For all the public outcry, official probes and hearings, financial penalties, apologies and proposed regulations, Facebook remains the world’s foremost surveillance tool–weaponized in all manner of malevolent ways by any number of hostile elements.
Archive for category: Surveillance
“In its efforts to arrest and deport, ICE has—without any judicial, legislative or public oversight—reached into datasets containing personal information about the vast majority of people living in the U.S.”
CFPB Director Chopra warned lawmakers Tuesday that the U.S. payments industry is developing a “Chinese-style” market structure dominated by large tech firms
In the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two obscure American startups met to discuss a potential surveillance partnership that would merge the ability to track the movements of billions of people via their phones with a constant stream of data purchased directly from Twitter. According to Brendon Clark of Anomaly Six — or “A6” — the combination of its cellphone location-tracking technology with the social media surveillance provided by Zignal Labs would permit the U.S. government to effortlessly spy on Russian forces as they amassed along the Ukrainian border, or similarly track Chinese nuclear submarines. To prove that the technology worked, Clark pointed A6’s powers inward, spying on the National Security Agency and CIA, using their own cellphones against them.
Virginia-based Anomaly Six was founded in 2018 by two ex-military intelligence officers and maintains a public presence that is scant to the point of mysterious, its website disclosing nothing about what the firm actually does. But there’s a good chance that A6 knows an immense amount about you. The company is one of many that purchases vast reams of location data, tracking hundreds of millions of people around the world by exploiting a poorly understood fact: Countless common smartphone apps are constantly harvesting your location and relaying it to advertisers, typically without your knowledge or informed consent, relying on disclosures buried in the legalese of the sprawling terms of service that the companies involved count on you never reading. Once your location is beamed to an advertiser, there is currently no law in the United States prohibiting the further sale and resale of that information to firms like Anomaly Six, which are free to sell it to their private sector and governmental clientele. For anyone interested in tracking the daily lives of others, the digital advertising industry is taking care of the grunt work day in and day out — all a third party need do is buy access.
Company materials obtained by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry provide new details of just how powerful Anomaly Six’s globe-spanning surveillance powers are, capable of providing any paying customer with abilities previously reserved for spy bureaus and militaries.
According to audiovisual recordings of an A6 presentation reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the firm claims that it can track roughly 3 billion devices in real time, equivalent to a fifth of the world’s population. The staggering surveillance capacity was cited during a pitch to provide A6’s phone-tracking capabilities to Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring firm that leverages its access to Twitter’s rarely granted “firehose” data stream to sift through hundreds of millions of tweets per day without restriction. With their powers combined, A6 proposed, Zignal’s corporate and governmental clients could not only surveil global social media activity, but also determine who exactly sent certain tweets, where they sent them from, who they were with, where they’d been previously, and where they went next. This enormously augmented capability would be an obvious boon to both regimes keeping tabs on their global adversaries and companies keeping tabs on their employees.
The source of the materials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood, expressed grave concern about the legality of government contractors such as Anomaly Six and Zignal Labs “revealing social posts, usernames, and locations of Americans” to “Defense Department” users. The source also asserted that Zignal Labs had willfully deceived Twitter by withholding the broader military and corporate surveillance use cases of its firehose access. Twitter’s terms of service technically prohibit a third party from “conducting or providing surveillance or gathering intelligence” using its access to the platform, though the practice is common and enforcement of this ban is rare. Asked about these concerns, spokesperson Tom Korolsyshun told The Intercept “Zignal abides by privacy laws and guidelines set forth by our data partners.”
A6 claims that its GPS dragnet yields between 30 to 60 location pings per device per day and 2.5 trillion locational data points annually worldwide, adding up to 280 terabytes of location data per year and many petabytes in total, suggesting that the company surveils roughly 230 million devices on an average day. A6’s salesperson added that while many rival firms gather personal location data via a phone’s Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections that provide general whereabouts, Anomaly 6 harvests only GPS pinpoints, potentially accurate to within several feet. In addition to location, A6 claimed that it has built a library of over 2 billion email addresses and other personal details that people share when signing up for smartphone apps that can be used to identify who the GPS ping belongs to. All of this is powered, A6’s Clark noted during the pitch, by general ignorance of the ubiquity and invasiveness of smartphone software development kits, known as SDKs: “Everything is agreed to and sent by the user even though they probably don’t read the 60 pages in the [end user license agreement].”
