A Major Wireless Network Flaw Is Still Being Exploited To Track User Locations

from the fix-your-shit dept

In 2017, hackers and security researchers highlighted long-standing vulnerabilities in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signalling System 7 in the US), a series of protocols first built in 1975 to help connect phone carriers around the world. While the problem isn't new, a 2016 60 Minutes report brought wider attention to the fact that the flaw can allow a hacker to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. All while the intrusion looks like ordinary carrier to carrier chatter among a sea of other, "privileged peering relationships."

Telecom carriers and lobbyists have routinely downplayed the flaw and their multi-year failure to do much about it. In 2018, the CBC noted how Canadian wireless providers Bell and Rogers weren't even willing to talk about the flaw after the news outlet published an investigation showing how (using only a mobile phone number) it was possible to intercept the calls and movements of Quebec NDP MP Matthew Dubé.

Now there's yet another wake up call: a new report from the Guardian indicates that Rayzone, an Israeli corporate spy agency that provides its government clients with “geolocation tools," has been exploiting the flaw for some time to provide clients access to user location information and, potentially, the contents of communications. Apparently, the company first leased an access point in the network of Sure Guernsey, a mobile operator in the Channel Islands. From there, it appears to have exploited the SS7 flaw to track users in numerous additional countries:

"Industry sources with access to sensitive communications data say there is recent evidence of a steady stream of apparently suspicious signaling messages directed via the Channel Islands to phone networks worldwide, with hundreds of messages routed via Sure Guernsey and another operator, Jersey Airtel, to phone networks in North America, Europe and Africa in August."

Of course, as with other past reveals of this type (like when Saudi Arabia was also found to be doing something similar to track targets inside the U.S.), the companies involved either insist they know nothing about such exploitation, or that they're vaguely aware of it, and have done everything possible to prohibit it from happening. Though one reason many telcos may not have been particularly keen on cracking down on the practice is that numerous western governments very likely exploit the SS7 flaw as well.

Senator Ron Wyden demanded answers as early as 2017 from mobile phone companies as to why they haven't done more to thwart the practice, and, last I checked, is still awaiting a response. For smaller carriers it can also be expensive and complicated to remedy the problem, which makes them even easier targets for exploitation. Experts say the U.S. FCC, as you might expect, hasn't done much of anything to coordinate a response to the threat:

Instead, as the SolarWinds supply chain hack illustrates, America under Trump spent countless calories hyperventilating over nonsense like TikTok instead of focusing on the vast number of very real cybersecurity threats that actually pose a risk to international consumer, government, and business privacy.

Filed Under: geolocation, location data, privacy, ss7, surveillance

Florida PD's Reverse Warrant Leads To Innocent Man Being Targeted In A Robbery Investigation

from the let-me-ride-my-bike-through-the-wide-open-country-that-I-love dept

Riding your bike while sending out geolocation data is the hot new crime.

Cops are using reverse warrants with increasing frequency, inverting the usual investigation process by demanding info about everyone in a certain area before trimming down the data haul to a list of suspects. It's sort of like canvassing a neighborhood, except investigators approach companies like Google, rather than people who might have seen something.

The problem with these dragnets is it makes everyone in the area a suspect. The more heavily-trafficked the area is, the more problematic this process is. Reverse warrants have already resulted in innocent people being jailed. This report by NBC News is another cautionary tale -- one that involves a man who became a suspect in a robbery just because he wandered into the geofence set up by cops.

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google’s legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

[...]

In the notice from Google was a case number. McCoy searched for it on the Gainesville Police Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others.

Now McCoy was even more panicked and confused. He knew he had nothing to do with the break-in ─ he’d never even been to the victim’s house ─ and didn’t know anyone who might have. And he didn’t have much time to prove it.

This put McCoy in the very uncomfortable position of proving his innocence even before he had even been charged with a crime. Realizing there was a good possibility approaching the department directly would result in his immediate arrest, McCoy hired a lawyer using money given to him by his parents from their savings. His lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, went to court to get the warrant killed.

