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A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab

A Civil Rights Firestorm Erupts Around a Looming Surveillance Power Grab

United States lawmakers are receiving a flood of warnings from across civil society not to be bend to the efforts by some members of Congress to derail a highly sought debate over the future of a powerful but polarizing US surveillance program.

House and Senate party leaders are preparing to unveil legislation on Wednesday directing the spending priorities of the US military and its $831 billion budget next year. Rumors, meanwhile, have been circulating on Capitol Hill about plans reportedly hatched by House speaker Mike Johnson to amend the bill in an effort to extend Section 702, a sweeping surveillance program drawing fire from a large contingent of Democratic and Republican lawmakers favoring privacy reforms.

WIRED first reported on the rumors on Monday, citing senior congressional aides familiar with ongoing negotiations over the bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), separate versions of which were passed by the House and Senate this summer.

More than 80 civil rights and grassroots organizations—including Asian Americans Advancing Justice | AAJC, Color of Change, Muslims for Just Futures, Stop AAPI Hate, and United We Dream—signed a statement this morning opposing “any efforts” to extend the 702 program using the NDAA. The statement, expected to hit the inboxes of all 535 members of Congress this afternoon, says that failure to reform contentious aspects of the program, such as federal agents’ ability to access Americans’ communications without a warrant, poses an “alarming threat to civil rights,” and that any attempt to use must-pass legislation to extend the program would “sell out the communities that have been most often wrongfully targeted by these agencies and warrantless spying powers generally.”

“As you’re aware, this extremely controversial warrantless surveillance authority is set to expire at the end of the year, but will continue to operate as it does currently until April, as government officials have recognized for many years,” the groups say.

Johnson and Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. Leadership of the House and Senate armed services committees likewise did not respond.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorizes the US government, namely, the US National Security Agency, to surveil the communications of foreign citizens believed to be overseas. Oftentimes, these communications—texts, calls, emails, and other web traffic—“incidentally” involve Americans, whom the government is forbidden from directly targeting. But certain methods of interception, those that tap directly into the internet’s backbone, may make it impossible to fully disentangle foreign communications from domestic ones.

Senate Leaders Plan to Prolong NSA Surveillance Using a Must-Pass Bill

Senate Leaders Plan to Prolong NSA Surveillance Using a Must-Pass Bill

Leaders in the United States Senate have been discussing plans to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) beyond its December 31 deadline by amending must-pass legislation this month.

A senior congressional aide tells WIRED that leadership offices and judiciary sources have both disclosed that discussions are underway about saving the Section 702 program in the short term by attaching an amendment extending it to a bill that is sorely needed to extend federal funding and avert a government shutdown one week from now.

The program, last extended in 2018, is due to expire at the end of the year. Without a vote to reauthorize 702, the US government will lose its ability to obtain year-long “certifications” compelling telecommunications companies to wiretap overseas calls, text messages, and emails without being served individual warrants or subpoenas.

Whether the authority is reauthorized before expiring on January 1 or not, the actual surveillance is likely to continue into the spring, when this year’s certifications expire.

Extending the program by attaching it to another bill that Congress can’t avoid is a risky political maneuver that will cause significant unrest among a majority of House lawmakers and a number of senators who are working to reform the 702 program. A top priority for privacy hawks is curtailing the ability of federal law enforcement to use 702 data “incidentally” collected on Americans. The 702 program collects communications from two sources: internet service providers and the companies that conduct traffic between them. The latter source is tapped less frequently but intercepts a greater quantity of domestic communications.

An aide to Jim Jordan, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said Jordan was firmly on the side of the reformers and would not support extending 702 through a temporary measure. Chuck Schumer, the senate majority leader, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

“America’s security and its citizens’ rights demand more than a short-term fix. Congress has had all year to scrutinize and address this crucial policy question,” says James Czerniawski, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Americans for Prosperity. “Doing a short-term extension punts the ball on the critical reforms desperately needed to this program to protect Americans civil liberties.”