The Intercept was not able to corroborate Anomaly Six’s claims about its data or capabilities, which were made in the context of a sales pitch. Privacy researcher Zach Edwards told The Intercept that he believed the claims were plausible but cautioned that firms can be prone to exaggerating the quality of their data. Mobile security researcher Will Strafach agreed, noting that A6’s data sourcing boasts “sound alarming but aren’t terribly far off from ambitious claims by others.” According to Wolfie Christl, a researcher specializing in the surveillance and privacy implications of the app data industry, even if Anomaly Six’s capabilities are exaggerated or based partly on inaccurate data, a company possessing even a fraction of these spy powers would be deeply concerning from a personal privacy standpoint.
Reached for comment, Zignal’s spokesperson provided the following statement: “While Anomaly 6 has in the past demonstrated its capabilities to Zignal Labs, Zignal Labs does not have a relationship with Anomaly 6. We have never integrated Anomaly 6’s capabilities into our platform, nor have we ever delivered Anomaly 6 to any of our customers.”
When asked about the company’s presentation and its surveillance capabilities, Anomaly Six co-founder Brendan Huff responded in an email that “Anomaly Six is a veteran-owned small business that cares about American interests, natural security, and understands the law.”
Companies like A6 are fueled by the ubiquity of SDKs, which are turnkey packages of code that software-makers can slip in their apps to easily add functionality and quickly monetize their offerings with ads. According to Clark, A6 can siphon exact GPS measurements gathered through covert partnerships with “thousands” of smartphone apps, an approach he described in his presentation as a “farm-to-table approach to data acquisition.” This data isn’t just useful for people hoping to sell you things: The largely unregulated global trade in personal data is increasingly finding customers not only at marketing agencies, but also federal agencies tracking immigrants and drone targets as well as sanctions and tax evasion. According to public records first reported by Motherboard, U.S. Special Operations Command paid Anomaly Six $590,000 in September 2020 for a year of access to the firm’s “commercial telemetry feed.”
Anomaly Six software lets its customers browse all of this data in a convenient and intuitive Google Maps-style satellite view of Earth. Users need only find a location of interest and draw a box around it, and A6 fills that boundary with dots denoting smartphones that passed through that area. Clicking a dot will provide you with lines representing the device’s — and its owner’s — movements around a neighborhood, city, or indeed the entire world.
As the Russian military continued its buildup along the country’s border with Ukraine, the A6 sales rep detailed how GPS surveillance could help turn Zignal into a sort of private spy agency capable of assisting state clientele in monitoring troop movements. Imagine, Clark explained, if the crisis zone tweets Zignal rapidly surfaces through the firehose were only a starting point. Using satellite imagery tweeted by accounts conducting increasingly popular “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT, investigations, Clark showed how A6’s GPS tracking would let Zignal clients determine not simply that the military buildup was taking place, but track the phones of Russian soldiers as they mobilized to determine exactly where they’d trained, where they were stationed, and which units they belonged to. In one case, Clark showed A6 software tracing Russian troop phones backward through time, away from the border and back to a military installation outside Yurga, and suggested that they could be traced further, all the way back to their individual homes. Previous reporting by the Wall Street Journal indicates that this phone-tracking method is already used to monitor Russian military maneuvers and that American troops are just as vulnerable.
In another A6 map demonstration, Clark zoomed in closely on the town of Molkino, in southern Russia, where the Wagner Group, an infamous Russian mercenary outfit, is reportedly headquartered. The map showed dozens of dots indicating devices at the Wagner base, along with scattered lines showing their recent movements. “So you can just start watching these devices,” Clark explained. “Any time they start leaving the area, I’m looking at potential Russian predeployment activity for their nonstandard actors, their nonuniform people. So if you see them go into Libya or Democratic Republic of the Congo or things like that, that can help you better understand potential soft power actions the Russians are doing.”
To fully impress upon its audience the immense power of this software, Anomaly Six did what few in the world can claim to do: spied on American spies.
The pitch noted that this kind of mass phone surveillance could be used by Zignal to aid unspecified clients with “counter-messaging,” debunking Russian claims that such military buildups were mere training exercises and not the runup to an invasion. “When you’re looking at counter-messaging, where you guys have a huge part of the value you provide your client in the counter-messaging piece is — [Russia is] saying, ‘Oh, it’s just local, regional, um, exercises.’ Like, no. We can see from the data that they’re coming from all over Russia.”
