ICE - Extreme Digital Vetting

IMHO:  ICE today, Trump's Gestapo Storm Troopers (it's not what they do, it is HOW they do their job).  This program means they will see ordinary American citizens who happen to have social media contacts with visa holders.

"Extreme Digital Vetting of Visitors to the U.S. Moves Forward Under a New Name" by George Joseph, ProPublica 11/22/2017

ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity.

The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement is taking new steps in its plans for monitoring the social media accounts of applicants and holders of U.S. visas.  At a tech industry conference last Thursday in Arlington, Virginia, ICE officials explained to software providers what they are seeking, algorithms that would assess potential threats posed by visa holders in the United States and conduct ongoing social media surveillance of those deemed high risk.

The comments provide the first clear blueprint for ICE’s proposed augmentation of its visa-vetting program.  The initial announcement of the plans this summer, viewed as part of President Donald Trump’s calls for the “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim countries, stoked a public outcry from immigrants and civil liberties advocates.  They argued that such a plan would discriminate against Muslim visitors and potentially place a huge number of individuals under watch.

ICE officials subsequently changed the program’s name to “Visa Lifecycle Vetting.”  But, according to the ICE presentation, the goal of the initiative — enhanced monitoring of visa holders using social media — remains the same.

Speaking to a room of information-technology contractors, hosted by the Government Technology & Services Coalition, Louis Rodi, Deputy Assistant Director of ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ National Security Program, said the agency needs a tool equipped with “risk-based matrices” to predict dangers posed by visa holders, with the social media of those considered a threat under continuous surveillance throughout their stay in the U.S.

“We have millions and millions and millions of people coming every year, and subsequently departing, so we have to be smart about it,” said Rodi to a room of representatives from companies like Microsoft, Accenture, Deloitte and Motorola Solutions.  “And I’m sure there are tools out there that can help.”

For this targeted group of visa holders, ICE’s online monitoring of public social media posts would be large-scale and non-stop.  “Everything we’re dealing with is in bulk, so we need batch-vetting capabilities for any of the processes that we have,” said Rodi.  Alysa Erichs, ICE Homeland Security Investigations’ acting Deputy Association Director for Information Management, told attendees that ICE hopes to get automated notifications about any visa holders’ social media activity that could “ping us as a potential alert.”

ICE spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell stressed to ProPublica that the Department of Homeland Security has not actually begun building any such program.  “The request for information on this initiative was simply that — an opportunity to gather information from industry professionals and other government agencies on current technological capabilities to determine the best way forward,” Cutrell wrote in an email.  The program would require clearance from numerous DHS units, including the Privacy Office and the Principal Legal Advisor, before it could be implemented, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In his speech, Rodi referred to meetings ICE has had with companies but did not mention any frontrunners.  The major tech companies present at the conference, including Microsoft, Accenture and Deloitte, either declined to comment or didn’t respond to ProPublica's request to comment about their level of interest in providing technology for the vetting program.  Microsoft has opposed Trump’s immigration policies, and several Microsoft researchers have publicly called for ICE to stop spying on visitors’ social media.

ICE is already monitoring some social media at eight Homeland Security Investigation posts internationally, Rodi said, and the plan is to expand to more sites.  In response to a question posed by ProPublica from the audience, he stated that the department was open to other social media monitoring techniques, such as link analysis (which helps authorities map out applicants’ online connections), so long as they solely rely on public posts.

The ICE officials emphasized the Trump administration’s strict stance.  “This administration is big on immigration enforcement, so we’re not going to look the other way like we have in the past when we have overstays,” said Rodi.  “Maybe it’s an administrative violation — it’s still a crime.  These people need to pay.  They can’t get away with it.”

Some analysts argue that gathering social media data is necessary.  ICE already has a tool that searches for connections to terrorists, according to Claude Arnold, a former ICE Homeland Security Investigations special agent, now with the security firm Frontier Solutions.  But, he said, potential terrorist threats often come from countries, such as Iraq or Syria, that provide little intelligence to U.S. authorities.  As a result, in Arnold’s view, social media information is all the more important.

Privacy advocates take a darker view.  “ICE is building a dangerously broad tool that could be used to justify excluding, or deporting, almost anyone,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology.  “They are talking about this as a targeted tool, but the numbers tell a different story.”

Bedoya noted that the program outline originally anticipated that the monitoring would identify 10,000 high-risk visa holders a year.  That suggests the pool of people under social media surveillance would be many orders of magnitude larger.  (ICE officials did not address this point at the conference.)

