‘Geolocation’? ‘Geotagging’? What is This Stuff?
If the Army is educating recruits about “geolocation,” maybe you should know about it too. In fact, the U.S. Army primer entitled “Geotags and Location-Based Social Networking” is a pretty good basic resource. Check it out.
Understand this: Your mobile phone sends out signals to cell towers, creating records of where you go throughout your day. If it is enabled with GPS, it can produce even more precise location information.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are rushing to exploit the potential of geolocation data, acquiring details of people’s movements and activities that once required costly, 24/7 surveillance. Uses of these data range from tracking fugitives, to reconstructing suspects’ travels, to analyzing the movements of whole populations in search of “suspicious” behavior patterns.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is drafting legislation to set standards for government access to geolocation data under both criminal law and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. On Wednesday, January 26th, Cato will host him at an event we’ve titled “Location-Tracking Technology and Privacy.”
We’ll ask you to silence your cell phone when the program starts. You might consider turning it off on the way here…
The Latest ‘Intelligence Gap’
Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before. The Washington Post reports that the National Security Agency has halted domestic collection of some type of communications metadata—the details are predictably fuzzy, though I’ve got a guess—in order to allay the concerns of the secret FISA Court that the NSA’s activity might not be technically permissible under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Naturally, there’s the requisite quote from the anonymous concerned intel official:
“This is a basic tool we used to have, and it’s now gone,” said one intelligence official familiar with the impasse. “Every day, every week that goes by, there’s just one more week of information that we’re not collecting. You sit there and say, ‘This is unbelievable that we have this gap.’”
I want to take claims like these with due gravity, but I can’t anymore. Because we’ve heard them again and again over the past decade, and they’ve proven to be bogus every time. We were told that the civil liberties restrictions built into pre-9/11 surveillance law kept the FBI from searching “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui’s laptop—but a bipartisan Senate panel found it wasn’t true. We were told limits on National Security Letters were FBI delaying agents seeking vital records in their investigations—but the delay turned out to have been manufactured by the FBI itself. Most recently, we were warned that the FISA Court had somehow imposed a requirement that a warrant be obtained in order to intercept purely foreign telephone calls that were traveling through U.S. wires. Anyone who understood the FISA law realized that this couldn’t possibly be right—and as Justice Department officials finally admitted under pressure, that wasn’t true either. But this time there’s a really real for serious “intelligence gap” and we’ll all be blown up by scary terrorists any minute if it’s not fixed? Pull the other one.
That said, Republicans are claiming the problem requires a mere “technical fix” to FISA, so we should at least be able to get a rough sense of what the issue is, if Congress actually decides to act. Democrats, by contrast, appear to think NSA can “address the court’s concerns without resorting to legislation.” The word “resort” here seems depressingly apt: They’ll ask for a legislative tweak if there’s absolutely no way to shoehorn what they want to do into the statute through clever lawyering in an ex parte proceeding in front of a highly deferential court, but it’s a last resort.
As for what the problem might be, I can think of a couple of possibilities off the top of my head. A few years back, the FISA pen register provision was amended to effectively build into the legal order for a standard pen register, which records data about calls or e-mails made and received, language mirroring a legal demand for subscriber records known as a 2703(d) order in the criminal context. Law enforcement routinely uses that combination of a 2703(d) plus a pen register to get location tracking information for cell phones. But the evidentiary standard for getting a 2703(d) order is (very) slightly higher than the standard for a pen register alone, and federal law prohibits the use of a pen register alone to gather location data. So there might be a question about whether FISA pen registers alone can be used for cell phone location tracking purposes.
Alternatively, given that Internet communications aren’t just “metadata” and “content” but rather a whole series of layers containing different types of information, there could be a question about just how far down “metadata” goes. This might be especially tricky for protocols where quite a lot of information about the content of the communication—which is supposed to require a full probable cause warrant—can be gleaned from sophisticated analysis of the size and timing of packets in the stream.
These are, of course, blind guesses. What’s disturbing is how much blind guessing the FISA court itself may be doing. The new hiatus, the Post tells us via an anonymous source, came about when the FISA Court “got a little bit more of an understanding”of what the NSA was up to. Their enhanced understanding concerns data that NSA has been getting with the court’s approval for “several years,” according to the Post. And there you have the real “intelligence gap” in modern surveillance: We have a Court going through a pantomime of oversight over thousands of highly technologically sophisticated interception programs, but it may take a few years for them to really understand what they’ve been signing off on.