To fully impress upon its audience the immense power of this software, Anomaly Six did what few in the world can claim to do: spied on American spies. “I like making fun of our own people,” Clark began. Pulling up a Google Maps-like satellite view, the sales rep showed the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. With virtual boundary boxes drawn around both, a technique known as geofencing, A6’s software revealed an incredible intelligence bounty: 183 dots representing phones that had visited both agencies potentially belonging to American intelligence personnel, with hundreds of lines streaking outward revealing their movements, ready to track throughout the world. “So, if I’m a foreign intel officer, that’s 183 start points for me now,” Clark noted.
The NSA and CIA both declined to comment.
Anomaly Six tracked a device that had visited the NSA and CIA headquarters to an air base outside of Zarqa, Jordan.
Screenshot: The Intercept / Google Maps
Clicking on one of dots from the NSA allowed Clark to follow that individual’s exact movements, virtually every moment of their life, from that previous year until the present. “I mean, just think of fun things like sourcing,” Clark said. “If I’m a foreign intel officer, I don’t have access to things like the agency or the fort, I can find where those people live, I can find where they travel, I can see when they leave the country.” The demonstration then tracked the individual around the United States and abroad to a training center and airfield roughly an hour’s drive northwest of Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Zarqa, Jordan, where the U.S. reportedly maintains a fleet of drones.
“It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to see how foreign spies can use this information for espionage, blackmail, all kinds of, as they used to say, dastardly deeds.”
“There is sure as hell a serious national security threat if a data broker can track a couple hundred intelligence officials to their homes and around the world,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a vocal critic of the personal data industry, told The Intercept in an interview. “It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to see how foreign spies can use this information for espionage, blackmail, all kinds of, as they used to say, dastardly deeds.”
Back stateside, the person was tracked to their own home. A6’s software includes a function called “Regularity,” a button clients can press that automatically analyzes frequently visited locations to deduce where a target lives and works, even though the GPS pinpoints sourced by A6 omit the phone owner’s name. Privacy researchers have long shown that even “anonymized” location data is trivially easy to attach to an individual based on where they frequent most, a fact borne out by A6’s own demonstration. After hitting the “Regularity” button, Clark zoomed in on a Google Street View image of their home.
“Industry has repeatedly claimed that collecting and selling this cellphone location data won’t violate privacy because it is tied to device ID numbers instead of people’s names. This feature proves just how facile those claims are,” said Nate Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “Of course, following a person’s movements 24 hours a day, day after day, will tell you where they live, where they work, who they spend time with, and who they are. The privacy violation is immense.”
The demo continued with a surveillance exercise tagging U.S. naval movements, using a tweeted satellite photo of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Mediterranean Sea snapped by the commercial firm Maxar Technologies. Clark broke down how a single satellite snapshot could be turned into surveillance that he claimed was even more powerful than that executed from space. Using the latitude and longitude coordinates appended to the Maxar photo along with its time stamp, A6 was able to pick up a single phone signal from the ship’s position at that moment, south of Crete. “But it only takes one,” Clark noted. “So when I look back where that one device goes: Oh, it goes back to Norfolk. And actually, on the carrier in the satellite picture — what else is on the carrier? When you look, here are all the other devices.” His screen revealed a view of the carrier docked in Virginia, teeming with thousands of colorful dots representing phone location pings gathered by A6. “Well, now I can see every time that that ship is deploying. I don’t need satellites right now. I can use this.”
Though Clark conceded that the company has far less data available on Chinese phone owners, the demo concluded with a GPS ping picked up aboard an alleged Chinese nuclear submarine. Using only unclassified satellite imagery and commercial advertising data, Anomaly Six was able to track the precise movements of the world’s most sophisticated military and intelligence forces. With tools like those sold by A6 and Zignal, even an OSINT hobbyist would have global surveillance powers previously held only by nations. “People put way too much on social media,” Clark added with a laugh.