Kenyon argued that the warrant was unconstitutional because it allowed police to conduct sweeping searches of phone data from untold numbers of people in order to find a single suspect.

[...]

“This geofence warrant effectively blindly casts a net backwards in time hoping to ensnare a burglar,” Kenyon wrote. “This concept is akin to the plotline in many a science fiction film featuring a dystopian, fascist government.”

Had McCoy not done this, the Gainesville PD would have continued to view him as the most likely suspect, approaching Google once again to obtain identifying info. McCoy's daily bike rides took him past the crime scene he never knew was a crime scene. With the warrant being questioned, the Gainesville PD withdrew it, saying statements made in the McCoy's lawyer's filings made it clear they were targeting the wrong person.

Imagine how this would have gone for someone without the funds to hire a lawyer… or for any number of people who may feel there's nothing they can do to prevent cops from obtaining their information from a third party. The novelty of this inverted interpretation of probable cause doesn't lend itself to simple answers. Clearing your name isn't as easy as showing up at the cop shop with a reasonable explanation about why your location data is all over the crime scene.

When rounding up the usual suspects means harvesting data on hundreds or thousands of innocent people, the possibility of putting the wrong person in jail increases exponentially. McCoy's experience may be an outlier, but it won't be that way for long.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, florida, gainesville, geofence warrant, geolocation, location data, warrants, zachary mccoy
Companies: google

Judge Alsup Threatens To Block Malibu Media From Any More Copyright Trolling In Northern California

from the run-away...-run-away dept

Yes, we keep seeing Judge William Alsup appear on these pages, as he keeps getting high profile tech related cases. And, while we don't always agree with his decisions, I don't think that anyone can argue that he isn't careful and thorough in making sure he understands the technology involved in these cases. The most well-known example of this, of course, was the time he taught himself to program Java to understand the deeper issues in the copyright dispute over Java's API's (which helped him make the right call in saying API's were not eligible for copyright protection -- a ruling that was unfortunately overturned by the Federal Circuit). More recently, Judge Alsup also got some attention for demanding lessons and reading materials in how to build LiDAR systems, to understand the trade secrets fight between Uber and Waymo over their LiDAR technology. And, just as a reminder, he's not talking about basic level stuff here:

Please keep in mind that the judge is already familiar with basic light and optics principles involving lens, such as focal lengths, the non-linear nature of focal points as a function of distance of an object from the lens, where objects get focused to on a screen behind the lens, and the use of a lens to project as well as to focus. So, most useful would be literature on adapting LiDAR to self-driving vehicles, including various strategies for positioning light-emitting diodes behind the lens for best overall effect, as well as use of a single lens to project outgoing light as well as to focus incoming reflections (other than, of course, the patents in suit). The judge wishes to learn the prior art and public domain art bearing on the patents in suit and trade secrets in suit.

Yeah. So. It was probably a good thing that, a year and a half ago, the Chief Judge in the Northern District of California, said that any new Malibu Media copyright trolling cases had to go in front of Judge Alsup. Malibu Media, of course, is the US's biggest copyright troll, responsible for a fairly insane percentage of all the copyright infringement lawsuits filed in the US. We've had a ton of stories about the company and some of its fairly shady practices in copyright trolling. Malibu Media, of course, is also a sleight of hand, as it's actually the porn company better known as X-Art. It's also been connected to the famous "international men of mystery", often referred to as Guardaley -- a German company, that's gone through various name changes, and seems to be behind numerous copyright trolling operations.

Either way, last year, we noted that Judge Alsup had been quick to understand what was going on with Malibu Media, and, in particular, called out the company for attempting to cut and run on any case when challenged. This is pretty typical of many copyright trolls. If the defendant in the case actually challenges anything, Malibu will often dismiss the case and run away, so as not to have to bother with defending its own legal tactics.

