Created by: Liz Woolery;xNLx;Contact: ewoolery@cyber.law.harvard.edu;xNLx;;xNLx;Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: chillingeffects.org
"The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse collects and analyzes legal complaints about online activity, helping Internet users to know their rights and understand the law. Chilling Effects welcomes submission of letters from individuals and from Internet service providers and hosts. These submissions enable us to study the prevalence of legal threats and allow Internet users to see the source of content removals. Chilling Effects aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate favorite stars, or criticize businesses, but concerned that not everyone feels the same way. Study to date suggests that cease and desist letters often silence Internet users, whether or not their claims have legal merit. The Chilling Effects project seeks to document that "chill" and inform C&D recipients of their legal rights in response."
Source: The New York Times
Source: The Washington Post
Source: The New York Times
Source: The Washington Post • "The documents, he said, show that the NSA gained access to massive amounts of e-mail and search and other Internet records of more than a dozen global and regional telecommunications providers. AT&T allowed the agency to hook into its network at a facility in San Francisco and, according to Klein, many of the other telecom companies probably knew nothing about it."
Source: The New York Times • The story broke online the night before after editors at The Times learned that the Bush administration was considering a Pentagon Papers-style injunction. For more information on that piece of the story, see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2008/03/the_education_of_a_911_reporter.single.html
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation • "In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF sued the telecommunications giant on behalf of its customers for violating privacy law by collaborating with the NSA in the massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications."
Source: Wired • "On August, 22, 2008, the FISA Court of Review issued an order upholding the ruling to compel Yahoo to cooperate with the order for data. The order was previously published only in redacted form (.pdf), with the petitioner’s name blocked out. But the New York Times has identified the party as Yahoo. According to the redacted order, it appears that Yahoo first received the warrantless request for data some time in 2007."
"Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, 'I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed.'"
Source: The Washington Post
Source: The New York Times • "The Yahoo ruling ... shows the company argued that the order violated its users’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court called that worry 'overblown.'"
Source: The Washington Post
Source: Wired
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation • "In Jewel v. NSA, EFF is suing the NSA and other government agencies on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal unconstitutional and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records."
Source: The Washington Post
Source: The Washington Post
Recent leaks of classified documents have pointed to the role of a special court in enabling the government’s secret surveillance programs, but members of the court are chafing at the suggestion that they were collaborating with the executive branch. A classified 2009 draft report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general relayed some details about the interaction between the court’s judges and the NSA, which sought approval for the Bush administration’s top-secret domestic surveillance programs. The report was described in The Washington Post on June 16 and released in full Thursday by The Post and the British newspaper the Guardian.
Source: The Washington Post
Source: The Washington Post
Source: ArsTechnica
Source: The New York Times • "One of the most notable challenges to a National Security Letter came from an unidentified electronic communications service provider in San Francisco. In 2011, the company was presented with a letter from the F.B.I., asking for account information of a subscriber for an investigation into “international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” The company went to court. In March, a Federal District Court judge, Susan Illston, ruled the information request unconstitutional, along with the gag order. The case is under appeal, which is why the company cannot be named."
Source: The Washington Post
Source: The Washington Post
Source: ArsTechnica • 1st of 2 orders for Google to turn over Wikileaks administrators' data. "On Friday, two Icelandic activists with previous connections to WikiLeaks announced that they received newly unsealed court orders from Google. Google sent the orders earlier in the week, revealing that the company searched and seized data from their Gmail accounts—likely as a result of a grand jury investigation into the rogue whistleblower group. Google was forbidden under American law from disclosing these orders to the men until the court lifted this restriction in early May 2013."
Source: ArsTechnica • 2nd of 2 orders for Google to turn over Wikileaks administrators' data. "Herbert Snorrason received a D-order dated from May 2011 for the metadata ... Snorrason, according to Wired, helped 'manage WikiLeaks’ secure chat room in 2010 but later left in protest in September 2010.'"
Source: CNET
Source: Electronic Privacy Information Center • 1,856 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) applications are presented. 1,855 are approved. One application was withdrawn.
Source: Microsoft • "Here is what the data shows: For the six months ended December 31, 2012, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and national security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting between 31,000 and 32,000 consumer accounts from U.S. governmental entities (including local, state and federal). This only impacts a tiny fraction of Microsoft’s global customer base."
Source: Facebook • In a blog post, Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot explained, "For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts."
Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts • "Encryption was reported for 15 wiretaps in 2012 and for 7 wiretaps conducted during previous years. In four of these wiretaps, officials were unable to decipher the plain text of the messages. This is the first time that jurisdictions have reported that encryption prevented officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications since the AO began collecting encryption data in 2001."
Source: The Washington Post
Source: Apple • In a statement the tech giant said, "From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters."
Source: Yahoo • " ... we are disclosing the total number of requests for user data that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. made to us between December 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. During that time period, we received between 12,000 and 13,000 requests, inclusive of criminal, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and other requests. The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations."
Source: The Guardian • "Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama."
Source: The Guardian (UK)
Source: The Guardian (UK) • Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft seek permission to reveal more information about the requests for data they receive from the government.
"The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant in the briefing said. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "'simply based on an analyst deciding that.'"
Source: The Washington Post • "Recent leaks of classified documents have pointed to the role of a special court in enabling the government’s secret surveillance programs, but members of the court are chafing at the suggestion that they were collaborating with the executive branch. A classified 2009 draft report by the National Security Agency’s inspector general relayed some details about the interaction between the court’s judges and the NSA, which sought approval for the Bush administration’s top-secret domestic surveillance programs. The report was described in The Washington Post on June 16 and released in full Thursday by The Post and the British newspaper the Guardian."
Source: The Washington Post • The tech giant wants to speak freely about certain parts of the NSA's PRISM program.
Source: ArsTechnica • "Microsoft submitted a motion to the notoriously secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court saying that the company 'continues to seek—to correct the misimpression, furthered by such inaccurate media reporting, that it provides the United States Government with direct access to its servers and network infrastructure and, thereby, indiscriminately discloses Microsoft users’ information to the Government.'”
Source: Electronic Fontier Foundation • "Campaign to end NSA warrantless surveillance surges Past 500,000 Signers. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, joins half million users in opposing NSA dragnet surveillance."
Source: Monterey Herald • "The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday's Herald, but Armywide. Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke stories on data collection by the National Security Agency."
Source: The Washington Post • Slides suggest that the NSA can track real-time events including email logins and emails sent, and chat service logins. Slides include information on: Acquiring data from a new target and analyzing information collected from private companies, among other topics.
Source: CNN • "Asked about an NSA program that tracks people's Internet activity, Bush said, 'I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed.'"
Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases. A McClatchy review of public records, statements by Obama administration officials and interviews with cyber and telecom security experts lends credence to assertions that the capability for such surveillance exists.
"The European Parliament voted in favor of a resolution that would back the Commission should it wish to suspend data sharing agreements with the U.S., such as the passenger name records system, in light of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency."
Source: Electronic Privacy Information Center • "EPIC is petitioning the Supreme Court to halt the disclosure of the telephone records of millions of Americans. The FISC did not have legal authority to compel Verizon to turn over all domestic telephone "metadata" to the NSA."
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