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Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet?
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- The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime
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Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet? Citation: Wicklander, Carl. (2015). Bipartisan Secure Data Act Has Votes to Pass House, But Will Lawmakers Drag Their Feet? Independent Voter Network. Retrieved 1/1/16. http://ivn.us/2015/02/09/bipartisan-secure-data-act-votes-pass-house-will-lawmakers-drag-feet/ Wicklander Article Summary: In the House of Representatives there has been some adequate support to pass the Secure Data Act. The Secure Data Act would give Congress more power to oversee on-line bulk data collection carried out by federal intelligence agencies. However, despite bipartisan support the act has still not been enacted, and the final version has been watered down. Wicklander Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a bill intended to protect Americans’ privacy and online data. In a press release, U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) announced that the purpose of the Secure Data Act of 2015 is not to restrict the ability of intelligence agencies to collect data in general. However, they do intend to re-assert the role of Congress in regulating these activities: “Congress has allowed the Administration’s surveillance authorities to go unchecked by failing to enact adequate reform. . . . With threats to our homeland ever prevalent, we should not tie the hands of the intelligence community. But unwarranted, backdoor surveillance is indefensible. The Secure Data Act is an important step in rebuilding public trust in our intelligence agencies and striking the appropriate balance between national security and civil liberty.” The bill is an attempt to specifically guard against backdoor searches, including those where “identifiers” such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses known to belong to Americans are employed to conduct the searches. For years, privacy advocates have denounced these types of searches as a way to skirt the law. According to the Register, a UK-based tech site, “Under the proposed Secure Data Act, developers cannot be forced to insert security holes into devices and code.” An ACLU lawyer quoted in the story said that the previous bill’s success might indicate “that at least in the House they know how important it is to secure encryption efforts.” Massie, Lofgren, and Sensenbrenner tried to pass a similar version of the Secure Data Act near the end of the 113th Congress. The legislation passed with broad support, 293-123, but was not included in the omnibus bill that passed at the end of the session. A Senate version of the Secure Data Act was introduced by Oregon U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D) in January. His bill is still waiting to move through the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. Regaining the people’s trust may be one of the harder obstacles when it comes to regulations on spying and surveillance. Polls have consistently shown that Americans do not approve of the current methods of surveillance and data collection. Previous bills have passed Congress seeking to limit the power and authority of agencies like the National Security Agency. However, the final products were severely watered down versions of the initial legislation. Even extensively supported bills such as the previous Secure Data Act failed to get anywhere in both chambers of Congress. The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime Citation: McQuinn, Alan. (2014). The Secure Data Act Could Help Law Enforcement Protect Against Cybercrime. The Hill. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/227594-the-secure-data-act-could-help-law-enforcement-protect-against McQuinn Article Summary: The Secure Data Act would protect the on-line/internet privacy of Americans in addition to elimination of “backdoors.” Currently, organizations like the FBI and NSA use encryption backdoors to access private data to track criminals. However, those backdoors weaken electronic security because they can also be accessed by hackers. McQuinn Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: Last Sunday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote an op-ed describing the role that U.S. law enforcement should play in fostering stronger data encryption to make information technology (IT) systems more secure. This op-ed explains Wyden’s introduction of the Secure Data Act, which would prohibit the government from mandating that U.S. companies build “backdoors” in their products for the purpose of surveillance. This legislation responds directly to recent comments by U.S. officials, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey, chastising Apple and Google for creating encrypted devices to which law enforcement cannot gain access. Comey and others have argued that U.S. tech companies should design a way for law enforcement officials to access consumer data stored on those devices. In this environment, the Secure Data Act is a homerun for security and privacy and is a good step towards reasserting U.S. competitiveness in building secure systems for a global market. By adopting its position on the issue the FBI is working against its own goal of preventing cybercrime as well as broader government efforts to improve cybersecurity. Just a few years ago, the Bureau was counseling people to better encrypt their data to safeguard it from hackers. Creating backdoor access for law enforcement fundamentally weakens IT systems because it creates a new pathway for malicious hackers, foreign governments, and other unauthorized parties to gain illicit access. Requiring backdoors is a step backwards for companies actively working to eliminate