It appears that Alsup is getting increasingly tired of Malibu Media trying to abuse the judicial system as part of its shakedown business model. As first noted by the Fight Copyright Trolls blog, Alsup has issued an order to show cause why it should be barred from filing any more lawsuits in the district.

Specifically, Alsup is doing this in response to Malibu Media's claims that the geolocation technology it uses, from Maxmind, is close to 100% accurate in locating where a given IP address is located. If Maxmind sounds familiar, that's because it's the company which was the subject of numerous stories last year about how laughably bad its geolocation tools were, including the truly horrifying story of how Maxmind would tell lots of people that various IP addresses were at a random house in Kansas, leading lots of strangers to show up there, often angry about scams or spam.

So, yeah, to then go into court and declare that Maxmind is perfect... didn't go over too well:

In this particular case, as in each case filed in this district in October 2016, counsel for Malibu Media averred in a sworn declaration that Malibu Media used a database called “Maxmind” to map our defendant’s IP address to a particular district in order to determine the proper venue for this action (Dkt. No. 7-6). The declaration parroted several hearsay statements about the accuracy of Maxmind from its website, but counsel also averred that in their experience in California “Maxmind has always been 100% accurate to the state level, 100% accurate at identifying the ISP and has predicted the correct district 146 out of 147 times”

He then points to that article linked above, about the house in Kansas, and says that Malibu Media better come up with better evidence of accuracy, or that's it for lawsuits in Northern California:

Malibu Media is hereby ordered to SHOW CAUSE at that hearing, why the Court should not bar further Malibu Media cases in this district until the accuracy of the geolocation technology is fully vetted. Malibu Media shall file a written statement, with all factual assertions supported by declarations sworn under the penalty of perjury by MAY 16 AT NOON.

Oh, and since Malibu Media has a history of cutting and running, he added this kicker:

To be clear, this order applies even if Malibu Media voluntarily dismisses this action.

In other words: don't run and hide. It won't work.

The order also highlights that Alsup is well aware of how the copyright trolling scam works, quoting another judicial hero in the fight against copyright trolls, Judge Otis Wright, who famously was the first to call out Prenda, and kicked off a series of events that resulted in Prenda's two principles getting indicted.

Here, Judge Alsup quotes Judge Wright, calling out Malibu Media as well:

The Court is familiar with lawsuits like this one. These lawsuits run a common theme: plaintiff owns a copyright to a pornographic movie; plaintiff sues numerous John Does in a single action for using BitTorrent to pirate the movie; plaintiff subpoenas the ISPs to obtain the identities of these Does; if successful, plaintiff will send out demand letters to the Does; because of embarrassment, many Does will send back a nuisance-value check to the plaintiff. The cost to the plaintiff: a single filing fee, a bit of discovery, and stamps. The rewards: potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. Rarely do these cases reach the merits.

The federal courts are not cogs in a plaintiff’s copyright-enforcement business model. The Court will not idly watch what is essentially an extortion scheme, for a case that plaintiff has no intention of bringing to trial.

It's really quite astounding that operations like Malibu Media have been able to keep this up this long. It eventually crashed and burned for Prenda, and it looks like Malibu Media may be facing some more significant challenges in the near future as well.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright trolling, geolocation, william alsup
Companies: malibu media, maxmind, x-art

Yet Another Leak Shows NSA Lied About Not Being Able To Geolocate Data It Scoops Up

from the whoops dept

And... yet another leak of NSA surveillance capabilities to The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald (who damn well better get a Pulitzer Prize for this) suggests pretty strongly that the NSA has directly lied, multiple times, when asked to disclose how many people it had spied on in the US. As we've noted for a while, the NSA has claimed that it was not possible to determine how many Americans it had data on. In a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had stated:

While it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed...

An NSA spokesperson also said that it was not possible to figure that out:

Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case."