Last week, a coalition of academics and technologists warned in a public letter that ICE’s interest in using big data algorithms to assess risk is misguided, given how rare it is for foreign visitors to be involved in terrorist attacks in the U.S.  That means there’s little historical data to mine in hopes of using it to design a new algorithm.  The letter cited a Cato Institute analysis that found that the likelihood of an American dying in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in any given year was 1 in 3.6 million in the period between 1975 and 2015.

Cathy O’Neil, one of the signatories to that letter and author of “Weapons of Math Destruction,” told this reporter in August that any algorithm a company proposes would come built-in with some very human calculations.  “At the end of the day, someone has to choose a ratio,” she said.  “How many innocent false positives are you going to keep out of the country for each false negative?”

Thus far, social media monitoring of visa applicants has not identified any potential threats that wouldn’t have turned up in existing government databases, Rodi acknowledged.  “We haven’t found anything that would preclude someone from getting a visa through social media alone,” he said.  “But, you never know, the day may come when social media will actually find someone that wasn’t in the government systems we check.”

That argument doesn’t placate those who believe ICE’s vetting is already exhaustive.  Social media surveillance would be difficult to carry out without collecting collateral data on thousands of American citizens in the process, said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel to the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

“Generally, with surveillance technologies, they are adopted for national security purposes overseas, but are then brought stateside pretty quickly,” she said, citing practices first honed overseas, such as intercepting cellphone calls.  “So once there’s some kind of dragnet surveillance tool or information collection tool in place for one purpose, slippage can happen, and it will expand and expand.”

TRUMP NOT - Applauding Russia (a Black Mirror episode)

Do you REALLY want this man Neanderthal for President?!  Of course he likes Putin, Trump is a authoritarian-want-to-be.

NOTE:  These 2 articles are from the online version of the newspaper, therefore no link.

"TRUMP ASKS RUSSIA'S AID ON CLINTON EMAILS" by ASHLEY PARKER & DAVID E.  SANGER, San Diego Union-Tribune 7/28/2016

Excerpt

Donald Trump said Wednesday that he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton's email, and encouraged them to publish whatever they may have stolen. 

“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said during a news conference in Florida before he flew to Pennsylvania for a campaign event.  “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

He was referring to emails on Clinton's private server that she said she deleted — because they were private — before turning other messages over to the State Department.  The Justice Department declined to prosecute Clinton over her email practices, but FBI Director James Comey called her “extremely careless” in handling classified information as President Barack Obama's Secretary of State. 

Trump's call marked another bizarre moment in the mystery of whether Vladimir Putin's government has been seeking to influence the United States' presidential race.  His comments came amid questions about the hacking of the Democratic National Committee's computer servers, which U.S. intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” was the work of the Russian government.

At the same news conference, Trump also appeared to leave the door open to accepting Russia's annexation of Crimea two years ago — which the U.  S.  and its European allies consider an illegal seizure of territory.  That seizure, and the continued efforts of Russian- aided insurgents to undermine the government of Ukraine, is the reason that the U.S. and its allies still have economic sanctions in force against Moscow.

"TRUMP: COMMENTS ABOUT CLINTON EMAILS WERE ‘SARCASTIC'" by ASHLEY PARKER, San Diego Union-Tribune 7/29/2016

Excerpt

GOP nominee ranks Putin's leadership superior to Obama's

Donald Trump called President Vladimir Putin of Russia “a better leader” than President Barack Obama, offering the praise in an interview with “Fox and Friends” on Thursday, just a day after saying he hoped Russian intelligence services had successfully hacked Hillary Clinton's email. 

Asked about comments he had made Wednesday at a news conference in Florida, where he said “Putin has much better leadership qualities than Obama,” Trump reiterated his views in slightly more specific terms. 

“I said he's a better leader than Obama,” Trump said.  “I said he's a better leader than Obama, because Obama's not a leader, so he's certainly doing a better job than Obama is, and that's all.  ”

Trump also tried to walk back, in part, comments he made Wednesday about Russia hacking Clinton's emails. 

“Of course, I'm being sarcastic,” Trump said in the interview taped Wednesday that aired Thursday.  “But you have 33,000 emails deleted, and the real problem is what was said in those emails from the Democratic National Committee.  You take a look at what was said in those emails, it's disgraceful.  It's disgraceful.”

Just thought of something....
This could be an episode of Black Mirror, not on NetFlix but real life.

NSA - Intercepted Data and Who's Targeted

"In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are" by Barton Gellman, Julie Tate, and Ashkan Soltani; Washington Post 7/5/2014

Excerpt

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans.  Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents.  NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public.  There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.

Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali.  At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality.  They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes.  The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are cataloged and recorded nevertheless.

In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications.  The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.

The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.

