Under CISPA, anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus - meaning most, if not all, computers - would be subject to having their information released. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

For the second year in a row, activists have successfully defeated a proposal to allow Internet companies to provide customers’ private information to government agencies and each other without risking violation of privacy laws and agreements.

The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), HR 624, passed the U.S. House on Apr. 18 in a 288-127 vote. Most Republicans and just under half of Democrats supported the measure."While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader." -- ACLU's Michelle Richardson

CISPA had been referred to the Senate Intelligence Committee, but the Senate was unable to support the House version and had yet to come up with its own proposal.

CISPA is not expected to resurface again as a single comprehensive bill on cybersecurity, but will likely be taken up as multiple pieces of legislation dealing with different aspects of cybersecurity.

President Barack Obama announced his opposition to, and threatened to veto, CISPA, both before the House Committee vote and again after it.

“The Administration still seeks additional improvements and if the bill, as currently crafted, were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill,” the White House wrote in a policy statement dated Apr. 16.

“Importantly, the Committee removed the broad national security exemption, which significantly weakened the restrictions on how this information could be used by the government,” the White House wrote.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that is one of several improvements – although, in the group’s opinion, still inadequate – that were made to the bill in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

As for the purposes for which the information could be released or used, “They had this catch-all, for national security purposes, that wasn’t defined. Based on how the government has defined national security in the past, with the Patriot Act, we thought that was a very big loophole, so they sort of struck that out altogether,” Michelle Richardson, legislative counsel for the ACLU, told IPS.

The White House echoed many of the same concerns raised by such advocacy groups as the ACLU, the Campaign for Liberty, Demand Progress, Democrats.com, a progressive organisation not affiliated with the Democratic Party, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as the Libertarian Party of the U.S.

Demand Progress sent out a petition to its 1.5 million members and around 200,000 signed a petition opposing CISPA, co-founder David Segal told IPS. Demand Progress is a civil liberties advocacy group co-founded in 2010 by Segal and the late Aaron Swartz.

Swartz is an Internet activist who committed suicide in January 2013 after being threatened with federal prison time for releasing copywrite-protected academic journal articles from the website JSTOR to the public for free.

Demand Progress first began organising in 2010 around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), two other bills dealing with government regulation of online freedom that were defeated in January 2012.

However, Segal says there has been a crucial difference between the organising efforts around SOPA and PIPA, which had to do with the government’s ability to block certain websites, and CISPA, which has to do with the government’s ability to obtain private information.

“The opposition to SOPA was so severe, we haven’t had to worry for the last year. This one [CISPA], the military-industrial complex, corporations, including web platforms that were against SOPA, are for CISPA, explicitly or tacitly,” Segal said, referring to companies like Amazon.com and Google.

“Those platforms, for the most part, are not opposing CISPA, or are supporting it. It gives them greater immunity from users if they share users’ information with the government,” he said.

The ACLU noted additional improvements were made to the bill in House committee, but still called it “scary”.

“They did say that the government does need to promulgate minimisation procedures, the idea that there would be an overarching set of rules to limit the sharing and use of personal data,” Richardson said.

“It’s also fixed to say as far as private is concerned, if you receive information from another company, you can only use it for cybersecurity purposes. They could have used it for marketing, or sold it to data-brokers,” she said.

Even with the changes, the CISPA proposal was “really scary because cybersecurity truly does affect us all. While the bill’s sponsors talk about China hacking in or a terrorist organisation taking down the grid, they’re writing legislation that’s much broader and encompassing bad acts on the Internet, phishing scams, and malware,” she said.

Anybody whose computer became targeted by a virus – meaning most, if not all, computers – would be subject to having their information released.

“I have started those Viagra [spam] emails, I keep getting through my work account. You could get a Nigerian Prince [scam] email. You’re on Facebook and there’s those viruses that say, ‘Oh my God, you have to watch these videos.’ All of these are everyday, just basic crimes, all of those things also implicated by this bill,” she said.

Richardson said that because the proposed law did not mandate that private companies turn over the information – and instead only provided legal protections for companies that would choose to voluntarily do so – the bill was an attempt to circumvent the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, which protects U.S. citizens from warrantless searches and seizures.

The ACLU further outlines their concerns regarding CISPA in a series of blog posts.

Segal also has raised concerns about the recent bombing in Boston, Massachusetts, being used by some as a backdrop to rush CISPA through Congress with little or no public debate.

“Some number of people who supported the legislation were invoking the bombings. It was up for a vote anyway, it was pre-scheduled. Some people were swayed to vote for it, because of the atmospherics of the bombing and they were called by other people in Congress,” Segal said.