But, as Greenwald reveals, the NSA appears to have a program, called Boundless Informant (quite a name, huh) that does exactly that. The leaks are coming fast and furious at this point, and I doubt they're going to stop soon.

Filed Under: dni, faa, fisa amendments act, geolocation, james clapper, leaks, lies, nsa, nsa suveillance, ron wyden, spying on americans

Senators Wyden & Udall To DOJ: Stop Saying Patriot Act Isn't A Secret Law When You Know It Is

from the will-it-matter? dept

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been pressing the feds for a while now concerning their secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which appears to go way, way, way beyond what most in the public believe on simply reading the bill. While the two Senators had put forth an Amendment to explain these secret interpretations when certain provisions of the Patriot Act were up for renewal, they eventually dropped the Amendment in exchange for some other concessions, and a promise that hearings would be held on the issue. Since then, the Senators have continued to press the feds on this issue at every opportunity, leading to quite a lot of doublespeak from the feds.

The latest development is that the two Senators have sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, saying that Justice Department representatives are clearly misleading the public about the interpretation of the law. Basically, they say that there's a classified ruling about the interpretation of the law, which some in the government (including Wyden, Udall and Holder) are clearly aware of, but which likely interprets the law vastly differently than most in the public would. And the statements from the Justice Department improperly imply that the details surrounding the law are publicly known -- when they are not.

Shorter version: There's a secret court ruling out there that says the government can spy on a ton of people under the Patriot Act, even though the text of the law seems to suggest otherwise. And the Justice Department is implying that the text of the law is an accurate representation of what the law actually is -- when the secret court ruling seems to say otherwise.

While we are sure that you would agree that government officials should not describe government authorities in a way that misleads the public, during your tenure Justice Department officials have -- on a number of occasions -- made what we believe are misleading statements pertaining to the government's interpretation of surveillance law.

The first set of statements that concern us are the repeated claims by Justice Department officials that the government's authority to obtain business records or other 'tangible things' under section 215 of the USA Patriot Act is analogous to the use of a grand jury subpoena. This comparison -- which we consider highly misleading -- has been made by Justice Department officials on multiple occasions, including in testimony before Congress. As you know, Section 215 authorities are not interpreted the same way that grand jury subpoena authorities are, and we are concerned that when Justice Department officials suggest that the two authorities are "analogous" they provide the public with a false understanding of how surveillance law is interpreted in practice.

More recently, we were troubled to learn that a Justice Department spokesman state that "Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] is not a secret law, nor has it been implemented under secret legal opinions by the Justice Department." This statement is also extremely misleading. As the NSA General Counsel testified in July of this year, significant interpretations of section 215 of the Patriot Act are contained in classified opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and these opinions -- and the legal interpretations they contain -- continue to be kept secret. In our judgment, when the government relies on significant interpretations of public statutes that are kept secret from the American public, the government is effectively relying on secret law.

Separately, they note that when the truth comes out, the government is going to be severely embarrassed:

Americans will eventually and inevitably come to learn about the gap that currently exists between the public's understanding of government surveillance authorities and the official, classified interpretation of these authorities. We believe the best way to avoid a negative public reaction and an erosion in confidence in US intelligence agencies is to initiate an informed public debate about these authorities today.

Filed Under: eric holder, fisa, geolocation, james clapper, mark udall, patriot act, privacy, ron wyden, secrecy, senate

Ron Wyden Puts Hold On FISA Amendments Act; Wants Answers To How Many Americans Have Been Spied On

from the good-for-him dept

Last week, we noted that as everyone was focused on the debt ceiling, some in the Senate Intelligence Committee saw it as an opportunity to rush through an extension for the FISA Amendment Act, which was originally passed to "legalize" the government's warrantless wiretapping program (already ongoing) with retroactive immunity. Of course, when that was passed, it was made clear that the intent was solely to use it to conduct surveillance on people outside of the US. However, as Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have made clear, intelligence officials have been using a very questionable "hybrid theory" to use the FAA and the Patriot Act to conduct widespread surveillance of Americans, most likely in the form of collecting tons of geolocation data from mobile phone operators.

