating with others in order to make up their minds about political and social issues. Such intellectual surveillance is especially dangerous because it can cause people not to experiment with new, controversial, or deviant ideas. To protect our intellectual freedom to think without state over-sight or interference, we need what I have elsewhere called “intellectual privacy.” A second special harm that surveillance poses is its effect on the power dynamic between the watcher and the watched. This disparity creates the risk of a variety of harms, such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance.

At a practical level, I propose a set of four principles that should guide the future development of surveillance law, allowing for a more appropriate balance between the costs and benefits of government surveillance. First, we must recognize that surveillance transcends the public/private divide . Public and private surveillance are simply related parts of the same problem, rather than wholly discrete. Even if we are ultimately more concerned with government surveillance, any solution must grapple with the complex relationships between government and corporate watchers. Second, we must recognize that secret surveillance is illegitimate and prohibit the creation of any domestic-surveillance programs whose existence is secret. Third, we should recognize that total surveillance is illegitimate and reject the idea that it is acceptable for the government to record all Internet activity without authorization. Government surveillance of the Internet is a power with the potential for massive abuse. Like its precursor of telephone wiretapping, it must be subjected to meaningful judicial process before it is authorized. We should carefully scrutinize any surveillance that threatens our intellectual privacy. Fourth, we must recognize that surveillance is harmful . Surveillance menaces intellectual privacy and increases the risk of blackmail, coercion, and discrimination; accordingly, we must recognize surveillance as a harm in constitutional standing doctrine. Explaining the harms of surveillance in a doctrinally sensitive way is essential if we want to avoid sacrificing our vital civil liberties.

I develop this argument in four steps. In Part I, I show the scope of the problem of modern “surveillance societies,” in which individuals are increasingly monitored by an overlapping and entangled assemblage of government and corporate watchers. I then develop an account of why this kind of watching is problematic. Part II shows how surveillance menaces our intellectual privacy and threatens the development of individual beliefs in ways that are inconsistent with the basic commitments of democratic societies. Part III explores how surveillance distorts the power relationships between the watcher and the watched, enhancing the watcher’s ability to blackmail, coerce, and discriminate against the people under its scrutiny. Part IV explores the four principles that I argue should guide the development of surveillance law, to protect us from the substantial harms of surveillance.

May 20, 2013

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• Lior Jacob Strahilevitz

Does the Past Matter? On the Origins of Human Rights

An analysis of competing histories of the origins of international human rights law

• Philip Alston

Civil Liberties and Law in the Era of Surveillance

• November 13, 2014
• Marguerite Rigoglioso
• Comments ( 1 )
• Fall 2014 – Issue 91
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It may no longer be an exaggeration to say that big brother is watching . When Edward Snowden leaked classified government documents last year, many were surprised to learn just how much access the National Security Agency (NSA) has to the personal email and phone records of ordinary citizens. Those revelations about the scope and extent of surveillance by American intelligence agencies have prompted a national debate about civil liberties in an age of new technology that enables the government to both collect and store vast amounts of personal information about its citizens. The discussion is also surfacing in local communities where technology allows law enforcement to indiscriminately gather information on law-abiding citizens—information that is collected, kept, and shared with little to no oversight, or awareness by the general public.

Today, new technologies are changing the relationship between the citizen and the state, with the government and law enforcement able to access our information and observe our private activities, raising important civil liberties questions. Stanford Law School faculty and alumni are centrally involved in some of the most important questions surrounding this issue—working in key areas where the law is still catching up with technology.

Looming large over the debate is the post-9/11 war on terrorism, which has led to legislation such as the USA Patriot Act, designed to make it easier for the government to collect data that would help combat terrorism. At the same time, the incredible evolution in technology over the past two decades has revolutionized both the tools available to the government for surveillance and those used by individuals to live their lives. 

“We’re living in the 21st century, but when it comes to issues concerning information technology, the law is still rooted in the 20th century,” says Anthony Romero, JD ’90, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In striking a balance between constitutional rights, crime fighting, and national security, the legal doctrines at issue include everything from post-9/11 legislation that has given law enforcement access to electronic records, to constitutional rules governing criminal procedure, to the regulation of surveillance technology equipment by local governments.

Technology at the Local Level

The U.S. is a country of highways and cars, where Americans spend a lot of time behind the wheel. And tracking how we use our cars offers a picture of much more than simply our mode of transportation.

Automatic License Plate Reader/Recognition technology, ALPR, developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, has been in use since the early 1980s as a tool to aid law enforcement agencies in various ways, from tracking stolen cars to identifying criminals. Since its introduction, this technology has become more powerful, mobile, and affordable. Today, more than 70 percent of police departments in the U.S. use some form of ALPR, recording thousands of plate numbers daily with cameras mounted on patrol cars and at key traffic areas such as highway overpasses and street lamps. 

While capturing the license plate information, ALPR can also capture photos of the cars—and often the occupants, as well as where they live, where they shop, and where they drive. Put together, this technology can tell a story of how we go about our daily lives. 

“Civil liberties problems arise when you engage in the mass tracking of hundreds of millions of Americans, most of whom are completely innocent of any wrongdoing,” says Catherine Crump, JD ’04 (BA ’00), who joined the Berkeley Law faculty this year as an assistant clinical professor of law and associate director of the Samuelson Clinic. She explains that technology is enabling the mass collection of data that can paint a detailed picture of how we interact, gleaning facts about us that the state couldn’t previously collect.  As data storage has become more available and affordable, police departments are increasingly sharing gathered data regionally, and with the federal government, creating large databases of citizens, most of them law-abiding.

“No one denies that a license plate reader can be a useful investigative tool and it’s valuable to law enforcement to be able to check to see if a particular vehicle is stolen or associated with a suspected criminal,” says Crump, who was a staff attorney at the ACLU focusing on issues of government surveillance until earlier this year. “The civil liberties objection arises when law enforcement starts to pool massive amounts of location data and keep it for long periods of time based on the mere possibility that it might be useful someday. Because then you have a large database tracking people’s movements and that’s the type of information that can be misused.”

• Watch a CSPAN report on Technology and Police Surveillance
• View a panel discussion about WikiLeaks

And currently, there are few regulations for how the data is used and how long it can be kept. 

“There are no generally applicable laws placing limits, there are no federal laws,” she says. “In general it’s up to each state and law enforcement agency to come up with its own rules.”

Crump cites a few states that have introduced legislation for ALPR, including Utah, Maine, and New Hampshire, noting that it is largely a nonpartisan issue.  

“It’s an issue where people on the left and right can find common ground between civil libertarian and law enforcement interests because everyone agrees that there are legitimate uses of the technology,” she says. “So the objections are not to the technology, but to certain uses.”

Crump thinks it important for all Americans to carefully consider these issues now, as new technologies are increasingly used by local law enforcement and the federal government.

“We should project forward to a world where it is possible to install a license plate reader on every street lamp,” she says. “And we should start planning for a world where that type of omnipresent surveillance is possible and figure out how we feel about it. And if people agree with my general view that that type of surveillance can be oppressive, it’s time to put rules and regulations in place to ensure that we take advantage of the positive aspects of this technology without suffering an undue loss to our civil liberties.”

Catherine Crump, JD ’04 (BA ’00)

New surveillance capabilities also raise concerns about how powerful investigatory tools typically reserved for investigations of criminal organizations may now be turned against certain communities.

“The government has a particular security interest in Muslim communities in the United States and abroad, yet these communities rarely have the political clout to resist overbroad surveillance,” says Shirin Sinnar , JD ’03, an assistant professor of law at Stanford.

• Watch a CSPAN report on Transportation Security
• Watch Sinnar speak about airport profiling

Sinnar has written about the devastating mistakes made in associating people with terrorist activity in the United States––errors that have resulted from prejudicial attitudes, insufficient oversight, and lopsided incentives to err on the side of security. She has also noted cases in which the pervasive mapping, surveillance, and investigation of Muslim communities have “significantly harmed their ability to practice their faith and express their views.”

