Charlie Crist, a liberal Republican turned Democrat, is now a U.S. House Member representing Florida’s 13th district, which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater. Mike Crapo, who has had a long career as a conservative Republican politician, now represents Idaho in the U.S. Senate. The differences between their careers and to some extent their constituencies can be as stark as the differences between Gulf Coast beaches and the Sawtooth mountains.
But they agree on one thing – the proposal now being debated in the Senate to direct the IRS to monitor all checking accounts and mobile payment and digital wallet apps that cumulatively exceed $10,000 would be a privacy nightmare. In a recent statement, Rep. Crist says he would support measures to do what the Biden Administration’s Treasury Department says it wants to do with its proposal – to go after wealthy tax cheats. But “working people with $10,000 in annual deposits are hardly the top 1 percent,” Rep. Crist said. “Allowing the IRS to data mine checking accounts raises serious privacy red flags and would increase costs, while targeting hardworking Floridians who are already struggling to get by. I will not support any IRS account reporting requirements that go after the middle class and working families. That dog won’t hunt.” Sen. Crapo likewise took to the Senate floor to object to the proposal, beginning with the observation that the original proposal was to report accounts with transactions totaling $600 a year. “That tells you what they wanted,” he said. “Now they said, well, we think we can get away with $10,000 because they know that still covers everybody,” Sen. Crapo said. “Think of a family that doesn’t spend more than $10,000 a year in their financial accounts. Think of a small business in America that doesn’t run more than $10,000 a year of income and expense through their accounts. It will pick up every small business in America … every family in America … and the IRS will have data on every American’s account. “The IRS does not need to have access to the accounts of every American who spends more than $10,000,” the senator said. “Or every American who has income of over $10,000.” Then Sen. Crapo zeroed in on the surveillance and privacy downsides of this proposal. He said: The Treasury Department has already proven it can’t even keep the data it has safe and that its data will be hacked … [It] has already proven that it will not avoid utilizing the data it has for political purposes, that it will not avoid weaponizing the data it collects to punish or try to diminish the influence of people with different political points of view. What can Americans expect from that? What we can expect is that the IRS/$10,000 reporting requirement will add another window into the private lives of Americans that can be exploited by an emerging surveillance state. Douglas Belkin of The Wall Street Journal reports the reaction of college students to overly aggressive surveillance measures by campus administrators in this era of Covid-19.
The vast majority of students are vaccinated. In fact, some three-quarters polled say they would support a vaccine mandate. In such an environment, colleges and universities have still managed to find the point at which students rebel against attempts at ubiquitous surveillance in the name of health. “It feels like the school is blackmailing me, they get all this personal information and in exchange I get an education,” said Dan Smith, a graduate student studying labor history at Wayne State University in Detroit. “It’s the growth of the surveillance state.” Belkin reports that even before the pandemic, many universities were recording students’ faces with surveillance cameras, tracking them with GPS and monitoring their messages on social media and email. Schools can also track students’ study habits through digital textbooks and log their presence in class and the library. Students at one Michigan school had to band together to stop a requirement to wear a “bio button” to monitor their heart rate, temperature and respiration. Under pandemic rules, colleges are fomenting what one student group at Rutgers called “creeping authoritarianism.” What Belkin’s reporting bears out is that the generation now rising through college is alert to abusive levels of surveillance. They see clearly how today’s compromises can lead to a total absence of privacy in the future. The State Secrets privilege requires secret evidence related to national defense or foreign relations to be evaluated in camera by a judge in her or his chamber. As we have seen, in some instances the FBI and other government agencies have used the State Secrets privilege to short-circuit a defendant’s case by also asking for a jury trial – which cannot be allowed to hear the evidence.
These mutually exclusive requests – holding some evidence secret while invoking the Seventh Amendment right to a jury – creates the perfect Catch-22, a rule the government always wins. It is for abuses like this that the use of the State Secrets privilege is coming under increasing scrutiny. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing FBI v. Fazaga – a case involving FBI penetration and bugging of a mosque by an informant – in which the privilege played a significant role in trials before lower courts. Now four Democratic senators have written to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland asking the Department of Justice to adhere to promises of greater transparency by President Biden. In August, President Biden issued a media release publicly committing to “adhering to the rigorous guidance” set forth in a 12-year-old memorandum, “Policies and Procedures Governing Invocation of the State Secrets Privilege.” This memo was issued in September, 2009, by then-Attorney General Eric Holder to pledge that the Department of Justice would “provide periodic reports to appropriate oversight committees of Congress.” It also promised to refer “credible allegations of wrongdoing” hidden by the privilege to the department’s Inspector General. The letter, signed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Robert Menendez, Cory A. Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, challenges Garland to live up to the president’s promise and adhere to the memorandum. It noted that the memo’s promise of “periodic” reviews is not defined, but “it should be plainly obvious that intervals – now more than six years since the last report on file was submitted – by which DOJ has provided these reports to Congress frustrates meaningful and effective congressional oversight.” Among the many requests the senators put to the attorney general are:
The senators demand written answers by Oct. 27. It will be interesting to see if DOJ responds by that date or remains as “periodic” as Halley’s Comet. Over the summer, the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability reported that Customs and Border Protection is routinely demanding personal passwords to conduct searches of files inside the digital devices of Americans returning from abroad. Some of these inspections are performed through eyeball scans. Some are done by plugging a thumbnail drive into devices to conduct a deep scan of contents.
