Page 80 - CDM Cyber Warnings February 2014

Many of these companies fulfill government requests for a user�s The Constitution was adopted on September 17, 1787, and
personal information; Google is one of the few companies that reserved privacy to a citizen� s person, home and property; the
th
publicly reveals such requests. However, the Washington Post�s 4 Amendment prohibits illegal search and seizure. In the
recent revelation about the NSA�s breaking into the intervening 225 years, the notion of personal privacy has been
communications links of Google and Yahoo significantly radically transformed, especially in light of repeated technology
expands the scope of federal surveillance. revolutions. The Constitution was written in a preindustrial,
agrarian era and continues to inform decisions made in a
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates- postmodern, globalized, digital world. While what was said 225
links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents- years ago is much the same, how it is said and communicated to
say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html
others has fundamentally changed.

War long provided the rationale for the imposition of state
security. World War I hysteria found expression in the
Espionage Act of 1917 and the Palmer Raids of 1920; World War
II hysteria resulted in the mass roundup and imprisonment of
120,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans; and Cold War
anti-communist hysteria gave us McCarthyism.

One consequence of 9/11 is that Constitutionally-protected
privacy rights have come under increasing threat from both
government entities and private corporations. These two
domains, the state and the market, the public and the private,
#5. Telecom capture traditionally functioned as separate, if not parallel, worlds. Since
9/11, both domains have witnessed an enormous expansion in
In 2006, an AT&T retiree revealed that the NSA was diverting the collection of raw digital and other information about
Internet traffic at one its San Francisco facilities. In early ordinary Americans. Most ominous, these parallel domains
November 2013, the New York Times revealed that NSA pays have increasingly joined forces, sharing very personal
the telecom $10 million a year for access to database of information on an ever-growing number of ordinary Americans.
Americans making international calls.
The line between the government and the corporate is eroding
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/07/us/cia-is-said-to-pay-att-for-call- when it comes to information sharing. There seems to be a
data.html?_r=0
widening two-way street between law-enforcement entities
(both federal and state/local) and private companies (whether
In July 2012, then-Rep., now-Sen., Ed Markey (D-MA) released
telecom, social networking or security consultants) with regard
the first set of findings from the House�s Bipartisan
to information sharing. One form of this working relation is
Congressional Privacy Caucus. It found that in 2011 over 1.3
ostensibly passive, a fee for service arrangement, as when a
million federal, state and local law enforcement data requests
telecom provides a user�s GPS tracking data or Google supplies
were made to cellphone companies for personal records. He is
user data to a law enforcement agency. Another is active, as with
now seeking to update his earlier findings with information from
the NYPD joint venture with Microsoft or the CIA�s backing of
eight major wireless providers – e.g., AT&T, T-Mobile and
Gilman Louie�s high-tech venture fund, In-Q-Tel. Still another
Verizon. His request covers geo-locational or GPS data, 911 call
is questionably legal when NSA�s hacking into Google and
responses, text message content, billing records, wiretaps, PING
Yahoo web services.
location data and what are known as cell tower �dumps � (i.e., a
carrier provides all the phones numbers of cell users that connect
Today� s great challenge is to figure out just how these �five
with a discrete tower during a discrete period of time).
horsemen of the cyber apocalypse� – the federal, the state &
local, private police, the online and the telecom – fit together.
http://www.markey.senate.gov/record.cfm?id=345699
It�s a challenge well worth engaging.

CYBER DEFENSE MAGAZINE - ANNUAL EDITION 80