Crump offers an example of police surveillance of mosques. She explains that in 2012 as part of a program to gather information on the city’s Muslim community, the New York City Police Department mounted cameras directly outside of city mosques and used license plate-reading technology to record the identities of attendees and the cars they arrived in. 

Although some of these practices have since been challenged in court, few have been resolved, Sinnar says. Most are dismissed for lack of standing or because the government invokes a national security-specific “state secrets” privilege, impeding any resolution of the constitutional questions at stake.

Reining in Mass Collection of Personal Data

In 2011, an unnamed telecommunications company received a demand from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hand over records about a customer (or customers). The demand came in the form of a National Security Letter (NSL), a type of legal demand that doesn’t require a court order and allows federal law enforcement to obtain information from telecommunications and Internet companies about their customers. NSLs have been issued by the government since about 1978, but the USA Patriot Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress in 2001, greatly expanded their use. Critics have argued that the procedure raises major problems because NSLs lack judicial oversight and are almost always accompanied by a nondisclosure provision that prevents the recipient from revealing that it has received such a letter.

The company, whose name could not be revealed because of that secrecy order, challenged the NSL in court, arguing that both the nondisclosure provision and the limited judicial oversight were unconstitutional. 

In March 2013, Judge Susan Illston, JD ’73, a federal district court judge in San Francisco, ruled that the statute authorizing the NSL violates the Constitution. In her decision, In re: National Security Letter , she wrote that even when “no national security concerns exist, thousands of recipients of NSLs are nonetheless prohibited from speaking out about the mere fact of their receipt of the NSL, rendering the statute impermissibly overbroad and not narrowly tailored.” She acknowledged “significant consti tutional and national security issues at stake” and stayed her order to allow an appellate court to weigh in. The case was argued before the Ninth Circuit in October.

The case is one of a number of ongoing challenges to legislation that has expanded the government’s ability to access private data since the 9/11 attacks. Separately, the ACLU filed a lawsuit (now before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals) that challenges the government’s program of collecting phone records of all Americans under the Patriot Act. “It’s the first suit that hasn’t been kicked out because, thanks to Snowden, we can now establish standing—that is, show that the American public has been the subject of surveillance,” says Romero, who has met with Snowden twice in Moscow and is assisting with his legal counsel through the ACLU.

• Read Romero’s Huffington Post article about Edward Snowden
• Watch Romero speak about the ACLU
• Watch Anthony Romero on the Colbert Report
• Watch a symposium presentation with Anthony Romero

Meanwhile, some members of Congress are pushing to revise the Patriot Act in light of recent developments. Under pressure from the public as well as many Internet and telecommunications companies, Congress is considering limiting surveillance with the USA Freedom Act. While the House and Senate passed differing versions of the bill, both versions propose to rein in the collection of data by the NSA and other government agencies. The aim is to increase transparency of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a federal court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against suspected foreign agents inside the United States. The FISC’s powers were extended under the Patriot Act to include domestic information collection when relevant to a counterterrorism investigation. The act also calls for narrowing of the requirement that businesses hand over customer data to the government and the creation of an independent constitutional advocate to argue cases before  the FISC. So far, the bill is pending. 

“The Senate version of the bill goes much farther than the tepid House version in strengthening the system of checks and balances and ensuring greater government transparency, but we still need to look more stringently at the operations of the judicial system and the oversight mechanisms of Congress,” says Romero.

With deadlines approaching, Congress is likely to act. “In June 2015, section 215, the law under which the phone records collection is happening, is set to expire. Congress will have to address the concerns raised by the telephony metadata program before then,” says Laura Donohue, JD ’07, professor of law at Georgetown Law, director of Georgetown’s Center on National Security and the Law, and co-director of the Center on Privacy and Technology.  

National Security and Personal Privacy

In designing national security laws, the challenge for policymakers is to strike the right balance, says Jennifer Granick , civil liberties director at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society . “The big-picture issue is how do we protect national security and conduct foreign intelligence without creating a surveillance state,” she says. 

• Watch a CIS video on the “surveillance state”
• Watch a video on civil liberties in the post-Snowden era
• Watch Granick speak about NSA surveillance

Referencing the NSA’s program to obtain email and other private communications from Internet companies, she explains that “the government is engaged in a huge ‘dragnet’ in which an immense amount of information is getting sucked in about Americans as well as foreign targets. That raises all kinds of statutory and privacy questions. Is the law appropriate? Is the government collecting and using data lawfully and appropriately? Do we protect the rights of foreigners? When they get information about Americans, what do they do with it?”

“The three branches of the government were asleep at the switch when it came to protecting fundamental freedoms and privacy in the post 9/11 era,” says Romero. “The courts rubber-stamped the overzealous collection of data by the executive branch, and Congress exercised only limited oversight.”  

Romero maintains that such acts have challenged not only the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizures, but also the First Amendment, which prohibits the abridging of free speech and of the practice of religion. 

“People who realize they’re being surveilled are less likely to write emails, place phone calls, and express themselves freely if they know they might be caught in government surveillance,” he says. “This will fundamentally change the way we live in our democracy.”

Granick asserts that a key priority should be ending government spying based on secret interpretations of law. “We don’t really know what laws the executive branch is following or how the Fourth Amendment and statutes already on the books are being interpreted. There’s an immense amount of classified information, including court opinions,” she says, referring to secret decisions of the FISC.  

The Fight for Internet Freedom — featuring David Drummond, JD ’89 and Google VP

Ivan Fong, JD ’87, former general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agrees that data collection has to stay within constitutional limits, while lauding the importance of intelligence in national security investigations. “A certain amount of intelligence collection is, of course, necessary for the president to fulfill his constitutional duties and to act as commander in chief,” he says. “In a number of cases in which I was involved, the intelligence indeed played a significant role in preventing or disrupting actual terrorist threats.” 

Fong   is also sympathetic to civil liberties concerns. From 2009 to 2012, Fong was responsible for all legal determinations and regulatory policy at DHS. He provided legal counsel to the secretary of homeland security on questions of counterterrorism and national security law and policy and of cybersecurity law and policy. Fong believes current intelligence surveillance can both be lawful and serve our national security interests. 

“Such collection should be, consistent with the law, as narrow as possible—in other words, a process known as minimization—and we should search for and embrace any new technological and other means to ensure stronger protection of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties interests.”  

Still, he agrees that courts, legislators, and policymakers “need to carefully articulate the core principles at stake to ensure outdated legal constructs or paradigms are reassessed in view of the new technology.” Fong points to the recent Supreme Court decision requiring police generally to obtain a warrant to search the contents of cell phones seized during an arrest as a good example of a case that updates existing legal doctrine in light of the power of new digital tools. 

Riley : Redefining the Limits of Legal Search

That decision [Riley v. California , which the Court decided along with a related case, U.S. v. Wurie ] recognizes that privacy in a digital world may require new rules and “brings the Fourth Amendment into the 21st century,” says Jeffrey Fisher , professor of law at Stanford and co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic .

• Fisher discusses Riley v. California
• Watch Fisher talk about arguing cases in the Supreme Court

It was Fisher who argued Riley before the Supreme Court in April, supported by the research and brief writing of his clinic students. The clinic represented David Riley, a college student currently serving a prison term in part due to evidence found on his cell phone that linked him to gang activities and a drive-by shooting. 

In general, the Fourth Amendment allows police to search items that are found on a person who has been arrested, which could include a cell phone. But until Riley and Wurie, it wasn’t clear whether that right extended to police reading and reviewing data stored on the phone—before first obtaining a warrant.

“We argued that smart phones are categorically different from any other kind of non-digital object that can be found on a person because of the vast quantities of sensitive personal information involved and we argued that they should therefore not be subjected to search without a warrant,” says Fisher. Because the Supreme Court agreed with that argument unanimously, handing down its decision in June, in the future police will be able to seize but not search cell phones until a warrant has been obtained. Riley himself may be entitled to a new trial that excludes the cell phone evidence, which was obtained without a warrant.