PPSA asked: “Do Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures apply at the border? Or is the border zone of airports and other ports of entry a kind of legal no man’s land?” We reported on the plight of a veteran, a journalist, an artist, a businessman and an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who had their privacy violated in this way while going through customs. Their petition, Merchant v. Mayorkas, was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court this summer, punting on the critical question of whether Americans have Fourth Amendment rights at the border. Fortunately, what cannot be achieved in the courts can be debated and perhaps passed in the Congress. Late last week, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rand Paul (R-KY) introduced the Protecting Data at the Border Act, which would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant before searching the phones and laptops of Americans at the border. “Americans’ Constitutional rights shouldn’t disappear at the border,” Sen. Wyden said. “The Protecting Data at the Border Act will ensure that the government, including Customs and Border Protection, must obtain a warrant to search the data of U.S. persons.” This bill would harmonize the practice at the border with a landmark Supreme Court decision, Riley v. California, that ruled that law enforcement needed a warrant to search the electronic devices of a person who has been arrested. The Court’s Riley decision, which was unanimous, describes how digital inspections are especially insidious. The Court declared that “cell phones differ in both a quantitative and qualitative sense from other objects that might be carried on an arrestee’s person … many of the more than 90 percent of American adults who own cell phones keep on their person a digital record of nearly every aspect of their lives.” The Court concluded, “an element of pervasiveness characterizes cell phones” that is not found in physical records. The Protecting Data at the Border Act follows up on the logic of Riley, extending the affirmed rights of an arrested person to all U.S. persons at the border. In addition to requiring probable cause warrants to inspect devices, the Wyden-Paul bill would:
It would, however, allow for emergency exceptions based on existing wiretap statutes and the USA Freedom Act. In some instances, the government would need to seek a warrant after an inspection. At this time of partisan gridlock, it is heartening to see a bipartisan bill that should be an easy one for Congress to pass. In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Bank Secrecy Act into law, requiring cash transactions exceeding $10,000 to be reported by banks to the Internal Revenue Service. In today’s dollars, $10,000 equals $70,000 in purchasing power. In 2021, the Biden Administration is proposing banks share data with the IRS on every American’s account in a bank, or in online money accounts such as PayPal, or Venmo, with transactions in excess of $600.
The Bank Secrecy Act was justified as a way to reveal money laundering from drug deals and illegal art and antiquities sales. What is the justification behind making almost every personal financial account in the United States open to warrantless government inspection? President Biden says his purpose is to “crack down on millionaires and billionaires who cheat on their taxes.” Senate Democrats, sensing the potential for a political backlash by anyone with a bank account greater than the proceeds of a lemonade stand, are discussing raising the additional disclosure requirements to accounts with balances to $10,000 or more. Required disclosures at either level would still have the effect of eliminating Americans’ last shred of financial privacy. There are many dangers to Americans if this measure goes into effect. Here are three. First, once the government possesses this information, it could conceivably share it with other federal agencies. There is ample legal precedent to worry about such warrantless access to our data. The Bank Secrecy Act was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court (California Bankers Assn. v. Shultz, 1974) as a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as a violation of Fifth Amendment guaranteeing due process. The Court ruled in favor of the government. If the same logic allows the government to now legally possess almost all of your financial information, what is to keep any agency of the government from accessing it whenever it wants, for whatever reason it wants? Second, the IRS has hardly been a bastion of data security and integrity. In 2015, cybercriminals walked away with sensitive information that put 724,000 taxpayers at risk of identity theft. This summer, the tax returns of thousands of taxpayers were stolen from IRS files either by an employee or through a cyberattack. Many details were published online by Pro Publica. Third, the greatest risk from this proposal is the erosion of the Fourth Amendment to a mere nub. Under our Constitution, “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our “effects” are forbidden without a warrant issued on the basis of probable cause. If the standards of the 1974 Supreme Court ruling are extended, when every American is compelled to share their financial data with the federal government, the Fourth Amendment will be rendered meaningless. James Madison, who introduced that amendment along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, saw clearly that economic privacy is inseparable from political liberty. He wrote: “Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties or his possessions.” The Fourth Amendment requires that a probable cause warrant be issued “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” But how does one define particularity in the age of digital networks and the cloud?
This question acquires fresh urgency after Thomas Brewster of Forbes noticed a court document accidentally unsealed by the Department of Justice. The document showed that the government had asked Google to divulge the identities of anyone who had searched for the name, phone number and address of a sex trafficking victim, as well as her mother’s name, over a 16-day span. Google was also directed to provide Google accounts and IP addresses of those who made these searches. Because such orders are kept under seal, there is no way to know how common they are. One such order made public was in 2020 for any individual who searched for the address of an arson victim in the government’s racketeering case against singer R. Kelly. Two others involved a fraud case in Minnesota and a serial bomber in Austin. In the case of the sex-trafficked victim, the keyword search – while limited to two people and a small number of searches – also included a request for CookieIDs. These are identifiers that can be used to group together every search from a particular device over a given duration. This gives law enforcement an ability to widen its view, and to see every website the owner of that device has visited. In such a world, unimagined by the Founders, where does particularity end? A computer or other digital device certainly qualifies as a particular object, but its reach is global, allowing for a deep and pervasive search of a person’s interests, beliefs and contacts. To be sure, law enforcement needs tools to catch sex traffickers or bombers. But by their very nature, keyword searches could easily become dragnets in which no particular person or group is the target. Instead, a keyword search can act like a fishing trawler dragging its net along the ocean floor – exactly the kind of open-ended investigation the Founders feared and explicitly forbade. The worst aspect of this practice is that these warrants are executed in secret. PPSA urges the Department of Justice to annually release the number of warrants for keyword searches it has sought and obtained. We ask Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a policy directive, beyond those currently in place to protect journalists, that would define the scope of keyword searches within precise and necessary limits. States should also codify these standards as well for state and urban police departments. When the FBI asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for permission to surveil an American on national security grounds, the agency’s application must be supported by a file documenting grounds for the FBI’s suspicion. The FBI calls this a “Woods file.”