security vulnerabilities in their products. In this way, security is a lot like a ship at sea, the more holes you put in the system—government mandated or not—the faster it will sink. The better solution is to patch up all the holes in the system and work to prevent any new ones. Rather than decreasing security to suit its appetite for surveillance, the FBI should recognize that better security is needed to bolster U.S. defenses against online threats. The Secure Data Act is an important step in that direction because it will stop U.S. law enforcement agencies from requiring companies to introduce vulnerabilities in their products. If this bill is enacted, law enforcement will be forced to use other means to solve crimes, such as by using metadata from cellular providers, call records, text messages, and even old-fashioned detective work. This will also allow U.S. tech companies, with the help of law enforcement, to continue to strengthen their systems, better detect intrusions, and identify emerging threats. Law enforcement, such as the recently announced U.S. Department of Justice Cybersecurity Unit—a unit designed solely to “deter, investigate, and prosecute cyber criminals,” should work in cooperation with the private sector to create a safer environment online. A change of course is also necessary to restore the ability of U.S. tech companies to compete globally, where mistrust has run rampant following the revelations of mass government surveillance. With the 113th Congress at an end, Wyden has promised to reintroduce the Data Secure Act again in the next Congress. Congress should move expediently to advance Senator Wyden’s bill to promote security and privacy in U.S. devices and software. Furthermore, as Congress marks up the legislation and considers amendments, it should restrict not just government access to devices, but also government control of those devices. These efforts will move the efforts of our law enforcement agencies away from creating cyber vulnerabilities and allow electronics manufacturers to produce the most secure devices imaginable.
Full Article: Privacy is essential to human freedom and happiness for reasons that are rarely discussed but instinctively understood by most people, as evidenced by the lengths to which they go to protect their own. To begin with, people radically change their behavior when they know they are being watched. They will strive to do that which is expected of them. They want to avoid shame and condemnation. They do so by adhering tightly to accepted social practices, by staying within imposed boundaries, avoiding action that might be seen as deviant or abnormal. The range of choices people consider when they believe that others are watching is therefore far more limited than what they might do when acting in a private realm. A denial of privacy operates to severely restrict one’s freedom of choice. Several years ago, I attended the bat mitzvah of my best friend’s daughter. During the ceremony, the rabbi emphasized that “the central lesson” for the girl to learn was that she was “always being watched and judged.” He told her that God always knew what she was doing, every choice, every action, and even every thought, no matter how private. “You are never alone,” he said, which meant that she should always adhere to God’s will. The rabbi’s point was clear: if you can never evade the watchful eyes of a supreme authority, there is no choice but to follow the dictates that authority imposes. You cannot even consider forging your own path beyond those rules: if you believe you are always being watched and judged, you are not really a free individual. All oppressive authorities — political, religious, societal, parental — rely on this vital truth, using it as a principal tool to enforce orthodoxies, compel adherence, and quash dissent. It is in their interest to convey that nothing their subjects do will escape the knowledge of the authorities. A prime justification for surveillance—that it’s for the benefit of the population—relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans’ growing concerns over the US government’s surveillance powers, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, assured readers that “any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever.” The point was made again by a White House spokesman, responding to the 2005 controversy over Bush’s illegal eavesdropping program: “This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people.” And when President Obama appeared on The Tonight Show in August 2013 and was asked by Jay Leno about NSA revelations, he said: “We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.” For many, the argument works. The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those “doing wrong”—the bad people—ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong,” in the eyes of such institutions, encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior, and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat. The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, and environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order. Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon Citation: Walt, Stephen. (2013). Snowden Deserves An Immediate Presidential Pardon. Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23229/snowden_deserves_an_immediate_presidential_pardon.html Walt Article Summary: Charges are possibly being brought against Edward Snowden for leaking classified data that revealed the extent of NSA bulk data collection. Walt argues that Snowden should be pardoned since he never revealed information about the NSA for his own personal gain. Due to Snowden’s leaks we now know the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance. We also know that a large number of non-criminal individuals were also being surveilled. Walt Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama called upon "We, the People" to preserve America's ideals of individual freedom and equality. When Edward Snowden disclosed the National Security Agency's secret surveillance programs, he was rising to this challenge. Like the nation's "founding fathers", he was also defying the usurpations of an increasingly intrusive government. Mr. Obama should therefore call off the campaign to apprehend him and offer Mr. Snowden a pardon instead. Mr. Snowden stands accused of stealing government property and unauthorized dissemination of classified information. But he did not pass valuable secrets to a foreign government or sell them for personal gain — as convicted spies such as Aldrich Ames or Jonathan Pollard did. On the contrary, he gave up a well-paid job and put his own freedom in jeopardy for a principle. Mr. Snowden’s motives were laudable: he believed fellow citizens should know their government was conducting a secret surveillance program enormous in scope, poorly supervised and possibly unconstitutional. He was right. Thanks to Mr. Snowden, we now know that officials and private contractors have been collecting vast amounts of information about ordinary Americans and conducting unprecedented levels of spying on US allies. We know key officials lied on Capitol Hill about what the NSA was doing, casting doubt on the quality of Congressional oversight. By going public, Mr. Snowden reminded us that secret programs undertaken in the name of national security are extremely difficult to control. NSA defenders argue that these programs only target individuals who might pose a threat. They maintain ordinary citizens whose digital records might be incriminating or embarrassing need not be concerned, because government officials will never examine their data without probable cause and judicial approval. How naive. Under the veneer of "national security", government officials can use these vast troves of data to go after anyone, questioning what they were doing, including whistleblowers, investigative journalists or ordinary citizens posting comments on news websites. Once a secret surveillance system exists, it is only a matter of time before someone abuses it for selfish ends. Richard Nixon kept his own "enemies list" and used the Central Intelligence Agency to spy on American citizens. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation director J Edgar Hoover helped keep himself in office by collecting dirt on officials. Fear of exposure threatens to stifle the dissent and debate that is essential to healthy democracy. Governments already classify much of what officialdom is doing and selectively leak information to influence public opinion, so citizens must rely on journalists, academics and principled individuals such as Mr. Snowden to find out what our "public servants" aren't telling us. But if critical voices are cowed by the possibility that their personal lives will be revealed, those in power will be harder to monitor and policy errors will go uncorrected. Pardoning Mr. Snowden would surely provoke howls of protest from the intelligence community, which hopes to deter future leakers by making an example of him. But a pardon for him is unlikely to trigger a wave of imitators; how many other insiders would sacrifice their jobs and risk their freedom because Mr. Snowden got a reprieve? And if a few did follow suit and exposed government wrongdoing, society as a whole would benefit. History will probably be kinder to Mr. Snowden than to his pursuers, and his name may one day be linked to the other brave men and women — Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Luther King Jr, Mark Felt, Karen Silkwood and so on — whose acts of principled defiance are now widely admired. Ironically, less august company awaits Mr. Snowden should he join the ranks of those whom presidents have spared. Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon, George HW Bush pardoned the officials who conducted the illegal Iran-Contra affair, and Mr. Obama has already pardoned several convicted embezzlers and drug dealers. Surely Mr. Snowden is as deserving of mercy as these miscreants. Pardoning him would also show that Mr. Obama's rhetorical commitment to "We, the People", and to open and transparent government, is not just empty words. “Afterword,” Homeland Citation: Applebaum, Jacob. (2013). “Afterword,” Homeland — by Cory Doctorow. Retrieved 1/2/16. http://pastebin.com/VHBx3imj Applebaum Article Summary: This article is more of a narrative dramatic speak about the need to move forward and disrupt injustices we see in society now. It mentions that free and open systems that help society view governments as a whole and better able to criticize, which is the key to ending over securitization and suppression of free speech. Applebaum Article Strategic Points:
Full Article: Everything good in the world comes from the efforts of people who came before us. Every minute that we are able to enjoy in a society that is not ruled by senseless violence is a minute given to us by the hard work of people who dedicated their lives for something better. Every person we meet is carrying his own burdens. Each person is the center of her own universe. There is so much left to be done, so many injustices to right, so much suffering to relieve, and so many beautiful moments to be lived, an endless amount of knowledge to uncover. Many secrets of the universe wait to be uncovered. The deck from which our hands are dealt need not be stacked against us; it is possible to create societal structures that are just and capable of reasoned compassion for everyone. It is possible to change the very nature of our lives. It is possible to redesign the entire deck, to change the very face and count of the cards, to rewrite the rules and to create different outcomes. We live in the golden era of surveillance; every phone is designed to be