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>> Thank you all so much for coming to spend 45 minutes with the ACLU. We appreciate it
a lot. This year there are not Q&A rooms. So, we hope that those of you that want to
continue the conversation will come to our table in the vendor room. Where you can become
members or renew your membership, get our new DEFcon special edition ACLU 4th Amendment
T-shirts. We would love to see you there. My name is Ben Wisner. I direct our national
project on speech privacy and technology. The women and men at the table with me work
on surveillance, national security, technology, privacy, both in our national office and in
some of our affiliate sites around the country. When we heard that the NSA had been disinvited
from Defcon this year, we kind of scratche dour heads a little. Because since when has
the NSA needed to be invited. We had planned to do a review that we were going to call
"Year in Surveillance" and talk to you about the breadth and scope of the work that we
do on privacy and surveillance. Then, Ed Snowden got on a plane to Hong Kong and really changed
everything. So, maybe we should give him a hand.
(Applause) What he revealed is something that many of
us were anxious about,, knew about, had worried about for years. Which is, that the NSA's
strategy has been to collect everything and worry about the law later. That as technology
has developed; as the cost off collection and storage has gone down, the NSA has begun
to construct the most comprehensive surveillance time machine ever created.
then that hope that the law could be twisted in order to justify what it was already doing.
I feel it's a cliche that the law has not kept pace with technology. We believe that
Americans' privacy should be protected by constitutional law, not by Moore's law.
(Applause). So my colleagues here are going to talk briefly.
There's five of them, we only have 45 minutes and we do hope to have time for a couple questions
to give you a taste of the kind of work that we are doing with regard to NSA surveillance
and we hope that many of you will join us at our table. We also have one of the parties
tonight on the public crawl, Party Like It's 1986, that is ACLU humor, so we hope to see
you all more later. And to kick us off, this is Alex Abdo from
our national security project. >> ALEX ABDO: Hi, everyone, and thanks so
much for coming. So I want to talk just for a few minutes about the prison program which
was revealed a couple months ago by Ed Snowden, but before I get to the PRISM program I want
to talk about what there was before the PRISM program and what we were doing beforehand
because it's a really fascinating change of events in the last two months.
In 2008 Congress passed the most sweeping surveillance statute that Congress has ever
passed, called FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And it begins the NSA and the government's
unfettered access to America's international communications. We challenged the law at the
time because we didn't think that the fact that someone is communicating internationally
means they should sacrifice the right to privacy. That in today's interconnected world you can't
often control the way your packets are scurried around the world, and your right to privacy
shouldn't depend on the paths they take and the frames you choose to associate with.
We brought that challenge in 2008, and for the next five years we didn't litigate the
merits of whether the government could collect our international communications. We spent
five years debating with the government whether our clients were allowed to sue. And our clients
were lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees and people who worked in areas of the world
where there was significant violence and terrorism interests on the part of the U.S. Government
and journalists who reported on those areas, the very source of people who would find themselves
trapped in the international NSA dragnet. And for that reason, these individuals we
claimed as our clients took significant measures to protect the confidentiality of their communications.
Some of those ethical obligations to do so, others just thought it was good professional
responsibility. Despite that fact, the government argued that
we couldn't sue unless our clients could prove that their communications were surveilled.
And if you know anything about the NSA, you know that's a vicious Catch‑22. Nonetheless,
the government prevailed in front of the Supreme Court in February in a decision, 5‑4 decision,
holding that the government's most sweeping surveillance statute ever enacted is essentially
immune from judicial review unless the NSA, in its benevolence, chooses to show who they're
surveilling. I don't recommend you hold your breath.
That all changed two months ago when Ed Snowden revealed the existence of the prison program.
And the prison program is one verse of the implementation of the FISA Act. It's one way
the government conducts international surveillance, but he was governed by the statute in state,
and some of the most important disclosures, what the government uses to select its targets
and to protect the privacy in theory of Americans who find themselves ensnared in the international
dragnet. And having seen those procedures now, we know that they never should have been
secret in the first instance, but they reveal a number of really critically important things
about the way the government conducts its surveillance.
