Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica reports that Senator Al Franken has been asking Apple CEO Tim Cook some good questions. Here’s part of the Senator’s letter: Does Apple consider fingerprint data to be the “contents” of communications, customer or subscriber records, or a “subscriber number or identity” as defined in the Stored Communications Act? (10) Under…
Category: Govt
FISA court: no telecoms company has ever challenged phone records orders
Spencer Ackerman reports: No telecommunications company has ever challenged the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court’s orders for bulk phone records under the Patriot Act, the court revealed on Tuesday. The secretive Fisa (sic) court’s disclosure came inside a declassification of its legal reasoning justifying the National Security Agency’s ongoing bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Read more on…
Amie Stepanovich: The NSA’s spying program is unconstitutional
Amie Stepanovich of EPIC.org writes: On June 5, we learned that, since 2006, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had continually compelled the ongoing disclosure of information pertaining to telephone calls traversing the United States to the National Security Agency. The program was justified under section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended by…
A Call for FBI Reform
From the ACLU: [Today] the ACLU will release a report, “Unleashed and Unaccountable: The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority,” documenting the bureau’s expanded post-9/11 authorities, their impact on civil liberties in the United States, and the FBI’s evasion of oversight that enables abuses to continue today. Twelve years after 9/11, its time for the attorney general…