New Mass Shooting Prevention Bill Will Use 'Anti-Terrorism' Methods To Ramp Up Surveillance Of Students

from the not-quite-the-civics-lesson-schools-had-in-mind dept

The federal government still doesn't have any great ideas on how to head off future school shootings. But it does have some ideas. Some ideas are better than none when calls to "do something" abound. Something is indeed in the works. Unfortunately, the solution being offered just opens up students to increased surveillance, on and off campus.

You already know we're headed to a darker place when the head of the DOJ is touting anti-terrorism tactics as a solution.

As America grapples with the crisis, [Attorney General William] Barr wrote in a letter to federal and local law enforcement officials that it was “critically important ... that we learn from our experiences over the last two decades fighting terrorism and violent crime and that we apply those lessons to hone an efficient, effective and programmatic strategy to disrupt individuals who are mobilizing towards violence, by all lawful means.”

Barr was speaking more broadly of mass shooters, but school shooters are also mass shooters, which means the "individuals" being "disrupted" will sometimes be school students.

Expanded surveillance of school students would be the result of Sen. John Cornyn's RESPONSE Act. (Expanded surveillance of everyone would also be the result of the proposed bill.) There are some helpful aspects to the proposed law, like increasing access to mental health treatment and the hiring of additional mental health professionals to handle the uptick in access.

But the law would also authorize less helpful things, like expedited death penalties and nudging ISPs towards monitoring their customers' internet use.

Encouraging Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to Better Collaborate with Law Enforcement to Prevent Mass Shootings —Clarifies that internet service providers and online platforms have the authority to share information with law enforcement concerning acts of mass violence, hate crimes, or domestic terrorism.

The bill doesn't demand increased monitoring. It just suggests law enforcement will be expected a bit more proactivity from service providers.

The bill also suggests doing more of what hasn't been proven to be useful, like the periodic traumatization of staff and students with active shooter drills.

But it's really about the surveillance. As The Guardian reports, schools are already engaged in plenty of student surveillance. Adding students to the "possible mass shooter" pool would just put existing systems on PEDs.

There is still no research evidence that demonstrates whether or not online monitoring of schoolchildren actually works to prevent violence.

Despite this, new legislation introduced Wednesday by Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and longtime ally of the National Rifle Association (NRA), would update the Children’s Internet Protection Act to mandate that public schools adopt “a technology protection measure that detects online activities of minors who are at risk of committing self-harm or extreme violence against others”.

That mandate isn't going to improve the faulty AI and algorithms already in place. It will increase their use, but it won't make systems prone to false positives any more reliable. Children will become haystacks sifted and sorted by companies like Gaggle. Students will spend more time talking to law enforcement about innocuous posts flagged as suspicious because they contain certain words.

Cornyn's mass shooting plan piggybacks on a vague law that demands schools monitor students online activities. What that covers has never been clearly defined. A do-almost-nothing law that demands increased surveillance will only make existing problems worse. No price is too high to pay for school safety, especially when the price is going to be paid by students.

Filed Under: gun control, john conryn, school shootings, shootings, students, surveillance, surveillance state, terrorism, william barr

Intelligence Oversight Committees Are Being Stocked With Former Intelligence Agency Employees

from the circle-of-life dept

RESOLVED: this nation's intelligence oversight is indisputably useless. It's about 99% joke and 1% Ron Wyden dog-whistle questions that go unanswered for months or years. Committees on both sides of the legislature are composed mostly of surveillance cheerleaders and flak catchers profoundly uninterested in performing actual oversight. Reform efforts tend to take place despite the intelligence committees, rather than because of them. Every so often, positive changes are made for purely partisan reasons.

Super-friendly "oversight" committees aren't helping hold our nation's multiple intelligence agencies accountable. But it goes deeper than lawmaking fanboys/girls holding prominent positions in intelligence committees. The desire to limit accountability traces back further than the front-mouths lobbing softballs to IC leaders at Congressional hearings. As Tim Johnson and Ben Wieder report for McClatchy News, the intelligence community has been stocking committees with home teamers for years.

Lawmakers assigned to oversee the sprawling U.S. intelligence apparatus rely strongly on a staff that in recent years has included scores of onetime spooks, analysts and lawyers who previously worked at the spy agencies under scrutiny.