As location data has proliferated largely unchecked by government oversight in the United States, one hand washes another, creating a private sector capable of state-level surveillance powers that can also fuel the state’s own growing appetite for surveillance without the usual judicial scrutiny. Critics say the loose trade in advertising data constitutes a loophole in the Fourth Amendment, which requires the government to make its case to a judge before obtaining location coordinates from a cellular provider. But the total commodification of phone data has made it possible for the government to skip the court order and simply buy data that’s often even more accurate than what could be provided by the likes of Verizon. Civil libertarians say this leaves a dangerous gap between the protections intended by the Constitution and the law’s grasp on the modern data trade.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that cellphone location information is protected under the Fourth Amendment because of the detailed picture of a person’s life it can reveal,” explained Wessler. “Government agencies’ purchases of access to Americans’ sensitive location data raise serious questions about whether they are engaged in an illegal end run around the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. It is time for Congress to end the legal uncertainty enabling this surveillance once and for all by moving toward passage of the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.”
Though such legislation could restrict the government’s ability to piggyback off commercial surveillance, app-makers and data brokers would remain free to surveil phone owners. Still, Wyden, a co-sponsor of that bill, told The Intercept that he believes “this legislation sends a very strong message” to the “Wild West” of ad-based surveillance but that clamping down on the location data supply chain would be “certainly a question for the future.” Wyden suggested that protecting a device’s location trail from snooping apps and advertisers might be best handled by the Federal Trade Commission. Separate legislation previously introduced by Wyden would empower the FTC to crack down on promiscuous data sharing and broaden consumers’ ability to opt out of ad tracking.
A6 is far from the only firm engaged in privatized device-tracking surveillance. Three of Anomaly Six’s key employees previously worked at competing firm Babel Street, which named all three of them in a 2018 lawsuit first reported by the Wall Street Journal. According to the legal filing, Brendan Huff and Jeffrey Heinz co-founded Anomaly Six (and lesser-known Datalus 5) months after ending their employment at Babel Street in April 2018, with the intent of replicating Babel’s cellphone location surveillance product, “Locate X,” in a partnership with major Babel competitor Semantic AI. In July 2018, Clark followed Huff and Heinz by resigning from his position as Babel’s “primary interface to … intelligence community clients” and becoming an employee of both Anomaly Six and Semantic.
Like its rival Dataminr, Zignal touts its mundane partnerships with the likes of Levi’s and the Sacramento Kings, marketing itself publicly in vague terms that carry little indication that it uses Twitter for intelligence-gathering purposes, ostensibly in clear violation of Twitter’s anti-surveillance policy. Zignal’s ties to government run deep: Zignal’s advisory board includes a former head of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Charles Cleveland, as well as the CEO of the Rendon Group, John Rendon, whose bio notes that he “pioneered the use of strategic communications and real-time information management as an element of national power, serving as a consultant to the White House, U.S. National Security community, including the U.S. Department of Defense.” Further, public records state that Zignal was paid roughly $4 million to subcontract under defense staffing firm ECS Federal on Project Maven for “Publicly Available Information … Data Aggregation” and a related “Publicly Available Information enclave” in the U.S. Army’s Secure Unclassified Network.
The remarkable world-spanning capabilities of Anomaly Six are representative of the quantum leap occurring in the field of OSINT. While the term is often used to describe the internet-enabled detective work that draws on public records to, say, pinpoint the location of a war crime from a grainy video clip, “automated OSINT” systems now use software to combine enormous datasets that far outpace what a human could do on their own. Automated OSINT has also become something of a misnomer, using information that is by no means “open source” or in the public domain, like commercial GPS data that must be bought from a private broker.
While OSINT techniques are powerful, they are generally shielded from accusations of privacy violation because the “open source” nature of the underlying information means that it was already to some extent public. This is a defense that Anomaly Six, with its trove of billions of purchased data points, can’t muster. In February, the Dutch Review Committee on the Intelligence and Security Services issued a report on automated OSINT techniques and the threat to personal privacy they may represent: “The volume, nature and range of personal data in these automated OSINT tools may lead to a more serious violation of fundamental rights, in particular the right to privacy, than consulting data from publicly accessible online information sources, such as publicly accessible social media data or data retrieved using a generic search engine.” This fusion of publicly available data, privately procured personal records, and computerized analysis isn’t the future of governmental surveillance, but the present. Last year, the New York Times reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency “buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant,” a surveillance method now regularly practiced throughout the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and beyond.
The post American Phone-Tracking Firm Demo’d Surveillance Powers by Spying on CIA and NSA appeared first on The Intercept.
By Caitlin Johnstone – Apr 7, 2022
NBC News has a new report out citing multiple anonymous US officials, humorously titled “In a break with the past, US is using intel to fight an info war with Russia, even when the intel isn’t rock solid.”
