How companies track you online

Internet privacy law needed

Congressman Rich Boucher defends your online privacy:

US lawmakers have been itching for a good excuse to slap mandatory security guidelines on online behavioral ad targeting schemes, and apparently, they've found it.

Google's new plan introduced Wednesday to track individual users' browser history to target ads was just the ticket for Democrat Rep. Rich Boucher, the newly-minted chairman of the House subcommittee on communications and the internet.

The Virginia congressman said yesterday he's working on a bill that will put restrictions on how internet companies can collect, save, store, and share user information. ...

Boucher says he's working with other ranking members of the communications subcommittee, Republican Representatives Cliff Stearns and Joe Barton, on a bill to take privacy rules out of the hands of online ad agencies.

Welcome to the American police state

From The Washington Post:

The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.

The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.

Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.

Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.

The lessons from President Bush's illegal domestic spying

From Daniel Solove:

Future presidents can learn a lot from all this — do exactly what the Bush Administration did! If the law holds you back, don't first go to Congress and try to work something out. Secretly violate that law, and then when you get caught, staunchly demand that Congress change the law to your liking and then immunize any company that might have illegally cooperated with you. That's the lesson. You spit in Congress's face, and they'll give you what you want.

The past eight years have witnessed a dramatic expansion of Executive Branch power, with a rather anemic push-back from the Legislative and Judicial Branches. We have extensive surveillance on a mass scale by agencies with hardly any public scrutiny, operating mostly in secret, with very limited judicial oversight, and also with very minimal legislative oversight. Most citizens know little about what is going on, and it will be difficult for them to find out, since everything is kept so secret. Secrecy and accountability rarely go well together. The telecomm lawsuits were at least one way that citizens could demand some information and accountability, but now that avenue appears to be shut down significantly with the retroactive immunity grant. There appear to be fewer ways for the individual citizen or citizen advocacy groups to ensure accountability of the government in the context of national security.

That's the direction we're heading in — more surveillance, more systemic government monitoring and data mining, and minimal oversight and accountability — with most of the oversight being very general, not particularly rigorous, and nearly always secret — and with the public being almost completely shut out of the process. But don't worry, you shouldn't get too upset about all this. You probably won't know much about it. They'll keep the dirty details from you, because what you don't know can't hurt you.

The big question is why have the Democrats in Congress allowed themselves to be such pushovers for the Bush administration? Even Barry Obama has allowed himself to be a lapdog for President Bush.

EFF plans to take domestic spying battle to the next level

This is from an Electronic Frontier Foundation email I recently received in my in-box:

Dear Friend of Freedom,

In a move that I can only describe as cowardice, Congress just passed legislation meant to immunize telephone companies for their illegal, disloyal, and irresponsible behavior. EFF has been fighting against telecom immunity, and we need your help to bring the fight to the next level:

http://secure.eff.org/wiretapping

Two and a half years ago, EFF sued AT&T on behalf of its customers, seeking to hold the telecom giant responsible for its craven complicity in the White House's illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Since then, the phone companies and their allies in Washington have spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying Congress to grant them retroactive immunity. They ran ridiculous fear-mongering attack ads against any politician who dared to oppose them. President Bush threatened to veto any bill that allowed EFF's lawsuit to continue.

Yesterday, Congress completely capitulated to the President's threats and voted to let the telecoms off the hook. If the telecoms are not held accountable, the administration will remain unchecked in its warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans. This must stop!

We need your help to take the fight to the next level. We're going to challenge Congress's unconstitutional grant of immunity in our case against AT&T. We're going to fight for a congressional repeal of immunity in the next Congress. And we're going to file a new lawsuit against the government, challenging its warrantless surveillance practices, past, present and future.

Now, more than ever, we need your support!

http://secure.eff.org/wiretapping

The fight for civil liberties would never have come this far without your help. We can't give up now. Help EFF today!

Senate Democrats sacrifice our liberties

From The Register:

The Senate today passed the revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), offering blanket immunity to the telecoms giants for whatever spying activities they conspired in, smothering ongoing litigation against the companies and for all intents and purposes burying forever whatever unconstitutional surveillance activities the Cheney administration embraced.

The bill, in fact, expands authority for unsupervised domestic surveillance while offering somewhat expanded protection for Americans living abroad. The oversight role of the FISA court itself is diminished, inasmuch as the bill requires markedly less specificity for obtaining a FISA surveillance warrant than is currently required.

Although the new bill does not quite permit blanket wiretaps, it does give authority to the Director of National Intelligence or the Attorney General to authorize surveillance on individuals or those connected to them without designating exactly what they're hunting. The court merely signs off on this type of surveillance in a kind of procedural flourish – as long as sufficient "minimization" procedures are in place to avoid accidental surveillance of Americans. You can expect the National Security Agency (NSA) or the Department of Justice (DOJ) to push the envelope.

Economists for Obama not so happy with Barack Obama

Don Pedro, the blogger at Economists for Obama, justifiably expresses his displeasure with Barack Obama regarding the proposed FISA legislation currently before Congress.

Obama's failure to oppose the warrantless wiretapping bill, critiqued in great detail by Glenn Greenwald (see his most recent post here) has given me some pause and made me think perhaps I should send my political contributions elsewhere. The immunity for lawbreaking telecoms is one of the events of the Bush years that has most angered me. The current FISA is perfectly capable of dealing with surveillance, and empowering the president to monitor my phone calls and e-mails is plainly a violation of the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Why, after voting against the Protect American Act and saying he would support any filibuster of immunity for lawbreaking telecoms, is Obama now saying he will vote for the new law? I don't understand.

Don Pedro is right. When companies willfully aid the government in violating the American people's Fourth Amendment rights, those companies should be held liable.