According to a comprehensive analysis by McClatchy, at least one-third, and perhaps far more, of the professional staff members who carry out the work of the House and Senate intelligence committees are themselves veterans of the agencies that the two panels oversee.

Really not a problem, I suppose, if the other two-thirds are staunch civil rights defenders and privacy advocates. But of course they're not. They're just more government employees, many of whom find defending the status quo to be a more sensible career path, one that starts with idealism (sometimes) and ends with a pension, with very little forward momentum during the intervening years.

The "intelligence community" term attempts to humanize a hulking behemoth bristling with surveillance apparati, currently hoovering up $80 billion every year. And that estimate is likely on the low end, as these agencies have another, entirely-opaque budget to utilize on top of this.

The other low estimate at work here is McClatchy's guess at the number of former agency employees currently working for the intelligence oversight committees. It's not always easy to sniff out the origins of staffers, especially if they've possibly spent some time engaged in clandestine activities.

McClatchy’s analysis determined the staffers’ backgrounds based on searches of LinkedIn profiles, congressional records, executive profiles and in a handful of cases, press reports, obituaries or personal interviews in which the former or current committee staff members publicly acknowledged their own intelligence background.

In dozens of cases, McClatchy could not determine whether a given staff member had worked in intelligence. Some have left almost no trace on the internet, itself perhaps a telling sign of a sensitive prior professional life.

According to staffers who spoke to McClatchy, the one-third estimate is way, way off. One said "all but a couple" of staffers he worked with came from intelligence agencies. Others estimated IC oversight market saturation to be 50-75%.

Obviously, a dearth of intelligence experience would be less than useful for oversight committees. Experience is extremely useful but in cases where oversight is already severely lacking, stuffing the roster with IC picks is guaranteed to result in the sort of non-oversight we've become accustomed to. Not only are staffers likely to advise against additional accountability and lobby against reform efforts, they're also likely to know how to ensure any reform efforts are shot full of exploitable holes by the time they hit the president's desk.

And there's no good way of fixing this that won't leave other government committees tied up in policies that prevent them from hiring anyone with subject matter expertise. Pretty much the only thing that can be done is sitting back and marveling at the breadth of the intelligence community's regulatory capture.

Filed Under: house intelligence committee, intelligence committees, oversight, senate intelligence committee, surveillance state

Is There Any Evidence In The World That Would Convince Intelligence Community That More Surveillance Isn't The Answer?

from the just-wondering dept

We've already discussed how the usual surveillance state defenders quickly rushed into action following the Paris attacks to demand more surveillance -- and also noted that the two attacks in Paris in the past year happened despite that country expanding its own surveillance laws twice in the past year (once right before the Charlie Hebdo attack and once soon after). And all of that raises a simple question in my mind:

If the intelligence community and its supporters will call for greater surveillance and less encryption even after the surveillance capabilities have been shown not to work at all -- is there any evidence at all that will convince them that maybe this is not the right idea? It's a strange kind of argument that repeatedly points to its own failures... and follows it up with "well, that proves we need more of that!"

Such an argument, by itself, seems self-refuting, because there is no other side. If things are working okay, call for more surveillance. If the surveillance doesn't work, just call for more surveillance. It's the default answer to anything, and thus these calls should be ignored. The fact that the surveillance community wants more power is not news and it's not surprising. It's not because of the Paris attacks -- they're always asking for this and they've mostly gotten it. And it didn't work.

A sober analysis would suggest that perhaps it's time to try something different. But that's not how these things tend to go apparently.

Filed Under: bulk collection, evidence, isis, mass surveillance, nsa, privacy, surveillance, surveillance state

Pathological: Surveillance State Defenders Use Their Own Failure In Paris To Justify Mass Surveillance

from the shut-up-jackasses dept

We already wrote a bit about the absolutely ridiculous attempts to connect the Paris attacks of last week with Ed Snowden and encryption. But, of course, the surveillance state sees successful terrorist attacks -- which often demonstrate their own failings -- as a way to double down on getting more power. Take, for example, our old friend and former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker.

As pointed out by Marcy Wheeler, Baker used the Paris attacks to argue that it was evidence that the NSA should not shut down its Section 215 bulk collection of phone records.