The implications of the case could go well beyond the context of law enforcement and cell phones, and Fisher argues it will have implications in the national security context. “The Riley decision essentially rejects the argument that the government is currently using to justify the NSA’s collection of data on individuals, which is that digital data is subject to the same legal rules as analog data,” says Fisher.  

The case also resolved a tough question about how to apply long-standing legal standards to new technologies. “This is a game changer, showing that the Court agrees that information gleaned from digital devices can paint a portrait of us that creates privacy considerations that didn’t exist before,” says Fisher.

Professor Jeffrey L. Fisherdiscusses the work he did with Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic students preparing for the important digital privacy case. Revisiting Third-Party Privacy Protection

One of the most serious places where the law has gone awry relates to the third-party doctrine, says Jonathan Mayer, JD ’13, a doctoral student in the computer science department who has taught Computer Security and Privacy at Stanford Law School.

According to Robert Weisberg , JD ’79, the Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr. Professor of Law, that legal theory, which evolved in the 1970s, holds that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in information volunteered to third parties, such as banks, phone companies, and perhaps even email services. Without that expectation of privacy, the government may constitutionally obtain information from third parties without a warrant.

“It’s an anachronistic doctrine, because these days we give all sorts of private information to third parties, including cloud services. That’s the modern way of life, and the law needs to catch up,” says Mayer, whose online Stanford University course Surveillance Law this fall explores how U.S. law facilitates electronic surveillance—but also substantially constrains it.

“Given the changes in technology over the past few decades, we definitely need new laws that revisit the third-party doctrine of Fourth Amendment concerns,” affirms Weisberg.

This past spring, Weisberg guided students in a policy practicum to prepare a background study of legal and policy issues regarding state law enforcement access to user records held by communications companies. The study, done for the California Law Revision Commission, considered civil liberties, public safety, and the scope of federal preemption.

“Our recommendation was that statutes imposing a warrant requirement be established for law enforcement access to user records of cell phone providers, Internet service providers, social media companies, and other mobile and Internet-based communication providers and that they be very specific about what they do and do not allow,” says Weisberg, who is co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. 

Such a revision in California statutory law, Weisberg explains, would address some problems, at least at the state level, with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a federal regulation regarding the government’s ability to intercept electronic communications and to demand disclosure of stored communications, customer records, and other user data. ECPA has been criticized for failing to sensibly protect communications and consumer records, mainly because the law is so outdated and out of touch with how people share, store, and use information today.

Drones Coming Home

Use of unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, by the military has increased dramatically as part of the effort to combat terrorism overseas. But use of drones in the U.S., for a variety of purposes, may also be on the rise.

High-altitude drones can hover over cities for long periods of time and record everything that takes place. But they are not widely adopted yet because the FAA has largely prohibited their use due to safety concerns with airplane traffic. But after passage of a provision in the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, drone use in the United States looks likely to increase. The act calls on the FAA to integrate unmanned aircraft by 2015 and to start by relaxing restrictions. Drones are already used to patrol the Mexican border and increasingly by businesses including agriculture. And local law enforcement agencies are now also exploring how they might be applied to crime fighting. Here again, new technology useful to law enforcement is raising questions about surveillance and mass collection of data, with regulations to safeguard the civil liberties of citizens not yet in place. 

“Drones’ ability to track people and their movements raises huge privacy concerns,” says Romero. “There’s a serious lack of oversight on how they are being deployed and used, where data is being accessed and stored, and who has access to it.” 

And the public seems to agree. Crump offers examples of two cities that have purchased drones but have then backtracked: Seattle and San Jose. “When the purchase of drones becam e public, there was an uproar, with residents raising privacy concerns,” she says. In each case the program was shut down. “I think the idea of unmanned airborne vehicles hovering over people’s backyards and peering into their windows makes people deeply uncomfortable. Drones challenge people’s notions of privacy in a way that few other technologies have.”

A key concern with the introduction of this new surveillance technology is the lack of public review and consultation. “I think this raises important questions about the democratic process,” says Crump. “It’s what is known as ‘policymaking by procurement.’ Police departments simply acquire this equipment, often with funding from the federal government. And then they use it and it takes months or years for local government and the public at large to even learn about it.” 

One exception—now—is Seattle. The city council passed an ordinance last year requiring the police department to first notify the council about surveillance purchases and to come forward with a proposal about how the information collected will be used.

Correcting the balance among social controls, governmental responsibilities for security, and individual liberty will require the public, Congress, and the courts understanding and navigating a maze of practices and policies, says Granick. “Over-classification, secret law, and intelligence jargon are getting in our way,” she says. 

In reflecting on the secrecy regarding surveillance law and lack of robust oversight, Donohue observes, “The founders of the Constitution understood very deeply that not only must the government control the governed—but we must ensure that the government controls itself. Concentration of power in the hands of the few is the very definition of tyranny that the founders held—and that’s what we want to protect against, as we face issues of how government surveillance is being conducted in theglobal digital age.”  SL

1 Response to “ Civil Liberties and Law in the Era of Surveillance ”

Maureen coffey.

“Can the law keep up with technology?” Yes and no. It was actually never the law (in my opinion) that could not keep up with technology, it was always a problem of detection and hence enforcement. This battle between crime investigation and enforcement never lacked legal framework. Poisoning (except by kings …) was always a crime, yet not all poisons were detectable. The invasion of privacy is a crime, but the means to do it are fast moving beyond enforceable detection. The more technology advances and no tangible damage can be seen (no broken windows, no finger prints, no “losses” – i.e. all passwords are “still there”) the less can law enforcement do about it. Once nano technology and quantum computing are advanced enough, we may not even know of any “intrusions” nor will the perpetrators themselves know (!) that in turn THEIR perimeters have been breached. Which may lead to interesting avoidance techniques by individualistic individuals that remind one of Amish lifestyles …

Comments are closed.

Government Internet Surveillance: Privacy Threat Essay

Introduction, the internet and surveillance, us government surveillance, surveillance efforts a threat to privacy and civil rights, justification for surveillance, discussion and conclusion.

The internet is the most important invention of the twentieth century and it has dramatically transformed human life. This invention has greatly increased the speed and efficiency with which communication occurs. Its unrivalled benefits in information processing have made this technology a part of most aspects of modern-daily activities.

Boghosian (2013) notes that while the internet plays a major role in improving life in our society, some sinister applications of this invention undermine privacy and civil rights. Perhaps the most troubling applications of the internet in current times are the mass surveillance efforts by the US government. This paper will argue that government internet surveillance is a threat to the privacy and civil rights of US citizens and it must therefore be mitigated.

Government surveillance has existed in various forms for centuries. Through this activity, the government has been able to obtain valuable public and secret information and act on it to aid governance. The internet age has dramatically increased the ability of government to engage in surveillance.

To begin with, the internet has become the most common medium of communication for many people. By monitoring this single communication network, the government has access to virtually all information that is communicated electronically including email habits, credit card, bank records, and phone records (Regan, 2014). The advancement in storage technology has contributed to the pervasive surveillance carried out by the US.

Today, the data that can be stored is nearly infinite due to the tremendous growth in storage capacity and the decline in storage prices. Intelligence agencies are therefore able to collect all available data since it is cheaper and easier than trying to determine what data should be stored and what should be ignored. At the same time, sophisticated computer algorithms make it possible for government agencies to analyze large amounts of data and derive meaning from it.

Scherer (2013) states that while electronic intelligence in the US historically focused on foreign governments, the events of 9/11 led to an increased focus on American citizens. Starting from that year, the NSA turned inward and shifted its focus to include private individuals. This shift was prompted by the understanding that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks had resided in the US and made their plans while living in the country. Since then, the government has engaged in widespread surveillance of its citizens in an attempt to prevent crime.

The internet has made it possible for the government to engage in mass surveillance. Through security apparatus such as the NSA, the American government can collect and analyze vast quantities of data about its citizens. These activities often take place without the consent or knowledge of the individual.

Revelations by Snowden showed that the government engaging in surveillance at a scale that a majority of society did not even think was possible (Scherer, 2013). Through US dedicates more than $52.6 billion each year to run a massive secret national security apparatus. This apparatus includes the NSA, which has over 30,000 employees and gathers and stores not only phone records in the US but also metadata on internet traffic.

