Carbon Chemist

Tag: congress

  • Senate Democrats Are Running Out of Time to Pass a Shield Law to Protect Journalism

    Senate Democrats Are Running Out of Time to Pass a Shield Law to Protect Journalism

    [ad_1]

    Trump and his allies like Peter Thiel, who famously destroyed Gawker Media by secretly funding a lawsuit against it, have demonstrated a willingness to use the legal system against journalists. Earlier this month, Trump himself sued CBS for $10 billion, claiming that an interview with Vice-President Kamala Harris constituted unlawful election interference. (While legal experts universally dismiss the suit as absurd, the network will still have to dedicate significant time and resources to defending against it.) And he has vowed to use the Justice Department to investigate his political enemies once in office—a threat that naturally extends to news outlets that have angered him. In September, the former president, now president-elect, accused NBC News and “others” of treason in response to coverage of his criminal court cases, while adding that many news outlets would be “thoroughly scrutinized” once he again takes office.

    “They are a true threat to Democracy and are, in fact, THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” Trump said.

    In July, the Reporters Committee and 53 other news media and press rights organizations called on Senate leaders to advance the PRESS Act, warning that the Justice Department’s rules could be changed or reversed on a whim. “Only Congress,” they said, “can provide the press the certainty of a federal statute.”

    Senate staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told WIRED the bill’s inclusive “journalism” definition was a selling point among conservatives, with the definition extending well beyond the “institutional press,” as the courts sometimes call it. The language of the act defines a journalist as “a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public.” This is in keeping with US traditions, rooted in the First Amendment, of defining a journalist as someone who practices journalism rather than as someone who belongs to a guild or operates under a government license.

    “It’s a very broad definition,” adds Timm. “And there is no ideological test. It protects conservative journalists as much as it does liberal or mainstream or corporate journalists.”

    “There’s nothing more commonsense, or more bipartisan, than shielding journalists from unnecessary government surveillance,” Senator Ron Wyden, who authored the Senate version of PRESS Act, tells WIRED. “Conservative, liberal, and nonpartisan media all depend on speaking to sources without fear of being spied on by government officials who want to suppress unflattering information.”

    Senator Tom Cotton, who previously voiced opposition to the bill, did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement two years ago, Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, said the bill would “open a floodgate of leaks damaging to law enforcement and our nation’s security.” He went on to decry the publication of the Pentagon Papers—a classified study that revealed the US government had misled the public for decades over its involvement in Vietnam, which was only published in full after being read into the Congressional Record by then-senator Mike Gravel.

    “These leaks were reckless and harmful to our national security,” added Cotton, declaring there are “no shortage of legitimate and legal avenues for whistleblowers to unveil potential government misconduct.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • What Donald Trump’s Win Will Mean for Big Tech

    What Donald Trump’s Win Will Mean for Big Tech

    [ad_1]

    The most raucous cheers of the night were prompted by Trump’s promise to fire Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a regulatory agency that has brought a volley of lawsuits against crypto businesses under the Biden administration.

    Separately, Trump has promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of darknet marketplace Silk Road, who is currently serving life in prison. Silk Road, through which people bought and sold drugs and other contraband, was among the first online services to accept bitcoin as payment. The severity of Ulbricht’s sentence is widely considered to be disproportionate by bitcoiners, who have long called for his release.

    Antitrust

    An early indicator of the relationship the Trump administration intends to have with big tech will be the fate of the Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan.

    Khan, the youngest ever FTC chair at 35, became a flashpoint in the election campaign. Among Democrat donors, her approach to antitrust enforcement and corporate power was deeply controversial. Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft all faced legal challenges under her tenure, although some were more successful than others.

    “Lina Khan is…a person who is not helping America,” Linkedin co-founder and Democrat donor Hoffman told CNN in July. Trump donor Elon Musk also expressed his dislike. “She will be fired soon,” he said of Khan last week.