This documentation is more than a mere procedural step. It validates the need for the surveillance, in effect supplying probable cause to the FISA judge in ex parte hearings in which only the government is present. Spurred to investigate by the Carter Page “unmasking” fiasco, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz took a sampling of 29 FISA applications. He released his findings in December, 2019, that included many errors and missing documentation, four of which were material to a case. Now his office has examined more than 7,000 FISA applications from 2015 to 2020. Many of them were terrorism or counter-intelligence cases. Some 183 of them, about 2.6 percent, have a Woods file that is either incomplete or missing entirely. Rounding back to the original 29 applications examined, Horowitz’s team found “over 400 instances of non-compliance with the Woods Procedures.” His report concludes with ten recommendations for the FBI and the Department of Justice’s National Security Division. Inspector General Horowitz has done a commendable job. But his recommendations will be implemented in secret by the FBI. We would have to trust that agency not to veer off again into rogue behavior, as it has done countless times before – from the days of COINTELPRO to its current refusal to respond to PPSA’s Freedom of Information Act requests about possible surveillance of Members of Congress. Congress should step in to implement reforms, including the Lee-Leahy Amendment, which would bring into the FISA court proceedings scrutiny of FBI applications from civil liberty experts with high-level security clearances. These friends of the court would act as proxies for those who may never know they were targets of surveillance. Highlights Absurd Twisting of Rules by FBI Agents to Evade AccountabilityThe Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability filed a brief today in FBI v. Fazaga, an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that will test the ability of the government to rely on the State Secrets privilege to close off American citizens’ access to justice.
The facts of the case are simple and shocking. The FBI paid an informant to pretend to convert to Islam to infiltrate a mosque and plant listening devices. The plaintiffs allege there was no probable cause and that they were targeted because of their religion. The informant was instructed to surveil Americans for being devout followers of Islam, the more “Muslim” a person was, the “more suspicious” the FBI considered him. Once taken to court over these violations of Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights, the government immediately moved to dismiss claims of religious discrimination by invoking the State Secrets privilege. This doctrine effectively shuts down judicial inquiry by blocking access to the facts needed to prove (or to defend against) charges of unconstitutional conduct. The government’s assertion of this privilege is so extreme that it holds that the Supreme Court itself cannot exercise judicial review over the secret opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The government’s handling of Fazaga reveals the slippery ways in which it distorts the law and the Constitution to protect itself from any accountability. Here’s the legal formula the government uses. First, government lawyers invoke the State Secrets privilege. This compels a judge to review the protected materials in her chambers so the secret information at the heart of the case can be privately and securely considered. But other parties and their counsel are denied the ability to review any claimed “state secrets” and thus cannot make or defend against any claim of wrongdoing. Having boxed in the court and the parties, the government agents who committed the constitutional violations – who were also sued – then claim to be denied their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial because their employer has blocked the evidence and therefore insist that the claim be dismissed. The result is to shield the most relevant facts from being litigated and to short-circuit the case, effectively denying plaintiffs their right to make their case to a jury – or, indeed, to any trial at all. “The assertion that the victims of alleged constitutional violations must bear the cost of government’s refusal to release information relating to such violations gets things backwards,” said Erik Jaffe, PPSA president. “While there may indeed be occasions where national security concerns prevent a full public airing of certain facts in a case, that should not entirely prevent it from going forward. In this case, some form of constitutional remedy is better than no remedy at all. If ordinary juries are indeed incapable of hearing certain evidence without threatening national security, then court precedents allow for bypassing juries in exceptional cases. Cases involving claims that national security trumps the Constitution should certainly qualify as exceptional. “We urge the Court to recognize that the government or its agents should not be able to avoid accountability by an all-too-clever, two-step process of invoking obscure evidentiary rules to suppress evidence central to the case and then have its agents self-servingly hide behind a claimed Seventh Amendment right to have a jury evaluate facts that they are forbidden to hear,” Jaffe said. “To accept the government’s argument would be to completely close the courthouse doors to any American whenever national security is invoked to avoid scrutiny of the government’s unconstitutional conduct.” The American Civil Liberties Union replied to a U.S. government brief last week over whether the U.S. Supreme Court has the authority to review rulings from lower, secret courts that relinquish the power to disclose secret court opinions from the judiciary to the executive branch.
At stake is whether Americans have a First Amendment right to be informed of the extent of government surveillance described in opinions issued by two lower U.S. courts. “When the founders wrote the Bill of Rights, they had in mind the secret Star Chamber of King Charles as a negative example of what not to allow,” said Gene Schaerr, general counsel of the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. “The existence of a secret surveillance court in Washington today is, to say the least, an anomaly in the American system. This court hears only from one side – the government’s side. And its opinions before 2015 have largely been kept under lock and key. At the very least, we should know the opinions of this secret court so we can assess the degree to which the government is peering into our lives.” Created in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) conducts secret hearings on foreign intelligence through the government’s collection of phone records, emails, and internet browsing data. American citizens and persons in the United States are often caught up in surveillance dragnets approved by FISC. The FISC and its superior court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) ruled on whether the First Amendment guarantees the public a qualified right of access to FISC opinions. The courts’ decisions? They ruled that the publication of these judicial opinions is up to the executive branch alone to decide. “This case raises a significant question,” PPSA declared in an amicus brief filed in May. “How can the American people learn of, debate, and cast informed votes relating to the Executive Branch’s surveillance activities performed in their names—and, for that matter, authorized by FISC and FISCR—if the government refuses to disclose that information?” “This is an astonishing abdication of the right of U.S. courts, established under Article III, to exercise judicial power in all cases,” Schaerr said. “Surely the Supreme Court will take umbrage at the supine surrender of judicial authority by the lower courts.” The U.S. government’s brief argues that the FISC and FISCR courts acted correctly for a “lack of jurisdiction.” The petition filed by the ACLU, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School, and former Solicitor General Ted Olson, seeks the release of these opinions, with necessary redactions to protect vital government secrets. The ACLU petition is a masterpiece of legal reasoning laced with restrained indignation. It is worth reading: At bottom, the government contends that no court has jurisdiction to decide whether citizens have a First Amendment right of access to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court’s opinions. “Think about that,” Schaerr said. “The government is saying the U.S. Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to decide First Amendment claims concerning lower court rulings.” The ACLU brief states that the Supreme Court has jurisdiction to resolve the petitioners’ First Amendment claim to release the opinions. Failure to do so, they write, “would raise a serious constitutional question.” “I would actually go a little further,” Schaerr said. “Failure to release these opinions would quietly precipitate a constitutional crisis.” But Will Doctrine Survive Upcoming Reviews by U.S. Supreme Court?A U.S. federal appeals court Wednesday struck a blow against government transparency with the dismissal of a long-running lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) for purported mass interception and searches of Americans' international internet communications.