To increase its surveillance abilities, the US government has engaged in programs aimed at influencing IT companies to provide the NSA with a back door to encrypted communications. Scherer (2013) documents that through such a program, the government denies private citizens of their right to create unbreakable encryption software.

Wide scale surveillance by the government has harmed the privacy rights of US citizens. Government internet surveillance efforts result in a violation of individual privacy as the government intercepts the personal information and communication from US citizens. For privacy to exist, an individual has to have control over himself and the information he shares with others.

Boghosian (2013) notes that attempts to safeguard the privacy of American have been compromised by the government’s demand for unrestricted access to information. Under the Patriot Act, the government has access to a wide array of personal information. Through the National Security Administration (NSA), the government has engaged in large-scale data collection on US citizens.

This data is then analyzed in an effort to identify suspects. However, this data can be used to obtain more information about the private lives of Americans thus violating individual privacy.

The right to free speech and association are affected by the existence of extensive internet surveillance programs. According to the freedom of speech right, an individual is entitled to communicate his personal opinion or ideas with others without the fear of repercussions. The freedom of association guarantees an individual the right to relate with persons or groups of his choosing without any external inhibitions.

Purkayastha and Bailey (2014) observe that mass surveillance undermines free speech as individuals may face retaliation action if they are critical of the government. The government may engage in steps to silence critics who are identified through the surveillance efforts. Private Citizens concerned that their communications may be under surveillance are likely to avoid making their opinions public out of fear of government reprisal. Internet surveillance will therefore have led to the violation of the civil rights of these US citizens.

Government surveillance violates the location privacy of an individual. Boghosian (2013) defines location privacy as the right of an American to move in public without being tracked on monitored. This right is violated by unrestricted surveillance by the government. By monitoring Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, the government can record the precise movement of an individual. His/her exact location at any time can be record and stored helping to create an elaborate profile on the individual’s movement patterns.

The Fourth Amendment, which guarantees Americans protection against unreasonable searchers and seizures is violated by the undiscriminating internet surveillance. Through this mass collection and scrutinizing of personal information, the government violates the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. Scherer (2013) confirms that unreasonable searches that take place with no justification characterize the internet surveillance carried out by the government. The government collects data from all citizens and then analyzes this information in the hope of finding patterns that will help identify criminals.

The US government has justified its aggressive surveillance activities as necessary efforts for the enhancement of national security. In a speech on the importance of surveillance, the US President Barack Obama asserts that these activities enable law enforcement officers to detect terrorists and prevent them from carrying out attacks against the US (Obama, 2014). Even ordinary US citizens recognize this positive role of internet monitoring.

While most Americans are opposed to government surveillance, there is a recognition that the government might need to engage in monitoring efforts in order to safeguard the homeland. Scherer (2013) notes that according to polls, a majority of Americans show continued willingness to give up some of their rights to privacy as part of efforts to combat terrorism.

Government surveillance of the internet helps to protect citizens from the dangers that an abuse of the internet can cause. The internet provides individual users with significant power due to the wide range of information contained on the network and the communication efficiency.

These attributes can be exploited for wrong purposes if the government does not police the network. Seidler (2013) confirms that the government might be forced to carry out secret activities for the benefit of its citizens. Through surveillance, the government can identify questionable activities by citizens and engage in further investigation. Such efforts might lead to the discovery and stopping of criminal elements before they carry out crime.

Under the Obama Administration, the US has continued and even expanded the electronic surveillance implemented by the Bush administration. The justification for this is that the surveillance regime is integral to protecting the US against Foreign and Homegrown terrorists. Even so, Obama (2014) admits that the prevalent internet monitoring creates a potential for abuse. Action therefore needs to be taken against government surveillance on its citizens.

According to the renowned American whistleblower, Edward Snowden, the important players in this issue include “the public, the technologist community, the U.S. courts, Congress and the Executive Branch” (Scherer, 2013, p.81). These bodies need to deliberate on the future of the country if government surveillance is allowed to go on uninhibited.

As it currently stands, Internet surveillance has given the government intrusive police power that can be used against innocent civilians. The liberties of Americans have been constricted by the deployment of the surveillance infrastructure. Action needs to be taken to address these issues and restore the privacy and civil liberties guaranteed to American citizens by the US Constitution.

Boghosian, H. (2013). The Business of Surveillance. Human Rights, 39 (3), 2-23.

Obama, B. (2014). Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence . Web.

Purkayastha, P., & Bailey, R. (2014). U.S. Control of the Internet Problems Facing the Movement to International Governance. Independent Socialist Magazine, 66 (3), 103-127.

Regan, L. (2014). Electronic Communications Surveillance. Independent Socialist Magazine, 66 (3), 32-42.

Scherer, M. (2013). Number Two Edward Snowden The Dark Prophet. Time, 182 (26), 78-89.

Seidler, N. (2013). A perspective on principles for Internet surveillance .

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Bibliography

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Privacy and Government Surveillance

Introduction.

Currently, a substantive study of the implementation and protection of the right to privacy in the US has shown that it is subject to numerous violations and restrictions. The practical civil law protection of this right is not sufficiently effective. It is due to the historical tradition and a relatively insignificant period of legislative recognition of the law in question in the US. In addition, the lack of a unified approach to considering the complex concept of the right to privacy and the natural vulnerability of the private sphere are the facilitators of the issue. The introduction of restrictions for public security, shortcomings, and gaps of the American legislation in this area leads to the lack of a relevant theoretical base and judicial practice of protection of this right. The combination of the increased public distress with terrorist acts and legislative abuse causes heavy civic monitoring. Due to this fact, the U.S. government uses a variety of surveillance methods to invade the privacy of citizens.

Surveillance

It is highly important to identify the monitoring tools and the legislative instruments allowing the privacy invasion to happen. At present, information about many citizens is contained in at least six databases: the passport system, databases of tax authorities, lists of social and medical welfare agencies, education, and lists of election commissions (Lippert and Walby, p. 331). In addition, there are data from the census, databases of military service citizens and motorists, and others. Today, the concept of privacy on the Internet has long become an anachronism. By tracking the history of visits to web pages, browsers, and its derivatives, anyone can determine the person’s addictions, interests, or a terrorist attack preparation. It also allows the possibility of determining the location of a person on calls from a mobile phone.

Prism and ICREACH

The Prism data collection and ICREACH search engine database contain billions of metadata records relating to private communication sessions of foreign nationals and millions of documents about US citizens for which no charges have been brought. The metadata that the search engine gives you access to includes phone numbers, unique SIM card numbers, and email addresses. Prism information can be used to track the movements of people, compile a list of their friends, relatives, and acquaintances, predict future actions, find out their religious affiliation and political preferences. Using unique pointers, system users can search for information related to specific people. For example, a list of telephone numbers for which a certain person called in the last month (Passini, p. 548). The system has the simplest interface with a search line and displays the results on a separate page.

The test launch took place in 2007 under the leadership of former NSA director Keith Alexander. The annual maintenance budget was determined in the range of $ 2.5-4.5 million. However, it is assumed that ultimately, the NSA managed to overfulfill the plan and collect over 850 billion metadata records, which were mentioned initially. The 2010 report reported that ICREACH had become the main tool for data exchange among the special services (Passini, p. 541). In addition to the security forces of the United States, access to ICREACH had the partner countries in the Five Eyes group: Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia.

Media monitoring and MAINWAY

Internet monitoring and MAINWAY are surveillance tools used to scan and analyze the private information of citizens. Internet monitoring allows for tracking website history, webpages, and browsers. MAINWAY is an instrument, which is used to collect and form a database of all phone calls conducted in the USA. Both of these surveillance tools allow having access to unprotected and private data of US citizens.