A ScanEagle UAV sits on a catapult in Iraq prior to launch. Credit: public domain

By George Gao
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 26 2013 (IPS)

On the long meadows of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York, a man pilots an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) – more commonly referred to as drones – in figure eights to the amusement of his Labrador.

A few miles north on the other side of the East River, U.N. delegates mull over a more serious idea for drones – their deployment, for surveillance purposes, into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Drones are a generative technology – a carte blanche platform that inspires a variety of functions, shaped by the actors who wield them. Among other applications, drones are used to gather data from hurricanes, deliver humanitarian aid packages in areas of conflict, fight fires, map territories for conservation, launch hellfire missiles and gather intelligence.

Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, told IPS that privacy issues surrounding the use of drones are also limiting the technology’s constructive potential.

Surveillance drones in the U.S.

“In the U.S., it is a core principle that the government does not invade people’s privacy and collect information about their innocent activities just in case they do something wrong,” explained Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“Surveillance drones certainly have the technological capacity to surreptitiously collect information about all of us, even when we are not suspected of a crime,” Bohm told IPS.

According to Bohm, U.S. courts are currently debating the constitutionality of drone technologies, since there are no binding laws governing their use. “Our privacy laws currently are not strong enough to ensure that this new technology will be used consistently with our democratic values,” she said.

However, “congress has required the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to open domestic airspace to drones in 2014”, she added, noting that the Department of Homeland Security has already started domestic drone programmes, such as in Oklahoma.

Calo, an expert on issues surrounding robotics and privacy, predicted that the visceral reactions people have in response to surveillance drones will lead the government to re-examine the adequacy of U.S. privacy laws.

“The issue with drone surveillance is that it is cheaper than previous forms of aerial surveillance, which rely on planes and helicopters that are expensive to purchase, maintain and operate.

“Whenever surveillance becomes cheaper or easier, you tend to see more of it,” he explained.

Psychological toll of constant surveillance

Unwelcome mental states such as fear and anxiety often stem from the belief that one is being watched or monitored, argues Calo in his essay entitled “The Boundaries of Privacy Harm”.

“There are studies suggesting, among other things, that people experience discomfort buying certain items with a camera present,” he told IPS.

“People are sometimes less creative when observed and have trouble accomplishing complex tasks,” he added.

When asked what the psychological effects that U.N. surveillance drones in the DRC may have on the civilians they fly over, Calo said, “I think the effects could be quite disconcerting.”

Drones in the DRC

The U.N. was not the first to think of flying drones in the DRC. Biologists Lian Pin Koh and Serge Wich, co-founders of conservationdrones.org, fly low-cost drones over a variety of countries to gather data for research and conservation purposes.

“In December 2012, our team brought a conservation drone to Odzala National Park in the Congo as part of an initiative by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Netherlands to explore the potential of drones for detecting poachers,” Koh, an assistant professor of applied ecology and conservation at ETH Zürich, told IPS.

“We are currently working with others to develop a long-distance telemetry system for video and control over the plane. This will make it much more usable to detect poachers from a distance and react faster,” added Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University.

“We have had no experience with people firing at it from the ground, but when flying at 150 (metres) high, they are quite small and hard to see and probably hard to shoot out of the sky with an AK-47,” said Wich.

“But none of those (projects) are in a phase that we can determine success yet. That will take some time,” he noted.

While presenting at the 2012 Fuller Symposium on Conservation Crime in Washington, D.C., Koh said, “One of the concerns Serge and I have been talking about is what would happen if these low-cost drones get into the wrong hands.

“It might be the case that poachers start using these drones to start looking for valuable wildlife that they can then go after,” he warned.

“Governments will have to start coming up with legislations of who is allowed and not allowed to fly these drones and under what conditions,” he added.

André-Michel Essoungou, U.N. public affairs officer at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Field Support, told IPS, “If and when we were to use UAVs, on a trial basis in the DRC, the usual procedures and consultations with legislative bodies will be respected.

“Ultimately, the use of UAVs will be done only in full cooperation with the government of the DRC. And to introduce them, we would need the support of member states to equip the mission,” he said.

San Diego Veterans for Peace demonstrate weekly near General Atomics against domestic and military drones. Credit: Dave Patterson/IPS

By Judith Scherr
OAKLAND, California, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Better known as drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles piloted by military in the U.S. hunt and kill suspected enemy combatants abroad. Now the drones are coming home to beef up local law enforcement.

But people across the U.S. are pushing back, contending that domestic drones could invade personal privacy or chill free speech by monitoring political activities.

