travis leblanc – Techdirt (original) (raw)

FISA Oversight Board Member Says Americans Need More Privacy Protections As Congress Debates Section 702 Reauthorization

from the doing-the-right-thing-for-the-wrong-reasons dept

One of the NSA’s most powerful spying tools is up for renewal at the end of the year. The problem with this power isn’t necessarily the NSA. I mean, the NSA has its problems, but the issue here is the domestic surveillance performed by the FBI via this executive power — something it shouldn’t be doing but has almost always done.

The FBI is currently catching a lot of heat for its “backdoor” access to US persons’ data and communications, something it has shown little interest in controlling or tracking. Abuse is a regular occurrence and this abuse finally received some high profile attention after Congressional Republicans got bent out of shape because some of their own people ended up under the FBI’s backdoor Section 702 microscope.

So, while there’s some grandstanding going on, the underlying concerns do need to be addressed. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for allowing the FBI to continue to abuse the privilege. They re-upped the program right after Trump took office. That it’s the Republicans complaining about surveillance abuses after banding together to ensure President Trump had this power is especially ironic. But let’s not forget prominent Democrats who previously complained about surveillance abuses decided it was a good idea to vote in favor of an unaltered reauthorization.

Section 702 allows the NSA to perform “upstream” collections of data and communications. It’s foreign-facing but it also collects any communications between foreign targets and US persons. That’s where the FBI steps in. It’s only supposed to be able to access minimized data and communications, but these restrictions are often ignored by the agency.

With this power on the line, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is expressing his concern with the ongoing failure of the DOJ and FBI to get the FBI’s abuse of this surveillance power under control.

The PCLOB was formed in the wake of the Snowden leaks to advocate on behalf of Americans and their rights. The PCLOB makes the court adversarial — something it always should have been (since Americans’ rights are often implicated in surveillance requests) but never was.

Travis LeBlanc — who served in Obama’s administration but was appointed to the PCLOB by President Trump — was interviewed by the Washington Post. And he says reauthorizing Section 702 without drastic alterations would be a mistake.

“I do have concerns with a clean reauthorization,” he said, and he believes the program needs “common-sense protections that could be put in place to balance privacy and civil liberties with the national security interest.”

Specifically, the program needs constraints on the FBI’s access and use of the data collected by the NSA. For years, the FBI has abused its access to perform backdoor searches of Americans’ data. And for years, it has been unable to explain why it can’t stop violating minimization procedures and what, if anything, this unexpected, “incidental” treasure trove contributes to its law enforcement work.

LeBlanc says it’s time to add the Fourth Amendment back into the mix to put an end to this form of secondhand, warrantless surveillance.

LeBlanc also said that “it is apparent we have reached a point where the massive number of U.S. queries, in particular, warrant the use of a prior court order before allowing any search of a Section 702 collection for U.S. persons information.”

To that end, LeBlanc suggests a couple of changes. First, there’s the court order requirement. Then Congress could limit the NSA’s haystack-building apparatus by ending its “about” variables, which allow it to also search for communications that merely mention certain individuals, rather than limiting collection to those actually communicating with the agency’s targets. Finally, Congress should act to limit or forbid “batch searches” of 702 collections by the FBI, preventing it from engaging in mass violations of the Fourth Amendment courts (so far) have ruled the government should never have to answer for.

If anyone can get this done, it’s Congressional leaders motivated by personal animus and political grandstanding. An entire party is, at the moment, extremely angry at the FBI. Blatant self-interest may finally achieve what privacy advocates and activists have been seeking for several years. If the ends are going to justify the means, it may as well be these ends and those means. Some concern for the little people would be nice, but as an advocate of restricted surveillance powers, I’m willing to take what I can get.

Filed Under: 702 reform, backdoor loophole, backdoor search, civil liberties, ed snowden, fbi, nsa, pclob, section 702, surveillance, travis leblanc

AT&T Fined Yet Again For Shady Behavior, This Time For Milking Low-Income Lifeline Program

from the are-we-sensing-a-pattern-yet dept

Fri, May 1st 2015 12:11pm - Karl Bode

After a fifteen-year slumber, regulators have apparently decided it might be a good idea to start cracking down on rampant fraud in the telecom market. Not long ago, we noted how AT&T was finally fined for abusing the IP Relay network for the hearing impaired, intentionally turning a blind eye to scammers on the network just to haul in the $1.50 per minute subsidies tied to the network. AT&T strung regulators along for years, implementing “solutions” that it knew wouldn’t work but technically met flimsy FCC requirements. As a result, simply stopping AT&T from profiting off of defrauding the deaf (it’s estimated that 95% of AT&T’s IP Relay traffic at one point was credit card or other scammers) only took regulators the better part of two decades.

