When the first message on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s Internet) was sent by UCLA programmer Charley Kline, on October 29, 1969, the message text was the word “login”; the letters “l” and the “o” were transmitted, then the system crashed.

Forty two years later, the Internet is everywhere and rapidly becoming embedded in every device. Kevin Kelly sees the Net as evolving into a single “planetary computer” with “all the many gadgets we possess” as “windows into its core.” The Internet Society’s slogan is “The Internet is for everyone,” but Vint Cerf (who co-developed the TCP/IP network protocol that connects everything on the Net today) now prefers “The Internet is for everything.”

The world-wide adoption of a decentralized network that connects everything creates continuous technical, social and policy challenges that no one could have foreseen in 1969. Even as we take the Net for granted, the way we do the air that we breathe, decisions are being made by policy-makers, technologists and end-users that shape its future.

The success of the Internet has had a great deal to do with the development of open standards — often by volunteers — in groups such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Decisions in Working Groups (WG) of the IETF are reached by consensus on the group mailing list so that anyone active on that list can be part of the process.

The need to add capacity is a constant challenge. What balance of public and private funding, regulation or deregulation are appropriate, and which types of infrastructure (centralized vs. decentralized; fiber, cable, wireless) warrant investment are subject to ongoing debate.

The Net has provided a platform for incredible innovation and economic growth. How to reward innovation and creativity while encouraging the widest dissemination of new content and technologies? How to encourage disruptive technologies while mitigating their potentially negative impacts?

Does there have to be a conflict between freedom and privacy on one hand and security on the other? How can users safely share personal information using social media which rely on the sale of their personal data as a business model? What legal and technical protections are necessary for businesses to securely move into the cloud?

Internet users have continuously influenced key technology innovations and policy decisions. But keeping them in the decision-making loop as they increasingly take the Net for granted presents an ongoing challenge.

On June 14, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information, and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), will address these questions as keynote speakers for the INET Conference in New York City, sponsored by the Internet Society and the Internet Society of New York. [Disclaimer: As President of the Internet Society of New York I will deliver opening remarks.]

There will also be panels featuring industry leaders, members of civil society organizations, open source software advocates and government officials. The conference is open to the public although advance registration is required. It will also be streamed live.

Just as a democracy is never the rule of the people, but rather the people who participate in the process, the Internet has evolved through the efforts of technologists and activists — many who have volunteered their time to develop open standards, open source software and to advocate for an open Internet. It’s your call: What kind of Internet do you want?

The temporary shutdown in Egypt of Internet and other telecommunication services, as well as similar interruptions in other Middle East countries experiencing large-scale protests and rebellions, has galvanized hackers and human rights activists as well as U.S. foreign policy makers. The consequences may be not be what anyone expected.

The technologies for secure, private, fault tolerant communication via the Internet exist but have not yet been widely implemented or bundled together in a single, user-friendly system.

Internet pioneer Vint Cerf was asked in a recent interview whether there was technical solution to a government shutdown of the Net. The Internet “is controllable by the government, [so] it’s possible to turn off the Internet,” he said. The solution, mesh networking, “can be done without benefit of things like routers provided by Internet Service providers.”

Mesh networking makes each device on a network capable of routing data to any other device, with the ability to rapidly change paths in the event of an interruption or blockage.

A current project of Cerf’s, the Interplanetary Internet, designed to overcome the delays and interruptions to communications during space exploration, could also be adapted to handle a partial shutdown of Net communications by an authoritarian government during a political crisis.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and software freedom advocate, first proposed the Freedom Box – a tiny device that could provide private, secure, fault-tolerant Internet access using mesh networking – at an Internet Society of New York event in February 2010. He has since founded the Freedom Box Foundation, has some early prototype software and expects to have a fully working device available for under $100 in twelve months. Another project, diaspora, was inspired by Moglen’s proposal and is developing a more privacy-friendly alternative to Facebook. The Freedom Box and diaspora both use a decentralized, peer-to peer model for improved security and to give the user more control.

On February 15, Hillary Clinton’s gave her second annual Net Freedom Speech, which denounced the Egyptian government for its Net shutdown. The State Department now has a number of initiatives and grants for the development of Internet censorship circumvention technologies.

