With the sunsetting of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the passage of the USA Freedom Act, Congress has, for the first time since the 1970s, put limits on the surveillance powers of America's spooks. Read the rest

Jon Stewart's on fire here, asking why the same Republican politicians who stuck up for the Patriot Act's invasive state surveillance to save hypothetical American lives were so violently opposed to state-sponsored health-care on the grounds that the state had no business poking its nose into your private health matters. Read the rest

For the first time since its passage in 2001, Congress has declined to renew section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, which provided for mass, warrantless surveillance -- now what happens? Read the rest

The most outstanding and urgent hour of audio you'll hear this week is the On the Media history of the PATRIOT Act (MP3), and the most important website you'll visit this week is Sunset the PATRIOT Act, which lets you do something about it. Read the rest

It's been less than a day since the company published its new, excellent privacy policy -- but Gigaom has noticed that the latest Apple transparency report, covering Jan 1-Jun 30 2014, has eliminated the line that says that the company has received no secret Patriot Act "section 215" requests, which come with gag orders prohibiting companies from discussing them. Read the rest

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). The Patriot Act's section 215 allows the FBI to collect relevant records for a specific investigation.

The NSA isn't collecting records, it isn't the FBI, the data it collects isn't relevant, and there is no specific investigation. It's pretty amazing that there are still people (including Obama) insisting that the program is legal. Read the rest

In an excellent, well-argued editorial, CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen eviscerates the claim that the NSA's total, global surveillance is necessary for preventing 9/11-style attacks. Bergen shows how the US intelligence agencies' own auditors concluded that pre-PATRIOT Act surveillance powers were more than sufficient to have predicted and prevented the 9/11 attack, and many attacks since, including the 2008 Mumbai attack, which was planned in Chicago; Maj. Nidal Hasan's 2009 shooting spree at Ford Hood; the 2009 shooting of a soldier in Little Rock, Arkansas; Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab's failed underwear bomb attack in 2009. All attacks for which America's spies had advance warning and did nothing or not enough. Read the rest

The Patriot Act provides for secret warrants to spy on ISPs' customers. These "Section 215" warrants come with gag orders that mean that the company can't disclose their existence. This lack of transparency is ripe for abuse and is bad for ISPs' business. Apple is fighting back with a "warrant canary": they've published a transparency report (PDF) that states "Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge an order if served on us." If they are served with a 215 order in future, their next transparency report will drop this language, omitting any mention of 215, and keen-eyed watchers will know that they've been subjected to a secret order. I proposed a more ambitious version of this in September, though I was hardly the first person to suggest it. Good for Apple for using it. Read the rest

NBC reports that senior US Attorney James Trump sent Lavabit founder Ladar Levison and his lawyer a veiled arrest threat when Levison shut down his private email service (used by NSA leaker Edward Snowden) rather than comply with a secret order to spy on his customers. Nothing more can be said definitively, because the order to Levison came with a gag order prohibiting Levison from discussing it. Everyone is pretty sure that Levison was served with a National Security Letter.

This gives additional context to the decision of Lavabit competitor Silent Circle to pre-emptively shut down its own private email service as well, in advance of any sort of court order. If a secret court can issue a secret order requiring you to spy on your customers, and if shutting down the service will land you in jail, then simply not operating the kind of service that spooks find snoopworthy is the only option. Read the rest