In a 2-1 decision, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to resurrect the challenge against the NSA by the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, and instead sided with the government’s defense, which claimed a “State Secrets” privilege. The court’s majority opinion reveals the nature of this privilege, something right out of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Judge Albert Diaz wrote for the majority that he agreed with a lower court’s termination of the suit. The majority reached this conclusion without reviewing the evidence of potential harm to the government’s national security interest. Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote a stinging dissent that the ruling: “stands for a sweeping proposition: A suit may be dismissed under the State Secrets doctrine, after minimal judicial review, even when the government premises its only defenses on far-fetched hypotheticals." Few dispute the need for some government secrecy, but this blanket defense and its cousin – the Glomar response – has been invoked to such an alarming extent that we have no way of knowing whether the government is acting in good faith or covering up bad actions. PPSA recently reported that the government has relied on the Glomar defense – neither confirming nor denying – even when asked if it has been purchasing the private digital information of Members of Congress from data brokers. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has an opportunity to clarify this case. This fall, SCOTUS will hear Federal Bureau of Investigation v. Fazaga, a case about the covert infiltration and bugging of a mosque and Muslim communities in Southern California in which the government has invoked the State Secrets privilege. This follows the Court’s acceptance of another State Secrets case involving a Palestinian man captured after the 9/11 attacks and held in prison at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This detainee, who accuses the government of torturing him, requests information that is blocked by the government’s invocation of the State Secrets privilege. These two cases mark the first reviews of the State Secrets doctrine in a decade. In a forthcoming amicus brief, PPSA will demonstrate that plaintiffs with substantial claims deserve to uncover enough factual material to argue their cases. We are confident this can be done while protecting secrets important to the safety of Americans. Government disbands unit that snooped on employees, letter writersYears ago, poultry inspectors in a large state were ridiculed when they appealed to the state legislature to provide them with firearms.
One can see why the inspectors wanted to be armed. There is a certain glamor attached to being law enforcement, the smell of cordite at the firing range, the weight of a gun belt, the badge and the respect that goes with it. These inspectors were denied guns, however, because they did not need them to do their job. In the federal government, with so many small offices within divisions inside agencies within departments, there are pockets of officials who are running programs that are poorly conceived and poorly supervised. One of them, the Investigations and Threat Management Service (ITMS) inside the Commerce Department, was a privacy nightmare. For fifteen years, the 13-person ITMS ran criminal probes and counterespionage activities apparently with little oversight. They rummaged through the offices and computers of Commerce Department employees. They investigated Americans who made disparaging comments about the Census on their social media accounts. And they opened investigations into people who wrote letters to the Secretary of Commerce (always a dead giveaway of the sleeper agents among us). Worse, a five-month investigation by Commerce Department lawyers found that the ITMS lacked “adequate legal authority” to even run the criminal probes it had pursued for 15 years. This lack of authority did not keep ITMS agents from running names through classified databases. Like a bad cop show, ITMS is now being cancelled. The Commerce Department announced earlier this month it would close this office. But one wonders how many other offices are role-playing at the expense of our privacy. Several of our civil liberties peers have joined us in mounting campaigns to urge followers to contact key Members of Congress to hold hearings on the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. Free Press Action is now offering a portal to contact all Members of Congress.
Free Press Action’s language is succinct and its purpose is clear. “If you have a smartphone or tablet, chances are that federal agencies know where you are right now. Agencies like ICE, U.S Customs and Border Protection, the FBI and others are buying sensitive data, including location data, from the apps we download on our devices — and they’re gaining all of this information without a warrant. “How can this be? In short, federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies are circumventing Congress, the Constitution and the courts by exploiting a loophole in the law. The laws regulating how the government acquires your data were written before the age of apps and digital data brokers — and federal agencies are taking advantage.” The Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act would close this loophole, ensuring that federal agencies can’t buy our private location data from apps or digital data brokers. Free Press Action urges hearings in the House and Senate Judiciary committees to move this legislation forward. Click to the Free Press Action portal to tell Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act. The word “lacuna” comes from a Latin expression that meant “to jump into a pit.” The gaps and redactions in government responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request can sometimes feel like a leap into the void. But occasionally, the government reveals a glimpse of something hidden in the void.
Start with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which admitted to at least one 2019 order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that involved the collection of web browsing data from a U.S. web page. The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability responded with a FOIA request on Feb. 4 asking the FBI to produce agency records mentioning the collection of web browsing data either originating in the United States or related to any U.S. person or person located within the United States. PPSA also asked for records on reports, rules, regulations, memoranda, policies, communications or training materials that discuss such collection. The FBI responded quickly, on Feb. 22, claiming the “request is overly broad … it does not provide enough detail to enable personnel to locate records ‘with a reasonable amount of effort.’” On Aug. 27, the FBI came back with another explanation that releasing the material “would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.” However, attached to that second response was the cover page for a document, “Advanced Electronic Surveillance and Searches Policy Directives and Policy Guide.” The cover sheet shows that this document, published on July 17, 2013, was reviewed (and presumably updated) on July 26, 2019. “This shows that the FBI has a secret policy governing the collection of web browsing data of Americans,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel. “Web browsing data is deeply personal information. It can highlight a person’s religious beliefs, political allegiances, and personal relationships. “Surely the Fourth Amendment implications of a broad policy governing the surveillance of the browsing history of people within the United States is worthy of public disclosure and discussions,” Schaerr said. The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability today joins 18 other civil liberties organizations in calling on the Biden Administration to appoint qualified nominees to fill three empty seats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB).