Last year, regulators finally cracked down on AT&T for helping scammers of a different sort: crammers. Crammers had been gouging AT&T customers for most of the last decade, charging them $10 a month for garbage “premium” text messaging, horoscopes and other un-asked-for detritus. There again, AT&T intentionally turned a blind eye to the criminal behavior, in large part because the company was netting around 35% of the proceeds from the scams. Worse perhaps, regulators found AT&T was actively making its bills harder to understand so the fraud would be more difficult to detect.

This month, the FCC has announced that it has struck a settlement with AT&T and former subsidiary SNET, over charges the companies were collecting undeserved subsidies under the agency’s “Lifeline” program, a low-income community subsidy effort created by the Reagan administration in 1985 and expanded by Bush in 2005. According to the FCC’s findings, AT&T apparently “forgot” to audit its Lifeline subscriber rolls and purge them of non-existent or no-longer-eligible customers, allowing it to continue taking taxpayer money from a fund intended to aid the poor:

“AT&T and SNET?s failure to remove ineligible Lifeline customers from their rolls was discovered in 2013 during an FCC audit of two AT&T Lifeline affiliates. The audit found that a number of Lifeline subscribers who no longer qualified for the program had not been de-enrolled following the annual recertification process for 2012 and 2013, a process in which consumers are required to certify their continued eligibility for Lifeline. These subscribers were given one extra month of Lifeline support, and AT&T improperly claimed reimbursement from the government for this extra month. Additionally, the Enforcement Bureau found other de-enrollment and recordkeeping violations.”

The FCC announcement goes well out of its way to avoid calling this fraud, but unless you believe AT&T honestly forgot to purge its rolls (pretty difficult to do in full context of AT&T’s historical behavior), it’s hard to call it anything but. The FCC doesn’t specify how great the discrepancy was, but given the speed at which AT&T has been backing away from unwanted DSL and phone markets, the revised differences likely aren’t modest. This latest fine comes as AT&T is busy trying to convince the government that there’s an endless parade of amazing benefits to be had by letting AT&T acquire DirecTV, effectively eliminating a competitor from the pay TV space.

Historically, telecom regulators love slam dunk cases against small scammers, but were willfully oblivious or too timid to acknowledge the larger players’ culpability. With regulators no longer napping in regards to obvious fraud by bigger telecom players like AT&T, companies have unsurprisingly started grumbling that Travis LeBlanc, Chief of the FCC?s Enforcement Bureau, is being too hard on industry and therefore not actually curbing bad behavior:

“Two telecom-industry advocates complained that LeBlanc has been successful at grabbing headlines, but less effective at actually curbing bad behavior. By not being lenient on companies that self-report violations, he is discouraging future companies from coming forward, they said. “The FCC’s new approach will discourage cooperation and self-disclosure, and it’s going to force regulatees to beef up on litigation instead of compliance with the rules,” one industry lobbyist said. “Ultimately, that’s a poor use of resources for taxpayers, and it will lead to a worse result for consumers.”

Yes, doing the bare minimum to prevent AT&T from ripping off taxpayers and consumers is just an atrocious affront to taxpayers and consumers.

While overreach is certainly possible, most of the stuff LeBlanc is cracking down on is either outright fraud, or the kind of enforcement that’s hard to seriously cry foul about (like fining companies for failing to report 911 outages or airing porn during prime time). By and large, LeBlanc appears to be following the lead of FCC boss Tom Wheeler, breaking FCC tradition and actually standing up to large telecom companies. If there’s a place LeBlanc (former aide to California AG Kamala Harris) may overreach, it’s as the FCC begins using newfound Title II authority to re-examine broadband privacy rules.

For the moment, however, it’s just interesting to see the FCC no longer turning a blind eye to scams and fraud when the country’s biggest telecom campaign contributors are involved, even if the fines being levied are likely a small fraction of the total money AT&T has made off of a decade of very shady behavior.

Filed Under: fcc, fines, lifeline, scam, travis leblanc
Companies: at&t