The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.

Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge.  One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies.  Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.

No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.

Among the latter are medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren.  In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.

Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers.  In some photos, men show off their physiques.  In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.

“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance.

NSA - President Obama's Attempt to Impose Limits

I paraphrase statement from a congressman; 'Finding terrorists is hunting for pins in a haystack, but first you have to have the haystack.'  The telephone records are the haystack.

As to the "one hop" comment on tracing calls, that would be foolish.

Scenario: The UK identifies a terrorist phone number in Yemen and pass it to the NSA.  At present the NSA can search the database for the suspect phone number to see how many calls came into the U.S., and how many (if any) calls from the U.S. to suspect number were made.  Note at this time there is NO names attached.  The NSA notes a pattern; incoming call from suspect phone to U.S. phone (1), which within 15min results in 5 calls from phone (1) to other phone numbers within the U.S.  This MAY be a terrorist cell leader in the U.S. contacting 5 cell members in the U.S.  At that time the NSA applies courts to find out the names attached to the phone numbers.  This is why "one hop" is a foolish and dangerous idea.

"What’s behind Obama’s campaign to limit bulk data collection by the NSA" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  We return now to the president’s proposal to limit the NSA’s ability to gather telephone information on Americans.

As intelligence agencies and Congress prepare to debate that balance between privacy and security, we turn to Gary Schmitt, staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee and executive director of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under Ronald Reagan, and Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy group.

How big a concession was it for the president — we are going to hear the details later this week, no doubt — Kate Martin, to decide to rein in this bulk collection program?

KATE MARTIN, Center for National Security Studies:  Well, it’s a significant step.

It’s the president saying to his intelligence community, you haven’t made the case that you need this authority, and I’m going to limit it.  So, it’s an important recognition.  You know, he did it after two separate outside reviews which said that this particular authority wasn’t needed and hadn’t actually been effective in doing anything.

GWEN IFILL:  Gary Schmitt, a significant step or going too far?

GARY SCHMITT, American Enterprise Institute:  Definitely a significant step.

Remember, when the president made his speech about a month or so ago, he called the program important.  He said that nobody had broken any laws and that it was an important tool for counterterrorism.  But yet he has put together a proposal that will make the system for collecting this kind of information a little less flexible and we will have a little less information to go with.

POLITICS - The Spy Wars

"Spying on Americans" New York Times Editorial

For more than five years, President Bush authorized government spying on phone calls and e-mail to and from the United States without warrants. He rejected offers from Congress to update the electronic eavesdropping law, and stonewalled every attempt to investigate his spying program.

Suddenly, Mr. Bush is in a hurry. He has submitted a bill that would enact enormous, and enormously dangerous, changes to the 1978 law on eavesdropping. It would undermine the fundamental constitutional principle — over which there can be no negotiation or compromise — that the government must seek an individual warrant before spying on an American or someone living here legally.

To heighten the false urgency, the Bush administration will present this issue, as it has before, as a choice between catching terrorists before they act or blinding the intelligence agencies. But the administration has never offered evidence that the 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, hampered intelligence gathering after the 9/11 attacks. Mr. Bush simply said the law did not apply to him.

The director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, said yesterday that the evidence of what is wrong with FISA was too secret to share with all Americans. That’s an all-too-familiar dodge. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who is familiar with the president’s spying program, has said that it could have been conducted legally. She even offered some sensible changes for FISA, but the administration and the Republican majority in the last Congress buried her bill.

Mr. Bush’s motivations for submitting this bill now seem obvious. The courts have rejected his claim that 9/11 gave him virtually unchecked powers, and he faces a Democratic majority in Congress that is willing to exercise its oversight responsibilities. That, presumably, is why his bill grants immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated in five years of illegal eavesdropping. It also strips the power to hear claims against the spying program from all courts except the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret.

The measure would not update FISA; it would gut it. It would allow the government to collect vast amounts of data at will from American citizens’ e-mail and phone calls. The Center for National Security Studies said it might even be read to permit video surveillance without a warrant.

This is a dishonest measure, dishonestly presented, and Congress should reject it. Before making any new laws, Congress has to get to the truth about Mr. Bush’s spying program. (When asked at a Senate hearing yesterday if Mr. Bush still claims to have the power to ignore FISA when he thinks it is necessary, Mr. McConnell refused to answer.)

Another example of the warped thinking of the Bush Administration. Just because the President is Commander and Chief, when it comes to protecting America (which they get to define just what that is), Presidents can ignore the other articles of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress. Well.... BS! In NO WAY does any President, or elected/appointed official, get to ignore the Constitution or law in the execution of their jobs!