PCLOB is an independent, bipartisan privacy watchdog established by Congress to bring transparency and accountability to federal surveillance in counterterrorism programs. At present, this bipartisan board lacks a chair and cannot attain a quorum. Worse, PCLOB has recently degenerated into an intelligence agency lapdog instead of a watchdog. It is an embarrassment to rubber stamps everywhere. PCLOB needs more than a quorum. It needs nominees who are curious, have expertise, are energetic and willing to perform the watchdog function.
EO 12333 is an executive order issued by President Reagan in 1981 to organize the government’s collection, analysis and use of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. Sen. Richard Burr, former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, astonished the civil liberties community last year when he said that 12333 allows the executive branch to do whatever it wants, without statutory authority. Many privacy experts remain concerned that with the expiration of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the “business records provision,” intelligence agencies have simply switched to 12333, in which the executive branch provides its own legal authority. So what light did PCLOB shed on these vital issues? After six years of examination, it created what is in essence a high-school level book report. One can literally glean as much information from Google and Wikipedia … this, after six years of what PCLOB called a “deep dive review” of classified information.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. This FOIA was filed in response to an earlier request filed by Patrick Eddington of the CATO Institute for records on EO 12333. PPSA is still waiting for the production of those records.
“We have seen what can happen when Board members fail to vigorously pursue the Board’s oversight mission,” the coalition letter says. “Years of work can be reduced to reports that provide little if any information or, worse, remain hidden from public view.” PPSA urges President Biden to appoint qualified nominees as soon as possible. The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia against the Department of Justice and FBI. PPSA is seeking records in which Members of Congress queried U.S. intelligence agencies about surveilling them and their colleagues.
“Spying on Members of Congress for suggesting that they’ve been spied on would be the kind of circular logic our government excels at,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA general counsel. “Could Congressional criticism prompt government surveillance of these very Members?”
Members of Congress who have questioned the surveillance policies of administrations of both parties continue to voice suspicion that they may have been spied upon by the agencies they oversee. With this concern in mind, PPSA filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI on Dec. 13, 2019, asking for information on the unmasking of a dozen members and former members of Congress who had made public inquiries into the U.S. intelligence community’s surveillance of them. PPSA specifically targeted correspondence between intelligence agencies and these Members of Congress, Congressional leadership and intelligence agencies about the unmasking of Members of Congress. PPSA’s lawsuit holds that if Members of Congress have queried these agencies, as they have publicly said they have, then the records of this correspondence must surely exist. On Oct. 13, 2020, the FBI denied the FOIA request and issued a “Glomar” non-response response that neither confirms nor denies the existence of such records. Having further exhausted all administrative remedies, PPSA today filed a lawsuit to compel the Department of Justice to produce these records. “Americans deserve to know if a Member of Congress can be targeted for surveillance for daring to question the activities of intelligence agencies,” Schaerr said. “Under our Constitution, it is Congress that should oversee intelligence agencies, not the other way around.” We commend Apple for delaying the rollout of its iPhone update to scan images and compare them to a database of Child Sexual Abuse Materials (CSAM). While everyone recognizes that Apple’s motives are commendable, there are more than a few devils in its details.
Apple pledged to use digital tools that would compare encrypted images stored in the cloud to CSAM databases in a way that not even Apple could use to access. Apple also pledged to have a rigorous auditing process. An excerpt from TechCrunch explains the hidden dangers with this approach: [S]ecurity experts and privacy advocates have expressed concern that the system could be abused by highly resourced actors, like governments, to implicate innocent victims or to manipulate the system to detect other materials that authoritarian nation states find objectionable. TechCrunch also reports that researchers were able to create the means to trick the system into thinking two entirely different images were the same. Under this scenario, it is easy to imagine that a repressive foreign government could silence a critic in the United States or elsewhere by framing him or her as a collector of child pornography. Over the next few months, Apple, outside experts and civil liberties organizations should join forces to look for ways to weed out illegal images without opening a backdoor into consumer accounts. Clearview’s First Amendment Defense Rejected in Illinois CourtConsider: With a single click from a smartphone or capture from a public camera, the government can now identify you and sweep your social media. This means that at a glance, the government can know how you vote, your religious beliefs, your relationships and activities.