The officials say the Biden administration has been rapidly pushing out “intelligence” about Russia’s plans in Ukraine that is “low-confidence” or “based more on analysis than hard evidence”, or even just plain false, in order to fight an information war against Putin.
The report says that toward this end the US government has deliberately circulated false or poorly evidenced claims about impending chemical weapons attacks, about Russian plans to orchestrate a false flag attack in the Donbass to justify an invasion, about Putin’s advisors misinforming him, and about Russia seeking arms supplies from China.
Psyops in the U.S. targeting the public used to be illegal, even though the way they got around it was to plant stories in the foreign press. But over the last five years beginning with Russiagate & now Ukraine, it is clear that U.S. public is fair game: https://t.co/gcEWoCZbkB
— Ajamu Baraka (@ajamubaraka) April 6, 2022
Excerpt, emphasis mine:
It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: US officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine.
President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three US officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the US released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions.
It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.
So they lied. They may hold that they lied for a noble reason, but they lied. They knowingly circulated information they had no reason to believe was true, and that lie was amplified by all the most influential media outlets in the western world.
Another example of the Biden administration releasing a false narrative as part of its “information war”:
Likewise, a charge that Russia had turned to China for potential military help lacked hard evidence, a European official and two US officials said.
The US officials said there are no indications China is considering providing weapons to Russia. The Biden administration put that out as a warning to China not to do so, they said.
On the empire’s claim last week that Putin is being misled by his advisors because they are afraid of telling him the truth, NBC reports that this assessment “wasn’t conclusive—based more on analysis than hard evidence.”
I’d actually made fun of this ridiculous CIA press release when it was uncritically published disguised as a breaking news report by The New York Times:
Breaking News: The most influential newspaper in the English-speaking world routinely passes off CIA press releases as “Breaking News”. https://t.co/aBzhidbozv
— Caitlin Johnstone
(@caitoz) March 30, 2022
(@caitoz) We’d also had fun with State Department Spokesman Ned Price’s bizarre February impersonation of Alex Jones, where he wrongly claimed that Russia was about to release a “false flag” video using crisis actors to justify its invasion:
US Again Tries To Pass Off Government Assertions As Evidence
“This is the kind of evidence you can’t see. The evidence is invisible.”https://t.co/mEqIsS0cUS
— Caitlin Johnstone
Other US government lies discussed in the NBC report were less cute:
In another disclosure, US officials said one reason not to provide Ukraine with MiG fighter jets is that intelligence showed Russia would view the move as escalatory.
That was true, but it was also true of Stinger missiles, which the Biden administration did provide, two US officials said, adding that the administration declassified the MiG information to bolster the argument not to provide them to Ukraine.
So the Biden administration knew it was sending weapons to Ukraine that would be perceived by a nuclear superpower as a provocative escalation, sent them anyway, and then lied about it. Cool, cool, cool.
This NBC report confirms rumors we’ve been hearing for months. Professional war slut Max Boot said via The Council on Foreign Relations think tank in February that the Biden administration had ushered in “a new era of info ops” with intelligence releases designed not to tell the truth but to influence Putin’s decisions. Former MI6 chief John Sawers told The Atlantic Council think tank in February that the Biden administration’s “intelligence” releases were based more on a general vibe than actual intelligence, and were designed to manipulate rather than to inform.
Amazing interview with of the former MI6 chief with the Atlantic Council’s @B_judah (the whole gang present) where the intel goon *admits* that many western “intel leaks” media outlets are dutifully conveying aren’t real leaks but propaganda messages designed to undercut Putin. pic.twitter.com/UOzBxG5F5H
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 17, 2022
And in case you were wondering, no, NBC did not just publish a major leak by whistleblowers within the US government who are bravely exposing the lies of the powerful with the help of the free press. One of the article’s authors is Ken Dilanian, who in 2014 was revealed to have worked as a literal CIA asset while writing for The LA Times. If you see Dilanian’s name in a byline, you may be certain that you are reading exactly what the managers of the US empire want you to read.
So why are they telling us all this now? Is the US government not worried that it will lose the trust of the public by admitting that it is continuously lying about its most high-profile international conflict? And if this is an “information war” designed to “get inside Putin’s head” as NBC’s sources claim, wouldn’t openly reporting it through the mainstream press completely defeat the purpose?