    Dan Ives, an analyst at financial services firm Wedbush, described Khan as a “nightmare for the tech sector,” adding there was a belief among analysts that her departure would act as a catalyst for more Big Tech deals. “The Musk influence for Trump could also catalyze and accelerate a potential Khan exit,” he said.

    Trump has suggested, vaguely, that “something” should be done about Google, to make the company “more fair.” Vance has been more explicit, praising Khan for “doing a pretty good job.”

    Vance appears to see break-ups as a solution for what he claims is Big Tech’s censorship of conservatives. “When you have companies like Facebook and Google censoring American citizens, making it harder for Americans to speak in their own political process, that is a major problem,” the vice president-elect said in September, giving Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 as an example. “I do think that there should be an antitrust solution to it.”

    A new Trump administration is unlikely to abandon antitrust cases against Big Tech, said Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a left-leaning technology trade group, in a memo on Wednesday, noting several of these began under his first term. ”But he will likely try to use these suits as leverage over the companies to get favorable treatment on speech and content concerns.”

    Whether Khan would serve under Trump is unclear. Her team declined to comment on Wednesday. Bill Kovacic, a former FTC chairman, said the chances of that happening beyond a few weeks were “close to zero.”

    Joel Khalili, Morgan Meaker, and Zeyi Yang contributed reporting.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • JD Vance’s Senate Office Fires Key Adviser Who Posted About Drug Use on Reddit

    JD Vance’s Senate Office Fires Key Adviser Who Posted About Drug Use on Reddit

    [ad_1]

    Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s office has fired key financial policy adviser Aaron Kofsky. A recent WIRED investigation found that Kofsky had posted extensively on Reddit over a period of years about using a variety of drugs, including cocaine and opiates, and called Vance a “Trump boot licker.”

    WIRED had been preparing a story about the news and had asked Kofsky to comment by Monday morning. Shortly before the deadline he’d been given, he forwarded Politico’s Morning Money newsletter, which reported that he’d left Vance’s office. It was “an honor to serve Senator Vance and the people of Ohio over the past two years,” he told Politico, and he was “thankful that dark period in my life is far behind me.”

    Kofsky continued, “Listen, I definitely screwed up, but we’ve reached an unprecedented level of absurdity when this much work goes into smearing an America First staffer.” He went on to question WIRED’s motives for publishing the piece, saying “something else is going on here.”

    According to Kofsky, he was suspended on October 16, the same day WIRED published its report, and was subsequently fired. “I’m sure it was ultimately because those silly Reddit posts were exposed,” he tells WIRED. “I’d note that those posts were written in good humor and didn’t hurt anybody.”

    Vance’s office declined to comment.

    Under the username PsychoticMammal, Kofsky posted about using cocaine, opiates, kratom, and many others for more than a decade. He wrote about experiencing withdrawal symptoms from trying to kick tianeptine, or “gas station heroin,” and kratom. He advised other users on how to transport drugs through TSA checkpoints without getting caught. In one post, Kofsky listed all of the drugs he had tried up until that point and rated them on a scale of 1 to 10.

    As recently as January, Kofsky posted a video from a Senate committee hearing of Vance questioning a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent on nitazenes, or manufactured opioids. Kofsky posted the video to several drug-related subreddits, including r/Opioid_RCs, r/Drugs, r/Opiates, and r/ObscureDrugs.

    “Surprising! Politician knows about nitazenes. Ohio Senator JD Vance Asks Witness About Nitzenes. Is it just me, or is this super surprisng? Like I’m just confused how this guy had heard of zenes? I can’t imagine any of his colleagues know anything about them,” Kofsky posted about the video in r/ResearchChemicals.

    Kofsky appears in the background of the video.

    “Like millions of Americans, I’ve struggled with drug use, which in my case was mostly an attempt to self medicate against the effects of epilepsy and epilepsy medication,” Kofsky said in a statement to WIRED last month. “I deeply regret posting these comments. I’m not proud of this and I’m embarrassed it’s being publicized in this way, but I am thankful to say that part of my life is behind me.”