The power of this technology for surveillance is chilling, but also tempting for those tasked with law enforcement and intelligence collection. The General Accounting Office last week reported that 10 of 24 federal agencies surveyed plan to broaden their use of facial recognition technology by 2023. Ten agencies are also investing in research and development for the technology. At the forefront in commercializing this technology is Clearview AI, the controversial startup that is a leader in providing facial recognition capability to public entities. In late August, Business Insider discovered a contract between Clearview and the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. At the same time, the story broke that Clearview AI’s controversial facial-recognition system has been trialed by police, government agencies, and universities around the world. BuzzFeed News revealed that Clearview, following the grocery store model of giving away free samples, is offering its technology on a trial basis to law enforcement agencies, governments, and academic institutions in 24 countries, including the UK, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. The only negative news for Clearview in the last week came in an Illinois state court, where the company stands accused of violating the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. This ACLU and ACLU of Illinois lawsuit against Clearview moved forward when a judge rejected Clearview’s contention that the First Amendment protected its surveillance activities. The use of facial recognition technology, if not checked, will soon be ubiquitous and inescapable. A recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on the government’s pervasive use of facial recognition technology brought leading Democrats and Republicans together to warn of the potential of this technology to encroach on our fundamental rights as Americans. Chairman Jerrold Nadler began the hearing by noting “facial recognition technology has proliferated in a manner largely unchecked by Congress.” He spoke of a rising tension between this technology that is now a commonplace fixture in our lives, but one the American people have little understanding how pervasive and powerful it actually is. Ranking Republican Jim Jordan added that a recent GAO report “makes clear that the federal law enforcement agencies using facial recognition technology haven’t even assessed the risk when using this technology.” Some other choice excerpts from the hearing: Rep. Karen Bass, (D-CA), on Error Rates “We can be certain of one thing: most if not all facial recognition systems are less accurate for people of color and women. For the most part, we can be confident that the darker your skin tone, the higher the error rate. Studies have found error rates in facial recognition software to be up to 34 percent higher for darker skinned women than lighter skinned men. It is not just sometimes wrong; it can be wrong up to a third of the time.” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) on Constitutional Rights “I am also concerned about the potential for First and Fourth amendment erosions that facial recognition technology can cause. Law enforcement agencies could potentially use the systems for the surveillance of individuals not involved in any suspicious activity whatsoever.” Barry Friedman, New York University School of Law, on Different Kinds of Harms “There are very, very serious costs, very, very serious potential harms. There are racial harms from the disparities. There are privacy harms. There are harms of giving too much power to the government, as we can all see by the use of this technology by totalitarian governments.” Kara Frederick, The Heritage Foundation “Reports that the Biden administration intends to expand the use of private companies unencumbered by constitutional strictures, and with a history of reckless privacy practices are troubling. Although government entities like the DHS have long used private firms to identify patterns in publicly available information, a renewed push to make use of outside expertise for domestic spying on the heels of the new White House plan to counter domestic extremism portends potential Fourth Amendment concerns. “Now, multiple data sources can be aggregated and synchronized to allow governments to look for patterns in citizens’ behavior. “This can engender a climate of fear, self-censorship, and the chilling of free speech and the right to peaceably assemble in public places. While authoritarian powers like China are at the bleeding edge of using facial recognition for internal control, the demonstrated inclination by governments to expand these powers in democratic nations renders the slope a slippery one. And we know that once these powers expand, they almost never contract.” Barry Friedman informed the committee that recent studies of facial recognition technology by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are not telling us much about the accuracy of this technology when law enforcement uses it, because the government uses it with a different process and much larger databases. No wonder many groups – from the ACLU to the Heritage Foundation – are questioning the expansion of facial recognition technology by law enforcement. Many civil liberties groups are calling for a complete halt to the use of the technology. At the very least, absent serious “hot pursuit” cases, it makes sense to require probable cause warrants to use it. The enormous data generated by facial recognition technology should not be a stocked pond in which the authorities can always go fishing. Do Americans who feel protected against “unreasonable searches and seizures” have an unreasonable expectation?
That clause, of course, comes from the Fourth Amendment. The Founders’ farsighted handiwork bequeathed to us the sacred gift of court-ordered warrants with which, in the interest of ordered liberty, perfectly reasonable searches and seizures can be conducted by officers of the law. Most Americans, if they read the news, know that over the past several decades the surveillance state has notably undermined the Fourth Amendment and our sense of personal security. Add to that the ever-growing suspicion that private parties spy on our web searches, and suddenly our expectations of privacy vanish into the constitutional ether. What would it take to push us over the precipice into a dread state of Big Brother Orwellia like the People’s Republic of China? Perhaps it would be a public-private partnership combining the will of the political state with the capability of the private sector. Remember that in any such partnership, the senior partner is always the one with the legal monopoly on coercion. Consider Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has emerged as an enthusiastic proponent of such an unconstitutional combination of public power and private technology. Also consider the disturbing White House confirmation that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been working with big social media companies to monitor and censor Covid-related “misinformation.” Now Mayorkas intends to forge alliances with social media to search for “extremist” content. “Who’s an extremist?” asked Bob Goodlatte, the former House Judiciary chairman who now serves as senior policy advisor to Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. “In some cases, it depends on who you ask. Are all controversial people now going to be surveilled by the government for their ideology?” Not amused, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote to the secretary, “According to recent reports, DHS intends to use third-party contractors to spy on the social media communications of American citizens for signs of ‘extremist’ threats.” This, Jordan continued, “is even more dangerous when viewed in the context of DHS’s prior targeting of American citizens for holding benign political opinions. Although the reports indicate that DHS intends to monitor ‘extremist’ threats, the Department has a history of targeting Americans for holding ‘suspicious views,’ such as being pro-Second Amendment, favoring lower levels of immigration, or opposing the use of force by police.” Jordan’s letter, giving a Sept. 1 deadline, demands Mayorkas provide detailed communications between DHS staff and with social media companies pertaining to his surveillance project. The UK has long been a realm with ubiquitous closed-circuit television on every corner. Scotland Yard moved last year to connect this system with facial recognition software that pixilates all faces except those on a watchlist database.
That facial recognition software has social value is undeniable. In February, facial recognition caught a wanted serial sexual predator from an image of him boarding a bus in Cardiff. But also in Cardiff, Ed Bridges, an activist and sometime Liberal-Democrat politician, was tracked twice by a facial recognition van – once while Bridges was having lunch, and once while he was peacefully protesting at an arms fair. Bridges won a court ruling that the wide use of automatic surveillance by the South Wales police was unlawful. The ruling did not strike down the practice – indeed, a police spokesman said that “this is a judgment we can work with.” But it did restrict the practice, finding the South Wales police have been too unrestrained in their use of the system. This week, the Home Office issued guidelines for rules governing live facial-recognition systems. These rules were criticized as being “bare bones” with a lot of gaps that could still compromise privacy. Victories like the capture of the sexual predator are welcome, but they also tempt us to overlook the larger picture and what can be lost. Silkie Carlo, Director, Big Brother Watch, offered a view that we would be well-advised to import to the United States: Never before have members of the public been treated like walking ID cards, subjected to an ongoing police line-up that our identities have to be biometrically checked to make sure that we’re not criminals. That’s a complete inversion of the traditional presumption of innocence that is so at the heart of British civilization. America, too. Thanks to the CATO Institute, we learned that the FBI in 2016 conducted a criminal “charity assessment” of the Concerned Women for America (CWA), an evangelical women’s non-profit activist group dedicated to upholding traditional family values and opposing abortion.