NSA's 215 program was designed to detect a Mumbai/Paris-style attack. https://t.co/UelhvrlNPp Maybe this is the wrong month to drop it.

— stewartbaker (@stewartbaker) November 14, 2015

There are so many problems with this level of idiocy that it's difficult to know where to start, but let's go with the basics... (1) the NSA program is still on and still working for another few weeks before it shifts to a slightly modified version. (2) France has its own equivalent program that is still in operation. In fact, France famously expanded its surveillance laws late last year prior to both the Charlie Hebdo and Paris attacks. (3) Outside of the US, the NSA relies on Executive Order 12333, which allows the NSA to collect a hell of a lot more information than the somewhat limited Section 215 program. (4) None of those programs appears to have discovered the Paris attacks (or, if they did, they clearly failed in stopping the attacks). (5) In other words, these programs did not work and yet the knee-jerk surveillance state defenders are using them as proof that the programs work.

What the actual fuck, Stewart?

Look, it's one thing to use horrible tragedies to promote your own political desires. It's another thing entirely to use the out and out failure of these intelligence programs to argue that they're proof of why those programs work and/or should be expanded.

Filed Under: bulk surveillance, executive order 12333, mass surveillance, nsa, paris attacks, section 215, stewart baker, surveillance state

Coming To A Surveillance State Near You: Lip-Reading Computers

from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-you-can't-say-that dept

One of the most famous -- and important -- scenes in Stanley Kubrick's film "2001" is when the two astronauts sit in a space pod in order to avoid being overheard by the ship's computer, HAL, which they believe may represent a threat to their lives. Although they have prudently turned off the pod's communication system, what they don't realize is that HAL is able to follow their conversation by lip-reading, and hence is alerted to their disconnection plans.

Although it is unlikely that the Turkish authorities were inspired by the film, the following incident, reported by Politico.eu in a post on the growing censorship in the country, reminds us that the use of lip-reading for surveillance purposes is not science fiction:

Last week, at the funeral of a solider in Osmaniye, south-eastern Turkey, mourners voiced anger at the government's decision to commit troops to conflict with PKK forces in the south-east, leading to several arrests.

Veli Ağbaba, deputy president of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), and his colleagues visited two suspects in prison, and have stated that they were arrested on charges of "insulting the president" after footage of the funeral was scrutinized by lip-reading experts.

Calling in lip-reading experts to check whether somebody was insulting the President of Turkey at a funeral might seem a one-off product of an increasingly-paranoid security apparatus. Moreover, using humans is a surveillance technique that doesn't really scale -- unlike metadata analysis, say -- so you might hope this is unlikely to be a problem for most of us. But it turns out that we are very close to building real lip-reading HALs. Here's a 2014 article from The Week:

A Jordanian scientist has created an automated lip-reading system that can decipher speech with an average success rate of 76 per cent. The findings, in conjunction with recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing, suggest that computers will soon be able to read lips accurately enough to raise questions about privacy and security.

Moore's Law and other advances in computing pretty much guarantee that 76 percent success rate will rise inexorably, until high-accuracy lip-reading becomes a standard feature for CCTV surveillance systems, especially as very high-resolution cameras fall in price and are deployed more widely. HAL would be proud.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: lip reading, lip reading computers, surveillance, surveillance state, turkey

Canadian And American Politicians Use Ottawa Shootings As Excuses To Demand More Surveillance, Greater Policing Powers

from the more-arrests dept

As you may have heard, an apparently mentally unstable guy shot up the Canadian Parliament earlier this week, killing a soldier, before being shot dead himself. The attack certainly raises some questions -- about dealing with mental health, about security at the Parliament and probably a few other things as well. However, police state/surveillance state apologists have seen the window to expand their own powers and are taking it. It starts with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who wasn't shy about using this one-off incident as an excuse to massively expand the surveillance and police state:

“Our laws and police powers need to be strengthened in the area of surveillance, detention and arrest,” the Prime Minister told the House of Commons. “They need to be much strengthened. I assure members that work which is already under way will be expedited.”

So, not only will they expand the police and surveillance state, but they'll do it in an "expedited" fashion as a kneejerk response to one guy shooting up the Parliament. That seems like a recipe for bad decision making and the erosion of the rights of the public.