There was no reason to approve the FAA extension last week, since it doesn't expire until next year. Even worse, the vote for the whole thing was in a "closed" session, not for classified reasons, since votes come out eventually, but basically to avoid public scrutiny. Wyden and Udall introduced an amendment requiring intelligence officials to explain the "problems" associated with secret interpretations of such laws that disagree with how most (including those in Congress) believe the law is intended for use. Since the vote was closed, there was no official notice on how it turned out, though we'd heard rumors that it was approved.

Senator Wyden has now come out and said that it was, in fact, approved, and his and Udall's Amendment was voted down 7-8. Because of this, Wyden is putting a hold on the FISA Amendments Act extension, and is pushing for a simple answer to the question that multiple intelligence officials said "is not reasonably possible" to answer: how many Americans are being spied under this Act, which was clearly intended to cover surveillance of foreigners.

As most of my colleagues remember, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act in 2008 in an effort to give the government new authorities to conduct surveillance of foreigners outside the United States. The bill contained an expiration date of December 2012, and the purpose of this expiration date was to force members of Congress to come back in a few years and examine whether these new authorities had been interpreted and implemented as intended.

I believe that Congress has not yet adequately examined this issue, and that there are important questions that need to be answered before the FISA Amendments Act is given a long-term extension.

The central section of the FISA Amendments Act, the part that is now section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act itself, specifically stated that it was intended to address foreigners outside the United States, and it even required the Attorney General to develop procedures designed to make sure that any individuals targeted with this new authority are believed to be outside the United States. So one of the central questions that Congress needs to ask is, are these procedures working as intended? Are they keeping the communications of law-abiding Americans from being swept up under this authority that was designed to apply to foreigners?

Wyden also notes that he has no intention of accepting the "not reasonably possible" language from the feds in response to his questions about how many Americans were spied on.

Hopefully this puts more pressure on the federal government to say how they've (mis)interpreted the law to collect vast aggregate data on Americans, abusing a law that was clearly designed for the sake of monitoring foreign communications.

Filed Under: fisa, geolocation, james clapper, mark udall, patriot act, privacy, ron wyden, secrecy, senate

Is Your Senator Using The Distraction Of The Debt Ceiling To Support The Feds Secret Interpretation Of Spying Laws?

from the sneaky-sneaky dept

We were just reporting on how Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was tap dancing around some specific questions about how much warrantless spying on Americans US federal intelligence agencies do. Much of that discussion revolved around the controversial FISA Amendments Act (recursively called the FAA) of 2008, which you may recall as the law that both made warrantless wiretapping officially legal (despite the fact that the federal government had been doing it for years under a very questionable legal theory) and granted telecom companies retroactive immunity for having helped the feds get such wiretaps despite the lack of warrants (and, in some cases, nothing more than a post-it note asking for it).

The FAA is set to expire in 2012, but, as we've seen with any law that grants the federal government more power to spy on Americans without oversight, there is no way the folks in power want to give up such things. Now come reports that, while most of Congress is focused on that whole debt ceiling thing, some have decided this is the perfect cover to quickly and secretly re-up the FAA. It's been reported that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is likely meeting behind closed doors today in an effort (by some) to re-up the FAA now, before anyone even realizes it's being debated. The last thing they want is pesky civil libertarians to re-start the discussion about the general constitutionality of spying on Americans without a warrant (believing in the 4th Amendment is sooooo old fashioned).

In trying to hunt down more details about what's going on, we found out that Senators Wyden and Udall -- who, as we've been discussing, have been trying to stop the federal government from secretly interpreting these laws in ways that seem contrary to what most believe the laws say -- are trying to add an amendment to this attempt to reauthorize the FAA. It's difficult to see how anyone can, in good conscience, vote against this. It includes such basic truths as:

In democratic societies, citizens rightly expect that their government will not arbitrarily keep information secret from the public but instead will act with secrecy only in certain limited circumstances.

