Privacy

Deputy director Paul Abbate emailed agents on April 20th — a day after the Senate voted to reauthorize 702.

“I urge everyone to continue to look for ways to appropriately use US person queries to advance the mission, with the added confidence that this new pre-approval requirement will help ensure that those queries are fully compliant with the law.”

The hackers obtained the names and banking information belonging to an unknown number of UK military personnel, according to reports from the BBC and Sky News.

Members of Parliament will reportedly be made aware of the breach on Tuesday. Although the UK government has not revealed who’s behind the attack, Sky News has linked it to China.

Google Maps is a handy way to view a specific address — but if you’d rather keep your house private, you can request it to be blurred out. CNET explains how: in Street View, click on the tiny “Report a problem” link in the lower right, and follow directions. But make sure this is what you want — apparently, there’s no unblurring.

Earlier this month, the adult entertainment group Free Speech Coalition filed an emergency appeal to overturn the online age verification law, but the Supreme Court has rejected the request. The group said the law violates free speech rights, as it forces users to upload a photo of their government ID to access porn sites.

Mahmoud Khalil, one of the students negotiating with the university over the encampment, told The City administrators had previously assured him he wouldn’t be disciplined.

I quoted Khalil in my article about the doxxings at Columbia:

I am here on a foreign visa. That’s why for the past six months, I’ve barely appeared on the media. ... I did not participate, fearing that I will be arrested and ultimately deported from this country.

Webb and Val Verde counties, both of which are located near the Texas-Mexico border, recently started using TraffiCatch to surveil their communities, NOTUS reports.

TraffiCatch lets police “detect in-vehicle wireless signals,” which it connects to cars’ license plate numbers. Webb County bought the tech with a grant from DHS, while Val Verde got the funds through Operation Lone Star, a controversial state-level immigration enforcement program.

Kind of! The Senate can’t agree on amendments to the bill that reauthorizes the warrantless surveillance program, so it’s looking like we’re about to hit the midnight expiration deadline without a bill for Biden to sign.

But technically speaking, the FISA court recently granted a government request to allow the program to continue until April 2025.

The amendment would reverse a provision included in the recent House bill reauthorizing Section 702 of FISA that expands the definition of “electronic communications service provider,” which critics say would force Americans to essentially spy for the government.

“Forcing ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying is what authoritarian countries do, not democracies,” Wyden said in a statement. 

The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act has been circulating since at least 2020, seeking to close this loophole in constitutional privacy protections. A version of the bill finally passed Wednesday evening, in a 212–199 vote.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a controversial law that allows warrantless surveillance on “foreign” targets — is set to expire on April 19th. The GOP, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, failed to move the bill forward the last three times, but I guess fourth time’s the charm.

Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and House Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Oregon) announced a new, national data privacy bill called The American Privacy Rights Act (PDF) today.

According to their release, the bill would, among other things, “require affirmative express consent sensitive data can be transferred to a third party.” The two were behind a since-stalled version of the bill back in 2022.