We’ll understand still less about the rationale for any “technical fix” to FISA that Congress might approve, if they deign to go that route. But we’ll be reassured that it’s very important, necessary to keep us safe from the terrorist hordes, and nothing worth bothering our pretty heads about.
State Secrets, Courts, and NSA’s Illegal Wiretapping
As Tim Lynch notes, Judge Vaughn Walker has ruled in favor of the now-defunct Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation—unique among the many litigants who have tried to challenge the Bush-era program of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency because they actually had evidence, in the form of a document accidentally delivered to foundation lawyers by the government itself, that their personnel had been targeted for eavesdropping.
Other efforts to get a court to review the program’s legality had been caught in a kind of catch-22: Plaintiffs who merely feared that their calls might be subject to NSA filtering and interception lacked standing to sue, because they couldn’t show a specific, concrete injury resulting from the program.
But, of course, information about exactly who has been wiretapped is a closely guarded state secret. So closely guarded, in fact, that the Justice Department was able to force the return of the document that exposed the wiretapping of Al-Haramain, and then get it barred from the court’s consideration as a “secret” even after it had been disclosed. (Contrast, incidentally, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on individual privacy rights, which often denies any legitimate expectation of privacy in information once revealed to a third party.) Al-Haramain finally prevailed because they were ultimately able to assemble evidence from the public record showing they’d been wiretapped, and the government declined to produce anything resembling a warrant for that surveillance.
If you read over the actual opinion, however it may seem a little anticlimactic—as though something is missing. The ruling concludes that there’s prima facie evidence that Al-Haramain and their lawyers were wiretapped, that the government has failed to produce a warrant, and that this violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But of course, there was never any question about that. Not even the most strident apologists for the NSA program denied that it contravened FISA; rather, they offered a series of rationalizations for why the president was entitled to disregard a federal statute.
A Preemptive Word on “Lone Wolves”
As Marcy Wheeler notes, the press seem to have settled on the term “lone wolf” to describe Fort Hood gunman Nidal Malik Hasan, which means it’s probably only a matter of time before we encounter a pundit or legislator who is cynical or befuddled enough (or both) to invoke the tragedy in defense of the PATRIOT Act’s constitutionally dubious Lone Wolf provision. (A “matter of time” apparently meaning the time it took me to write that sentence: We have a winner!) Though the Senate Judiciary Committee has approved a bill that would renew the measure, their counterparts in the House wisely—though narrowly—voted to permit it to expire last week.
To spare anyone tempted by this argument some embarrassment: The Lone Wolf provision is totally irrelevant to this case. It could not have been used to investigate Hasan, nor would it have been necessary.
The Lone Wolf provision permits the targeting of non-U.S. persons when there is probable cause to believe they’re preparing to engage in acts of international terrorism. Even if we assume the statutory definition of “international terrorism” could be stretched to cover the Fort Hood attack—and perhaps it could—the provision would have been inapplicable to the Virginia–born Hasan.
So were investigators powerless? Of course not. PATRIOT’s Lone Wolf clause relates only to whether the tools available under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act can be invoked. Shooting people, however, is a crime even when committed for reasons having nothing to do with jihad, and the standard for obtaining a warrant—probable cause—is the same. The chief advantage of FISA tools is that they tend to be both highly secret and, in certain respects, broader than criminal investigative tools—features that are vital when dealing with trained terror agents who are working with an international network it’s important not to tip off, but not so much for “lone wolves,” who by definition lack any such network.
In fact, though, even if the most ambitious reforms proposed by Democrats had been in place, PATRIOT powers could have been brought to bear on Hasan had investigators chosen to do so. We are told, for instance, that investigators months ago became aware of Hasan’s efforts to contact al-Qaeda affiliates abroad. That alone would have provided grounds—again, under current law and under the most civil-liberties protective modifications being considered—for the issuance of National Security Letters seeking his financial and telecommunications records.
The truth is that the Lone Wolf provision didn’t help—and couldn’t have helped—stop this “lone wolf.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what additional powers would have been useful here given what it seems investigators already knew. As our recent history makes all too clear, what typically makes the difference between intelligence success and failure is not how much information you can get, at least past a certain point, but knowing what to do with the information you’ve got. But of course, that’s difficult to do, and doesn’t tend to be the kind of thing that can be fixed with a couple crude statutory provision you can brag about in press releases to your constituents. So pundits and legislators see a delicate information processing system failing to flag the right targets and conclude, every time, that the right solution is more juice! Turn up the voltage! Try that troubleshooting strategy with your laptop sometime and let me know how it works out.
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