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Well, the answer to those questions is where it gets really creepy. I welcome everyone’s feedback and theories on the matter, but as near as I can figure the only reason the US government would release this story to the public is because they want the general public to know about it. And the only plausible reason I can think of that they would want the public to know about it is that they are confident the public will consent to being lied to.
To get a better sense of what I’m getting at, it helps to watch the televised version of this report in which Dilanian and NBC anchor Alison Morris enthuse about how brilliant and wonderful it is that the Biden administration is employing these psychological warfare tactics to mess with Putin’s mind:
The message an indoctrinated NBC viewer will get when watching this segment is, “Isn’t this awesome? Our president is pulling off all these cool 3D chess moves to beat Putin, and we’re kind of a part of it!”
It’s been obvious for a long time that the US empire has been working to shore up narrative control to strengthen its hegemonic domination of the planet via internet censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the normalization of the persecution of journalists. We may now simply be at the stage of imperial narrative control where they can begin openly manufacturing the consent of the public to be lied to for their own good.
Just as the smear campaign against Julian Assange trained mainstream liberals to defend the right of their government to keep dark secrets from them, we may now be looking at the stage of narrative control advancement where mainstream liberals are trained to defend the right of their government to lie to them.
The US is ramping up cold war aggressions against Russia and China in a desperate attempt to secure unipolar hegemony, and psychological warfare traditionally plays a major role in cold war maneuverings due to the inability to aggress in more overt ways against nuclear-armed foes. So now would definitely be the time to get the “thinkers” of America’s two mainstream political factions fanatically cheerleading their government’s psywar manipulations.
A casual glance around the internet at what mainstream liberals are saying about this NBC report shows that this is indeed what is happening. In liberal circles there does appear to be widespread acceptance of the world’s most powerful government using the world’s most powerful media institutions to lie to the public for strategic gains. If this continues to be accepted, it will make things a whole lot easier for the empire managers going forward.
Featured image: US President Joe Biden speaking at the White House. Photo: ABC News
Google is fighting back against a Brazilian court order to turn over data on all users who searched for specific terms, including the name of a well-known elected official and a busy downtown thoroughfare. (Brief in Portuguese / English*) While we applaud Google for challenging this digital dragnet search in Brazil, it must also stand up for the rights of its users against similar searches in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Background: Keyword Search Warrants
Keyword search warrants like the one in Brazil are far broader than traditional search warrants described in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment requires police to establish probable cause to search a particular place or seize a particular person or thing before the court authorizes the warrant. But keyword search warrants don’t start with a suspect person or device. Instead, they require Google to comb through the search histories of all of its users, including users who are not logged into a Google account when they search.
Keyword warrants allow the police to learn anyone and everyone who may have searched for particular terms on the off-chance one of those people could have been involved with the crime. Like better-known geofence warrants, keyword warrants allow police to conduct a fishing expedition and sweep up data on innocent people, turning them into criminal suspects. Police are using both types of expansive, suspicionless searches with increasing frequency.
Google Takes a Stand Against Keyword Search Warrants—in Brazil
The Brazilian case arises out of the assassination of Rio de Janeiro City Councilor Marielle Franco. Franco was murdered, along with her driver, Anderson Gomes, near Rio de Janeiro in 2018. It was a terrible crime that stirred up public outcry.
As part of the investigation into the assassination, police ordered Google to trawl through its users’ search histories, scanning for searches of certain terms—including the name of a heavily trafficked street in Rio de Janeiro (“Rua dos Inválidos”), Franco’s name, and the name of a nonprofit cultural space intended to support Black women (Casa das Pretas), where Franco had participated in an event earlier on the day she was killed. The order required Google to turn over identifying data about all users who searched for these and other related terms over the course of four days.
Google has challenged this order, eventually appealing it all the way to Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, arguing that this kind of indiscriminate search violates the Brazilian constitution. (Google’s brief in Portuguese / English*) As Google rightly explains, the warrant is wildly overbroad. The search terms would all have been popular and common queries, and many people are likely to have used them—including citizens and journalists interested in the activities of a city councilor, or people interested in collaborating with or receiving support from the nonprofit cultural center Casa das Pretas.
