The law-making behind “lawful intercepts”

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There’s a truly astonishing piece by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books about how the ‘legal’ basis for bulk collection and warrantless wiretapping was laid. The program was originally code-named Stellar Wind. Here’s an excerpt that gives the general flavour; the date is March 10, 2004:

John Ashcroft has been in intensive care for nearly a week. Though Ashcroft is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States—and though it is the attorney general’s signature that is required to recertify Stellar Wind—no one seems to have thought it relevant to tell the commander in chief. No matter; Bush telephones intensive care, insists on speaking to the heavily sedated Ashcroft, and tells him he is sending over his chief of staff and White House counsel “to talk to him about an urgent matter.” What follows is the famous Hospital Room Showdown, the great melodramatic set piece of the Bush administration, which features, as Barton Gellman describes it in the superb Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, “men in their forties and fifties, stamping on the brakes, abandoning double-parked vehicles, and running up a hospital stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.”

The White House men were clutching the paper they were determined to persuade the attorney general to sign, and the Justice Department lawyers, led by James Comey, Ashcroft’s deputy, were determined to prevent him from signing it. They converged in a hospital room around the IV-festooned body of the ailing attorney general, who “looked half dead.” Nonetheless, Gellman tells us, in the midst of this coven of lawyers, like some unvanquishable horror movie character, Ashcroft “raised himself up stiffly” off the bed.

He glared at his visitors and said they had no business coming. He gave a lucid account of the reasons that Justice had decided to withhold support. And then he went beyond that. Ashcroft said he never should have certified the program.

…If it were up to him now, he would refuse to approve. But it was not up to him. Gesturing at his deputy, Ashcroft said, “There is the attorney general.” Spent and pale, Ashcroft sank back down.

In the face of this defiance, the White House chief of staff and counsel ignore Comey and stride from the room and then race back to the White House where, Bush informs us rather laconically, “they told me Ashcroft hadn’t signed.” Why not? Apparently they didn’t say and the president doesn’t ask. Instead, he decides to overrule the objections of the Department of Justice and sign “an order keeping the TSP alive based on my authority as head of the executive branch.”

It is, as will soon become clear, a momentous decision, though there is no sign he realizes quite how momentous. Still, the president isn’t happy. “I went to bed irritated,” Bush tells us, “and had a feeling I didn’t know the full story.”

The military-information complex, updated

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In my Observer column last Sunday I contrasted the old military-industrial complex that so worried President Eisenhower with the emerging military-information complex (the core of which consists of the four Internet giants: Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft). What I should have guessed is that the two complexes are beginning to merge.

Consider, for example, this interesting Pando Daily piece by Yasha Levine, which says, in part:

Last week, I detailed how Google does much more than simply provide us civvies with email and search apps. It sells its tech to enhance the surveillance operations of the biggest and most powerful intel agencies in the world: NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA and NGA — the whole murky alphabet soup.

In some cases — like the company’s dealings with the NSA and its sister agency, the NGA — Google deals with government agencies directly. But in recent years, Google has increasingly taken the role of subcontractor: selling its wares to military and intelligence agencies by partnering with established military contractors. It’s a very deliberate strategy on Google’s part, allowing it to more effectively sink its hooks into the nepotistic, old boy government networks of America’s military-intelligence-industrial complex.

Over the past decade, Google Federal (as the company’s D.C. operation is called) has partnered up with old school establishment military contractors like Lockheed Martin, as well as smaller boutique outfits — including one closely connected to the CIA and former mercenary firm, Blackwater.

This approach began around 2006.

Around that time, Google Federal began beefing up its lobbying muscle and hiring sales reps with military/intelligence/contractor work experience — including at least one person, enterprise manager Jim Young, who used to work for the CIA. The company then began making the rounds, seeking out partnerships with with established military contractors. The goal was to use their deep connections to the military-industrial complex to hard sell Google technology.

Don’t you just love that corporate moniker: Google Federal! So now we have a tripartite complex: military-industrial-information.

The Public-Private Surveillance Partnership: still going strong

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I annoyed a lot of people in the industry in December when I pointed out that the NSA and the Internet companies have the same business model: intensive surveillance. So it’s good to see a real expert, Bruce Schneier, lay it on the line.

We don’t know what sort of pressure the U.S. government has put on Google and the others. We don’t know what secret agreements those companies have reached with the NSA. We do know the NSA’s BULLRUN program to subvert Internet cryptography was successful against many common protocols. Did the NSA demand Google’s keys, as it did with Lavabit? Did its Tailored Access Operations group break into to Google’s servers and steal the keys?

We just don’t know.