Oh, and some other Canadian politicians are already looking for ways to use this as an excuse to attack free speech online, because obviously that's the real problem here:

There is frustration in government, and among law enforcement agencies, that the authorities can’t detain or arrest people who express sympathy for atrocities committed overseas and who may pose a threat to public safety, one Conservative MP said. “Do we need new offences? If so which?”

Sources suggest the government is likely to bring in new hate speech legislation that would make it illegal to claim terrorist acts are justified online.

Down here in the US, at least it's not the President saying this kind of crap, just well-known terrorist appeaser Rep. Peter King who has declared that the Ottawa shootings mean that the US needs to start spying on all the Muslims to find out which ones are radicalized. I wonder how King would react to someone saying that, based on that, we should also spy on "all the Irish to find out which ones are radicalized." Or, you know, perhaps he wouldn't like that so much, seeing as he has a rather long history supporting Irish terrorists, and such surveillance might turn up something he wouldn't like.

King, by the way, also attacks the "morons" at the NY Times and the ACLU for daring to push back against the NYPD's program of spying on Muslims. That now disbanded program, by the way, cost a ton and generated exactly zero leads. And yet, suddenly King thinks bringing it back is the answer?

This, unfortunately, is the ridiculous cycle of kneejerk defenders of the police and surveillance state. Privileged folks, in power, who use any excuse whatsoever to push for ever increasing power, and ever fewer rights by the public. It's a culture of control, paranoia and fear. These people aren't leaders, they're cowards in leadership positions.

Filed Under: canada, ottawa, peter king, police, police state, shootings, stephen harper, surveillance, surveillance state

UK Home Secretary: UK Isn't A Surveillance State... And I'd Give You Proof, But You Might All Die Because Of It

from the oh-do-shut-up dept

Theresa May, the UK's Home Secretary has hit back after the UK's Director General of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, Charles Farr, revealed how the UK believes it can spy on all "external" communications without a warrant and that it's definition of "external" was pretty close to "everything" (and that's only a slight exaggeration). May's response might be summarized as denying everything and insisting that if the UK government revealed any details, everyone might die. First up, the denial:

"Some people have alleged that GCHQ is exploiting a technical loophole in legislation that allows them to intercept external communications - that is, communications either sent or received outside the UK - at will and without authorisation. This is... nonsense."

Okay, so perhaps you could reveal more details about what GCHQ is actually doing and whether or not it's actually got any purpose towards national security? Oh, sorry, that would be "helping the terrorists win" of course:

But Mrs May warned that it would be "cavalier and reckless" to let the public know details of which terrorist plots had been thwarted by the security services.

"Considerable" threats to UK security were developing with the emergence of militant group Isis, the collapse of Syria, the activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the "expanding scope" of cyber crime, the home secretary said.

In other words: FUD FUD FUD, be afraid!!! Oh, and of course, in her mind, she'd actually prefer it if the UK were even more of a surveillance state:

She concluded by renewing a call to change the law to hand the security services more powers to scrutinise online communication

She's specifically discussing the so-called Snooper's Charter, which has been soundly rejected by both the public and other politicians, but which her party still wants... because they're scared of fictional TV crime dramas (that's not a joke).

I'm sorry, but this continuing game of "we're not spying on you... but we need more powers to spy on you because FEAR FEAR FEAR... and we can't give you any evidence because you all might die" is getting rather tired.

Filed Under: fear, fud, gchq, surveillance, surveillance state, theresa may, uk

When Vladimir Putin Is Envious Of Your Surveillance State, You've Gone Too Far

from the that's-quite-a-statement dept

Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a big press conference on Thursday, and spent some time talking about President Obama, Ed Snowden and the various US surveillance programs that have been revealed. Putin appeared to be quite supportive of the surveillance programs, saying that he believes that the US's surveillance programs are a "necessity" and "mainly directed at fighting terrorism," so there's not a real problem with them. He even defended collecting data on everyone "because you have to monitor not only a specific terrorist suspect, but rather his whole network of relationships." That Vladimir Putin would appreciate vast spying power is hardly a surprise. But this claim is raising some eyebrows:

"How do I feel about Obama after Snowden's revelations? I envy him because he can do this without incurring any consequences."