The government's main defense, as you can read in the news about the prison program,
is that it's a program directed at foreigners, not Americans. And I think that's an extraordinarily
misleading defensive program. When the government was pushing for the passage of this Act, actually
to a predecessor of the statute, it learned that some of the communications of most interest
to the NSA were the ones that had one terminus in the United States. And you could imagine
for obvious reasons why that would be the case, but the government used the fact that
Americans were communicating internationally essentially to bootstrap away their rights
to privacy. So even though foreigners have to be the target, Americans' intelligence
is swept into that. Because the government calls the collection
of Americans' communications insignificant, you might think they would treat them incidental
and delete them. America is allowed to keep communications for five years in any event
and indefinitely if any of a number of sweeping exceptions apply. One of the exceptions, by
the way, is if the information is encrypted. So ironically, as we are now seeing a push
in the industry for a greater use of HTTPS and encrypted communications, we are actually
handing the NSA more authority to retain those communications indefinitely until a time that
they can decrypt them if they can't already. The second big problem with the government's
targeting of foreigners is that it presumes its targets are foreign unless it has a reason
to believe otherwise, which is a really bizarre way of going about it, if you can imagine.
So if the government has any doubt as to where you are and they don't have any positive indication
you're an American, they'll treat you as a foreigner and targetable, and they'll retain
your communications even if they later discover that they were wrong. So they think you're
a foreigner, it turns out you're not, but they keep your communications anyway. And
you can imagine the types of services available digitally now that would give the government
the doubt they need about your foreignness that allow them to keep their communications.
You can think of TOR and MTM communications. The government's defense of the prison program
says the program is supposedly limited to foreign intelligence information which is
this phrase they bandy about which has little meaning. It includes things as broad as the
foreign affairs of the United States, which essentially makes a target out of everyone
who is a foreigner. And we know that in part because the procedures that were released
by Ed Snowden confirmed that two of the broadest factors the government relies on in determining
whether someone is exchanging foreign intelligence information, are one, if you're communicating
with a foreigner; and two, if your phone number or e‑mail address appears in a foreigner's
contact book. And the end result of these two rules and the presumption that you are
a foreigner is that virtually every international communication is susceptible to NSA surveillance.
And they can keep those communications even if they later discover that you're an American.
Just two quick additional points and then I'll hand it over.
First, the government is not actually limited to directing its surveillance at targets.
It can direct its surveillance at third parties to collect information about its targets.
And it can do so using ID filtering and country code filtering. And the example I think that's
been thrown out is that they might decide that Osama Bin Laden is a target and then
decide to ID filter Internet traffic going into and out of Pakistan as their filter and
collect everything. So the prison program allows the government to do broad geographic
surveillance in a way that ensures countless rights to privacy are intruded upon.
And secondly, the government considers that any extensive use of a IP range or cryptographic
service by foreigners allows the NSA to start that IP range or cryptographic. If there's
something used extensively by foreigners, who knows what that means. In terms of terrorists,
there's not so many terrorists, we hope, if they are using TOR. The government might collect
everything going over TOR to allow traffic analysis and later encryption. The irony is
that those who seek to protect the sensitivity of their communications the most are engaging
in communications that are born targetable whether or not the government has any specific
reason to collect those individuals' communications. I think there's an easy fix to this problem,
but maybe we can discuss that later, and I'll hand it over for now with that teaser.
>> CATHERINE CRUMP: I'm Kathleen Crump. I've been at the ACLU about eight years and I've
been primarily litigating challenges to government surveillance programs and that length of time
has given me perspective on this. The government has been saying if American people knew actually
what was going on with some of the NSA‑related spying programs they would be outraged, but
there was no way to have an honest conversation about what was happening until just recently
when Edward Snowden showed these programs. There's information about the programs that
it can be often difficult to figure out what the specific programs are and what they're
doing. So Alex talked about the prison program, and now I want to spend a few minutes talking
about the NSA's domestic collection of all metadata, why the we need to rein in surveillance.
We know now by reporting by Edward Snowden, that the U.S. is collecting all telephony
metadata. It's going to the secret court in Washington, D.C. and it seems every three
months it gets an order authorizing it to collect telephony data from all major U.S.
data companies. Every day every telephone call you make, every telephone call you receive
and how long those telephone calls last get handed over to the government. This is true
for domestic communications, this is not about international communications, and I think
sometimes in some of the government's counter messaging that fact is being lost.