This particular keyword search warrant is particularly egregious, given the sheer number of people likely caught in its dragnet, but even a more narrow warrant should trigger human rights concerns. These types of warrants inevitably sweep in users whom police have no reason to believe were involved in the crime, and they give police unbridled discretion to determine which of these people to target for further investigation. In the Fourth Amendment framework, the unbridled discretion inherent in keyword search warrants, like geofence warrants, makes them an unconstitutional “general warrant.”
As Google emphasized in its brief, this case in Brazil has far-reaching implications. This method of investigating transforms a platform intended to provide access to information into a tool for the government to collect highly revealing private data from innocent people. And Google receives thousands of law enforcement orders to provide user data in Brazil each year, affecting tens of thousands of users. If Brazil’s Supreme Court signs off on dragnet keyword searches, the number of impacted users could skyrocket.
Google Fails to Challenge Keyword Search Warrants in the U.S.
Keyword search orders are becoming increasingly common in the U.S.—but Google seemingly hasn’t fought nearly as hard to protect the privacy of its U.S. users. We aren’t aware of any cases in which Google has pushed back against keyword search warrants in the U.S. In fact, we have no idea how many keyword warrants Google receives or how it responds to them at all, because Google has kept that information entirely secret. That secrecy surrounding keyword warrants contrasts with Google’s recent reporting on geofence warrants; Google has now shared the number of geofence warrants it receives and the three-step process it uses to respond to them.
It’s remarkable that Google has taken a strong stand in favor of user privacy in Brazil. But this problem isn’t limited to one country, and Google could do much more to protect its users. Google can and should take proactive steps to address the highly revealing capacity of its databases and adopt robust data minimization measures on how user data is processed and for long it is stored. And it should take a stand in the courts to protect users in the U.S. and other countries from dragnet keyword searches, just like it’s doing in Brazil.
* The official copy of the brief that Google submitted to the Brazilian court is only available in Portuguese. We used an online tool to translate the brief into English so there may be some inaccuracies in translation.
The CIA recently declassified parts of a letter written by two U.S. senators that revealed the existence of a previously unknown bulk spying program that collects and stores Americans’ data. The letter, written by Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, calls for the CIA to reveal the details of the program. It was sent to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in April 2021. Much of the letter remains classified, and neither the senators nor the CIA have provided any specifics about what the underlying spying program entails.
“Among the many details the public deserves to know are the nature of the CIA’s relationship with its sources and the legal framework for the collection; the kinds of records collected [redacted] the amount of Americans’ records maintained; and the rules governing the use, storage, dissemination, and queries (including US person queries) of the records,” the senators wrote. The mention of the CIA’s “relationship with its sources” is likely a reference to the telecommunication companies providing the data, a reminder of the symbiotic roles private companies play in national security surveillance.
The existence of the CIA’s program was first disclosed to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 2021, according to Wyden and Heinrich. They became aware of the bulk collection from a report issued by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), an independent executive branch agency whose members have access to classified information. That review, known as “Deep Dive II,” remains classified, but the CIA partially declassified a set of recommendations issued by the board. That document revealed that when CIA analysts enter a search term, or query, into the program, a “pop-up box will appear to remind the analysts” that they need to provide a foreign intelligence justification for the search. Analysts are not required to document that justification; the oversight board recommended requiring it.
Although Wyden and Heinrich, who both sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said they were only informed about the bulk spying program in March 2021, a CIA official told The New York Times that Congress had already been told about the data collection. That official suggested that the new information in Deep Dive II had to do with the “repository and analysis tools for storing and querying that data after its collection.”
If the CIA is lying to Congress, or misleading members through wordplay and hiding behind technicalities, it would not be the first time in recent memory an intelligence official had done so. In 2013, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Senator Wyden in an open hearing about bulk surveillance of U.S. persons. Wyden asked if the National Security Agency (NSA) collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper responded “no,” later adding “not wittingly.”
Clapper’s obfuscation was a key motivation for Edward Snowden, then an NSA contractor, to leak documents to journalists exposing multiple mass surveillance programs. Following the Snowden disclosures, Clapper referred to his own earlier testimony as “clearly erroneous.”
There have been other episodes of tension, in some cases outright hostility, between intelligence agencies and their congressional watchdogs. At the end of Obama’s second term in office, the Senate Intelligence Committee assembled the most exhaustive accounting to date of the CIA’s role in the post-9/11 rendition, detention and interrogation program. Commonly referred to as “The Torture Report,” the document was designed to expose the CIA’s lies about the efficacy and necessity of torture. In the days immediately before the report was to be released, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose office was the primary author of the report, revealed that the CIA had spied on her staff. Then-CIA Director John Brennan initially denied the allegations, but later admitted the CIA had inappropriately surveilled Senate staffers while they were using a CIA network to conduct their research. The report remains classified, other than an executive summary that was released to the public with heavy redactions.