    Kofsky played a significant role in shaping Vance’s banking and financial services policy. He wrote “much of the language” for Vance’s proposal to regulate cryptocurrency and consulted with a number of crypto firms on its policies, according to Politico.

    “I was an asset to Vance’s office,” he says, “and will be an asset to whatever organization I end up with next.”

    Shortly before publication of this story, Kofsky took to X to share his version of events.

    You can follow all of WIRED’s 2024 presidential election coverage here.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Will Your Elected Officials in Congress Accept the Results of the Election?

    Will Your Elected Officials in Congress Accept the Results of the Election?

    [ad_1]

    We are in the final days of a momentous presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Do you know whether your elected officials will accept the outcome?

    WIRED reached out to every single senator and member of the US Congress asking whether they would accept the results of the election as called by the Associated Press. Why the AP? Because in the absence of a national election authority, calls made by the AP—a nonprofit cooperative—have long been accepted as authoritative. We wanted something politically neutral, particularly because some local and state-level officials have indicated that they may not certify the results.

    You can look up your zip code or state in the search bar below to find your congressional representative and senator, as well as their response to our question about whether they will accept the AP’s results. In some instances, your zip code may not match your current congressional district, as district boundaries can change over time.

    We organized the legislators’ responses into three categories: those who will accept the results of the elections as reported by the AP, those who won’t, and those who have not responded. This is a living document, and we will continue to update it with responses from representatives as we continue to receive them. When possible, we are also including the full responses from lawmakers to add further context to their responses. For instance, some lawmakers may say that they will accept the results when states certify but not based on the AP call.

    A note is attached to the results of all lawmakers who signed the “Unity Commitment” in September, vowing to certify the results after “all legal means” to challenge the outcome “have been exhausted.” Additionally, the results indicate if a lawmaker previously declared a commitment “to certifying the election results” as part of a USA Today poll conducted in mid-October.

    It’s the first presidential election since the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol and baselessly claimed the election had been stolen.

    In the interceding years, election denial has gone from being the purview of fringe conspiracists to a staple of major figures on the American right. Trump has already indicated plans to challenge election results this year, and hundreds of Republican candidates for office have cast doubt on them as well. Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice presidential candidate, has said that he would not have certified the 2020 election unless states had sent alternative pro-Trump electors.

    Election officials across the country have delayed or refused the certification of state and local election results. Conspiracy theories about the results of the 2024 election have already flooded the internet, as election denial groups, the Trump campaign, and people such as billionaire and X owner Elon Musk have spread falsehoods about election fraud.

    In the face of the proven willingness of Trump and his allies to attempt to seize power after losing an election, a statement from elected officials that they will accept the results of the election as declared by a neutral arbiter is critical information for voters preparing to cast their ballots.

    Dell Cameron, Vittoria Elliott, Leah Feiger, David Gilbert, Makena Kelly, and Dhruv Mehrotra contributed to this project.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling

    US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling

    [ad_1]

    Andy Carvin, the managing editor and research director of the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), tells WIRED that his organization, which conducts a vast amount of research into disinformation and other online harms, has been tracking Doppelganger for more than two years. The scope of the operation should surprise few, he says, given the fake news sites follow an obvious template, and that populating them with AI-generated text is simple.

    “Russian operations like Doppelganger are like throwing spaghetti at a wall,” he says. “They toss out as much as they can and see what sticks.”

    Meta, in a written statement on Tuesday, said it had banned RT’s parent company, Rossiya Segodnya, and “other related entities” globally across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads for engaging in what it called “foreign interference activity.” (“Meta is discrediting itself,” the Kremlin replied Tuesday, claiming the ban has endangered the company’s “prospects” for “normalizing” relations with Russia.)

    Testifying on Wednesday, Meta president of global affairs Nick Clegg stressed the industry-wide nature of the problem facing voters online. “People trying to interfere with elections rarely target a single platform,” he said, adding that Meta is, nevertheless, “confident” in its ability to protect the integrity of “not only this year’s elections in the United States, but elections everywhere.”