The government has also tried to argue that metadata isn't sensitive and that made the
point, for example, we're just getting telephone numbers, we're not getting anyone's name,
but I think the people in this room certainly see the flaw in that argument without anyone
having to point it out. It's not just the government is getting this information, it's
that they're also storing the metadata going back five years, so that's really a truly
vast amount of information about all of the communications all of us engage in.
So what is the government doing with this information? Whenever the government says
whenever it has a reasonable articulable suspicion, there's a telephone number, for example, associated
with terrorism, it can query this database to that number and track communication that
hops out three, the telephone number that calls the telephone number that calls the
telephone number. It's sweeping data. If a person has, for example, 40 telephone numbers
in that phone, that can sweep in as many as 2.5 million phone numbers. This, by the way,
is being approved on an individual basis by a court. The FISA court has approved that
general problematic approach, but there's no supervision of individual pieces of surveillance
along the way. I want to step back for a second and talk
about what a major paradigm shift this is. As Alex said, this is about collecting it
all. We haven't lived in a world where everything we say or do is capable of being recorded,
but now that's the world we live in, and that's exactly what's happening when it comes to
metadata. The government's argument is that it essentially doesn't implicate a privacy
interest for the government to merely collect the data. That only happens when you look
at it. But I think having a record of essentially everyone you call can have a real chilling
effect on who people are willing to communicate with.
The standard under which the government says ‑‑ what is the government's legal argument here?
The government is relying on a section called 215 of the Patriot Act which says it is authorized
to collect information that is relevant to certain types of investigations, generally
foreign intelligence or terrorism investigations. And on that relevance definition, the government
has argued that every single phone call all Americans make are under that definition relevant.
Now, that's a pretty broad and sweeping definition of relevance, one we haven't really seen before,
and I think it poses an interesting conundrum too in the area of big data.
Does the fact ‑‑ if it is true to understand the one piece of data you need to understand
the entire universe, does that make a piece of data relevant? The UCLA doesn't object
to the problem, I think it raises real problems. One of the first orders disclosed about the
court giving the government access to this information dealt with Verizon Business Network
Services, which is pretty startling to us, because do you know who provides the ACLU's
telephone communications? Verizon Business Network Services. And we sat in our office
and talked about all the people who called us, right? All the whistle blowers who call
us, seeking legal help or protection. Everyone who calls our offices for help for reproductive
services or reporting any number of abuses, and you can see some real problems with the
idea that all of this information is being monitored and logged by the government and
because we think that poses a real theft to the long‑standing right of Americans to
be able to associate with one another, and also our Fourth Amendment freedom to be free
from unreasonable searches and seizures. We filed a suit in the court, and we asked
the court to enjoin the government from engaging in this mass collection program and also to
delete all of the data from the ACLU in this because we know that it's sitting in a database,
every phone call we've made for the last five years. The court has scheduled a briefing
schedule for the ‑‑ going through the fall. There's an argument in November, and
so hopefully by the time we're all back here next year we'll be able to report a little
more. (Applause).
>> I don't know if any of you had the privilege to hear Chris Soghoian this morning in the
Penn and Teller room. (Applause).
>> I made the mistake of getting there 5 to 12, and you all had the seats already. So
next up, Chris Soghoian. >> CHRISTOPHER SOGHOIAN: Hi, everyone. I'm
the principal technologist with our technology project and technology team. I joined last
fall. For those of you who caught my talk earlier, the FBI is now in the hacking business.
If you didn't catch the talk, hopefully the video will be available at some point.
I want to talk ‑‑ for the few minutes I have, I want to talk about how the government
spies. There are not enough FBI agents to follow every person. There are not enough
NSA employees to read everyone's e‑mail or to go and directly acquire everyone's communications.
The government doesn't have the resources to directly monitor every American or let
alone every foreigner. But they want to read the communications of every foreigner and
they wants to be able to collect information about every American. And so they have this
problem, particularly for dragnet style searches, where you want to do a key word search or
you want to do social network analysis, you need everyone's communications.