But governments often have different agendas and policies for different situations. Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarek was viewed as a “force of moderation” before he became a “dictator” when the geopolitical winds shifted. As Clinton was making her speech, Wired reported that the FBI Pushes for Surveillance Backdoors in Web 2.0 Tools and an antiwar protestor in Clinton’s audience was roughed up when he turned his back to her. Would he have been unscathed if he had tweeted his protest?

Even with the best intentions, high-profile Internet freedom initiatives by nation-states can have unexpected consequences. Evgeny Morozov says of Clinton’s speeches:

Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don’t talk about promoting Internet freedom.

The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the United States.

Today, foreign governments … are now seeking “information sovereignty” from American companies … Internet search, social networking, and even email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from foreign control.

The U.S military has developed open source software for secure, private communication on the Internet, however. The Tor project, which develops Tor, a tool for private, encrypted communication on the Internet, is used by many dissidents in authoritarian countries, as well as by Wikileaks, and was originally sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

But not every such project has been as successful. The Haystack program, designed to help Iranian dissidents, actually endangered them because it was easily intercepted by the Iranian authorities due to flaws in its design. It received a huge amount of hype but the developer, Austin Heap, refused to allow security experts to examine it. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury Department granted Heap an Office of Foreign Assets Control license to export the software to Iran, in effect endorsing it. By the time it the software bugs became publicly known, the damage had been done.

Open source software advocate and cyberliberties activist Eric Raymond was also helping Iranian dissidents connect to the outside world at that time. He reflects:

… to protect your network, and yourself, you have to accept that you are going to have relatively little information about what your network partners are doing and what their capabilities are …. my rationally-chosen ignorance left me unable to form judgments about whether people in my network were lying to me. More subtly … it left me unable to form judgments about whether they were lying to themselves.

I don’t mean to excuse whatever lies Austin Heap may have told, but I do mean to suggest he may well have been his own first victim.

Open source software, where the inner workings of a program are available for public scrutiny, is essential when developing tools for secure communication in a highly insecure environment.

But open source is not a panacea. Take the case of OpenBSD, an open source operating system bundled with thousands of applications, which has been optimized for security by a team of the world’s best security experts. OpenBSD is sponsored by a nonprofit foundation and many of the programmers volunteer their time.

At one point the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) gave OpenBSD a grant, then rescinded it when OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt made remarks critical of the Iraq war.

In December 2010, de Raadt received an email alleging the FBI had paid some OpenBSD ex-developers to insert backdoors into the software. He was skeptical but immediately made the email public and invited an independent review of the relevant program code. A few bugs were fixed but no evidence of a backdoor was found. So even though the allegations turned out to be false, they succeeded anyway – as an act of psychological warfare – by destroying trust in the OpenBSD project.

George Orwell said:

… ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance…. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

At first it would seem that a social networking service like twitter, recently used by many protesters in the Middle East, would fit Orwell’s definition of a “simple weapon” that “gives claws to the weak”. But in fact the situation is much more ambiguous. Twitter is a for-profit corporation which must maintain large data centers and a complex infrastructure. And they are subject to many financial, legal and political pressures.

Internet freedom initiatives must be independent of political connotations, run on a decentralized infrastructure, and use technology that is subject to public review by security experts. Most importantly, users must have complete trust in the skills and integrity of the people providing those tools and services.

If they don’t the cure could prove worse than the disease.

Note: Wikipedia has a good list of other anti-censorship software.

Protesters fed up with political repression, corruption and poverty (particularly recent food price inflation) toppled the government of Tunisia. They threaten to do the same in other countries throughout the Mideast as pundits hail the “Twitter and Facebook revolution.” But repressive governments have as much compunction about shutting down communication services as they do about torturing dissidents.

Egypt has cut all Internet access and most mobile phone service as huge protests threaten to topple that government. For a while the ISP Noor remained online — largely because it connects the country’s Stock Exchange and many offices of foreign companies to the outside world. Noor has now been cut off as well.

Interestingly, Egypt and Tunisia have some of the largest percentages of the population online in Africa. Egypt’s Communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, was secretary and co-founder of the global Internet Society’s Egyptian Chapter (which is no longer active). He is still listed as a member of the Board of Trustees on the Internet Society’s website. The Internet Society has strongly denounced the Internet shutdown.

Kamel is widely recognized as the person who brought the Internet to Egypt. He has publicly supported the open development of the Internet. His bio on the Internet Society’s website states that in the early years of the development of the Internet in Egypt, “Kamel’s work extended into liberalization issues such as a tax reduction for ISPs as well as a government/private sector partnership to serve the Egyptian Internet community. He has actively participated in the establishment of community centers in remote areas to bring the Internet to the have-nots.” His role in the shutdown is unknown, although he wasn’t among the cabinet members removed in the shakeup of the Egyptian government in the wake of the protests.

