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electronic frontier foundation
Snowden Warns Today's Surveillance Technology Makes 2013 Look Like 'Child's Play'
"We trusted the government not to screw us," said Edward Snowden. "But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Jun 08, 2023
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
"If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today," Snowden told The Guardian, "2013 seems like child's play."
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products' vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data."
Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
Protecting the public from surveillance "is an ongoing process," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children's lives and beyond."
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
"Technology has grown to be enormously influential," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden's revelations, EFF noted that some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:
- The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the U.S. government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
- The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was "a pipe dream in 2013";
- The end of the NSA's bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
- Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.
The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans' communications, and "to take privacy seriously," particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data... or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community's overreaches," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. "It's why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent."
"It's been 10 years since the Snowden revelations," they added, "and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly."
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ACLU Says Montana GOP Has 'Trampled' First Amendment With TikTok Ban
"We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points," said the civil liberties group.
May 18, 2023
The ACLU and other civil liberties groups accused the Montana GOP of running roughshod over free expression after Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a bill completely banning TikTok in the state and prohibiting private companies from allowing Montanans to download the popular social media app.
Gianforte's move made Montana the first state in the U.S. to ban TikTok as congressional Republicans—and some Democrats—push for a federal ban or heavy restrictions, casting the short-form video platform as a national security threat with little to no supporting evidence.
TikTok is a subsidiary of the Chinese tech firm ByteDance. Gianforte echoed the typical GOP line on TikTok in a statement Wednesday, saying the new ban is aimed at protecting "Montanans' private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party."
But the ACLU of Montana said in response that "there's no public evidence of harm that would meet the high bar set by the U.S. and Montana Constitutions" to justify a total ban on a widely used communication platform.
"With this ban, Governor Gianforte and the Montana legislature have trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information, and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment," said Keegan Medrano, the ACLU of Montana's policy director. "We will never trade our First Amendment rights for cheap political points."
Montana's new ban, which is set to take effect on January 1, 2024, sets financial penalties of up to $10,000 a day for companies—including TikTok itself—that continue to make the app available for Montanans to download.
"This unconstitutional ban undermines the free speech and association of Montana TikTok users and intrudes on TikTok's interest in disseminating its users' videos," the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote on Twitter. "It is a blatant violation of the First Amendment, whether it's done by Congress or Montana."
\u201cThe state of Montana just banned TikTok. \n\nHave questions about circumventing network censorship? Here's our guide: https://t.co/xI9mJLQXhc\u201d— EFF (@EFF) 1684363997
More than 150 million Americans use TikTok, according to the company's own figures.
Earlier this year, the Biden administration launched a fresh effort to force ByteDance to sell TikTok, reprising a failed pressure campaign first launched by the Trump White House. Late last year, President Joe Biden signed into law a spending bill containing a provision barring the TikTok app from devices issued by the federal government.
Congressional Republicans, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), have demanded legislative action to prohibit TikTok nationwide, drawing pushback from progressive lawmakers who say the push is fueled by dangerous anti-China sentiment and unfounded national security fears.
"I am opposed to efforts by some Republicans and Democrats to unilaterally ban an entire social media platform," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said in a statement in late March, echoing Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), and others.
"I don't like censorship," Omar added.
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Now Is the Time for a Federal Ban on Facial Recognition Surveillance
A bill in Congress would ensure that federal agencies cannot use this invasive technology to track, identify, and misidentify millions of people.
Apr 06, 2023
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go. It also disproportionately impacts people of color, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in first amendment protected activities. Even Amazon, known for operating one of the largest video surveillance networks in the history of the world, extended its moratorium on selling face recognition to police.
Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a campaign that will easily allow you to contact your elected federal officials and tell them to support the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act.
Police and other government use of this technology cannot be effectively regulated. Face surveillance in the hands of the government is a fundamentally harmful technology, even under strict regulations and if the technology was 100% accurate.
Face surveillance disproportionately hurts vulnerable communities. The New York Times published a long piece on the case of Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, who was arrested by Detroit police after face recognition technology erroneously identified him as a suspect in a theft case. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on his behalf against the Detroit police.
The problem isn’t just that studies have found face recognition disparately inaccurate when it comes to matching the faces of people of color. The larger concern is that law enforcement will use this invasive and dangerous technology, as it unfortunately uses all such tools, to disparately surveil people of color.
Williams and multiple other Black men (Michael Oliver, Nijeer Parks, Randal Reid, and Alanzo Sawyer) have garnered the attention of national media after face recognition technology led to them being falsely arrested by police. How many more have already endured the same injustices without the media’s spotlight? These incidents show another reason why police cannot be trusted with this technology: a piece of software intended only to identify investigative leads is often used in the field to determine who should be arrested without independent officer vetting.
This federal ban on face surveillance would apply to increasingly powerful agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Customs and Border Patrol. The bill would ensure that these and other federal agencies cannot use this invasive technology to track, identify, and misidentify millions of people.
Tell your Senators and Representatives they must co-sponsor and pass the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act. It was recently introduced by Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Representatives Pramila Jayapal (WA-07), Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), Rashida Tlaib (MI-12), Earl Blumenauer (OR-03), Cori Bush (MO-01), Greg Casar (TX-35), Adriano Espaillat (NY-13), Barbara Lee (CA-12), Eleanor Holmes Norton (DC), Jamaal Bowman (NY-16), and Jan Schakowsky (IL-09).
This important bill would be a critical step to ensuring that mass surveillance systems don’t use your face to track, identify, or harm you. The bill would ban the use of face surveillance by the federal government, as well as withhold certain federal funds from local and state governments that use the technology. That’s why we’re asking you to insist your elected officials co-sponsor the Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act, S.681 in the Senate and HR.1404 in the House.
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