Legislative basis

There is a diversity of approaches to the understanding of the mechanism for the implementation of human rights. Most scientists in this concept include the process of its practical application, a system of guarantees, and the conditions and factors affecting this mechanism (Stoycheff et al, p., 617). It is important to clarify that privacy belongs to personal human rights. Therefore, a person deliberately does not commit voluntary actions that are directly aimed at the exercise of the given right, since he/she is the bearer of this good, enshrined in the law.

First Amendment

The First Amendment is one of the most important amendments in the US Constitution, which guarantees the rights that are considered to be inalienable attributes of liberal democracy. It includes freedom of religion, freedom of speech and the press, the right to assemble and appeal to the government peacefully. It is an essential part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment, ratified in 1791, was intended to reassure those citizens who were alarmed by the possible prospect of a strong central government (Simon, p. 4). In the XX century. The Supreme Court, referring to the formulation of the due process rule contained in the Fourteenth Amendment, indicated that the freedoms declared by the First Amendment are also protected from infringement by state authorities. Thus, it ensures that surveillance cannot hinder or diminish the freedom of American citizens.

Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights allows US citizens to possess the certainty that their protection and safety. It gives people the right to defend personal belonging, including information, properties, documents from unreasonable searches and confiscations (Simon 5). A sufficient basis should be provided beforehand, which must be backed with evidence and proof of its legality and plausibility. Both the 1st and 4th Amendments ensure citizens that nothing can diminish their freedom and right to privacy. Thus, mass surveillance instruments are at high risk of violating the law by not justifying data gathering and monitoring.

Privacy Invasion

Terrorism monitoring.

The Freedom Act takes into account that terrorists can use various methods of communication, encrypt, change SIM cards, and negotiate under fictitious names. In each of these cases, the order can only give a general description: the known name of the person, his nickname, the geography of his location, and the place of the rented apartment (Lippert and Walby, p. 349). In case of any general doubts about the legality of the observation, the judge may appoint an expert who is known for his accomplishments in the protection of the right to privacy. The expert, in turn, presents his conclusion, which either supports the requestor indicates its shortcomings. The term of the court order is limited. If the observation is carried out about a foreign organization or a foreign citizen, the warrant may be issued for one year.

Freedom Act

Moreover, the Freedom Act is a very voluminous document, containing in itself point changes of previously existing regulations. Due to the inclusion of various detailed refinements, a general attempt was made to create a background for the reform of special services. However, given that the representatives of the FBI and the National Security Agency themselves called for its early adoption, there is considerable doubt about the sincerity of the developers of the Act. Firstly, law enforcement agencies are not willing to reduce their powers in a period that can hardly be described as calm in terms of the activity of foreign intelligence services and destructive organizations. Secondly, the author of the Freedom Act was a congressman who introduced the Act of Patriotism to Parliament. It is unlikely that his views have changed drastically; therefore, political statements about the abuse of law enforcement are more plausible.

There were several attempts to restore privacy protection rights, therefore, some points of the Freedom Act deserve attention. It is necessary to recognize that the fight against terrorism becomes effective when the special services operate one step ahead (Gürses et al, p. 589). It allows to prevent terrorist acts, and not to react to the tragic events that have happened. By taking into account Internet technologies and activity in this segment of extremist organizations, it is difficult to achieve a meaningful result without certain control. Interference in private life is the inevitable effect of the expansion of the powers of law enforcement agencies to prevent criminal activity.

Patriot Act

The Patriot Act is a law passed by the US Congress and signed by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. Due to this law, the powers of the special services in the field of anti-terrorism activities were significantly expanded. The effect of this law also extended to the financial sector (Passini, p. 539). The Minister of Finance received expanded powers to carry out regulatory activities and supervise commercial operations, especially those carried out by foreign private and legal entities.

The keynote of criticism of the new law is that it confers overly broad powers to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the state, put in place at their discretion and that such permits can be used against non-terrorist citizens simply to establish more thorough control over society to the detriment of constitutional rights and freedoms of US citizens. Against the backdrop of massive use of the Internet and e-mail, critics of the law point out that the new law enforcement powers of operational monitoring of the Internet can be used to detect crimes and criminals (Passini, p. 537). It also allows to control information flows and unjustifiably invade citizens’ privacy.

In conclusion, there are several ways for the government to conduct mass surveillance practices without acquiring citizens’ approval. The main instruments include ICREACH, Prism, MAINWAY, and media monitoring. Nevertheless, the 1st and 4th Amendments in the Bill of Rights ensure that the US citizens possess full rights to have the safety of freedom and privacy. It also mandates special forces to have a significant basis for the surveillance. Due to the rise of terrorism, the recent legislative measures, such as the Patriot Act and Freedom Act enables the government to be able to invade the citizen’s private life. These technological developments and jurisdictional permits allow the government to be exceedingly powerful without being responsible. It can lead to highly negative consequences for society, such as social distress. Therefore, the main solution would be to make mass surveillance procedures more targeted and specific, and less invasive. It can be achieved by using the Amendments in the Bill of Rights as significant legislative protection.

Works Cited

• Gürses, Seda, et al. “Crypto and Empire: The Contradictions of Counter-Surveillance Advocacy.” Media, Culture & Society , vol. 38, no. 4, 2016, pp. 576–590.
• Lippert, Randy K., and Kevin Walby. “Governing Through Privacy: Authoritarian Liberalism, Law, and Privacy Knowledge.” Law, Culture and the Humanities , vol. 12, no. 2, 2016, pp. 329–352.
• Passini, Stefano. “Freedom, Democracy, and Values: Perception of Freedom of Choice and Readiness to Protest.” Culture & Psychology , vol. 23, no. 4, 2017, pp. 534–550.
• Simon, William H. “Justice and Accountability: Activist Judging in the Light of Democratic Constitutionalism and Democratic Experimentalism.” Law, Culture and the Humanities , vol. 1, no. 1, 2016, pp. 2-6.
• Stoycheff, Elizabeth, et al. “Privacy and the Panopticon: Online Mass Surveillance’s Deterrence and Chilling Effects.” New Media & Society , vol. 21, no. 3, 2019, pp. 602–619.

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Congress Has a Chance to Rein In Police Use of Surveillance Tech

As state police amass more spying tools, privacy advocates say Congress’s debate over a mass surveillance bill offers hope for reform.

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Hardware that breaks into your phone; software that monitors you on the internet; systems that can recognize your face and track your car: The New York State Police are drowning in surveillance tech.

Last year alone, the Troopers signed at least $15 million in contracts for powerful new surveillance tools, according to a New York Focus and Intercept review of state data. While expansive, the State Police’s acquisitions aren’t unique among state and local law enforcement. Departments across the country are buying tools to gobble up civilians’ personal data, plus increasingly accessible technology to synthesize it.

“It’s a wild west,” said Sean Vitka, a privacy advocate and policy counsel for Demand Progress. “We’re seeing an industry increasingly tailor itself toward enabling mass warrantless surveillance.”

So far, local officials haven’t done much about it. Surveillance technology has far outpaced traditional privacy laws, and legislators have largely failed to catch up. In New York, lawmakers launched a years-in-the-making legislative campaign last year to rein in police intrusion — but with Gov. Kathy Hochul pushing for tough-on-crime policies instead, none of their bills have made it out of committee.

So New York privacy proponents are turning to Congress. A heated congressional debate over the future of a spying law offers an opportunity to severely curtail state and local police surveillance through federal regulation.

At issue is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which expires on April 19. The law is notorious for a provision that allows the feds to access Americans’ communications swept up in intelligence agencies’ international spying. As some members of Congress work to close that “backdoor,” they’re also pushing to ban a so-called data broker loophole that allows law enforcement to buy civilians’ personal data from private vendors without a warrant. Closing that loophole would likely make much of the New York State Police’s recently purchased surveillance tech illegal.

Members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, who have introduced bills to close the loopholes, are leading the latest bipartisan charge for reform. Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, meanwhile, are pushing to keep the warrant workarounds in place. The Democratic leaders of both chambers — House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, both from New York — have so far kept quiet on the spying debate. As Section 702’s expiration date nears, local advocates are trying to get them on board.