Cutting off most communication with the outside world for an extended period would be economic suicide for any modern, developed country, but temporary interruption — long enough to kill or imprison a large number of protesters without too much visibility for squeamish foreign allies — is viable for a poor country ruled by an elite supported by gifts of military technology from wealthier countries.

The protesters’ vulnerability is relying on highly centralized communication networks and services while fighting an overly centralized political system. The younger ones probably don’t have any memory of being without mobile phones and the Internet and may have taken them for granted.

To succeed in the face of violent repression and the shutdown of Internet and phone service, they must quickly develop low-tech strategies that are as fast and flexible as the ones that have been lost.

Another approach is to build communication services that cannot be intercepted or shut down. Human rights activists and hackers are already starting to do it with combination of low-cost commodity hardware and free open source software:

• Landlines still work in Egypt and a French ISP FDN offers free dialup Internet to Egyptians. Instructions to connect to foreign ISPs via dialup with a mobile phone are also being circulated for those who can use them.
• For Egyptians who are still able to use their mobile phones, there is Sukey, “a security-conscious news, communications and logistics support service principally for use by demonstrators during demonstrations.”
• Tech entrepreneur Shervin Pishevar put a call out on Twitter for volunteers to help construct self-configuring unblockable mobile ad hoc networks to prevent government caused blackouts during future protests worldwide.
• We Rebuild, a Europe-based group working for free speech and an open Internet is developing non-Internet modes of communication, including amateur, shortwave and pirate radio as well as a fax gateway, to assist protesters and humanitarian relief efforts. Information on these efforts can be found on their Telecomix news site.
• Remaining Internet activity is certainly being monitored. The Tor network of anonymous, encrypted proxies has seen a huge increase in Egyptian traffic.

Efforts like these could be the tipping point for the uprisings. In 1989 Czech student protesters received a gift of then state of the art 2400 baud modems from a mysterious man who may have been from the covert-operations wing of the Japanese embassy. Modems were illegal but the most Czech police didn’t even know what they were. The students set up BBS systems to coordinate actions throughout the country and successfully overthrew the Soviet communist backed dictatorship.

If you think the problems people in Egypt have could never happen here, you might want to think again. In the U.S. the “Internet kill switch” bill in Congress would allow interruption of Internet services in a “national cyberemergency.” Senator Joe Lieberman, who introduced the bill in the Senate, has described the Internet as a “dangerous place” and promised the bill would protect against “cyber terrorists.”

Some of our current political leaders, hanging on every word of their consultants and pollsters, and terrified of harsh criticism, might consider hostile online commentary more of an “emergency” than something trivial like say, a collision with an asteroid.

General Douglas MacArthur said, “No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation.” Today that vigilance means learning to build and modify the technology that we use rather than being passive consumers of it.

You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” The United States doesn’t hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal. Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.

Last weekend the Bush administration pushed through Congress a law to bolster the government’s ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners and other “persons reasonably believed to be outside the U.S.” without a court order.

The so-called Protect America Act, which passed both the House and Senate by wide margins just before Congress went on its August recess, allows the government to intercept the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who communicate with people overseas, and for the first time, allows the government to intercept communications between foreigners which are merely routed through the United States, as well as conversations of Americans traveling abroad.

The only bright spot in this legislation is that it requires the government to design procedures to prevent the intelligence collection under the law from infringing on the privacy of ordinary Americans and for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to sign off on those procedures within six months. It also requires a review of the program every six months afterward.

The legislation will “give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation,” spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Democratic leaders expressed disappointment about the result, but they pointed to language that would require lawmakers to reconsider the key provisions in six months.

“My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration’s past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). — Washington Post

Privacy and civil liberties advocates were not mollified by the privacy provisions in the bill.

“Rather than acting as a meaningful check on the Executive, Congress essentially handed him a blank check to invade Americans’ privacy,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation activism coordinator Derek Slater. “Congress’ actions are particularly disgraceful given that the Administration has concealed the truth about its illegal spying.”