The amendment specifically says that the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence would need to explain "the problems posed by the reliance of government agencies and departments on interpretations of domestic surveillance authorities that are inconsistent with the understanding of such authorities by the public."

Who could possibly vote against that?

Well, tragically, since this supposed meeting is "closed" (though not classified), the Senators get to hide from view for a while. It's one of those arcane Senate rules that are all too often used to allow Senators to avoid public scrutiny for their actions. While no members of the public or press are allowed in the room, and those in the room cannot tell what anyone else says (or votes) in the room... since it's not classified the Senators who are in the room can absolutely say what they said or did in the room. The specific votes on this particular amendment will be made public three weeks after the markup occurs, buying anyone voting against it three weeks of cover (and when the votes come out, they can pretend this is "old news"). The amendment itself is not secret or classified. Senators cannot reasonably claim that they can't say how they voted for "national security" reasons (a popular cop out) because their votes are going to be made public. The only reason to not answer the question of how they voted is because they want to avoid scrutiny.

So... if your Senator happens to be on the Senate Intelligence Committee now would be the time to call, email, tweet, fax, carrier pigeon, etc. to ask them whether they voted to let Americans know how the government is secretly interpreting its own laws... or if they voted against your basic fundamental rights to know how the government interprets its own laws. The list of Senators on the Committee are as follows:

• Dianne Feinstein, California (chair)
• Saxby Chambliss, Georgia (vice chair)
• John D. Rockefeller IV, West Virginia
• Olympia J. Snowe, Maine
• Ron Wyden, Oregon
• Richard Burr, North Carolina
• Barbara A. Mikulski, Maryland
• James Risch, Idaho
• Bill Nelson, Florida
• Daniel Coats, Indiana
• Kent Conrad, North Dakota
• Roy Blunt, Missouri
• Mark Udall, Colorado
• Marco Rubio, Florida
• Mark Warner, Virginia

If any of these Senators represent you, please reach out to them as soon as possible to ask them how they voted on the amendment embedded below, and please report back to us with what you hear. Let's not let certain Senators allow the government to make up its own rules and not tell the American public what those rules are.

Filed Under: fisa, geolocation, james clapper, mark udall, patriot act, privacy, ron wyden, secrecy, senate

Intelligence Chief To Wyden: It Would Be Difficult To Reveal What You Want Us To Reveal Because We Don't Want To Reveal It

from the got-it dept

We've been covering Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall's attempts to get folks working in national intelligence to explain their secret interpretation of certain provisions of the PATRIOT Act. It hasn't been too difficult to piece together the implication that the government has interpreted the already controversial Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act to allow it to gather geolocation data of pretty much anyone in the US from their mobile phone provider without a warrant or any other oversight. If you're unfamiliar with it, Section 215 was the part of the PATRIOT Act that allowed the feds to demand "any tangible thing (including books, records, papers, documents and other items)," from an organization, just as long as the records are being asked for "in connection with" a terrorism investigation.

A while back, there was an attempt to change the language of the law to make it specific that the collection of such records had to actually be about a terror subject, rather than the much broader initial definition (how hard is it to claim that collecting any data is "in connection with" a terrorism investigation these days?) Combined with a few other novel legal theories, and some convoluted loophole finding, it appears likely that the feds believe they can get pretty much realtime info on almost anyone without any warrant, which allows them to do all sorts of things that seem to go way beyond what people would normally think of as a "reasonable" search.

