The Associated Press announced that the Department of Justice secretly obtained two months’ worth of phone records of its journalists, and the news service wants to know the reason for this surveillance, which could have significant implications for First Amendment civil rights:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed outgoing calls for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP. It was not clear if the records also included incoming calls or the duration of calls.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012. [...] Read more »

To recap: A privacy and civil liberties oversight board was recommended by the 9/11 Commission, and the board was created in 2004 and placed within the White House. In 2008, Congress passed and President Bush signed the “Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007,” which took the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board out of the White House and established it “as an independent agency within the executive branch.”

Terms for the original board expired in January 2008, but President Bush delayed the nomination of new board members for many months; none were confirmed by the Senate. In 2010, President Obama nominated James X. Dempsey, Vice President for Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, and Elisebeth Collins Cook, who worked in the Justice Department in the Bush administration. Privacy Lives joined in the call to nominate and confirm experts to the board. (For more information on the board, here’s a 2008 Congressional Research Service report (pdf) on the board’s history and powers.)

In December 2011, Obama nominated Rachel L. Brand (Chief Counsel for Regulatory Litigation at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Chamber Litigation Center), Patricia M. Wald (who had served for twenty years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia), and for the chairmanship, David Medine (a partner at WilmerHale whose practice focuses on data security and privacy). In August, all but Medine were approved by the full Senate, so the board did not have a chairman.

On Tuesday, the Senate finally voted to confirm (pdf) Medine (53 yeas, 45 nays, 2 did not vote). On the floor, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of Judiciary Committee, which sent the nomination to the full Senate for a vote, said: Read more »

CNet reports that President Obama has chosen Nicole Wong, a lawyer for social-networking site Twitter, as chief privacy officer:

President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter’s legal director, to be the White House’s first chief privacy officer, CNET has learned.

Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google at its Mountain View headquarters, where she managed a team of lawyers that worked with the company’s engineers to review products before they launched. The reviews included privacy, copyright, and removal requests, which earned her a nickname of “The Decider” — as recounted in a 2008 New York Times Magazine article. [...]

Choosing a Silicon Valley lawyer who has been immersed in technology issues is a reversal of the administration’s previous picks for department-level chief privacy officers. Homeland Security Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan is a Washington lawyer who previously worked for the Library of Congress.

The Federation of American Scientists has posted a new Congressional Research Service report (FAS pdf; archive pdf) concerning the FBI and its terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks and how the FBI’s investigations affect individuals’ privacy and civil liberty rights. The CRS says, “Since 9/11, the Bureau has arguably taken a much more proactive posture, particularly regarding counterterrorism. It now views its role as both ‘predicting and preventing’ the threats facing the nation, drawing upon enhanced resources.”

The CRS report details “several enhanced investigative tools, authorities, and capabilities provided to the FBI through post-9/11 legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001; the 2008 revision to the Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations (Mukasey Guidelines); and the expansion of Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) throughout the country.” The CRS also discusses the civil liberties controversy surrounding the FBI use of, among other things, national security letters (NSLs), roving wiretaps, “sneak and peek” search warrants.

And CRS notes the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program, COINTELPRO, which revealed that the FBI built dossiers on groups (including the NAACP) that were suspected of having a Communist ideology even though they had not engaged in crimes, and that the agency burglarized political groups to gather data on them: Read more »

NPR looks at a new book from Google executive Eric Schmidt, which includes a discussion of privacy and technology, and interviews him and his co-author about the issues:

Imagine a world with machines that wash, press and dress you on the way to work and vacations via hologram visits to exotic beaches. In his new book, The New Digital Age, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt does just that — but it’s no gee-whiz Jetsons fantasy.

Schmidt partners up with Jared Cohen, a foreign policy counterterrorist specialist poached from the State Department now working for Google Ideas. Together they forecast a raft of new innovations and corresponding threats that will arise for dictatorships, techno revolutionaries, terrorists and you.

Cohen and Schmidt chatted with NPR’s Audie Cornish about negotiating the shifting balance between privacy and security in a rapidly changing technological landscape.

On the cost in privacy to everyday users of the latest technology Read more »

In an opinion column for PC World, Melissa Riofrio lists the threats she sees to Internet users’ privacy rights:

Your online life may not seem worth tracking as you browse websites, store content in the cloud, and post updates to social networking sites. But the data you generate is a rich trove of information that says more about you than you realize—and it’s a tempting treasure for marketers and law enforcement officials alike.

Battles have long raged over how third parties can access and use your data. [...]

Every move we make on our PCs, smartphones, and tablets turns into a data point that trackers can easily collect and share. And you effectively agree to such collecting and sharing whenever you sign up for an online service and accept its privacy policy. [...]

Federal law may or may not mitigate the privacy threats. Efforts to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) aim to make your online data harder to collect and share. Meanwhile, proposed legislation called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) could make it easier to obtain. Read more »