“This bill would grant the attorney general the ability to wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., during the debate preceding the vote. “I think this unwarranted, unprecedented measure would simply eviscerate the 4th Amendment,” which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

Republicans disputed her description. “It does nothing to tear up the Constitution,” said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. — Associated Press

House Democrats complained that they had been “railroaded” into passing the bill, since they were close to passing a much narrower bill when the administration presented its demands for additional powers.

“I’m not comfortable suspending the Constitution even temporarily,” said Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), a member of the House intelligence committee. “The countries we detest around the world are the ones that spy on their own people. Usually they say they do it for the sake of public safety and security.” — Washington Post

The rush to push through enhanced spying powers came from a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court earlier this year that found that several key portions of President Bush’s terrorist surveillance program were illegal.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court’s decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision.

The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency’s enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration’s legal judgment was at least partly wrong. — Washington Post

This is important to the administration because by monitoring foreign communications from within the U.S., where many of them are routed, the National Security Agency can gain access to over one-third of the world’s communications traffic.

Bush administration officials, though, said that the measure didn’t grant any broad authority to expand the government’s intelligence activities.

In a telephone briefing for reporters on Monday, officials said the administration had set out to resolve a “narrow” technical problem that had called into question whether intelligence officials needed to get a court warrant to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications that happened to pass through American telecommunication switches. But in fact the legislation as enacted not only provides that no warrant is needed in such a situation but also goes further, in giving the administration discretion to eavesdrop on foreign communications that might involve Americans.

The officials who participated in the briefing spoke on condition of anonymity, saying only that doing so would allow them to talk more freely.

They said the legislation did not authorize “a driftnet” aimed at eavesdropping on large volumes of phone calls and e-mail messages inside the United States. But they declined to discuss in detail the N.S.A.’s broader efforts tracing and analyzing the patterns of American communications — who is calling and e-mailing whom — without actually listening to or reading the content of the conversations. Those broader data-mining activities were part of a heated dispute within the administration that led senior Justice Department officials in 2004 to refuse at first to certify the legality of the N.S.A. operations and to threaten to resign in protest over their continuation. — New York Times

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requesting the release of court orders interpreting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. “Over the next six months, Congress and the public will debate the wisdom and necessity of permanently expanding the executive’s authority to conduct intrusive forms of surveillance without judicial oversight,” the motion said.

Indeed, the only oversight the program will get is from Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and the attorney general. Alberto Gonzales has hardly proved himself capable of overseeing and preventing abuses of the American people’s rights. His idea of oversight, it seems, is the word’s other definition: to fail to notice, to overlook.

As for McConnell, he says in a letter to the U.S. Senate that he is “committed to keeping the Congress fully and currently informed of how this Act has improved the ability of the Intelligence Community to protect the country and reporting — and remedying — any incidents of non-compliance.” It remains to be seen if he’s up to the task.

There are at least three other problems with this law and the surveillance system it represents.

First among them is that the government will pay communications providers to create a potentially permanent surveillance infrastructure out of the country’s communications facilities, one which could be turned inward at any time and without legal recourse.

In short, the law gives the Administration the power to order the nation’s communication service providers — which range from Gmail, AOL IM, Twitter, Skype, traditional phone companies, ISPs, internet backbone providers, Federal Express, and social networks — to create possibly permanent spying outposts for the federal government.

These outposts need only to have a “significant” purpose of spying on foreigners, would be nearly immune to challenge by lawsuit, and have no court supervision over their extent or implementation.

Abuses of the outposts will be monitored only by the Justice Department, which has already been found to have underreported abuses of other surveillance powers to Congress.

In related international news, Zimbabwe’s repressive dictator Robert Mugabe also won passage of a law allowing the government to turn that nation’s communication infrastructure into a gigantic, secret microphone. — Threat Level

A second problem is that this surveillance infrastructure is unlikely to be secure, and will make an inviting target for hackers, criminals and other countries, not to mention the very terrorists it’s supposedly meant to catch.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical. For almost a year beginning in April 2004, more than 100 phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister and ministers of defense, foreign affairs, justice and public order, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused. Exactly who placed the software and who did the listening remain unknown. But they were able to use software that was supposed to be used only with legal permission.

