Steve Woods

Whilst I was away at Barncamp (posts passim), I missed all the furore when awareness of the NSA’s Prism programme broke in the news, along with revelations that the surveillance information gathered was also shared with foreign governments, presumably including the British government, despite the pie-crust assurances of British Foreign Secretary William Hague.

In response to the revelations, two days ago 86 civil liberties organisations and internet companies in the USA wrote to Congress to demand an end to internet and communications surveillance in the USA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports.

The letter is reproduced in full below.

Dear Members of Congress,

We write to express our concern about recent reports published in the Guardian and the Washington Post, and acknowledged by the Obama Administration, which reveal secret spying by the National Security Agency (NSA) on phone records and Internet activity of people in the United States.

The Washington Post and the Guardian recently published reports based on information provided by a career intelligence officer showing how the NSA and the FBI are gaining broad access to data collected by nine of the leading U.S. Internet companies and sharing this information with foreign governments. As reported, the U.S. government is extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time. As a result, the contents of communications of people both abroad and in the U.S. can be swept in without any suspicion of crime or association with a terrorist organization.

Leaked reports also published by the Guardian and confirmed by the Administration reveal that the NSA is also abusing a controversial section of the PATRIOT Act to collect the call records of millions of Verizon customers. The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other “identifying information” for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime. The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.

This type of blanket data collection by the government strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy. This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures and protect their right to privacy.

We are calling on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and the FBI’s data collection programs. We call on Congress to immediately and publicly:

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;

2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;

3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

Access

Advocacy for Principled Action in Government

American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression

American Civil Liberties Union

American Civil Liberties Union of California

American Library Association

Amicus

Association of Research Libraries

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

BoingBoing

Breadpig

Calyx Institute

Canvas

Center for Democracy and Technology

Center for Digital Democracy

Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights

Center for Media and Democracy

Center for Media Justice

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Consumer Action

Consumer Watchdog

CorpWatch

CREDO Mobile

Cyber Privacy Project

Daily Kos

Defending Dissent Foundation

Demand Progress

Detroit Digital Justice Coalition

Digital Fourth

Downsize DC

DuckDuckGo

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Entertainment Consumers Association

Fight for the Future

Floor64

Foundation for Innovation and Internet Freedom

4Chan

Free Press

Free Software Foundation

Freedom of the Press Foundation

FreedomWorks

Friends of Privacy USA

Get FISA Right

Government Accountability Project

Greenpeace USA

Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA)

Internet Archive

isen.com, LLC

Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)

Law Life Culture

Liberty Coalition

May First/People Link

Media Alliance

Media Mobilizing Project, Philadelphia

Mozilla

Namecheap

National Coalition Against Censorship

New Sanctuary Coalition of NYC

Open Technology Institute

OpenMedia.org

Participatory Politics Foundation

Patient Privacy Rights

People for the American Way

Personal Democracy Media

PolitiHacks

Privacy and Access Council of Canada

Public Interest Advocacy Centre (Ottawa, Canada)

Public Knowledge

Privacy Activism

Privacy Camp

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse

Privacy Times

reddit

Represent.us

Rights Working Group

Rocky Mountain Civil Liberties Association

RootsAction.org

Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic

Sunlight Foundation

Taxpayers Protection Alliance

TechFreedom

The AIDS Policy Project, Philadelphia

TURN-The Utility Reform Network

Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center

William C. Velasquez Institute (WCVI)

World Wide Web Foundation

The letter was accompanied by the launch of StopWatching.us, a global petition calling on the US Congress to provide a public accounting of the United States’ domestic spying capabilities and to bring an end to illegal surveillance.

In a typical knee-jerk response in the wake of the barbaric murder in Woolwich last week of Lee Rigby, allegedly by a couple of religious extremists, Theresa May, the UK’s control freak Home Secretary has threatened to revive the so-called “Snooper’s Charter” (posts passim).

In this move she has been joined on the bandwagon by a couple of former Labour Home Secretaries, Lord Reid and Alan Johnson, who have backed her proposals. Furthermore, Alan Johnson suggested she should resign if she could not get cabinet backing for the stalled Communications Data Bill, as the Snooper’s Charter is better known in official circles.

In addition, these authoritarians have been joined by Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, who has been making some very illiberal noises indeed and attacking his party’s defence of civil liberties: “The reason [the Bill] was vetoed, as Nick Clegg, the leader of my party, knows very well, was purely political because of demands from inside the Liberal Democrats.”

Let’s face it, the logic of those politicians mentioned above is flawless: a man hacked to death in the street therefore we obviously need more internet surveillance.

However, political commentators on both the right and the left remain unconvinced by such flawless logic.

Writing in The Spectator’s blog on Sunday, Fraser Nelson states:

Crucially, we have seen nothing in the last few days to suggest we need a Snooping Act. And although power-hungry ministers never admit it, MI5 and MI6 already have full legal powers to intercept anything that can be described as a ‘communication’- from smoke signals to SMS. The Snooping Bill was more about granting espionage powers to the taxman and other nosy government agencies.

Meanwhile at the other end of the political spectrum, The Morning Star also commented as follows on Sunday:

In truth, state agencies such as GCHQ, MI5, MI6 and Special Branch have no need of additional powers.

They have all the means required to monitor actual or wannabe terrorists in Britain, buttressed by the issue of 500,000 intercept warrants each year.

We also know that in practice the security and intelligence services have no compunction about acting outside the law should it be deemed necessary.

The insatiable nature of the UK’s law enforcement and security services for communications data is further reinforced by the fact that UK law enforcement made more requests for user data from Skype last year than any other country. In 2012 the UK was the source of 1,268 requests for Skype user information, while the whole of the USA (population 316 mn., 5 times that of the UK. Ed.) made only 1,154 requests and German police made a paltry 685. The UK was looking for information on 2,720 different users in its requests.

When will the UK’s law enforcement and security services for surveillance be satisfied? When they have reached the ultimate Orwellian scenario of state CCTV in every building in the land and all communications being monitored and their contents archived by the state?

The murder of one man – no matter how brutal – should not be used as the excuse to treat all of the 63 mn. citizens of the UK as criminal suspects.