According to stories last Friday in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, the NSA’s phone call data program seems to be less comprehensive than previously thought—the agency is apparently collecting data on only about 20-30% of calls, and mostly from landlines. I’m quoted in the Post story saying that this “calls into question whether […]
ECHR Fast-tracks Court Case on PRISM and TEMPORA (and VERYANGRYBIRDS?)
January 29, 2014 by
So. The NSA and GCHQ piggyback on Angry Birds to spy on its 1.7 billion users. potential terrorists. Not only that, but everything on smartphones can be compromised: “if its on the phone, we can get it”. Will it ever stop? A few days ago, the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECHR’) made the unique move […]
It matters what the NSA does
January 23, 2014 by
It seems axiomatic that if we want to have an informed conversation about the legality, ethics, and policy implications of the NSA’s actions, it is useful to know what the NSA is doing. Yet a vocal subset of NSA defenders seem to be taking the contrary position, that information about the agency’s activities serves no […]
NSA call data analysis: inside or outside government?
January 21, 2014 by
Last week the President suggested that the NSA’s database of phone call data be stored outside the government, and he asked his Administration to study how this could be done. Today I’d like to start unpacking the options.
Can Washington re-architect the NSA phone data program?
January 20, 2014 by
In the President’s NSA reform speech last week, he called for a study of how to re-architect the NSA’s phone call data program, to change where the data is stored. This raises a bunch of interesting computer science questions, which I’m planning to explore in a series of posts here.