The United States itself has been attacked. In six hours in August 2006, remote attackers entered computers at the Army Information Systems Engineering Command at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.; the Defense Information Systems Agency in Arlington; the Naval Ocean Systems Center in San Diego; and the Army Space and Strategic Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala. The hackers transported more than 10 terabytes of data to South Korea, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and from there to the People’s Republic of China. Each intrusion was only 10 to 30 minutes. The downloaded information included Army helicopter mission-planning-systems specifications and flight-planning software used by the Army and Air Force. — Washington Post

Why don’t we save the taxpayers a few hundred billion dollars and just publish all the government’s secrets on the Internet where everybody can get to them without having to waste 30 minutes hacking into an insecure system?

Finally, widespread surveillance introduces destructive changes in behavior in the population under surveillance.

Now imagine a society where everyone knows they are or may be watched as they walk through the streets, or while surfing online. That – as in societies like Hitler’s Germany or Soviet Russia – will have tangible and widespread psychological consequences, reinforcing conformity, and literally crippling the ability to make autonomous and ethical decisions, he argued.

An analogy might be the well-studied population of children with overprotective mothers, the philosopher said. Studies show that such children tend to be indecisive, dependent on others, have little “ethical competence,” and often live suppressed and unhappy lives.

As or more disturbing may be the political implications of having a surveillance infrastructure in place.

Many philosophers reject the notion that given technologies are inherently politically neutral, [philosopher Sandro] Gaycken said. Surveillance, for example, can be used to support democratic values of freedom, equality, and state neutrality – but its tendency to create a watched and a watching class lends itself better to totalitarianism. In a country such as Germany, which has seen democracy slide into the Nazi state, such a warning resonates strongly.

“Surveillance stabilizes totalitarianism, and destabilizes democracy,” Gaycken warned. — Threat Level

So the end result is 300 million Americans who think they’re safe because the government is watching out for them by watching them, even though they weren’t doing anything wrong to begin with. Shortly, the people begin watching what they say, suppressing themselves out of fear they could be mistaken for a terrorist, and the destruction is complete.

In late 2001, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing a controversial National Security Agency program, and on Tuesday, director of national intelligence Mike McConnell revealed that the executive order authorized not only the “terrorist surveillance program” whose existence was revealed in 2005, but a series of other programs as well.

The program, which President Bush publicly acknowledged in December 2005 after its existence was revealed by the New York Times, is only one part of a series of undisclosed intelligence programs which were authorized at the same time.

The terrorist surveillance program has been criticized for producing large volumes of information with little intelligence value while violating the privacy of ordinary Americans.

In a letter (PDF) to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included “a number of . . . intelligence activities” and that a name routinely used by the administration — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — applied only to “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more.”

“This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged,” McConnell said.

McConnell’s letter was aimed at defending Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales from allegations by Democrats that he may have committed perjury by telling Congress that no legal objections were raised about the TSP. Gonzales said a legal fight in early 2004 was focused on “other intelligence activities” than those confirmed by Bush, but he never connected those to Bush’s executive order.

But in doing so, McConnell’s letter also underscored that the full scope of the NSA’s surveillance program under Bush’s order has not been revealed. — Washington Post

Gonzales has also come under fire recently for telling Congress in 2005 that no civil liberties abuses had occurred in connection with the Federal Bureau Investigation’s misuse of national security letters and exigent letters in counterterrorism investigations, while he had received internal reports documenting such misuses as early as a year before his testimony. Some members of Congress have called for Gonzales to resign.

The Bush administration, which placed the terrorist surveillance program under the review of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in January, is pushing for a change in law which would permit it to continue operating the program without warrants or other court review.

“Time and again, the Administration has described the blatantly illegal TSP as a ‘narrow’ and ‘targeted’ program, and it’s playing a similar game of linguistic misdirection with this bill,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn. “Rather than a mere ‘update’ to the law focused on foreign-to-foreign communications, it could facilitate wide-ranging surveillance of Americans’ private communications.”

Cohn urged people to contact their legislators and oppose the bill. “It would be absurd for Congress to legislate in the dark, before the Administration comes clean about the domestic spying program.”

Updates to stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity include spying, spying and more spying.

The National Security Agency has run out of power, causing it to implement severe power-saving measures across the Fort Meade, Md., complex from which it runs acres of computing equipment to collect and process signals intelligence. Now, the NSA has implemented rolling blackouts and scheduled shutdowns of computer equipment to help keep it running at all. But it still hasn’t arranged for more power to be brought into the complex, despite having known about the problem for years.