What do you do when you don't have the manpower to collect everyone's communications? You
deputized telephone and Internet companies, in some cases with their willing assistance,
and in other cases against their will, but you force these companies to help out. Sometimes
paying helps to get them to agree. One of the documents Edward Snowden released was
a 2009 Inspector General Report of the NSA showing payments were made to telecommunication
companies to get them to participate in some of the domestic metadata programs. $100 million
goes a long way when you're buying the goodwill of companies who are going out of their way
to help the government with its mission. So I want to talk about the role these companies
play. Every Internet company, every telephone company
has a team of people who do nothing but respond to surveillance requests. And I'm not going
to talk about how many requests they get because my colleague Nicky will be talking about that,
but I want to emphasize these companies provide assistance that enable surveillance that wouldn't
be possible without their help. There would not be a 215 metadata program without the
willing assistance of AT&T and Verizon and reportedly Sprint. It simply wouldn't be possible.
There wouldn't be a program of monitoring the communications of foreigners talking to
Americans if the NSA couldn't get the undersea cable operators to provide access to the communications
that are flowing through fiber optic cables. One with a foreigner, and one end with an
American, or both foreigners and passing through the United States. The NSA program depends
upon American communications companies. What's good is communications have shifted
in the last few years from telephone companies to Internet companies. We're starting to see
companies that aren't as happy about being deputized. We're starting to see companies
that are deploying crypto, whether it's HTPS, to protect data over the wire, or in some
cases end‑to‑end crypto, and what it's doing is making dragnet available.
I don't think we'll be able to put the government out of surveillance. I would like to personally,
but I don't think we'll get there, but I think we could make dragnet surveillance impossible.
We just have to raise the cost. We have to make it difficult enough to target one person
that they simply don't have the resources to collect everyone's communications. Crypto
can help us get there. Moving from companies that say yes to dragnet requests to companies
that only say yes to targeted requests can help too. But I really think we need to be
thinking not about making it impossible for the government but making it expensive.
Chris Rock has this joke in which he says he believes guns should be legal and bullets
a million dollars apiece. And I think surveillance should be expensive, too, but right now the
cost of surveillance is too damn low. Thank you very much.
(Applause). >> NICOLE OZER: Hi, everyone, I'm Nicole Ozer,
I'm the policy director for the ACLU of California, so nice to be back with you today. I want
to take a bigger picture for a moment to understand just how Edward Snowden's impact has rippled
out much farther than NSA spying, much farther than the docs he released or the revelations,
or just to give everyone a sense of just how important these revelations have been to getting
out the truth about what's really happening and ongoing efforts by the ACLU and other
organizations to really reestablish some desperately needed and long overdue balance between government
surveillance and all our personal privacy. So Edward Snowden's actions, in terms of giving
us a sense of what the NSA has been doing, has finally given us all a real first information
on just how often, as Chris was talking about, that the government from the lowest levels
of police on the street to all the way up to the highest echelon of the U.S.A., how
often the government is taking advantage of laws from the 1980s, outdated privacy laws
that haven't been updated since the 1980s from when the web existed, from when our cellphones
were the size of bricks and no one would imagine people would store e‑mail for longer than
six months. And they've been taking advantage of these outdated laws and things that really
haven't been properly reconsidered for decades to engage in what we have known for a long
time to be a largely unsupervised shopping spree in the treasure trove of data that online
companies are collecting every day about who each of us are, where we go on a daily basis,
who we know, what our concerns are, our habits, our hobbies, and are keeping that for extremely
long periods of time. The ACLU first really started to sound the
alarm about the sort of surveillance industrial complex that had been growing and growing
largely in the dark way back a decade ago in 2003. We knew for a long time that this
was happening, that the government was really reaching into these treasure troves and largely
getting at this data without a warrant, without a judge's permission, but we never had the
facts. The government doesn't need to tell the American people how often they're demanding
electronic communications, they're being held by these companies. Unlike the fact they have
to report how many wiretaps they issue, they're not required by law to do that, so they weren't
doing it, no surprise. And the companies weren't very interested in telling us either how many
times the government was knocking on their door asking for really personal data about
people. They didn't really want to give us pause and wonder and worry, are we really
having sort of a three‑way conversation every time we e‑mail a friend or pick up
the phone? So we knew it was happening, but the facts
just weren't there. The companies largely didn't want to come forward and the government
didn't want to ‑‑ didn't want to give us this information voluntarily. But post‑PRISM,
a lot of what we had known for a long time was confirmed. The companies, in an attempt
to actually defend themselves against being surveilled said they had been given a back
door to the government; and to actually try and assuage the fears of the public, many
of them for the first time released transparency reports that gave some contours of just how
many demands were coming from local law enforcement all the way up the pike.
