Tag: US

Last month the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies released their report and recommendations on reform of U.S. surveillance programs. The criticisms in the report, and the detailed nature of the more than 46 recommendations, underscore how much the NSA’s current mass surveillance programs violate the fundamental privacy rights of people around the world.

Following close on Verizon’s heels, AT&T today announced it will begin to publish a semi-annual online transparency report in early 2014. This announcement is an abrupt about-face for the company, which only two weeks ago requested that the SEC allow it to ignore a shareholder proposal calling for exactly such transparency.

AT&T announced today it would begin in early 2014 to publish a semi-annual online report on the number of law enforcement requests for customer information that it receives, in each country of operations.

Access welcomes today’s news that Verizon Communications has broken ranks with telcos globally by announcing that it will issue a transparency report. It will be the first telco to do so. We call on all telcos to release regular, detailed transparency reports: Anything less is a failure of their human rights obligations and their investors’ expectations.

This afternoon the White House released “Liberty and Security in a Changing World,” the report and recommendations of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. This five-person task force was convened by President Obama to assess the NSA’s communications surveillance programs and provide recommendations on reform.

Even before Edward Snowden began leaking documents detailing the scale and scope of the NSA and other intelligence agencies’ violations with our privacy, Access had been working with civil society organizations (like Privacy International and EFF), as well as international law experts, and human rights scholars to draft the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance (“the Principles”).

News broke last week that the US government is surveilling the location and movements of international cell phones, collecting 5 billion daily records of cellphone location data. An official confirmed the bulk collection of data through fiber optic cables in the US, saying intelligence agencies do not intentionally target cellphones in the United States.

This morning eight major internet companies — AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, and Yahoo! — issued a broad and powerful call for surveillance reform. The joint statement represents the strongest stance yet by U.S. internet companies on government surveillance and has the potential to shift the debate in Washington.

Today, Access is joining a day of action in the United State calling for reform of the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) — the law known for giving the U.S. government the ability to access your email and documents in the cloud without a warrant. ECPA is one of the internet’s most outdated laws: it was passed in 1986, before most people even had access to the internet.

The NSA is eavesdropping on the private cables running between the Google and Yahoo data centers where all user data is held. Under a program codenamed MUSCULAR the NSA is going right in, without permission from the companies or the courts.