Speaking of the NSA, last week the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an August 2006 decision that held that the NSA’s terrorist surveillance program was unconstitutional. The program monitors telephone calls and other communications entering and exiting the U.S. which the government says may have a connection to terrorists. The decision was overturned because the plaintiffs could not prove they had been directly affected by the program. Lawsuits related to the program remain alive in the Ninth Circuit.

In 2005, the Department of Defense was caught running an intelligence program which was collecting information on peaceful anti-war protesters. Much of the improperly collected data originated with the Department of Homeland Security. The database was cleaned up and later shut down. The Department of Defense Inspector General released a report (PDF) on the Threat and Local Observation Notice program saying that it complied with relevant law, though some information was improperly collected. But even though the database was shut down, NORTHCOM plans to bring back something like it.

Technology is changing how people interact with government forever, says a prominent homeland security consultant.

In Federal Computer Week on Monday, W. David Stephenson argues that emergent behavior enabled by the convergence of personal communications and publishing technology with massive private and government data sources will “empower individuals in their relations with governments.”

Stephenson cited examples of New York City’s plans to allow mobile phone users to send text and multimedia messages to 911 and 311, as well as a private project in Washington, D.C., which publishes District-provided road work data overlaid on a Google map, as two examples of the changes in the way citizens interact with government.

Displays showing the status of potholes repairs subtly, but effectively, keep the city’s Department of Public Works on its toes. That example also illustrates an important aspect of the Web 2.0 world. Some call it “sousveillance,” which happens when people turn the tables and monitor government.

Also, the growing scientific understanding of the principle of swarm intelligence is an important aspect of this potential transformation of government. The term suggests that groups of people may be capable of a higher level of collaborative behavior than could be predicted from the abilities of individual members. — Federal Computer Week

In the past, Stephenson has also cited how private citizens collaborated during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to share information, help reunite families, and pick up the slack where government failed.

Smart mobile phones, PDAs and other communications devices, all connected to Web 2.0 applications on the Internet, have the potential to utterly transform the way people react to natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or even ordinary fender benders, Stephenson argued, as people collaborate with each other to find solutions.

“These devices have transformed our daily lives and the media,” Stephenson said in an e-mail. “It’s inevitable that they will have the same impact on government.”

Stephenson also has had a long-running weblog which he recently relaunched, along with a new RSS feed. For those of you who have wondered where he disappeared to, Stephenson said he’s trying to move all of his old content from Userland to the WordPress platform.

“Unfortunately those who have subscribed to my blog in the past don’t know that, because, with everything else, the blog feed changed,” Stephenson said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly broke the law in order to obtain personal information about tens of thousands of Americans, much of which was never related to any sort of investigation, according to an inspector general’s report released Friday.

The report (PDF) did not find that FBI agents deliberately broke the law, but misinterpreted or ignored it, and failed to implement procedures which would ensure that agents followed the law when using national security letters.

It also found that the FBI frequently used so-called “exigent letters,” to obtain telephone records for more than 3,000 telephone numbers, without having exigent circumstances, or even an open investigation. It just wrote up a letter, said there was an emergency, and threatened the phone companies with dire consequences should they fail to comply with these illegal requests.

The FBI used the letters to request telephone records, e-mail records, employment and credit histories, and other personal information on more than 52,000 people from 2003 to 2005, the report said.

“This is not simply about errors in oversight,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “This is about disregard for the law. For example, FBI terrorism investigators ignored their own lawyers’ advice to stop using so-called exigent letters for about two years.”

Congress significantly lowered the threshold for the government to obtain such information after the 2001 terrorism attacks, producing what the FBI itself reported as at least a fivefold increase in annual requests. Its tally cited 39,000 requests in 2003, 56,000 in 2004 and 47,000 in 2005 — involving a total of 24,937 “U.S. persons” (including citizens and green-card holders) and 27,262 foreigners in the United States. In 2004, nine letters alone requested telephone-subscriber information on 11,100 phone numbers.

The inspector general’s report discloses, however, that these numbers understated the FBI’s use of national security letters to collect data. After checking 77 investigative case files at four FBI field offices, investigators found that those offices had “significantly” underreported the number of requests they had made and that, in this small subset alone, the real number was 22 percent higher. — Washington Post

The above Post article is a great summary of the IG’s findings.

