Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Elspeth Reeve

The Government Is Spying on America with Drones, Too

Elspeth Reeve, The Wire — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 12:51:06 -0400

FBI director Robert Mueller said the government has used surveillance drones in the U.S. — though "in a very, very minimal way, very seldom" — at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "It's very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident when you need the capability," Mueller said before the judiciary committee. "It is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized needs." He said he did not know what happens to the images the drones capture.

Mueller's answer came following questioning from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who said drones were the "biggest threat to privacy" in America today. This is funny, because Feinstein had just given a rousing defense of the National Security Agency's program to collect the metadata on all phone calls made by all Americans. Feinstein is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and since Edward Snowden leaked the NSA programs, has dismissed concerns that the government is spying on Americans. At Wednesday's hearing, Feinstein said the NSA collects "not the names, but the data. Not the content, but the data." A drone wouldn't collect the content of your conversation, either. It would only show exactly where you are and when. Which is what your phone call metadata says, too. Nevertheless, Dianne Feinstein is anti-NSA paranoia but pro-drone paranoia.

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Why Your Metadata Is Your Every Move

Elspeth Reeve, The Wire — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:23:22 -0400

The metadata that the National Security Agency collects on all calls in the U.S. is not just what's on a phone bill, as the program's supporters have claimed. Your phone bill lists some of the same things the NSA's collecting — numbers dialed, length of all — but does not list the geolocation of each of your calls. It is that final piece of data — where you made your calls — that tells the government everything about your life. "Nobody's listening to the content of people's phone calls,"President Obama said last week. "The only thing taken, as has been correctly expressed, is not content of a conversation, but the information that is generally on your telephone bill," Sen. Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday. "We don't know anything that's in there, we won't search that," said Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA's director of Cyber Command, at a Senate hearing today. But it doesn't matter. The government doesn't need to listen to your calls. Because it already knows where you are, and that does matter.

In a paper published in Nature's Scientific Reports last year, MIT researchers found that with cell phone call metadata from 1.5 million anonymous people, they could identify a person easily with just four phone calls. As Foreign Policy's Joshua Keatingexplains, they didn't need names, addresses, or phone numbers. They only used time of the call and the closest cell tower.

"We use the analogy of the fingerprint," said [MIT professor
Yves-Alexandre] de Montjoye in a phone interview today. "In the 1930s, Edmond Locard, one of the first forensic science pioneers, showed that each fingerprint is unique, and you need 12 points to identify it. So here what we did is we took a large-scale database of mobility traces and basically computed the number of points so that 95 percent of people would be unique in the dataset."

And it's not just that metadata easily identifies us. Where we go and who we talk to tells a story. Mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau explained to The New Yorker's Jane Mayer. "If you can track [metadata], you know exactly what is happening—you don’t need the content." As a New York Times editorial explains, metadata can reveal "political leanings and associations, medical issues, sexual orientation, habits of religious worship, and even marital infidelities." Have you ever called in sick — from the beach? The NSA would know. Just checkyour daily metadata.

When IEDs Come Home: What Boston Looked Like to Iraq Veterans

Elspeth Reeve, The Wire — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:20:44 -0400

What happened at the Boston Marathon was inconceivable, horrific, shocking to most who have seen the videos and photos, but there are lots of Americans for whom the scene was appallingly familiar: veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I spoke to five men who served with my husband in the infantry. All of them went to Iraq at least once between 2006 and 2009 and are now scattered across the country, integrating into civilian life, more or less. They're my friends.

It wasn't like seeing the Iraq war break out on the Boston streets, they said, but they found their experiences rushing back while watching the news as they tried to figure out what kind of bomb it might have been. Because, for a year or more of their adult lives, what happened on Monday was a regular experience. Some worried the attack could become another pretense for war. Some tried to stifle a feeling that Americans don't care about the people overseas who are blown up all the time.

On Monday, T.J. Brummett came home from his construction job in Indiana and flipped on the TV just a few minutes after the explosion. He knew immediately it wasn't an accident. Brummett was an Army specialist deployed to Baghdad in 2006 and 2007, and for a few months, he was a driver for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, or EOD, the guys who blow up bombs -- you probably saw them in The Hurt Locker. He was on call 24 hours a day, and "when someone was blown up, it was my job to get them there."

