Daily Archives: May 4, 2017

Former intelligence contractor and fugitive Edward Snowden has once and for all been honored by a Norwegian free expression group following a lengthy legal battle before the nations highest court.

Members of the Norwegian chapter of PEN personally awarded Mr. Snowden with its annual Ossietzky Prize in Moscow last month in place of holding a ceremony in Oslo as desired, the groups head, Hege Newth Nouri, told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Mr. Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, was first announced as the recipient of the groups annual free expression award in April 2016 for leaking NSA documents unveiling the U.S. governments questionable, extensive global surveillance, according to Ms. Nouri and company. He remains the subject of an active arrest warrant for related charges four years later, but has evaded U.S. authorities cloaked by Russian asylum.

Lawyers for the PEN Clubs Norwegian chapter fought for months in local and federal courts to let Mr. Snowden pick up his award in person without being whisked away to the U.S. and potentially incarcerated for decades. Attorneys asked an Oslo City Court judge last April to let Mr. Snowden safely attend the ceremony, but their petition was rejected two months later. The case was unsuccessfully brought before a three-person appeals court and was eventually dismissed by the Norwegian Supreme Court last November.

The award was given to Mr. Snowden on April 21 in Moscow but went unreported for a week. English news reports of the event first appeared online Wednesday after Ms. Nouri confirmed the meeting to the AP.

Im grateful for the support from Norwegian PEN Mr. Snowdensaid at the ceremony, according to PEN.

Nevertheless, the NSA leaker said he was disappointed Norway wouldnt allow him safe passage so he could personally pick up his award, a lithography by Norwegian artist Nico Wideberg.

Its sad, Mr. Snowdentold Norways Aftenposten, according to an English translation of a recent interview. The Norwegian government had the opportunity to recognize what had been done in this case when the Norwegian PEN invited me to Norway to receive the prize, but instead they chose to use lawyers to fight in court, he said.

Mr. Snowden, 33, has resided around Moscow since being granted asylum by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013. His current asylum status is set to expire in 2021. In January, meanwhile, his attorneys made a case for asylum before the European Parliament.

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Edward Snowden honored for NSA leaks in Moscow by Norwegian free expression group - Washington Times

In our digital worlds, there is a gap between the real you and the algorithmic you. Online, you live in a realm functionally distinct from the world you thought you knew: one where your data assigns you a gender different from your own, or a citizenship unlike the one in your passport.

In some cases, its easy to check out the algorithmic you. For example, the plug-in Citizen-Ex by UK artist James Bridle uses your browsers metadata to calculate your algorithmic citizenshipand the answer might surprise you. National citizenship is normally seen as binary: You either are, or are not, a citizen of a country. But Bridles plug-in assigns you a percentage-based citizenship where you can be 54.8% Irish, 43.7% American, 1.49% German, and even 0.01% Estonian, as I currently am.

I say currently because our algorithmic selves alter minute by minute and byte to byte depending on how were using the internet. Last night, after chatting with friends living in England, you might have skewed British. This morning, chatting to your cousin in Spanish, Mexican.

This is citizenship by algorithm. The concept comes from leaked 2013 documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) that outlined the agencys PRISM program, which allows analysts access to the data caches of private companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Apple. The NSA avoided the privacy protections against domestic surveillance that US citizens normally enjoy by creating a new, datafied template for citizenship online. In other words, instead of halting domestic spying, the federal government redefined what it means to be a US citizen by creating an algorithmic citizen made only of data.

Your right to privacy modulates according to how the NSA interprets your data via its algorithmic logic of citizenship.Your right to privacy from government surveillance modulates according to how the NSA interprets your data via its algorithmic logic of citizenship. US citizens whose data appears foreign become classified as foreignersand therefore lose their constitutional right to privacy. This applies to a lot of Americans: To the NSA, Americans are likely to be perceived as foreign if they have an IP address outside the US, talk to people outside the US, use languages other than English, encrypt their communication, or even have friends who are reasonably believed to be foreign. In fact, youre considered algorithmically foreign if an NSA agent is only 51% confident of your foreignness.

But it doesnt stop at nationhood: You also have an array of algorithmic genders, races, class statuses, sexual orientations, and even statuses of celebrity. And like citizenship by algorithm, these additional interpretations are functionally disconnected from how we understand ourselves. Our algorithmic identities are simply fabrications made by the institutions profiling you for purposes of selling products and/or exerting digital control.

You can check out what gender and age Google thinks you are based on your search queries and website visits by clicking here. But be prepared: Googles algorithmic gender and age identifications will probably seem wrong. (For example, you might be a 30-year-old woman, but Google thinks youre a 65-year-old man.) This error actually has nothing to do with your real age or gender because Google is measuring something completely separate from the human notion of identity. These models are created by categorizing certain search terms and websites and then parsing our data to determine what algorithmically fits or doesnt. So if youre a woman who is algorithmically interpreted as a man, that merely means youre more closely aligned to Googles model of a man than a woman.

Because algorithms draw from our data, not our lived experience, it largely doesnt matter if were incorrectly identified. (And as much as it sometimes may seem, Google is not invested in explicitly maintaining the patriarchy.) Instead, Google wants to provide advertisers with a consumer base of users who are seen to be profitably man-ish. Similarly, the NSA really doesnt care if a user is citizen or foreigner, as algorithmic citizenship itself is only a legal caveat that protects them from constitutional overstepping.

But it still raises the question: What would the real world look like if users were identified based only on their algorithmic self?