On Tuesday, a group of 33 organizations, many from New York, sent a letter to Jeffries and Schumer urging them to close the loopholes. More than 100 grassroots and civil rights groups from across the country sent the lawmakers a similar petition this week.

“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse.”

“These products are deeply invasive, discriminatory, and ripe for abuse,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, which signed both letters. They reach “into nearly every aspect of our digital and physical lives.”

Jeffries’s office declined to comment. Schumer’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

Both letters cited a Wired report from last month, which revealed that Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, pointed to New York City protests against Israel’s war on Gaza to argue against the spying law’s reform. Sources told Wired that in a presentation to fellow House Republicans, Turner implied that protesters in New York had ties to Hamas — and therefore should remain subject to Section 702’s warrantless surveillance backdoor. An intelligence committee spokesperson disputed the characterization of Turner’s remarks, but said that the protests had “responded to what appears to be a Hamas solicitation.”

“The real-world impact of such surveillance on protest and dissent is profound and undeniable,” read the New York letter, spearheaded by Empire State Indivisible and NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice. “With Rep. Turner having placed your own constituents in the crosshairs, your leadership is urgently needed.”

Police surveillance today looks much different than it did 10, five, or even three years ago. A report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, declassified last year , put it succinctly: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits.”

That report called specific attention to the “data broker loophole”: law enforcement’s practice of obtaining data for which they’d otherwise have to obtain a warrant by buying it from brokers. The New York State Police have taken greater and greater advantage of the loophole in recent years, buying up seemingly as much tech and data as they can get their hands on.

In 2021, the State Police purchased a subscription to ShadowDragon, which is designed to scan websites for clues about targeted individuals, then synthesize it into in-depth profiles.

ShadowDragon: Inside the Social Media Surveillance Software That Can Watch Your Every Move

“I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their coffee? Where do they get their gas? Where’s their electric bill? Who’s their mom? Who’s their dad?” ShadowDragon’s founder said in an interview unearthed by The Intercept in 2021. The company claims that its software can anticipate crime and violence — a practice, trendy among law enforcement tech companies, known as “predictive policing,” which ethicists and watchdogs warn can be inaccurate and biased .

The State Police renewed their ShadowDragon subscription in January of last year, shelling out $308,000 for a three-year contract. That was one of at least nine web surveillance tools State Police signed contracts for last year, worth at least $2.1 million in total.

Among the other firms the Troopers contracted with are Cognyte ($310,000 for a three-year contract); Whooster ($110,000 over three years); Skopenow ($280,000); Griffeye ($209,000); the credit reporting agency TransUnion ($159,000); and Echosec ($262,000 over two years), which specializes in using “global social media, discussions, and defense forums” to geolocate people. They also bought Cobwebs software , a mass web surveillance tool created by former Israeli military and intelligence officials — part of that country’s multibillion-dollar surveillance tech industry , which often tests its products on Palestinians .

That’s likely not the full extent of the State Police’s third party-brokered surveillance arsenal. As New York Focus revealed last year , the State Police have for years been shopping around for programs that take in mass quantities of data from social media, sift through them, and then feed insights — including users’ real-time location information — to law enforcement. Those contracts don’t show up in the state contract data, suggesting that the public disclosures are incomplete. Depending on how the programs obtain their data, closing the data broker loophole could bar their sale to law enforcement.

The State Police refused to answer questions about how its officers use surveillance tools.

“We do not discuss specific strategies or technologies as it provides a blueprint to criminals which puts our members and the public at risk,” State Police spokesperson Deanna Cohen said in an email.

Closing the data broker loophole wouldn’t entirely curtail the police surveillance tech boom. The New York State Police have also been deepening their investments in tech the FISA reforms wouldn’t touch, like aerial drones and automatic license plate readers , which store data from billions of scans to create searchable vehicle location databases.

They’ve also spent millions on mobile device forensic tools, or MDFTs, powerful hacking hardware and software that allow users to download full, searchable copies of a cellphone’s data, including social media messages, emails, web and search histories, and minute-by-minute location information.

Watchdogs warn of potential abuses accompanying the proliferation of MDFTs. The Israeli MDFT company Cellebrite has serviced repressive authorities around the globe, including police in Botswana , who used it to access a journalist’s list of sources, and Hong Kong , where the cops deployed it against leaders of the pro-democracy protest movement there.

In the United States, law enforcement officials argue that more expansive civil liberties protections prevent them from misusing the tech. But according to the technology advocacy organization Upturn, around half of police departments that have used MDFTs have done so with no internal policies in place. Meanwhile, cops have manipulated people into consenting to having their phones cracked without a warrant — for instance, by having them sign generic consent forms that don’t explain that the police will be able to access the entirety of their phone’s data.

In October 2020, New York police departments known to use MDFTs had spent less than $2.2 million on them, and no known MDFT-using department in the country had hit the million-dollar mark, according to a report by Upturn.

Between September 2022 and November 2023, however, the State Police signed more than $12.1 million in contracts for MDFT products and training, New York Focus and The Intercept found. They signed a five-year, $4 million agreement with Cellebrite, while other contracts went to MDFT firms Magnet Forensics and Teel Technologies . The various products attack phones in different ways, and thus have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the type of phone, according to Emma Weil, senior policy analyst at Upturn.

Cellebrite’s tech initially costs around $10,000–$30,000 for an official license, then tens or low hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ability to hack into a set number of phones. According to Weil, the State Police’s inflated bill could mean either that Cellebrite has dramatically increased its pricing, or that the Troopers are “getting more intensive support to unlock more difficult phones.”

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If Congress passes the Section 702 renewal without addressing its warrant workarounds, state and local legislation will become the main battleground in the fight against the data broker loophole. In New York, state lawmakers have introduced at least 14 bills as part of their campaign to rein in police surveillance, but none have gotten off the ground.

If the legislature passes some of the surveillance bills, they may well face opposition when they hit the governor’s desk. Hochul has extolled the virtues of police surveillance technology , and committed to expanding law enforcement’s ability to disseminate the information gathered by it. Every year since entering the governor’s mansion, she has proposed roughly doubling funding to New York’s Crime Analysis Center Network, a series of police intelligence hubs that distribute information to local and federal law enforcement, and she’s repeatedly boosted funding to the State Police’s social media surveillance teams.

The State Police has “ramped up its monitoring,” she said in November . “All this is in response to our desire, our strong commitment, to ensure that not only do New Yorkers be safe — but they also feel safe.”

This story was published in partnership with  New York Focus , a nonprofit news site investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter  here .

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The use and impact of surveillance-based technology initiatives in inpatient and acute mental health settings: A systematic review

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Background: The use of surveillance technologies is becoming increasingly common in inpatient mental health settings, commonly justified as efforts to improve safety and cost-effectiveness. However, the use of these technologies has been questioned in light of limited research conducted and the sensitivities, ethical concerns and potential harms of surveillance. This systematic review aims to: 1) map how surveillance technologies have been employed in inpatient mental health settings, 2) identify any best practice guidance, 3) explore how they are experienced by patients, staff and carers, and 4) examine evidence regarding their impact. Methods: We searched five academic databases (Embase, MEDLINE, PsycInfo, PubMed and Scopus), one grey literature database (HMIC) and two pre-print servers (medRxiv and PsyArXiv) to identify relevant papers published up to 18/09/2023. We also conducted backwards and forwards citation tracking and contacted experts to identify relevant literature. Quality was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Data were synthesised using a narrative approach. Results: A total of 27 studies were identified as meeting the inclusion criteria. Included studies reported on CCTV/video monitoring (n = 13), Vision-Based Patient Monitoring and Management (VBPMM) (n = 6), Body Worn Cameras (BWCs) (n = 4), GPS electronic monitoring (n = 2) and wearable sensors (n = 2). Twelve papers (44.4%) were rated as low quality, five (18.5%) medium quality, and ten (37.0%) high quality. Five studies (18.5%) declared a conflict of interest. We identified minimal best practice guidance. Qualitative findings indicate that patient, staff and carer perceptions and experiences of surveillance technologies are mixed and complex. Quantitative findings regarding the impact of surveillance on outcomes such as self-harm, violence, aggression, care quality and cost-effectiveness were inconsistent or weak. Discussion: There is currently insufficient evidence to suggest that surveillance technologies in inpatient mental health settings are achieving the outcomes they are employed to achieve, such as improving safety and reducing costs. The studies were generally of low methodological quality, lacked lived experience involvement, and a substantial proportion (18.5%) declared conflicts of interest. Further independent coproduced research is needed to more comprehensively evaluate the impact of surveillance technologies in inpatient settings, including harms and benefits. If surveillance technologies are to be implemented, it will be important to engage all key stakeholders in the development of policies, procedures and best practice guidance to regulate their use, with a particular emphasis on prioritising the perspectives of patients.