    Warner appeared less than fully convinced, noting the use of paid advertisements in recent malign influence campaigns. “I would have thought,” he said, “eight years later, we would be better at at least screening the advertisers.”

    He added that, seven months ago, over two dozen tech companies had signed the AI Elections Accord in Munich—an agreement to invest in research and the development of countermeasures against harmful AI. While some of the firms have been responsive, he said, others have ignored repeated inquiries by US lawmakers, many eager to hear how those investments played out.

    While talking up Google’s efforts to “identify problematic accounts, particularly around election ads,” Alphabet’s chief legal officer, Kent Walker, was halted mid-sentence. Citing conversations with the Treasury Department, Warner interrupted to say that he’d confirmed as recently as February that both Google and Meta have “repeatedly allowed Russian influence actors, including sanctioned entities, to use your ad tools.”

    The Virginia senator stressed that Congress needed to know specifically “how much content” relevant bad actors had paid to promote to US audiences this year. “And we’re going to need that [information] extraordinarily fast,” he added, referring as well to details of how many Americans specifically had seen the content. Walker replied to say that Google had taken down “something like 11,000 efforts by Russian-associated entities to post content on YouTube and the like.”

    Warner additionally urged the officials against viewing Election Day as if it were an end-zone. Of equal and great importance is the integrity of the news that reaches voters, he stressed, in the days and weeks that follow.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The US Needs Deepfake Porn Laws. These States Are Leading the Way

    The US Needs Deepfake Porn Laws. These States Are Leading the Way

    [ad_1]

    Last year, WIRED reported that deepfake pornography is only increasing, and researchers estimate that 90 percent of deepfake videos are of porn, the vast majority of which is nonconsensual porn of women. But despite how pervasive the issue is, Kaylee Williams, a researcher at Columbia University who has been tracking nonconsensual deepfake legislation, says she has seen legislators more focused on political deepfakes.

    “More states are interested in protecting electoral integrity in that way than they are in dealing with the intimate image question,” she says.

    Matthew Bierlein, a Republican state representative in Michigan, who cosponsored the state’s package of nonconsensual deepfake bills, says that he initially came to the issue after exploring legislation on political deepfakes. “Our plan was to make [political deepfakes] a campaign finance violation if you didn’t put disclaimers on them to notify the public.” Through his work on political deepfakes, Bierlein says, he began working with Democratic representative Penelope Tsernoglou, who helped spearhead the nonconsensual deepfake bills.

    At the time in January, nonconsensual deepfakes of Taylor Swift had just gone viral, and the subject was widely covered in the news. “We thought that the opportunity was the right time to be able to do something,” Beirlein says. And Beirlein says that he felt Michigan was in the position to be a regional leader in the Midwest, because, unlike some of its neighbors, it has a full-time legislature with well-paid staffers (most states don’t). “We understand that it’s a bigger issue than just a Michigan issue. But a lot of things can start at the state level,” he says. “If we get this done, then maybe Ohio adopts this in their legislative session, maybe Indiana adopts something similar, or Illinois, and that can make enforcement easier.”

    But what the penalties for creating and sharing nonconsensual deepfakes are—and who is protected—can vary widely from state to state. “The US landscape is just wildly inconsistent on this issue,” says Williams. “I think there’s been this misconception lately that all these laws are being passed all over the country. I think what people are seeing is that there have been a lot of laws proposed.”

    Some states allow for civil and criminal cases to be brought against perpetrators, while others might only provide for one of the two. Laws like the one that recently took effect in Mississippi, for instance, focus on minors. Over the past year or so, there have been a spate of instances of middle and high schoolers using generative AI to make explicit images and videos of classmates, particularly girls. Other laws focus on adults, with legislators essentially updating existing laws banning revenge porn.