The suspicion raised by this investigation is that CWA may have been targeted more for its political point of view than out of any concern for its adherence to the law. Civil libertarians have equal reason for concern that from 2017-2020, the shoe might have been on the other foot, ideologically speaking. During that period, the FBI targeted “Black identity extremists” that many believed included Black Lives Matter and other racial activist groups In this case, with no criminal predicate, CWA was targeted for an “embezzlement of non-profit organizations/corporate fraud” investigation. The apparent trigger for the investigation, according to material obtained by CATO in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, was a “two-star rating” from Charity Navigator, a non-profit that gives charities online evaluations. A cursory review shows that of almost 5,500 charities rated by this organization, almost 1,000 received a two-star review. (Charity Navigator now gives CWA a rating of three stars out of four.) Patrick Eddington of CATO reports that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves FBI electronic surveillance of foreigners under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments, “has repeatedly chastised – but not punished – the FBI for unwarranted digital database searches involving American citizens.” That the FBI opened this “assessment” on CWA on an unwarranted basis is beyond dispute. Did it also access authorities for foreign intelligence to surveil CWA as well? We can’t tell from the FOIA, since the FBI redacted all the databases that were searched. Rep. Jim Jordan, the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, fired off a recent letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray about such “charity assessments.” “This document raises serious questions about the FBI’s targeting of domestic civil society organizations on the basis of a third-party opinion, and not any credible allegation of a crime,” Jordan wrote. He asked the FBI to provide unredacted documents, a staff-level briefing, and information about all such “charity assessments” from January 2016 to the present. The information is required by Rep. Jordan by the close of business on August 24. One doesn’t have to agree with Concerned Women for America to be bothered by the FBI’s actions. The chilling effect of such investigations could impact the First Amendment rights of organizations across the ideological spectrum, from CWA to Black Lives Matter and the Human Rights Campaign. PPSA will follow this story and report developments on possible political surveillance under both Democratic and Republican Administrations. The Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability announced today that the government informed our organization that it will not respond in any way to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request concerning the possibility that agencies are buying data on current and former Members of the House and Senate judiciary committees.
“The government doesn’t want to even entertain our question,” said Gene Schaerr, PPSA General Counsel. “What do they have to hide?” On July 27, 2021, PPSA filed this FOIA request with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and other intelligence agencies concerning the possible purchases of information on 110 House and Senate judiciary committee members. The list of representatives in the request include Jerrold Nadler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; ranking member Jim Jordan; Sen. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee; and ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley. The list includes many leading lights of both parties, from current Vice President Kamala Harris to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, both former Members of Congress. “The government’s answer to us is known as a Glomar Response, essentially a non-denial denial in which the government refuses to even entertain the question,” Schaerr said. “The next remedy available to PPSA under law is to file an administrative appeal to force the government to answer us, which we intend to do shortly. “This troubling refusal gives all the more reason for Congress to pass the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which would ban such surveillance from purchased data,” Schaerr said. “If Vice President Harris and Gov. DeSantis are potentially having their constitutional rights violated, imagine how little protection you and I have.” Apple executive Craig Federighi stoutly defended the company’s decision to check images stored in the cloud against child pornography databases.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Federighi said that Apple will resist any pressure from governments to expand this capability by employing “multiple levels of auditability.” “If and only if you meet a threshold of something on the order of 30 known child pornographic images matching, only then does Apple know anything about your account and know anything about those images,” Federighi said. “This isn’t doing some analysis for, did you have a picture of your child in the bathtub?” He added, “This is literally only matching on the exact fingerprints of specific known child pornographic images.” It is reassuring that Apple is sensitive to the backlash from civil liberties groups and is matching hashes, the algorithmic strings that identify a precise image, with a discrete database. PPSA, however, remains concerned that even continuous and rigorous audits by Apple will not catch unauthorized uses of this new capability for nefarious purposes. We worry that Apple may not be able to resist demands from U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to expand the targets of these capabilities. And we worry that when an American company creates a potentially new surveillance capability, that they will be able to resist entreaties by authoritarian regimes with big markets – like China – to hand over the keys. Apple has long been a leader in digital privacy. To quote the Center for Democracy and Technology: “What Apple is showing with their announcement last week is that there are technical weaknesses that they are willing to build in. It seems so out of step from everything that they had previously been saying and doing.” Brian X. Chen, lead consumer technology writer for The New York Times, offers specific ways we can protect our images from exploitation in the digital cloud. He walks us through simple steps we can all take to store our images on our computers and delete them from the cloud. But why did The Times deem this advice worthy of its editorial page?
The privacy of our images is suddenly topical now that privacy advocates are alarmed by Apple’s announcement that it will scan iPhones for code linked to a database of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) when our photos are uploaded to the iCloud. Chen explains why this commendable concern for children could lead to other abuses: But some cybersecurity experts countered that the content-flagging system was invasive and infringed on people’s privacy. They warned that Apple was creating a precedent that made it simple for surveillance-heavy countries like China to pass laws that could require the company to use the technology for other purposes, such as scanning for political images that are unfavorable to an authoritarian government. Chen quotes Erica Portnoy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that Apple “said they don’t have any plans to do worse things with this technology, but this just feels, at this point, naively optimistic.” Bottom line: Apple is building a backdoor. Who will walk through it and for what purpose? When Apple unveiled new technology tools to combat child sexual abuse, the move was met with almost universal criticism and concern from civil liberties groups, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to the Center for Democracy and Technology, to the ACLU.