While surveillance of US calls is illegal and unconstitutional without a warrant based on probable cause, the government is permitted to collect domestic calls for specific national security purposes under procedures created to minimize its access to them later. The US National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance for the Pentagon, is only permitted to eavesdrop on foreigners who are overseas. Those foreigners, however, many of whom are likely government officials and not criminals or terrorists, frequently exchange calls and emails with people inside the United States, and those get collected as well.

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

Here’s How Violent Extremists Are Exploiting Generative AI Tools

“We’re going to partner with Microsoft to figure out if there are ways using our archive of material to create a sort of gen AI detection system in order to counter the emerging threat that gen AI will be used for terrorist content at scale,” Hadley says. “We’re confident that gen AI can be used to defend against hostile uses of gen AI.”

The partnership was announced today, on the eve of the Christchurch Call Leaders’ Summit, a movement designed to eradicate terrorism and extremist content from the internet, to be held in Paris.

“The use of digital platforms to spread violent extremist content is an urgent issue with real-world consequences,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft said in a statement. “By combining Tech Against Terrorism’s capabilities with AI, we hope to help create a safer world both online and off.”

While companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have their own AI research divisions and are likely already deploying their own resources to combat this issue, the new initiative will ultimately aid those companies that can’t combat these efforts on their own.

“This will be particularly important for smaller platforms that don’t have their own AI research centers,” Hadley says. “Even now, with the hashing databases, smaller platforms can just become overwhelmed by this content.”

The threat of AI generative content is not limited to extremist groups. Last month, the Internet Watch Foundation, a UK-based nonprofit that works to eradicate child exploitation content from the internet, published a report that detailed the growing presence of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) created by AI tools on the dark web.

The researchers found over 20,000 AI-generated images posted to one dark web CSAM forum over the course of just one month, with 11,108 of these images judged most likely to be criminal by the IWF researchers. As the IWF researchers wrote in their report, “These AI images can be so convincing that they are indistinguishable from real images.”

Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2023 Seeks to End Warrantless Police and FBI Spying

Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2023 Seeks to End Warrantless Police and FBI Spying

In 1763, the radical journalist and colonial sympathizer John Wilkes published issue no. 45 of North Briton, a periodical of anonymous essays known for its virulent anti-Scottish drivel—and for viciously satirizing a British prime minister until he quit his job. The fallout from the subsequent plan of the British king, George III, to see Wilkes put in irons for the crime of being too good at lambasting his own government reverberates today, particularly in the nation whose founders once held Wilkes up as an idol, plotting a revolt of their own.

Wilkes’ arrest boiled the Americans’ blood. Reportedly, the politician-cum-fugitive had invited the king’s men into his home to read the warrant for his arrest aloud. He quickly tossed it aside. At trial, Wilkes explained its most insidious feature: “It named nobody,” he said, “in violation of the laws of my country.” This so-called general warrant, which subsequent lawsuits by Wilkes would see permanently banned, vaguely described some criminal allegations, but not a single place to be searched nor suspect to be arrested was named. This ambiguity granted the king’s men near blanket authority to arrest anyone they wanted, raid their homes, and ransack and destroy their possessions and heirlooms, confiscating large bundles of private letters and correspondence. When the Americans later passed an amendment to ban vague legal warrants describing neither “the place to be searched” nor “persons or things to be seized,” it was Wilkes’s home, historians say, that they pictured.

This morning, a group of United States lawmakers introduced bicameral legislation aimed, once again, at reining in a government accused of arbitrarily snatching up the private messages of its own citizens—not by breaking down doors and seizing handwritten notes, but by tapping into the power of internet directly to collect an endless ocean of emails, calls, and texts. The Government Surveillance Reform Act of 2023 (GSRA)—introduced in the US House by representatives Zoe Lofgren and Warren Davidson, and in the US Senate by Ron Wyden and Mike Lee—is a Frankenstein bill more than 200 pages long, combining the choicest parts of a stack of cannibalized privacy bills that rarely made it past committee. The patchwork effect helps form a comprehensive package, targeting various surveillance loopholes and tricks at all levels of government—from executive orders signed by the president, to contracts secured between obscure security firms and single-deputy police departments in rural areas.