We had some companies, like Google and Twitter, come forward with these reports before, but
post‑PRISM, was the first time that folks like Yahoo and Apple and Facebook actually
came out with this information as well. And it really confirms what we had long known,
that tens of thousands of requests are coming into these companies, you know, just in a
six‑month basis that is affecting 80, 90, 100,000 different accounts.
And if you think about all the information that Google might have in a particular account,
it may be tons and tons of e‑mails and photos, sort of the whole range of data. So we know
from some of the reports, Google and Twitter are actually doing a break‑down of how many
of these demands are actually coming with a warrant and how many of these demands are
actually just coming with a subpoena which a judge has often never seen. And as we expected,
subpoenas are sort of much take the bulk of these things.
You know, Twitter recently reported just a couple of days ago that 56% of the demands
for the government are subpoenas. Only 23% are warrants with probable cause. And Google
has gotten over 5,000 demands that are subpoena demands just in the past six months that accounts
for over 10,000‑plus accounts of people. So we're finally starting to see a glimpse
into how often the government is demanding this information, which finally gives us some
of the facts to talk to Congress about how important it truly is to update these laws
and make sure that they do keep pace with the technology that we're all living in, the
fact that we are living our lives online, and the government shouldn't be able to reach
in and spy on that personal information without having a very good reason and going to a judge
and explaining it. Thank you. (Applause).
>> So we have one more speaker, we have 15 minutes, we probably will have time for a
couple of questions. So maybe while my colleague Kade Crockford is speaking, if someone of
you want to gather at the microphones, we'll try to take a bunch of questions at once and
use the last couple minutes to answer questions. >> KADE CROCKFORD: I'm Kade Crockford, I work
as the director of technology in Massachusetts. To explain what I'm going to talk about, over
the past years we've seen a shift in the relationship between the governed and the government, and
that is marked by two really problematic features, one of them is that now we're basically guilty
until proven innocent as these bulk records collections programs demonstrate, and the
second is that, you know, the way a democracy works is the government is transparent and
people have privacy from the government. Unfortunately, that situation has been radically flipped,
so now the government is incredibly secretive, as we know, about these surveillance policies,
as well as even about the law in some cases, and the government, if it wants to know nearly
everything about us, even if it doesn't have articulable situation, probable cause, show
evidence to a judge, all of the sort of, you know, traditional American norms of justice.
Having to frame the conversation in that way, I just want to talk very briefly about how
some little brothers have sprung up over the past 12 years.
We've heard a lot about Big Brother and the surveillance by corporations, but also the
Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice have over the past 12 years given
billions and billions of dollars to state and local law enforcement to build up a robust
police militarized presence. They have done this by funding the procurement of things
like electronic fingerprint readers at state and local police departments nationwide, face
technologies, as well as automatic license plates readers. Can I get a show of hands
how many people know what that is? Great, you're awesome. We put out a huge report on
this, actually, you can see it at ACLU.org/plates. Basically, what we found is the state and
local police departments as well as private corporations are operating under the same
methodology as NSA, they want it all, they want to collect records of what everyone has
driven, going back even months or years. We found regulations are all over the map. There
are only five states that have laws on the books about this technology. Every other state
it's up to the local police departments to decide how long they want to keep records
where everyone has driven. Right now, as I'm sure you know, these cameras are not as ubiquitous
as surveillance cameras, but they will become that ubiquitous. I'm sure in the next 20 years
these cameras will be on every police cruiser in urban sections. It's a situation where
the government will be able to track our driving habits retroactively for however long they
keep this information. So I also just want to tell you very quickly
about ‑‑ okay. On the license plate reader tip, private companies, there are these private
companies, one of which is called Vigilance Solutions. It maintains a database of the
national driver's license service. It has one billion discrete license plates, actually
more than that, those are slightly dated figures I'm working off of, and that information is
accessible not only to state and local law enforcement as well as FBI, immigration, customs
enforcement, likely the U.S. military, but other private companies, insurance companies,
repo men, tow truck drivers. So, you know, the corollary between the NSA's
surveillance and collusion with Google and state and local cops colluding with companies
like Vigilant Solutions is a very serious problem, like again, as my colleagues have
said, in the vast majority of cases state legislatures have not really stepped up to
the plate to deal with. And so that's some of the work that we're trying to do in the
states, is to pass discrete legislation that would, for example, ban the police from retaining
this data for a long time. You know, the ACLU, Chris maybe is the one
exception to this, but the ACLU as an organization does not oppose law enforcement surveillance
if they go to the judge and get a probable cause warrant, right? There are murderers
in the world, there are rapists. People do bad things. If there's evidence to show somebody
is involved in criminal activity then, you know, the judge should give the cops a warrant
to invade that person's privacy. I personally don't like it either but I think it's a reasonable ‑‑
it's a reasonable balance to strike between privacy and security.