Apple plans to scan images stored by iPhones, iPads and Macs in the cloud to enable a machine-learning algorithm to compare those images against others contained in the databases of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. It also plans to give parents the option to be informed if their child under 13 sends or receives explicit images. Apple’s reasons for acting are commendable. Nobody will rush to defend producers or consumers of child pornography or others who abuse children. But Apple’s approach to searching private data extends far beyond such bad actors, despite Apple’s unenforceable promise to not search for other disfavored images or data, or otherwise exploit its new methods for rummaging through your phones, iPads, and other devices. Because devices and the cloud are deeply integrated, Apple will be of necessity reaching into our phones and other devices, as well as our personal data stored on the cloud. Any time a company deploys surveillance tools that governments, institutions, and bad actors would love to exploit, there’s cause for concern about unintended consequences. It’s unknown whether Apple’s new image scanning technology can withstand the tests of overreach and criminal intent. Consider Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, who told Gizmodo: “However altruistic its motives, Apple has built an infrastructure that could be subverted for widespread surveillance of the conversations and information we keep on our phones. The CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) scanning capability could be repurposed for censorship or for identification and reporting of content that is not illegal depending on what hashes the company decides to, or is forced to, include in the matching database. For this and other reasons, it is also susceptible to abuse by autocrats abroad, by overzealous government officials at home, or even by the company itself.” The potential for illicit uses by state and non-state actors is staggering:
Can Apple’s technology truly differentiate between dangerous content and art, memes or other legal images? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) found that surveillance technologies are notoriously error-prone and difficult to audit. And even if supposedly limited to known images, that limit still depends on the whims of Apple in not adding a broader set of images or general search criteria. Consider the 2018 case of Tumblr’s faulty algorithm meant to filter adult content, which flagged images of puppies, Garfield and Big Bird, among others, as explicit content. In another case, technology originally built to scan and hash child sex abuse imagery was repurposed to create a database of “terrorist” content. What about fentanyl dealers? Gangs? White collar criminals? Folks who are pro-abortion? Or anti-abortion? Never Trumpers? Trump supporters? Once the door is open, the temptation to breach it for other supposedly altruistic, or fashionable, purposes is almost endless. Apple is on the brink of breaking its own oft-proclaimed promises of encryption and “deep commitment to user privacy.” By all appearances, the company is giving itself more knowledge of customer content and seems poised to use semantics to gloss over this dramatic departure from its stance on privacy. Why? Facebook last year reported more than 20 million cases to the Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Apple reported 265 cases. It seems Apple is, at least in part, acting out of concern that iCloud not be used as a resource for pedophiles and human traffickers. The phone company might say much the same as an excuse to wiretap and monitor all phone calls for troubling key words. The problem is, as the Center for Democracy and Technology put it, the “mechanism that will allow Apple to scan images in iMessages is not an alternative to a backdoor – it is a backdoor.” Tim Cook and his leadership team should reconsider this roll-out or at least refine their approach. Otherwise, Apple could unleash unintended consequences that will hurt that brand, as well as democracy. As Machiavelli said, “Learn the way to hell in order to steer clear of it.” In a win for surveillance reform advocates, the House Rules Committee agreed this week to allow an amendment aimed at curbing the government’s unconstitutional backdoor surveillance of Americans to proceed to a vote by the full House. This bipartisan amendment, co-sponsored by several representatives, including Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), represents one of the most tangible attempts in recent years to rein in warrantless government surveillance.
PPSA had hoped for a vote this week, but Congress did what it does best – delay. Now civil libertarians foresee a likely vote when the amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill is considered after Congress returns from its August recess. The Lofgren-Massie Amendment would prohibit funding for “backdoor searches” of the communications – calls and emails – of Americans “incidentally” caught up in surveillance of foreign targets. PPSA has supported this amendment from the beginning and recently joined 27 other civil liberties groups in signing a letter urging Congress to pass it. This is an opportunity to protect the rights of all Americans that Congress simply cannot miss. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has long provided a loophole for the government to search through the communications of Americans without a warrant. FISA gives the government wide latitude to collect information for foreign intelligence purposes in which the collection of Americans’ communications is inevitable. In practice, thousands of Americans have been subjected to warrantless surveillance simply by communicating with a foreigner. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency have been so lax in the surveillance of U.S. citizens (and other “U.S. persons”) that they were publicly rebuked by the FISA court for repeatedly ignoring court orders and the law. While the letter of the law states the purpose of 702 collection is foreign intelligence, it is becoming increasingly clear that “incidental collection” is often a primary purpose of the surveillance. Sharon Bradford Franklin of the Center for Democracy and Technology explains how this works: Current law permits the government in most cases to search through the communications collected under Section 702 to seek information about a particular U.S. person without obtaining a warrant or any other type of court approval. The government calls this practice conducting a ‘U.S. person query,’ since they are searching through or ‘querying’ collected 702 data using an identifier associated with a particular U.S. person. The NSA’s querying procedures permit the agency to conduct such queries provided that personnel have submitted a statement of facts showing that use of the U.S. person identifier as a selection term is ‘reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information,’ and the NSA’s General Counsel has approved the use of that U.S. identifier for queries. Many civil liberties advocates appropriately refer to this practice as conducting a backdoor search, because no warrant or other judicial approval is required either at the ‘front end’ when the communications are collected, or prior to searching through collected information using the U.S. person identifier. Although Congress added a requirement in 2018 for the FBI to seek court approval in a small subset of cases, this rule does not cover the vast majority of circumstances in which the FBI actually conducts U.S. person queries at the assessment state. The most recent estimate of the number of such backdoor searches by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence shows that the NSA in 2020 conducted such searches for the contents of communications more than 7,000 times, and 9,000 in each of the prior years. In a move worthy of a Hollywood accountant, this is likely an undercount as current FBI rules for example only require the agency to disclose certain queries for oversight purposes. Despite its genuine original purpose of collecting solely foreign intelligence, Section 702 has unquestionably become a way for federal law enforcement to avoid the Fourth Amendment and the requirement for probable cause and a warrant. PPSA will be alert and active over the summer in urging our supporters to tell Congress that it must pass the Lofgren-Massie Amendment and end these unconstitutional backdoor searches of U.S. citizens. |
Categories
All
|