One of the details buried in a footnote in the IG’s report was that FBI agents were supposed to record national security letters issued into a database maintained by the Office of General Counsel for its required semiannual classified report to Congress. Many of these records never made it into this Microsoft Access database which, the report noted, “had limited analytical capabilities.” Anybody who’s ever used Microsoft Access knows not to use it for anything more serious than your kid’s lemonade stand. It’s certainly not something you would trust classified information to — unless you’re the FBI.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were furious, at least while reporters were watching.

“This goes above and beyond almost everything they’ve done already,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), who was among a host of Democrats promising investigative hearings. “It shows just how this administration has no respect for checks and balances.”

Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.), the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, told reporters that Congress may “impose statutory requirements and perhaps take away some of the authority which we’ve already given to the FBI, since they appear not to be able to know how to use it.”

Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who has been pressing for a review of national security letters since 2005, said the report “confirms the American people’s worst fears about the Patriot Act.” — Washington Post

FBI director Robert S. Mueller offered a public apology and said, “I am to be held accountable.” But, he noted, nobody had yet asked him to resign.

Sen. Schumer did, however, get on national television Sunday and call for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.

“Attorney General Gonzales is a nice man,” Mr. Schumer said. “But he either doesn’t accept or doesn’t understand that he is no longer just the president’s lawyer but has a higher obligation to the rule of law and the Constitution, even when the president should not want it to be so.”

Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said Mr. Gonzales had “demonstrated decisive leadership by demanding a new level of accountability to address systematic problems in oversight over some of the F.B.I.’s national security tools.” — New York Times

Gonzales said Friday he would follow up to ensure that the FBI implemented the IG’s recommendations for fixing the problems.

“People have to believe in what we say,” Gonzales said. “And so I think this was very upsetting to me. And it’s frustrating.”

The American Civil Liberties Union said the audit proves Congress must amend the Patriot Act to require judicial approval anytime the FBI wants access to sensitive personal information.

“The attorney general and the FBI are part of the problem, and they cannot be trusted to be part of the solution,” said ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero.

Both Gonzales and Mueller called the national security letters vital tools in pursuing terrorists and spies in the United States. “They are the bread and butter of our investigations,” Mueller said. — Associated Press

Even President Bush weighed in Saturday, saying he had been briefed and ordered the problems fixed.

“These problems will be addressed as quickly as possible,” Bush said at a news conference in Uruguay, his second stop on a six-day Latin America tour. . . .

“My question is: What are you going to do to solve the problem and how fast can you get it solved?” he said.

But Bush defended the need for tools such as national security letters, which are used by the FBI to demand information from businesses and individuals without the court order normally required for a subpoena. Such methods, he said, are “important to the security of the United States” as it tries to track down and capture terrorists. — Washington Post

That much is obvious. After all, when you’re requesting highly sensitive personal information on almost 10,000 Americans per year, using a highly secretive process intended to ensure that Americans never find out they’ve been targeted, then the country must be just crawling with terrorists. Sooner or later, perhaps they’ll start arresting these thousands of terrorists who are apparently already here.

The Bush administration will stop conducting warrantless surveillance on Americans with suspected ties to terrorism, and will give the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court jurisdiction over the so-called terrorist surveillance program run by the National Security Agency since shortly after 9/11 and first disclosed in December 2005.

Senior Justice Department officials said Wednesday that the department had been working with the secret court since before the program was disclosed to find a way to bring the program under the court’s review, but would not explain how the court orders worked or whether the orders applied to individuals or gave blanket authorization to conduct surveillance.

An official did say that a judge on the court issued more than one order, and that each order is valid for 90 days.

“As a result of these orders,” Mr. Gonzales told leaders of Congressional Intelligence and Judiciary Committees in a letter dated Wednesday, “any electronic surveillance that was occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program will now be conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.”

Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets — or how court approval had been expedited — because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing “the mechanics of the orders” could compromise intelligence activities. — New York Times

“The orders we’re talking about here are not some cookie cutter order,” one official said. “People have been working very hard on this for almost two years actually, and it has just now been approved a week ago by the judge of the FISA court.”

Congressional Democrats and privacy activists are not convinced that the program doesn’t still need oversight. “I intend to move forward with the committee’s review of all aspects of this program’s legality and effectiveness,” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller (D-W.V.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The administration’s claims that it was simply too cumbersome to comply with FISA held absolutely no water,” said Mark Moller, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.

The announcement comes a day before Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the Justice Department’s activities.

The terrorist surveillance program spawned dozens of lawsuits against the government and telephone companies, and Wednesday’s announcement is likely to render moot at least some of the cases.