But we're seeing a really ‑‑ what we have now is that that probable cause warrant
practice barely exists anymore. The DOJ has said to Congress that it doesn't think it
needs a warrant to read our e‑mails. The DOJ has also said to Congress and to courts
that we have no privacy interest in information showing where we go 24 hours a day that is
communicated through cell site information through our cellphones. And I just want to
give you really quickly a very brief example of how not only the collect‑it‑all sort
of theme has trickled down to the state and local level, but also the state's secrecy
itself has really trickled down in a really dangerous way.
And that is a case we had a couple years ago during Occupy Boston. Somebody decided to
pick a fight with the cops and put together a paste bin with information about Boston
police officers which was all publicly available. This person didn't do anything illegal, they
put it together in a database and put it on Paceman. Suffolk County didn't like that.
They sent an administrative subpoena to Twitter. This is not a warrant, it's ‑‑ no judge
ever sees this piece of paper, subpoenas are just pieces of paper that prosecutors fill
out and give to companies like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook. So Twitter is one of very
few companies that actually stands up for its users on a routine basis when they get
these subpoenas, and they do that by informing the person who is targeted that a subpoena
has been filed, that prosecutors are seeking information about them.
So what happened was this person came to us at the ACLU of Massachusetts and said, "The
DA in Suffolk County wants my information and I'd like to remain anonymous," so we took
the case. It was incredible what happened after that. You know, this is a legal issue.
This is not something Al‑Qaeda, national security issue, but we had a, you know, pipsqueak,
I'm going to say that, this pipsqueak Assistant DA, right, in Suffolk County telling a judge,
you know, holding ex parte hearings, which essentially means the government is giving
information to the judge in secret that not even our attorneys could see. So secret proceedings.
And to this day two years later, those records are secret. They were sealed. The prosecutor
asked that these records be sealed. So I mean, it's just incredible abuse of power going
on at all levels of government. And I think that's it. There are people who
probably have a lot of questions. I would just say please support the ACLU if you have
a concern about these issues. We are working on a range of issues, from choice to privacy
and everything in between. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it.
(Applause). >> So ‑‑ so I see six people standing.
We have nine minutes. Maybe seven. The only way we're going to make this work is if people
speak for 30 seconds and ask a question. If you have statements for us, we'll be at the
table this afternoon. You will not believe my ability to violate your right to free speech
if you go 30 seconds (laughter). I'm really good at it. So we'll start here, but really,
we don't want to hear your story. >> Is the mic on?
>> I'm Mike Daughtry from Atlanta, I was going to ask you about the judicial decision, I'm
under ‑‑ (Unintelligible). It is amazing, the judicial system I find incredibly behind
and judges don't deal. So how do you deal with the judges who don't deal in a judicial
system that's so far behind looking the other way?
>> Let's hear the next one. We're going to take them all and then we're going to answer.
>> My name is Dana, I'm from San Antonio, Texas. These issues come up, I'm concerned,
so I write my Congressman and my representative like, you know, I'm supposed to or I'm told
to do. >> Yeah.
>> I make phone calls, I leave messages. All I get is the ‑‑ excuse me?
>> (speaker off microphone.) >> Okay. The question is?
>> What can I do? >> How can I get a better response than thank
you for being a concerned citizen, we'll get back to you? I don't ever get a response?
>> Citizen empowerment. Next, quickly. >> So what about me? I'm not American, I'm
a foreigner, obviously I use American services all the time. Am I suspicious just because
I'm a foreigner? That's my question. >> Good question.