    Unlike laws that focus on nonconsensual deepfakes of minors, on which Williams says there is a broad consensus that there they are an “inherent moral wrong,” legislation around what is “ethical” when it comes to nonconsensual deepfakes of adults is “squishier.” In many cases, laws and proposed legislation require proving intent, that the goal of the person making and sharing the nonconsensual deepfake was to harm its subject.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The Controversial Kids Online Safety Act Faces an Uncertain Future

    The Controversial Kids Online Safety Act Faces an Uncertain Future

    [ad_1]

    After passing the Senate nearly unanimously last week, the future of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) appears uncertain. Congress is now on a six-week recess, and reporting from Punchbowl News indicates that the House Republican leadership may not prioritize bringing the bill to the floor for a vote when legislators return.

    In response to Punchbowl’s reporting, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released a statement saying, “Just one week ago, Speaker Johnson said that he’d like to get KOSA done. I hope that hasn’t changed. Letting KOSA and [the Children and Teens’ Online Protection Act] collect dust in the House would be an awful mistake and a gut punch—a gut punch to these brave, wonderful parents who have worked so hard to reach this point.” The bill has also received support from vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

    But the bill created a massive divide among the digital rights and tech accountability community. If passed, the legislation would require online platforms to block users under 18 from seeing certain types of content that the government considers harmful.

    Proponents of the measure, which included the Tech Oversight Project, an nonprofit focused on tech accountability through antitrust legislation, saw the bill as a meaningful step toward holding tech companies accountable for the way their products impact children.

    “Too many young people, parents, and families have experienced the dire consequences that result from social media companies’ greed,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, in a statement in June. “The accountability KOSA would provide for these families is long overdue.”

    Others, like the nonprofit digital rights organization the Center for Technology and Democracy, said that, if enacted, the law could be used to prevent young users from accessing critical information about topics like sexual health and LGBTQ+ issues. This meant that some organizations that regularly lobby to hold Silicon Valley accountable found themselves siding with tech companies and their lobbyists in trying to kill the bill.

    “KOSA is not ready for a floor vote,” said Aliya Bhatia, policy analyst with the Center for Technology and Democracy’s Free Expression Project, in a statement in July. “In its current form, KOSA can still be misused to target marginalized communities and politically sensitive information.”

    Evan Greer, director of the nonprofit advocacy group Fight for the Future, which opposed the bill, tells WIRED that KOSA and legislation like it “divides our coalition” while allowing tech companies to “keep getting away with murder and avoiding regulation.”

    “This was never really about protecting kids,” Greer says. “It was sort of about lawmakers wanting to say that they’re protecting kids, and that doesn’t actually help kids.” Instead of legislators focusing on the “flawed” legislation, Greer says that Congress could have spent that same time and energy on antitrust-focused legislation like the American Innovation and Choice Online and the Open App Markets Act, or on the American Privacy Rights Act.

    “When our coalition is divided in fighting each other, we’re going to get rolled every time by Big Tech,” she says.

    Meanwhile, Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, has said that she supports KOSA, as has the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a tech accountability nonprofit that was sued by X last year for exposing hate speech on its platform.

    Although the House Republican leadership’s decision may signal the beginning of the end of KOSA itself, Gautam Hans, an associate law professor at Cornell University, says that “given the bipartisan interest in enacting this law, I suspect other proposals will follow—with hopefully more extensive safeguards against potential censorship by the state.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

    The US Election Threats Are Clear. What to Do About Them Is Anything But

    [ad_1]

    On Wednesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee questioned senior national security officials on how they plan to respond to attacks on voting infrastructure and attempts to influence the election using deepfakes, generative AI, and misinformation. While everyone in the room appeared to agree on what the threats are, senators expressed concern about how exactly government agencies would respond.

    In a wide-ranging session, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, and FBI Executive Assistant Director Larissa focused especially on the wide availability of increasingly sophisticated AI tools that make it easier for more people to create convincing and deceptive fake videos and audio. Senators pressed them on what they would do if one of those AI-generated fakes went viral in the heat of a presidential election.