tapped, the Internet passes through snooping equipment of agencies that are so vast and unaccountable that we hardly know their bounds. Corporations are forced (though some are willing enough!) to hand over our data and data of those whom we love. Our lives are ruled by networks and yet those networks are not ruled by our consent. These networks keep us hooked up but it is not without costs that they keep us hooked together. The businesses, the governments, and the individuals that power those networks are incentivized to spy, to betray and to do it silently. The architecture of the very systems produces these outcomes. This is tyranny. The architecture of our systems and of our networks is not the product of nature but rather the product of imperfect humans, some with the best of intentions. There is no one naturally fit to survive in these unnatural systems, there are some who are lucky, others who have adapted. This letter to you, from your perhaps recent past, was written with Free Software written as a labor of love by someone who wished to help the children of Uganda while flying over an expansive ocean at difficult to understand heights, it was composed while running under a kernel written by scores of people across every national line, across every racial, sexual and gender line by a socially and politically agnostic engineer, it was sent through multiple anonymity networks built by countless volunteers acting in solidarity through mutual aid and it was received by an author who published it for a purpose. What is the common purpose of all of these people? It is for the whole of our efforts to be more than the sum of our parts -- this creates a surplus for you - to give breathing room to others, so that they may take the torch of knowledge, of reason, of justice, of truth telling, of sunlight -- to the next step, wherever it may lead us. There was a time when there were no drone killings, societies have existed without armed policemen, where peace is not only possible but actually a steady state, where mass surveillance was technically and socially infeasible, where fair and evenhanded trials by impartial juries were available for everyone, where fear of identification and arrest was not the norm but the exception. That time was less than a generation ago and much more has been lost in the transition from one generation to the next. It's up to you to bring those things back to our planet. You can do this with little more than cooperation, the Internet, cryptography, and willingness. You might do this alone or you might do it in a group; you might contribute as a solitary person or as one of many. Writing Free Software empowers every person, without exception, to control the machines that fill our lives. Building free and open hardware empowers every person, without exception, to construct new machines to free us from being slaves to machines that control us. Using free and open systems allows us to construct a new basis by which we may once again understand as a whole, the systems by which we govern ourselves. We are on the edge of regaining our autonomy, of ending total state surveillance, of uncovering and holding accountable those who commit crimes in our names without our informed consent, of resuming free travel without arbitrary or unfair restriction. We're on the verge of ensuring that every person, not one human excluded, has the right to read and the right to speak. Without exception. It's easy to feel hopeless in the face of the difficult issues that we face everyday -- how might one person effectively resist anything so much larger than herself? Once we stop acting alone, we have a chance for positive change. To protest is to stop and say that you object, to resist is to stop others from going along without thinking and to build alternatives is to give everyone new choices. Omission and commission are the yin and yang of personal agency. What if you could travel back through time and help Daniel Ellsberg leak the Pentagon papers? Would you take the actions required, would you risk your life to end the war? For many it is easy to answer positively and then think nothing of the actual struggles, the real risk or the uncertainty provided without historical hindsight. For others, it's easy to say no and to think of nothing beyond oneself. But what if you didn't need to travel back through time? There are new Pentagon Papers just waiting to be leaked; there are new wars to end, new injustices to make right, fresh uncertainty that seems daunting where success seems impossible, new alternatives need to be constructed, old values and concepts of justice need to be preserved in the face of powerful people who pervert the rule of law for their own benefit. Be the trouble you want to see in the world, above nationalism, above so-called patriotism, above and beyond fear and make it count for the betterment of the planet. Legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong -- do what is right and never give up the fight. Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2015 2015 -> Police Militarization 2015 -> 2015 ihbb championships: hs history Bowl Round 4 – Prelims First Quarter 2015 -> Wrtp/big step · 3841 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, wi 53208 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 December 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Darton College 2015 -> Training Workshop on Planning and Implementation of Multi-Sectoral Development Programme (MsDP) in Bihar Date : 6th 2015 -> Rao bulletin 15 June 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 September 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Rao bulletin 1 August 2015 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles 2015 -> Science, and transportation united states senate Download 396.84 Kb. Share with your friends:
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