When it comes to what prevents the CIA from using this bulk surveillance repository to search for U.S. persons’ data, Goitein writes, “Let’s be honest: nothing.”
Although little is known about the newly disclosed CIA bulk spying program, Wyden and Heinrich wrote in their letter that its legal foundation is Executive Order (EO) 12333. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, serves as the authority that governs most covert foreign intelligence activities carried out by the U.S. government. It purportedly bans the assassinations and covert action “intended to influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies, or media,” but the order gives wide latitude for overseas physical and electronic surveillance. Executive orders are issued by presidents, and by definition have not been passed by Congress. Although the intelligence committees in both chambers are supposed to have broad oversight over the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community, programs and activities governed by EO 12333 generally have more autonomy than those controlled by statutes, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bulk spying may have something to do with collecting “financial data” as it relates to ISIS, as suggested by a different, partially declassified PCLOB report. If it does, it would suggest a familiar pattern in the “war on terror,” namely, intelligence agencies claiming that countering the threat of terrorism requires mass surveillance with no congressional or judicial oversight.
Elizabeth Goitein, codirector of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, reacted to the newly disclosed surveillance program by summarizing the distinctions between the two types of legal authorities. “You might be asking, didn’t Congress end bulk collection? The short answer is no,” she tweeted. “In 2015, Congress passed a law aimed at prohibiting bulk collection when the government is acting under [FISA], but FISA only applies to certain types of surveillance that target U.S. persons or happen inside the United States. When the collection happens overseas or falls into one of FISA’s statutory gaps, it takes place under Executive Order (EO) 12333.”
Goitein added that “most foreign intelligence surveillance actually takes place under EO 12333, not FISA. That means it is subject to no statutory constraints whatsoever, and there is no judicial review or oversight.” When it comes to what prevents the CIA from using this bulk surveillance repository to search for U.S. persons’ data, Goitein writes, “Let’s be honest: nothing.”
The Snowden disclosures partially reveal the nearly limitless authority that intelligence agencies have claimed under EO 12333. The NSA program MYSTIC, revealed based on Snowden’s leaked documents, was “capable of recording ‘100 percent’ of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place,” The Washington Post reported in 2014. The Intercept reported two months later that a MYSTIC sub-program called SOMALGET had targeted the Bahamas, without the country’s government’s knowledge or approval. Both MYSTIC and SOMALGET operated under EO 12333.
Despite the well-documented abuses the CIA carried out under the auspices of the war on terror, and during the Cold War before that, there is very little political will at the moment to abolish the agency. However, the idea has been broached over the decades. In a 1974 speech, then-Senate candidate Bernie Sanders called the CIA “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” In 1991 and 1995, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan introduced legislation to abolish the CIA and move some of its authorities to the State Department. Presidents Truman and Kennedy each expressed their reservations about the CIA’s authority, as did Secretary of State Dean Acheson.
The recent disclosures from Senators Wyden and Heinrich are a reminder that the CIA sees itself as an institution beyond the reach and control of Congress, and U.S. and international law. The agency can’t be trusted, and has repeatedly shown that it can’t be reformed. It may be well past time to resume questioning whether it should exist at all.
Civil liberties watchdogs condemn agency’s collection of domestic data without congressional or court approval or oversight
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been secretly collecting Americans’ private information in bulk, according to newly declassified documents that prompted condemnation from civil liberties watchdogs.
The surveillance program was exposed on Thursday by two Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico alleged that the CIA has long concealed it from the public and Congress.
“Rather than thinking about vaccine passports as temporary, isolated, public health-related measures, we should view them as just one example of how the pandemic is accelerating the rollout of digital identity infrastructure.”
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- Proposal also includes construction of retractable fencing
- Recommendations follow 6 January insurrection at US Capitol
House Democrats plan on Wednesday to unveil a $2.1bn supplemental bill to enhance security at the Capitol that will propose creating a quick reaction force to guard against future threats in the wake of the Capitol attack, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The proposed bill will also include the construction of a retractable fencing system around the Capitol, the sources said.