This is already happening to some extent. Googles gender and age audience analytics determine which users are targeted with content and advertisements, as well as how websites interpret who is visiting their site. For example, if your data suggests youre algorithmically wealthy, you might be shown higher prices for hotels or flights on a site like Orbitz.com, because your data suggests you can pay. Or, like the case of a Wisconsin man this week, you might be denied parole because youve been identified as an algorithmic reoffender.

A life algorithmically ordered and reordered often beyond our comprehension ushers us into a dangerous terrain of lopsided knowledge. On this plane, users have little to no idea how they are defined, but commercial firms and governmental agencies use our data to determine privacy rights, targeted content, plane-ticket prices, and our position in society. As humans continue to produce increasing amounts of mineable information, who we are as data might soon become more important than who we are as people.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Who we are as data might soon become more important than who we are as people - Quartz

Ever since the day of its creation, critics have slammed the Office of Director of National Intelligence as an expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy, a threat to the longtime primacy of the Director of Central Intelligence and a toothless tiger.

Much of that changed during the joint tenures of DNI Mike McConnell and SecDef Bob Gates (former DCI) when they agreed to give the DNI budgetary teeth in a March 21, 2008 memo. It gave the DNI acquisition authority over any program that received 51 percent of its funding from the intelligence communitys National Intelligence Program pool. Up til then, the Pentagon controlled an intelligence programif even one dollar of its money funded it.

But some Republicans have continued to press for a diminution or dissolution of the DNI. The 2017 Omnibus Spending Bill includes what would have been the 2017 Intelligence Authorization Act, which orders the new DNI review. It directs President Trump to create a five-person panel of expertswith significant intelligence and national security expertise to review ODNIs roles, missions and functions

Heres what the bill says the panel will do:

The panel should present its unclassified report within 180 days of the bills passage.

The intel committees come close to calling for the separation of the jobs of NSA Director and the head of Cyber Command.

They want a briefing from Defense Secretary Jim Mattis just three months after passage of the Omnibus Billconsidering theimpact of the dual-hatting relationship, including advantages and disadvantages.

It wants to know timelines for ensuring that no damage is done to national security should the arrangement change, any legal changes that might be neededand saya larger organizational review of NSA should be conducted with respect to the eventual termination of the dual-hatting relationship.

To that end, they also want a report from the DNI on options to better align the structure, budgetary procedures, and oversight of NSA with its national intelligence mission in the event of a termination of the dual-hatting relationship.

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Hill Intel Committees Order DNI, NSA/CyberCom Review - Breaking Defense

For years, U.S. government surveillance of innocent Americans has been a topic of heated debate, especially for those in the tech community.

With Congress gearing up for a fight over the 2017 reauthorization of a surveillance authority that lets the NSA spy on innocent Americans without a warrantSection 702, enacted as part of the FISA Amendments Actthat debate is sure to rage on in the coming months.

So we sent reporter David Spark to the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California in February to ask one simple question: What dont you want the NSA to know about you?

The answers spanned the spectrum, from emails, to phone calls, to web browsing records, to financial information, to information about individuals children, to nothing.

Some got philosophical. Everyone says, I have nothing to hide, and thats not the point, one attendee told us. The point is that I want to control what people know about me.

Others turned the question on its head, asking instead why the NSA is conducting surveillance on Americans. I dont think their charter is to spy on Americans, so why are they? one asked.

And some got blunt. One attendee said he already assumes the NSA knows a lot about him already. It scares me and offends me, he said.

If the warrantless spying on Americans scares and offends you, contact your representatives in Congress and tell them to pull the plug on Section 702 surveillance. And watch the video to see other RSA Conference attendees responses.

Special thanks to David Spark (@dspark) and Spark Media Solutions for their support and production of this video. The background music heard at the endthe song Hydratedis licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 by Kronstudios. EFF original work (i.e., every thing but the background music heard at the end) is licensed CC BY 4.0.

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What Don't You Want the NSA to Know About You? | Electronic ... - EFF

May 2, 2017 4:43 PM By Alex DeMetrick

BALTIMORE (WJZ) The National Security Agency is promising to cut back on the number of private emails its been reading and collecting.

Alex DeMetrick reports, its ending a controversial surveillance technique thats focused on U.S. citizens.

For nearly 10 years, the NSA has been prying into the private emails of citizens. Congress OKd it when it amended how foreign intelligence can be collected.

It authorized NSA to look into strictly personal e-mails between U.S. citizens, says Dr. Michael Greenberger, of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security. They got the right simply because a foreign operative of foreign operation was mentioned.

That practice came to light when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden publicly revealed it.

So just whose email got read?

Anyone who used a targeted phrase or word, according to Greenberger.

Like ISIS, which many people might mention in passing, he says.

The NSA says it has now stopped the practice, focusing instead only on communications that are sent directly to or from a foreign target.

This now means the NSA will not be reading those emails, and if they collect those emails, theyll destroy them, Greenberger says.

Violating Americans privacy has proven so controversial, the NSA may have ended the email practice in order to win congressional re-authoritization of its other surveillance techniques.

The authority for the NSA to conduct surveillance operations expires at the end of the year, unless congress re-authorizes it.

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Alex DeMetrick has been a general assignment reporter with WJZ Eyewitness News since September 1984. Alex began his journalism career in California. Alex has received many awards from United Press International and The Associated Press. He...

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NSA Plans To Cut Back On The Number Of Private Citizen Emails It Reads - CBS Baltimore / WJZ