Competing Interest Statement

AS and UF have undertaken and published research on BWCs. We have received no financial support from BWC or any other surveillance technology companies. All other authors declare no competing interests.

Clinical Protocols

https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=463993

Funding Statement

This study is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Policy Research Programme (grant no. PR-PRU-0916-22003). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. ARG was supported by the Ramon y Cajal programme (RYC2022-038556-I), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

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I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines, such as any relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material, if applicable.

Data Availability

The template data extraction form is available in Supplementary 1. MMAT quality appraisal ratings for each included study are available in Supplementary 2. All data used is publicly available in the published papers included in this review.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — 1984 — Government Surveillance in 1984 by George Orwell: Bogus Security

Government Surveillance in 1984 by George Orwell: Bogus Security

• Categories: 1984 George Orwell Government Surveillance

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Words: 814 |

Published: Nov 22, 2018

Words: 814 | Pages: 2 | 5 min read

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Works Cited

• BBC. (2013, June 7). NSA Prism program taps into user data of Apple, Google, and others. BBC News. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-22837105
• Greenwald, G. (2014). No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books.
• Lyon, D. (2018). Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Automated Discrimination. Routledge.
• McQuade, B., & Phillips, B. J. (Eds.). (2018). Surveillance and Society Reader. Oxford University Press.
• Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secker & Warburg.
• Rosen, J. (2012). The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America. Vintage.
• Solove, D. J. (2013). Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security. Yale University Press.
• Vaidhyanathan, S. (2011). The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press.
• Warren, I., & Brandeis, L. D. (1890). The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4(5), 193-220.
• Westin, A. F. (1967). Privacy and Freedom. Atheneum.

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Schneier on Security

Maybe the phone system surveillance vulnerabilities will be fixed.

It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7 and the Diameter protocol:

On March 27 the commission asked telecommunications providers to weigh in and detail what they are doing to prevent SS7 and Diameter vulnerabilities from being misused to track consumers’ locations. The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018. The regulator wants to know the date(s) of the incident(s), what happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited and with which techniques, where the location tracking occurred, and ­ if known ­ the attacker’s identity. This time frame is significant because in 2018, the Communications Security, Reliability, and Interoperability Council (CSRIC), a federal advisory committee to the FCC, issued several security best practices to prevent network intrusions and unauthorized location tracking.

I have written about this over the past decade.

Tags: infrastructure , phones , protocols , vulnerabilities

Posted on April 5, 2024 at 7:00 AM • 7 Comments

sle • April 5, 2024 10:02 AM

You also talked about SS7 in this essay Cyberweapons Have No Allegiance

Clive Robinson • April 5, 2024 12:34 PM

@ Bruce, ALL,

Re : SS7 is older than security.

“It seems that the FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities in SS7”

Hmm some might say “about time” and older wiser heads “Probably not”.

Because this id by no means the first time people have tried…

Back in April 2016 Congressman Ted Lieu called for an oversight committee investigation into the very significant security vulnerabilities of SS7 after they had been repeatedly highlighted in U.S. governmental bodies, and it was not the first call at this level, and here we are the better part of a decade later…

There are two observations you can apply,

The first is that SS7 is from a time when security was not an issue between telco operators and resources were still electromechanical in nature. It was brought in as had SS6 to try and get rid of the “in-band signalling” that could and was being exploited by the likes of “Capt Crunch Rings” and “blue boxes” of the 1960’s and 1970’s

Thus whilst it fixed the perceived problem of half a century ago, it had no chance of fixing the known security problems of this century.

“Trying to fix SS7 problems is like trying to get rid of air bubbles when hanging wall paper. If you push down in one place it pops right up in at least another three.

But also SS7 is an old protocol from the old Analogue POTS days. Whilst only half jokingly said,

“It’s older than the trees but not quite as old as the hills…”

Some know that as far as telco company developments go it’s potentially older than Bakelite and before integrated circuits…

There is an old joke that applies,

A pair of young newly weds were trying to drive to their honeymoon cottage, and either the directions or the roads themselves were not making sense. So they decided being happily in love that the next person they saw they would stop and ask. They saw a very old guy with long long grey beard leaning on a gate and smoking a pipe and watching the world in that cautious way some do. On being asked how to get to the cottage he nodded and puffed his pipe a couple of times and then said, “If I was you, I’d not start from here”

Which kind of says all most need to know about SS7…

If the world had progressed at the rate some think it should have, we’d be on SS13 or 14 by now 😉

Because above SS7 in the comms stack everything has changed. Likewise below SS7 in the comms stack everything has changed, yet SS7 endures for some unknown reason of human logic…

“For all it’s many and grievous failings it actually does what it was designed to do.”

Trying to update SS7 is… some feel, like holding a “re-run on IPSec”…

LUCIAN • April 5, 2024 2:49 PM

“FCC might be fixing the vulnerabilities …”

No, the worthless FCC government bureaucrats are now merely asking private telecoms to analyze the current problem for THEM

lurker • April 5, 2024 4:01 PM

The FCC has also asked carriers to detail any exploits of the protocols since 2018.

The carriers might not know or care of any exploits if no money was lost. Sr.Wyden’s pious handwringing will need to demonstrate a benefit to their balance sheets to make the carriers move.

Al • April 5, 2024 5:11 PM

Perhaps having insecure protocols benefits the government. Or allied governments. I guess the problem is that bad actors benefit too.

ResearcherZero • April 6, 2024 12:54 AM

@Clive Robinson

If they fixed it, then how would they trace people’s locations during emergency calls? 😉

“I can see some rocks, a tree, there are hills in the distance. I’m facing to the left.”

SS7 was used in 2G/3G mobile networks for connectivity between core network elements in the circuit-switched domain, for international roaming between carriers and services like Local Number Portability and Toll Free numbers.

Emergency calls often also use G2, and for that reason G2 cannot be completely disabled yet. It is also used of course in some parts of G4 networks. Although G3 is being switched off in many areas, G2 network functions are still in operation. Eventually they will be replaced by Diameter and 5G, yet it will take time to replace all of those functions.

(though the newer protocol stack is not exactly free of it’s own flaws) https://troopers.de/events/troopers16/653_assaulting_ipx_diameter_roaming_network/

‘https://www.slideshare.net/yodresh/assaulting-diameter-ipxnetwork

“Technically speaking, more people use the SS7 than use the Internet.”

‘https://spectrum.ieee.org/alarming-security-defects-in-ss7-the-global-cellular-networkand-how-to-fix-them

ResearcherZero • April 6, 2024 1:06 AM

SS7 is used by switches, routers, service control points (SCPs), home location registers (HLRs), and a bunch of other stuff. SS7 also “facilitates the establishment, maintenance, and termination of calls, as well as the delivery of various supplementary services such as call forwarding and caller ID.”

As Clive pointed out, it’s a hard problem to fix.

The SS7 site itself is not particularly helpful, but there is a bit of an overview here.

‘https://www.patton.com/whitepapers/intro-to-ss7-tutorial/

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Syndromic surveillance summary: 4 April 2024 week 13

Updated 4 April 2024

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Reporting week 13: 25 March to 31 March

During week 13, most syndromic respiratory indicators remained stable but selected indicators (including GP in-hours lower respiratory tract infections and emergency department ( ED ) pneumonia attendances) continue at above expected levels. Please note that the of occurrence of the Easter bank holiday can impact on syndromic trends, including NHS 111 calls and GP-in hours consultations, and therefore data presented in the week 13 syndromic reports should be interpreted with some caution.