“Americans know that it is possible to confront our country’s adversaries ferociously without throwing our constitutional rights in the trash can,” Wyden tells WIRED, adding that for too long surveillance laws have failed to keep up with the growing threats to people’s rights. The GSRA, he says, would not strip US intelligence agencies of their broad mandate to monitor threats at home or abroad, but rather restore warrant protections long recognized as core to democracy’s functioning.

The GSRA is a Christmas list for privacy hawks and a nightmare for authorities who rely on secrecy and circumventing judicial review to gather data on Americans without their knowledge or consent. A US Justice Department requirement that federal agents obtain warrants before deploying cell-site simulators would be codified into law and extended to cover state and local authorities. Police in the US would need warrants to access data stored on people’s vehicles, certain categories of which should already require one when the information is stored on a phone. The government could also no longer buy sensitive information about people that would require a judge’s consent, had they asked for it instead.

What’s more, the bill will end a grandfather clause that’s keeping alive expired portions of the USA Patriot Act that’s allowed the FBI to continue employing surveillance techniques that have technically been illegal for two years. Petitioners in federal court seeking relief due to privacy violations will also no longer be shown the door for having no more than a “reasonable basis” to believe they’ve been wrongfully searched or surveilled.

The Destruction of Gaza’s Internet Is Complete

The Destruction of Gaza’s Internet Is Complete

For more than three weeks, Gaza has faced an almost total internet blackout. The cables, cell towers, and infrastructure needed to keep people online have been damaged or destroyed as Israel launched thousands of missiles in response to Hamas attacking Israel and taking hundreds of hostages on October 7. Then, this evening, amid reports of heavy bombing in Gaza, some of the last remaining connectivity disappeared.

In the days after October 7, people living in Gaza have been unable to communicate with family or friends, leaving them unsure whether loved ones are alive. Finding reliable news about events has become harder. Rescue workers have not been able to connect to mobile networks, hampering recovery efforts. And information flowing out of Gaza, showing the conditions on the ground, has been stymied.

As the Israel Defense Forces said it was expanding its ground operations in Gaza this evening, internet connectivity fell further. Paltel, the main Palestinian communications company, has been able to keep some of its services online during Israel’s military response to Hamas’ attack. However, at around 7:30 pm local time today, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks confirmed a “collapse” in connectivity in the Gaza Strip, mostly impacting remaining Paltel services.

“We regret to announce a complete interruption of all communications and internet services within the Gaza Strip,” Paltel posted in a post on its Facebook page. The company claimed that bombing had “caused the destruction of all remaining international routes.” An identical post was made on the Facebook page of Jawwal, the region’s biggest mobile provider, which is owned by Paltel. Separately, Palestinian Red Crescent, a humanitarian organization, said on X (formerly Twitter) that it had lost contact with its operation room in Gaza and is “deeply concerned” about its ability to keep caring for people, with landline, cell, and internet connections being inaccessible.

“This is a terrifying development,” Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager focusing on the Middle East and North Africa at the digital rights group Access Now, tells WIRED. “Taking Gaza completely off the grid while launching an unprecedented bombardment campaign only means something atrocious is about to happen.”

A WIRED review of internet analysis data, social media posts, and Palestinian internet and telecom company statements shows how connectivity in the Gaza Strip drastically plummeted after October 7 and how some buildings linked to internet firms have been damaged in attacks. Photos and videos show sites that house various internet and telecom firms have been damaged, while reports from official organizations, including the United Nations, describe the impact of people being offline.

Damaged Lines

Around the world, the internet and telecoms networks that typically give web users access to international video calls, online banking, and endless social media are a complicated, sprawling mix of hardware and software. Networks of networks, combining data centers, servers, switches, and reams of cables, communicate with each other and send data globally. Local internet access is provided by a mix of companies with no clear public documentation of their infrastructure, making it difficult to monitor the overall status of the system as a whole. In Gaza, experts say, internet connectivity is heavily reliant on Israeli infrastructure to connect to the outside world.

Amid Israel’s intense bombing of Gaza, physical systems powering the internet have been destroyed. On October 10, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which oversees emergency responses, said air strikes “targeted several telecommunication installations” and had destroyed two of the three main lines of communications going into Gaza.