Brummett watched the news replaying the explosion over and over. "When C4 explodes it has a crack. It doesn't sound like anything else." The bombs in Boston didn't sound like that. This was more "gunpowderish," Brummett says. (The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that some investigators think black gunpowder might have been used because the blasts were not strong enough to cause structural damage to buildings or gouge the sidewalk.) "Probably had a timer," he said. (An official told The New York Times an egg timer was used.) Nick Cox, a former Army specialist who deployed to Iraq twice, saw the white smoke and figured it was the work of an "amateur." (Wired reports the white smoke indicates the explosive was gunpowder.) Of the bomb made of a pressure cooker, Staff Sgt. John Sellars thought, "Wow, that's some OIF-2 shit right there," referring to the military's term for the second year of combat operations in Iraq. "Ball-bearing IEDs would do a number on the old-school Humvees," Sellars said. "Then we started up-armoring everything… so that generation of IED wasn't any good anymore." In Iraq, the American armor and insurgents' weapons were constantly evolving. That hasn't happened in America, of course.

Congress Continues the War on Gun Data

Elspeth Reeve, The Wire — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:40:01 -0400

Republican senators inserted several gun rights measures into a bill to fund the government through September, including one that says the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives must attach a disclaimer to any gun data saying it "cannot be used to draw broad conclusions about fire-arms-related crimes." The gun lobby has lobbied to prevent government funding of research on gun deaths and injuries for almost two decades. It has succeeded. This follows a report that a Senate deal on universal background checks would require gun sellers to destroy records, which, as Mother Jones' Kevin Drum points out, would make the law meaningless. It's hard not to be skeptical of an industry that lobbies not just to keep it's product legal, but to keep scientists from studying the effects of its product, and anyone from keeping track of who uses its product.

Democratic senators allowed the gun measures, The New York Times' Jennifer Steinhauer reports, to preempt more restrictive House ones. The House version would have banned the ATF from requiring gun dealers near the border with Mexico to report when they sold two or more rifles with detachable magazines — guns like the AR-15 and the AK-47. (The ATF was trying to monitor gun trafficking in Mexico in the Fast & Furious scandal.) The measures in the Senate bill will make permanent several gun rules that have been around since 2004.

What the NRA should fear most from government action: Research

Elspeth Reeve, The Wire — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:54:46 -0500

President Obama is looking at issuing 19 executive actions on gun control, and while gun enthusiasts fear a gun ban that can't happen by executive order, there is one proposal that should make the gun lobby plenty nervous: allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to research gun violence. The possibilities to emerge from Vice President Joe Biden's gun commission, as The New York Times catalogs them, appear to mostly involve steps like more background checks on gun buyers or making it easier for federal agencies to share mental health and gun records. They are mostly small ways that Obama can, without needing Congressional approval, keep bad guys from getting guns. But there's one very big, and potentially momentous measure that Obama can achieve with an executive order: by allowing the CDC to conduct research on guns, we'd know more about what happens when good guys have guns.

Despite the fears of some genuine gun nuts threatening civil war, Obama can't issue a gun-grabbing executive order. An assault weapons ban would have to go through Congress. Biden's proposals will mostly involve better enforcement of existing laws, which are supposed to keep legal guns out of the hands of criminals. Which is popular! No one wants bad guys to have guns. Bad guys do bad things with guns.

But what the gun lobby wants is more good guys -- normal average citizens like teachers and movie theater patrons -- to have more guns. That is why it has been fighting since the mid-1990s to block any science that might show the costs of lots of good guys having lots of guns might outweigh the benefits.

In 1996, some members of Congress tried to completely defund the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which was doing gun research, Live Science explains. Instead, lawmakers stripped $2.6 million from the CDC's budget -- the exact amount it had spent on gun injury research the year before. Congress forbade research that might "advocate or promote gun control." In 2003, Kansas Rep. Todd Tiahrt forbid the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from giving researchers data about guns used in crime. Last year, the National Institutes of Health was blocked from funding gun research. The efforts have had impressive results. According to a letter to Biden signed by 100 researchers, The NIH has funded just three studies on gun injuries in the last 40 years. Hey, that's three whole studies, right? Hardly censorship! Well, the researchers point out that guns have killed 4 million people since 1973, while four infections diseases have killed just 2,000 -- and the NIH has funded almost 500 studies on them. The letter protests that "legislative language has the effect of discouraging the funding of well-crafted scientific studies."