“They want to use it for intelligence gathering – that’s spying,” Linda Lye of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union told media at a hastily called press conference Dec. 4 outside the Alameda County administration building in downtown Oakland.

That morning, the Alameda County sheriff’s request for the Alameda County Board of Supervisors’ acceptance of Homeland Security grant funds for a drone was almost buried in a 66-item meeting agenda.

But when the Northern California ACLU – a member of Alameda County Against Drones – learned of the sheriff’s request, they called the press conference to expose a process they said ignored the community. The sheriff subsequently removed his request from the agenda.

And so, rather than a cursory board review, the supervisors’ Public Protection Committee will hold a comprehensive discussion on the drone question in January.

“Public policy should not be made by stealth attack,” Lye said, calling for debate on “the important questions of whether a drone is even appropriate in our community and if so, what safeguards should be in place before we buy a drone.”

Speakers at the press conference pointed to special circumstances in Oakland that call for protection against law enforcement abuse.

“When we see in the (sheriff’s Jul. 20 application to Homeland Security) that the drones could be used for large crowd control, naturally everybody thinks of Occupy Oakland,” said Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to alleged police abuse of Occupy activists.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Department is just one of many law enforcement agencies across the country lining up for free money for drones from Homeland Security. They often point to popular uses for the technology, such as searching for missing children or escaped convicts.

But those concerned with privacy issues note that the technology allows drones to peer through walls and ceilings, monitor cell phone calls and texts, read license plates, recognise faces and record a person’s every move.

Some domestic drones, like the ShadowHawk acquired by Monterey, Texas, are able to carry “less lethal” weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets.

As the Afghanistan war winds down, the defence industry is intensifying its push for domestic drones, which Susan Aluise, writing in investorplace.com, calls the “next market opportunity”.

“Just when you think the (drone) market cannot go any higher, it does,” says Forecast International’s unmanned vehicles analyst Larry Dickerson, quoted on the Defense Professionals website. “No matter how many systems are built, operators want more.”

Dickerson estimates the industry’s value over the next decade at 70.9 billion dollars, with the civilian market worth 600 million to one billion dollars.

The industry is fueled by a 60-person congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus whose members have pocketed some eight million dollars in drone-related campaign contributions over the past four years, according to a Hearst Newspaper and Center for Responsive Politics investigation.

Citizens concerned with drone misuse are lobbying local officials. Buffalo, New York and Portland, Oregon activists want their city governments to ban drones entirely from airspace above the city.

Syracuse, New York petitioners are calling for an ordinance that “declares Syracuse and its airspace to be a SURVEILLANCE DRONE FREE ZONE wherein such drones are banned from airspace over the City of Syracuse until Federal legislation is adopted that adequately protects the population as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”

San Diego Veterans for Peace and their allies take their protest each Thursday to a busy corner near General Atomics, the manufacturer of Predator and Reaper drones.

“The technology’s not going to go away; we want oversight,” said VFP activist Dave Patterson, whose sign reads, “G.A. drones surveil America. Is that OK?”

Like Alameda County, Buffalo, Syracuse, Portland and San Diego don’t have drones.

Seattle does – but they’re not deployed, except for training missions. Like activists in Alameda County, Seattle residents were unaware when Seattle police initially pursued a Homeland Security grant for the drones.

They also were unaware of their delivery in 2010. The Seattle City Council and community learned of the drones in April of this year, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation uncovered the 82,500-dollar acquisition through a freedom of information request.

Police insist they did not keep the drones a secret, but concede they could have kept the public better informed.

Alerted to the acquisition, the ACLU of Washington sounded the alarm, saying in an April press release that, while drones could have valid domestic uses, they also “provide an unprecedented ability for the government to engage in surveillance of the activities of law-abiding people.”

Seattle Councilmember Bruce Harrell, chair of the Public Safety, Civil Rights and Technology Committee, said at a meeting in May that he was concerned that “the federal government is coming in making funds available through Homeland Security…and basically getting into the city’s business.”

In a recent phone interview with IPS, Seattle City Council President Sally Clark said if she had discretion over the grant funds, she’d opt to spend the money on city priorities, such as paying for an additional police officer.

Seattle’s Public Safety Committee will take up drone regulation in January. Harrell told IPS he’d like the law to restrict use of the drone to monitoring specific individuals named in a warrant, rather than allowing general surveillance. He said he’d like the law to require an officer with the rank of sergeant or above to authorise drone missions, and he wants public logs kept for each drone deployment.

He said the drones won’t fly until regulations are in place. Moreover, he said the council “put a requirement in our budget for next year, 2013, that there be no more purchases of drones.”