Of course, the feds don't want to admit that this is how they're (ab)using the PATRIOT Act. However, Senator Wyden has been pretty insistent in asking intelligence officials about the federal government's authority to collect geolocation info. He recently asked this question specifically to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper... who has provided a display in tap dancing as an answer. You can see the full letter from Clapper below, but the key point:

The questions you pose on geolocational information are difficult to answer in an unclassified letter. It is our understanding, based on a conversation with your staff, that you are most interested in learning about the government's authority to collect cell phone mobility data of American citizens in the United States for intelligence purposes. As you acknowledge, the government has some authority to collect cell phone mobility data under appropriate circumstances but there have been a diverse set of rulings concerning the quantum of evidence and the procedures required to obtain such information. We will work closely with the relevant agencies to define the government's view of the full contours of this authority and will get back to you.

In other words, we can't tell you what you want to know because that would look bad. Still, this answer definitely seems to further confirm Julian Sanchez's original speculation on what was going on here. In that report, he discussed the government's highly questionable "hybrid theory," of picking and choosing tiny pieces of different statutes, to put together the fake authority to get location info without a warrant. As Sanchez noted at the time, "many courts have been skeptical of this theory and rejected it--but at least some have gone along with this clever bit of legal origami..."

That certainly sounds like the "diverse set of rulings," mentioned in the letter.

The rest of the letter is full of similar tap dancing, explaining the rather plain interpretation of what the laws seem to say (i.e., they're not supposed to track Americans in the US), but any time it gets close to actually revealing the "secret" interpretations or the results of those interpretations, the letter basically says "that's not possible." For example, there's this:

While it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed...

In other words, yeah, we're spying on so many people we can't even count 'em all.

The letter, of course, points out repeatedly that intelligence agencies report the answers to what Wyden is asking in classified briefings. In other words, they're saying "hey, look, we already provided the answers to your questions in secret, and you know the answers and we know you know the answers, and we sure as hell don't want the public to know the answers." When Senator Wyden brought this issue up a couple months ago, he noted that if the public knew these answers, it would make them "angry." It seems that the intelligence folks don't want the public angry... but sure as hell don't want to give up their broad and questionable interpretation of the PATRIOT Act.

Filed Under: geolocation, james clapper, mark udall, patriot act, privacy, ron wyden

Wyden Continues To Press Intelligence Officials About Tracking Americans Under 'Secret' Interpretation Of The Patriot Act

from the you-have-no-privacy dept

Senator Ron Wyden has made it pretty clear, for the past few months, that the federal government is secretly interpreting the PATRIOT Act to mean that it can spy on the location of Americans without a warrant. Wyden, who is likely aware of the interpretation due to his position on the Senate Intelligence Committee, can't say what the interpretation is, but it's become abundantly clear through his questioning. Recently, we noted his questions to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, specifically asking if government agencies "have the authority to collect the geolocation information."

And now he's been asking the same basic question, getting even more specific, and confirming what some had suspected all along. The link there is from Julian Sanchez, who was one of the first to piece together the clues and suggest that Wyden was hinting at an interpretation of the PATRIOT Act that let the government feel it could track location info on just about anyone with a mobile phone. Whereas Wyden's previous questions focused generally on collecting location info, in this hearing, Wyden specifically asked if the intelligence community uses "cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country." At this point, it's kind of ridiculous that the feds don't just come out and admit it. At the hearing Wyden was told that there were "certain circumstances" under which such authority could exist, but that it was "complicated." However, he was promised more details on the circumstances by September. As Sanchez notes:

That means that just about ten years after Congress approved the Patriot Act, a handful of legislators may get the privilege of learning what it does. Ah, democracy.

There really are two separate issues here, each of which is disturbing. The first, of course, is the feds possibly believing that they can effectively spy on everyone's location at will. If true, that seems like a gross expansion of the surveillance state. But, perhaps an even bigger issue is that the federal government feels that it can secretly interpret laws with meanings that certainly are not stated explicitly within the law... and can then avoid explaining what its own interpretation is. That's not how a representative and transparent government is supposed to work.

Filed Under: geolocation, james clapper, mark udall, patriot act, privacy, ron wyden