I have a new op-ed in today's Privacy Tech, the in-house organ of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, about the risks to security and privacy from the World Wide Web Consortium's DRM project, and how privacy and security pros can help protect people who discover vulnerabilities in browsers from legal aggression.
It's not just Rep Pete Hoekstra [R-MI] who switched sides in the surveillance debate when he discovered that his beloved NSA had been spying on him — a whole raft of Congressional NSA cheerleaders have followed the path that German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the entire UK Parliament blazed when they learned that, as far as spies were concerned, no one was exempt.
Because "evildoers."
215 allows FBI to get records relevant to an investigation. PCLOB: NSA program fails on "FBI", "records," "relevant" & "investigation."
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) January 23, 2014
As Julian Sanchez points out, the NSA's program of phone record collection is clearly, unequivocally, and totally illegal (and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board agrees). — Read the rest
The forthcoming report of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the arm's-length body established by the Congress to investigate NSA spying, has leaked, with details appearing in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
From its pages, we learn that the board views the NSA's metadata collection program — which was revealed by Edward Snowden — as illegal, without "a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value…As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program." — Read the rest
It's been a year and Obama has yet to fill the empty seats on the government's main civil liberties oversight committee:
— Read the rest
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was recommended initially by the bipartisan September 11 commission as an institutional voice for privacy inside the intelligence community.