>> Go ahead. >> Thank you. We're going to go over here.
>> Any thoughts or remarks on Sandra Riden's speech and his delusions to his theoretical
geo tracking program? >> Quickly, next.
>> 2006, 2007, I assisted most of the telecommunications companies in the country installing probes
for law enforcement, also known as Kalia. That was all done on their dime, and I believe
one of the speakers mentioned that they were being subsidized. I'm curious to know how
we know that's being subsidized by the government. >> Come to at a us at our table, please.
>> Go ahead. >> How can people get access to this stuff
through ‑‑ for civil matters, civil lawsuits? >> Okay.
>> And again, most of these answers are going to be provided at our makeshift A part of
the Q and A at our table in the vendor area, but go ahead.
>> I didn't hear anything on LexisNexis or Fusion Centers.
>> Come talk to me. >> Yeah.
>> Okay. So fellow panelists, there are a range of things you can weigh in on. I hope
someone will at least say something about the feeling of helplessness that citizens
have who write to their legislators, because it seems we're in a pretty unique moment where
we're being heard. Go ahead. >> I will respond to two of the things. If
Senator Widener has been warning about the surveillance for a couple years, he's been
hitting the issue of location. He gave a speech last year in which he said the word "location"
five times. If he could signal any more clearly, I don't know what it would look like. Right
now he's basically standing on a stool waving his hands jumping up and down. So I think
there's something locationally that he's trying to tell us about, and I hope we will find
out what it is. The question about the foreigners, it's not
that you're suspicious, it's just you're fair game. Foreigners don't vote in Kansas, and
it doesn't protect the communications of non‑Americans. That's really unfortunate. I think if we ‑‑
if we were going to see change there, it's not going to be because individuals were writing
to their members, it's going to be because companies are complaining they're losing out
on contracts in Europe and Asia. If the Klout computing companies want to salvage their
foreign business, we need to see a big change in the law or they're going to have to start
using anti and Encrypto where you don't care about access to data.
>> Alex? >> ALEX ABDO: Just quickly on what you can
do. A week and a half, two weeks ago there was an incredibly important vote in the house
about whether the government was going to rein in the bulk collection of our phone records.
Unsurprisingly the vote lost; but surprisingly, it was close, 217 to 205 votes. And a big
part of the reason why the vote was so close is because literally thousands of people called
their representatives and urged them to vote in support of the bill that would have reined
in the NSA. That support matters more than you know, more than I knew up until a few
weeks ago. If you have any questions about it, you should really talk to Kevin Bacon
who has been doing some incredible work on this and can speak to how effective it is
for to you call your representatives. >> I would like to say for those of us here
in California, we know how difficult Feinstein has been on these issues, she's been a huge
supporter for the NSA, and it's been intractable for years and years. Couple days ago Feinstein
actually said, hmmm, maybe there needs to be some changes. And we also saw President
Obama meeting with top legislators just a couple of days ago saying he's open to suggestions.
So, you know, we have finally sort of started to turn the tide in Washington, D.C. based
on the facts that members of the public have picked up the phone, have responded to those
e‑mails from the ACLU and have started to meet actually with their members of Congress.
So it is making a huge difference. We've talked a lot about sort of how we got
to this point and the problems that we're seeing, but we're at a really crucial point
to turn the tide on these issues, and I really hope that anyone in the audience who has not
picked up the phone and called their members of Congress or stopped by our booth and filled
out the action alert, please do it, because we can change this, we really can.
>> This is predictable and self‑serving note to end on, but it matters a lot for you
to become members of the ACLU. And I mean it, I mean it. You know, we have between 6
and 700,000 ACLU members nationwide. The NRA has over 4 million members. If all of you
who had an affinity for the ACLU were members of the ACLU we would have a lot more voice,
a much louder voice in Washington. I'm not saying that to denigrate the NRA for those
of you who are supporters, they're a very effective organization in support of what
they do. We can be even more ‑‑ >> Help us about that effective.
>> No, no, seriously, it matters a lot to have a large civil society counterweight to
the kinds of developments we've been talking about today. So please come by, get our special
edition DEF CON 4 Alert. Thank you so much for joining us today.
(Applause)