Did you catch that? Putin, the former head of the KGB, and very well known for using Russian intelligence services to his strong advantage is envious that President Obama has all this surveillance capabilities at his fingertips and that all of this can be revealed "without incurring any consequences." It seems like there should be a general rule of thumb: when Vladimir Putin is envious of your surveillance state, you've gone too far.

Filed Under: barack obama, nsa, surveillance, surveillance state, vladimir putin

Helping Build The Surveillance State Is Good Business: Palantir Gets $196 Million More In Funding

from the money-money-money dept

Palantir is definitely a fairly well-known (if somewhat secretive) company in Silicon Valley. While Silicon Valley firms actually tend to have a reputation for being skeptical of partnering up with the intelligence community, Palantir has always focused on trying to work directly with the intelligence community, quite successfully. Palantir got a bit of notoriety a couple years ago, when it was revealed to be associated with HBGary Federal when Anonymous leaked plans to try to discredit Wikileaks and various critics (including Glenn Greenwald) in a pitch to Bank of America and the US Chamber of Commerce. However, with the latest stories about NSA surveillance, and questions concerning the involvement of Silicon Valley, more and more attention has been paid to Palantir. Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac did a profile in Forbes of the "deviant philosopher" who built the company. And the Telegraph recently called it the creepiest startup ever.

Apparently all the revelations concerning the surveillance state haven't been bad for business either. Reports are that the company has recently closed on a little under $200 million from investors, bringing its total raised to around $500 million. Supposedly the latest valuation has the company around $8 billion -- which would mean that the $200 million only bought around 2.5% of the company.

Obviously, there's money in feeding the surveillance state. In fact, we've argued that so much of the hype around "cybersecurity" has really been about efforts to drum up more business for contractors, including Palantir. It's just a shame that all these revelations don't seem to have dampened the interest in building the surveillance state. Apparently the 4th Amendment doesn't mean too much when all that money is on the table.

Filed Under: nsa, nsa surveillance, surveillance state, venture capital
Companies: palantir

FISA Court Judges Aren't Happy That The Public Is Upset Secret Court Issuing Secret Rulings Allowing NSA To Spy On Them

from the well,-perhaps-they-should-have-thought-about-that-earlier dept

Shockingly, it appears that the various judges who make up the secretive FISA Court, which issues secret rulings on secret interpretations of the law that allow the government to spy on Americans, aren't particularly happy about the sudden attention they're getting. In fact, they're complaining that the claims that they're a rubber stamp are unfair, and that they're human beings too. Specifically, they're upset about the recent leaked revelations that include an inspector general's report about some FISA court activities:

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the former chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took the highly unusual step Friday of voicing open frustration at the account in the report and court’s inability to explain its decisions.
“In my view, that draft report contains major omissions, and some inaccuracies, regarding the actions I took as Presiding Judge of the FISC and my interactions with Executive Branch officials,” Kollar-Kotelly said in a statement to The Post. It was her first public comment describing her work on the intelligence court.

You see, they're not just FISA court judges, but they're human too. When you cut them, do they not bleed? When they issue secret rulings that appear to go completely against the 4th Amendment, are their phone call records and emails not subject to mass collection as well?

Kollar-Kotelly disputed the NSA report’s suggestion of a fairly high level of coordination between the court and the NSA and Justice in 2004 to re-create certain authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that created the court in response to abuses of domestic surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s.

“That is incorrect,” she said. “I participated in a process of adjudication, not ‘coordination’ with the executive branch. The discussions I had with executive branch officials were in most respects typical of how I and other district court judges entertain applications for criminal wiretaps under Title III, where issues are discussed ex parte.”

Of course, it's nice to say this, but when it's all done in total secrecy, without any sunlight or real oversight, it's difficult to believe that the process really is all that careful. Given the additional leaks that show that the NSA more or less signed off on massive data collections, it's hard not to see that as a very cozy and "collaborative" setup, rather than particularly adversarial, where anyone is looking out for the rights of the public and the limits on government overreach as presented in the Constitution.

Filed Under: fisa court, nsa surveillance, rubber stamp, surveillance state