Tag: NSA

Late Monday night, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian each reported on what will inevitably be new competing efforts to reform the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata surveillance program.

The U.S. government has developed and deployed a surveillance system that records every single telephone call made in an unnamed country outside the U.S. for up to 30 days.

Today, the European Parliament adopted its report and recommendations stemming from its investigation of the mass surveillance programmes of the NSA and GCHQ on E.U. citizens. The report, which was drafted over the course of 15 inquiry hearings conducted by the European Parliament civil liberties (LIBE) committee, heard testimony about the impact of the programmes revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden on the fundamental rights of European citizens.

This week the United States will stand before an expert body at the United Nations and be forced to face difficult questions regarding its human rights record, including its performance on the right to privacy. Among the list of issues prepared by the Human Rights Committee for the review and shadow reports by human rights organizations is mass government surveillance and the U.S.’s refusal to recognize the extraterritorial application of human rights obligations.

Yesterday, the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee (LIBE) presented its final report on the activities of the American and British spy agencies surveillance programmes and their impact on E.U. citizens’ fundamental rights.

In 2013, the world learned that the NSA’s reach into our privacy extends further and deeper than we ever could have imagined.

Watch the U.S. State of the Union tonight and play along with the Access team: We’re bringing you SOTU 2014 Mass Surveillance Bingo.

Access sees the PCLOB’s recommendations as a major step toward ending the practice of indiscriminate bulk collection of user data. While the report is limited in its scope, it makes bold statements casting doubt on both the legality and the utility of the NSA’s mass surveillance programs.

Last week, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) released a statement detailing plans to release not just one, but two reports on NSA surveillance programs. The Board will release one report on metadata collection under PATRIOT Act Section 215 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), expected in late January or early February, and a second report on the targeting of non-US persons under FISA Section 702, with an indeterminate release date. These reports come on the heels of a parallel report by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, released in December 2013.

One of the many recommendations in the President’s Review Group report on the NSA surveillance programs released last month was for the review of MLATs, or Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties. This was the second time that MLATs made the news in December: at the beginning of the month, eight major internet companies issued a series of principles for reforming government surveillance that including improving the MLAT system. Clearly MLATs are an issue, but what does this four-letter word mean, and why are they so desperately in need of reform?