    “I don’t think I have a clearer understanding of who’s in charge and how we would respond,” said Marco Rubio, senator from Florida and vice chair of the committee. “I don’t want there to be any gray area.”

    Haines pointed to a US government “notification framework,” that provides guidance for making public disclosures while considering sensitive intelligence collection methods used by the US government.

    Building off of Rubio’s question, committee chair Mark Warner, senator from Virginia, praised the response by the Trump administration after Iranian linked actors posed as the Proud Boys in an attempt to intimate voters. In an unprecedented move at the time, senior law enforcement and intelligence officials publicly attributed the impersonation to Iranian-linked actors within days.

    Senator Angus King of Maine called the framework “a bureaucratic nightmare,” and pushed for faster disclosure of influence efforts.

    “What I want to urge is disclosure of sources when you’re aware of it immediately,” King said.

    Haines responded that the framework may “sound quite bureaucratic,” but that the government has been able to expedite its decision-making process to happen in as quickly as two days.

    Warner noted that it’s now easier than ever for other countries to attempt to interfere in elections. “The barriers to entry for foreign malign influence—including election influence—have become almost vanishingly small,” Warner said. “The scale and sophistication of these sorts of attacks against our elections can be accelerated several-fold by what are now cutting-edge AI tools.”

    He also criticized efforts to downplay the severity of election interference in 2016. “I think there has been some rewriting post-2016 that somehow some of the activities in Russia, or even in 2020 with Iran, that was kind of harmless trolling,” Warner said.

    Haines agreed, pointing to Iran as an example of a foreign actor making serious attempts to sow discord among Americans.

    “[Iran is] increasingly aggressive in their efforts seeking to stoke this kind of discord and promote chaos and undermine confidence in the integrity of the process and they use social media platforms, really, to issue threats, [and] to disseminate disinformation,” she said.

    And Iran’s not alone; the officials gave an overview of other countries seeking to influence the upcoming presidential election. Haines said that Russia “remains the most active foreign threat to our elections.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Secrecy Concerns Mount Over Spy Powers Targeting US Data Centers

    Secrecy Concerns Mount Over Spy Powers Targeting US Data Centers

    [ad_1]

    Last month, US president Joe Biden signed a surveillance bill enhancing the National Security Agency’s power to compel US businesses to wiretap communications going in and out of the country. The changes to the law have left legal experts largely in the dark as to the true limits of this new authority, chiefly when it comes to the types of companies that could be affected. The American Civil Liberties Union and organizations like it say the bill has rendered the statutory language governing the limits of a powerful wiretap tool overly vague, potentially subjecting large swaths of corporate America to warrantless and secretive surveillance practices.

    In April, Congress rushed to extend the US intelligence system’s “crown jewel,” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The spy program allows the NSA to wiretap calls and messages between Americans and foreigners abroad—so long as the foreigner is the individual being “targeted” and the intercept serves a significant “foreign intelligence” purpose. Since 2008, the program has been limited to a subset of businesses that the law calls “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—corporations such as Microsoft and Google, which provide email services, and phone companies like Sprint and AT&T.

    In recent years, the government has worked quietly to redefine what it means to be an ECSP in an attempt to extend the NSA’s reach, first unilaterally and now with Congress’s backing. The issue remains that the bill Biden signed last month contains murky language that attempts to redefine the scope of a critical surveillance program. In response, a coalition of digital rights organizations from the Brennan Center for Justice to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pressing the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, and the nation’s top spy, Avril Haines, to declassify details about a relevant court case that could, they say, shed much-needed light on the situation.

    In a letter to the top officials, more than 20 such organizations say they believe the new definition of an ECSP adopted by Congress might “permit the NSA to compel almost any US business to assist” the agency, noting that all companies today provide some sort of “service” and have access to equipment on which “communications” are stored.