Remote health advice syndromic surveillance system

Total NHS 111 calls and online assessments increased over the Easter bank holiday weekend (Friday 29 March to Monday 1 April) in line expected heightened activity during a public holiday. Activity and trends should therefore be interpreted with some caution during week 13.

Please note that recent updates to the NHS Pathways clinical system used by NHS 111 have affected levels of certain syndromic indicators, including cold or flu and cough calls (which should currently be interpreted with caution). NHS Pathways changes have also affected online assessments for fever and difficulty breathing indicators (which have been temporarily removed from this report to avoid misinterpretation). Please see ‘Notes and Caveats’ for further information.

Remote health advice syndromic surveillance bulletins

GP in-hours syndromic surveillance system

During week 12, GP in-hours consultations for upper and lower respiratory tract infections remained stable but above seasonally expected levels. There was a small decrease in pneumonia consultations overall, however rates remain elevated and above expected levels (particularly in the 5 to 14 years age group). Whooping cough consultations increased during week 12 while there was a small decrease observed in measles consultations; both remain above seasonally expected levels.

GP in-hours syndromic surveillance bulletins

GP out-of-hours syndromic surveillance system

During week 12, GP out-of-hours consultations for acute respiratory infections remained stable and just above expected levels. There was a small increase in contacts for acute bronchitis or bronchiolitis and also an increase in difficulty breathing, wheeze or asthma contacts in children aged under one year.

GP out-of-hours syndromic surveillance bulletins

Emergency department syndromic surveillance system

During week 13, ED attendances for respiratory infection indicators remained stable nationally, however attendances for acute respiratory infection and pneumonia remain above seasonally expected levels. Scarlet fever attendances also remained stable but at above expected levels.

Emergency department syndromic surveillance bulletins

Ambulance syndromic surveillance system

During week 13, daily difficulty breathing calls increased and remained above expected levels. There were slight increases in ‘cardiac or respiratory arrest’ and ‘impact of heat or cold’ calls but these remain below expected baseline levels.

Ambulance syndromic surveillance bulletins

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Guest Essay

Let People Sell Their Kidneys. It Will Save Lives.

By Dylan Walsh

Mr. Walsh is a freelance journalist who focuses on science and the criminal justice system.

I owe the past 25 years of my life to my father, who dozed under general anesthesia as a surgeon cut eight inches from stomach to spine, removed one of his kidneys, placed it on ice and sent it to a nearby operating room, where it was fitted into my abdomen. My brother had a kidney transplant the same week, six days before I did. His new kidney came from a man we never knew who had died in a car accident in the mountains.

We were teenagers, afflicted with a congenital kidney disease. But we were lucky.

There are 100,000 people in the United States waiting for a kidney. More than half a million are on dialysis, which from my experience I know to be more of a means of survival than a form of living. About 4,000 people die each year while waiting for a kidney. Another 4,000 become too sick to undergo surgery — a gentler way of saying that they, too, die. The National Kidney Foundation estimates that without more investment in preventing diabetes and other ailments, more than one million people will be suffering from kidney failure by 2030, up from over 800,000 now .

These numbers illuminate a story of largely preventable suffering. Hundreds of millions of healthy people walk the streets quietly carrying two kidneys. They need only one. The head-scratcher is how to get kidneys from the people who have one to spare into the people who need one. Getting them from genetically modified pigs , as was recently found possible, won’t be a widespread solution for a very long time.

There’s a simpler and long overdue answer: Pay people for their kidneys.

Creating a market for kidneys is not a new concept, but it’s historically been met with disgust: Sell what? To be fair, some of the ways to structure such a market would be irresponsible, coercive and deserving of that disgust.

But others are more thoughtful and prudent. One approach is to make the federal government the sole purchaser of kidneys. Donor and recipient would never meet. Compensation would be fixed, haggling impossible. After the kidney is acquired, the transplant process would unfold in the typical manner.

This idea fits nicely within today’s health economics. Through a quirk of a 50-year-old law , Medicare is the primary insurer for anyone of any age in need of dialysis or a transplant. This has extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. It has also been costly, with end-stage renal disease patients accounting for about 7 percent of Medicare’s spending, despite constituting 1 percent of its users. Because transplants are ultimately cheaper than dialysis, if Medicare started paying people to donate kidneys, fewer people would need to survive on dialysis, and Medicare would need less taxpayer money to cover it.

Federal law presents the first and most significant hurdle to a market for kidneys. The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, NOTA for short, makes it unlawful “to knowingly acquire, receive or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation.” Though markets exist for human tissue, bone, amniotic stem cells and blood plasma and for the use of a woman’s womb and her eggs, organs cannot legally be bought and sold.

For several decades, efforts to persuade people to become kidney donors haven’t increased the number of volunteers. There were roughly 6,000 living kidney donors in 2000; there were roughly 6,000 in 2023. The only way to get more donors is to change the law.

One organization, the Coalition to Modify NOTA, hopes to legalize compensation and then pass a federal law it has titled the End Kidney Deaths Act . As it’s written, it would award living donors $50,000 over five years — $10,000 per year — through refundable tax credits. The coalition says it has held meetings with nearly 100 legislators from both parties and has been encouraged by the level of support for its idea (though the bill still has not been brought to the floor of Congress).

Other proposals meant to solve kidney donation shortages abound. Several bills have recently been introduced to Congress, including one that would prohibit life and disability insurance companies from denying coverage to or increasing premiums for donors, and another that would reimburse donors for expenses they incur during donation. Two Colorado state representatives, one Democratic and one Republican, have drafted their own proposal for a statewide tax credit of up to $40,000 for organ donors; a representative in New Hampshire is trying to create an open market for organs in his state.

Some people who are opposed to the idea of selling organs argue that we should instead improve the process of capturing organs from people who have died. But even a flawlessly functioning system that recovered and transplanted 100 percent of available organs would not meet demand. And deceased-donor kidneys don’t last as long as those from living donors.

One of the most consistent and vociferous objections to a kidney market centers on the fear of coercion or exploitation: If you pay people to do something, particularly if you pay them a lot, then you will drive those who are most desperate and socially precarious to take steps they later will regret.

Ned Brooks, a co-founder of the Coalition to Modify NOTA, told me there are ways to mitigate “the concern that someone is going to donate a kidney because they have a gambling debt or they are losing their house to foreclosure or you name it.” His organization’s proposal, for example, would split the $50,000 payment into installments arriving only around tax season to weaken donation as a get-rich-quick scheme. Even now, donation requires a weeks- to monthslong process of physical and psychological evaluation .

Compensating donors could also go a long way to reducing current inequities. Black patients are more than three times as likely to develop kidney failure as white patients. And under today’s system, white patients are about four times as likely as Black patients (and approximately two times as likely as Asian and Hispanic patients) to receive a living kidney donation within two years of needing one . While there are many reasons for this imbalance, one critical factor is that white people generally possess social networks saturated with volunteers who are able to make the kinds of accommodations needed for major surgery. Compensation would broaden the pool of available kidneys for those who lack these social networks.

Alongside the flurry of political activity surrounding organ donation, a shift in attitudes among the public seems to be underway, making this moment particularly ripe for legislative change. A 2019 study found that roughly 60 percent of Americans would favor compensation through a public agency — and this number, depending on the form of compensation, would increase to 70 percent to 80 percent if such a system eliminated kidney shortages. This is a rare nonpartisan idea at a highly polarized moment and could save the dozen people who die every day waiting for a kidney.

My kidney has been ticking along since August 1998, far longer than the average transplantation. It will give out sometime, maybe before my children graduate from high school. It will almost certainly fail before any children they may have are born. Still, I’ve lived 25 years I would not have had otherwise. I hope for a world in which others — many others — are given such an exquisite gift.

Dylan Walsh is a freelance journalist in Chicago who focuses on science and the criminal justice system.

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