The best we have are caveat-laden pseudo-assurances. At SXSW earlier this month, CEO Eric Schmidt tried to reassure the audience by saying that he was “pretty sure that information within Google is now safe from any government’s prying eyes.” A more accurate statement might be, “Your data is safe from governments, except for the ways we don’t know about and the ways we cannot tell you about. And, of course, we still have complete access to it all, and can sell it at will to whomever we want.” That’s a lousy marketing pitch, but as long as the NSA is allowed to operate using secret court orders based on secret interpretations of secret law, it’ll never be any different.

Dear Diary, er, Blog…

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There is, I have discovered, a clear inverse correlation between blogging and what is laughingly called my “work”. That is to say, when I am busy doing dutiful things I am, as a result, not writing about the things that I’d like to blog about. So an alert reader can determine from this blog whether or not I have been rushing around, sitting on committees, interviewing candidates for jobs, being polite to visiting dignitaries and doing all the other things needed to feed the administrative appetite of an academic institution.

As I write this, for example, in my notebook there are fragmentary notes about at least a dozen topics on which I would like to write a blog post. There is, for example, that post I was hoping to write about a terrific film – The Grand Budapest Hotel – that we saw the other night and which led me to read everything I could lay my hands on about Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer whose life and work inspired Wes Anderson to make the film.

And then there’s that blog post I was incubating about the strange paradox that everywhere one looks contemporary political scientists are studying everything except real politics, while in another part of the academic forest computer scientists (for God’s sake) are arguing and thinking about cryptography, virtual currencies, privacy, network effects, increasing marginal returns and the Power Law distributions that are the stuff of the realpolitik of our emerging networked world.

Of course, part of the reason for the inverse correlation is that I am hopelessly inefficient. One way of putting it is that I am a multi-tasker equipped with the wrong algorithm. (When I once said that to my friend Quentin he replied cheerily that I could always be re-flashed, like a recalcitrant DSL modem, but he was just being polite.)

Another way of putting it would be to say that I’m easily distracted. I’m a fox rather than a hedgehog – to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction. And one of the things I have been distracted by this week is One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper. Roper was often castigated by his critics for squandering his talent and effort on essay-writing, reviewing, journalism — and letter-writing — when he should have been writing massive volumes of specialised historical research. But it seems that he too was not very efficient at the administrative side of academic life. Here he is, for example, writing to Jack Plumb in 1970:

“I am a hopeless writer of letters – or at least, a hopeless organiser of the paper which falls like a gentle but continuous blizzard of snow on my various desks. Some of them congeal into solid, lasting ice; others have somehow get pushed off into great drifts at the table-side; others simply melt away and no trace is left of them. Yours has suddenly emerged from beneath the drift, and fills me with shame for my long silence.”

Hmmm… I should perhaps write in the same vein to this blog.

Targeted ads

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From Frederic Filloux

Over the recent years, the advertising community managed to find a new gun to shoot itself in the foot. It's called targeted ads. Everyone has ugly anecdotes about those. Typically, the stories go like this: You do a web search for an item and quickly find it. In the following months you're deluged by ads for the product you bought. The annoyance prompts many to opt for AdBlocking systems – I did (except for sites I'm in charge of), with no regret nor guilt.

To put it mildly, there is room for improvement, here.

Yep. For some reason, even reputable outfits like John Lewis tend to be particularly annoying in this respect.

The Dictator’s Dilemma

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My Observer Comment piece on the latest episode in the ongoing conflict between the state and the Internet.

Here we go again: authoritarian ruler finds that social media are making life uncomfortable for him in the run-up to elections; finds Twitter particularly annoying; instructs local authorities to shut off access for his citizens; announces that he is unbothered by international criticism of this act of censorship which, he says, will demonstrate the power of his republic.

Welcome to Turkey, our staunch ally in the fight against jihad and the Forces of Darkness. There is a certain grim familiarity in the story of Prime Minister Erdogan’s battle against social media…

Military-Industrial Complex 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column.

As they burgeoned, the big internet companies looked with disdain on the leviathans of the military-industrial complex. Kinetic warfare seemed so yesterday to those whose corporate mantras were about “not being evil” and adhering to “the hacker’s way”. So when Snowden revealed NSA claims that the spooks had untrammelled access to their servers the companies reacted like nuns accused of running a webcam porn site. It wasn’t true, they protested, and even it if was they knew nothing about it. Of course they did comply with government requests approved by a secret court, but that was the extent of it. As the months rolled by, however, this reassuring narrative has unravelled. We discovered that the NSA and GCHQ had indeed covertly tapped the data-traffic that flows between the companies’ server farms. But since Google and co were – they claimed – unaware of this, perhaps their protestations of innocence seemed justified. More embarrassing were the revelations about the astonishing lengths to which one company (Microsoft) went to facilitate NSA access to its users’ private communications.

Last Wednesday, another piece of the jigsaw slotted into place. The NSA’s top lawyer stated unequivocally that the technology firms were fully aware of the agency’s widespread collection of data. Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said that all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA occurred with the knowledge of the companies – both for the Prism system and the covert tapping of communications moving across the internet.