    “Deliberately writing overbroad surveillance authorities and trusting that future administrations will decide not to exploit them is a recipe for abuse,” the letter says. “And it is entirely unnecessary, as the administration can—and should—declassify the fact that the provision is intended to reach data centers.”

    The Justice Department confirmed receipt of the letter on Tuesday, but referred WIRED to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which has primary purview over declassification decisions. The ODNI has not responded to a request for comment.

    It is widely believed—and has been reported—that data centers are the intended target of this textual change, and Matt Olsen, the assistant US attorney general for national security, appeared to confirm as much during an April 17 episode of the Lawfare podcast.

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Top FBI Official Urges Agents to Use Warrantless Wiretaps on US Soil

    Top FBI Official Urges Agents to Use Warrantless Wiretaps on US Soil

    [ad_1]

    House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner and ranking member Jim Himes blasted out invitations announcing a “bipartisan celebration” of the 702 program’s continuation last week. The event, which the lawmakers have dubbed FISA Fest, is being held in a reception room in the US Capitol building Wednesday night.

    A House Intelligence Committee spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

    Turner and Himes were instrumental in preserving the FBI’s warrantless access to 702 data. In countless “briefings” since October, the pair urged members of their respective parties to avoid reining in the FBI’s authority too greatly. Instead, the new procedures designed by the bureau itself were touted by both lawmakers as a sufficient bulwark against further abuse.

    Narrowly winning that battle last month, Himes and Turner worked to kill an amendment that would have forced FBI employees to get search warrants before reviewing the communications of Americans swept up by the program. (The amendment, opposed by the Biden White House, failed in a tie vote, 212-212.) Instead, the FBI’s procedures, now part of the 702 statute, require employees to affirmatively “opt in” before accessing the wiretaps. They must also seek permission from an FBI attorney before conducting “batch queries” of the database. And queries for communications of elected officials, reporters, academics, and religious figures are now all deemed “sensitive” and require approval from higher up the chain of command.

    Congress established Section 702 in 2008 to legitimize an existing surveillance program run by the National Security Agency (NSA) without congressional oversight or approval. The program, more narrowly defined at the time, intercepted communications that were at least partly domestic but included a target the government believed was a known terrorist. While bringing the surveillance under its authority, Congress has helped to steadily expand the scope of the surveillance to encompass a new slate of threats, from cybercrime and drug trafficking to arms proliferation.

    While advocates for 702 surveillance often imply that Americans who are wiretapped are communicating with terrorists—a concoction that Turner himself repeatedly lent credence to this year—the allegation is dubious. Officially, it is the US government’s position that it is impossible to know which US citizens are being surveilled or even how many of them there are. The chief aim of the 702 program is to acquire “foreign intelligence information,” a term that encompasses not only terrorism and acts of sabotage but information necessary for the government to conduct its own “foreign affairs.”

    Surveillance critics worry that the array of possible targets extends far beyond what is being characterized in unclassified settings. It is uncontroversial to suggest that the US government—like all governments with the power to spy—finds reasons to spy on foreign allies, businesses, even news publications. So long as the target is foreign, they have no privacy rights.

    The limits of the 702 program remain murky, even to congressional members insisting that it should not be curbed further. The Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Mark Warner, acknowledged to reporters this week that language in Section 702 needs to be “fixed,” even though he voted last month to make the current language law.

    FISA experts had warned for months that new language introduced by the House Intelligence Committee is far too vague in the way it describes the categories of businesses the US government can compel, fearing that the government would obtain the power to force anyone with access to a target’s online communications into snooping on the NSA’s behalf—IT workers and data center staff among them.

    A trade group representing Google, Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft, among some of the world’s other largest technology companies, concurred last month, arguing that the new version of the surveillance program threatens to “dramatically expand the scope of entities and individuals” subject to Section 702 orders.

    “We are working on it,” Warner told The Record on Monday. “I am absolutely committed to getting that fixed,” he said, suggesting the best time to do so would be “in the next intelligence bill.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link