Tag Archives: government

Wuhan Virus Tracking

Posted on by
Reply

Many nations are using cell phone data and/or apps installed on cell phones to track folks known to be infected in order to identify those persons’ contacts and to build up anticipatory data of pending and developing hotspots. This is intended to facilitate more efficient targeting of medical resources, to more efficiently target more limited populations, and so to more quickly free up economic resources and activity.

The US Federal government, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is creating a portal that will compile phone geolocation data to help authorities predict where outbreaks could next occur and determine where resources are needed, though the effort faces privacy concerns.
… Alphabet Inc’s Google said Thursday it would share a portion of its huge trove of data on people’s movements.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an app to track Covid-19 patients and the people they interact with, and are in talks with the federal government about its use, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

The EU is going even further, developing and propagating apps that track individuals, ostensibly with their permission.

These moves are being sold as necessary for the present situation, even though they badly risk individual privacy—cue Ben Franklin.

Such sales pitches would be believable—and stipulate arguendo that the tradeoff might be minimally acceptable—if these surveillance moves had sunset clauses in them. Such surveillances need to be automatically terminated after some specified period of time or at some easily measurable milestone—Wuhan Virus infection rate drops below a particular threshold, for instance. Sunset clauses also must include destruction of the surveillance databases, with that being verifiable by anyone who asks—the present FOIA procedures would provide an example of how that would work.

Unfortunately, sunset clauses are notably absent from these moves toward government surveillance of us citizens—the danger of which is emphasized by the example of the People’s Republic of China and by our own FBI’s abuse of its surveillance authorities, along with our own FISA Court judges’ cynical acceptance of those abuses.

Where Were the FISA Court Judges?

Posted on by
Reply

DoJ’s Inspector General is finding yet more, yet more rampant, miscreancies in and done by what used to be our nation’s—the world’s, even—premier law enforcement agency.

DOJ’s new assessment indicated that FISA problems were systemic at the bureau and extended beyond the Page probe. In four of the 29 cases the DOJ inspector general reviewed, the FBI did not have any so-called “Woods files” at all, referring to documentation demonstrating that it had independently corroborated key facts in its surveillance warrant applications. In three of those applications, the FBI couldn’t confirm that Woods documentation ever existed.
The other 25 applications contained an average of 20 assertions not properly supported with Woods materials; one application contained 65 unsupported claims. The review encompassed the work of eight field offices over the past five years in several cases.

The IG went on.

“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the DOJ IG wrote in a memo today [31 Mar] to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

That’s damning enough, but the problem is much wider than just a failed FBI.  The judges sitting on this Star Chamber FISA court knew those materials needed to be present, yet they approved the warrants in all of those flawed, to the point of dishonesty, warrant applications. Every single one of them.

This is another demonstration that this secret court cannot be fixed; it must be eliminated.

Full stop.

Government Ownership of Private Companies

Posted on by
Reply

There is a move afloat that, as part of a (supposedly) temporary support measure during the current Wuhan Virus situation, the Federal government should inject money into troubled businesses by taking equity stakes—buying shares of stocks—in them.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, that’s a bad idea, and it illustrated the dangers by describing the failure of Japan’s moves in this regard.

As it happens, we have a domestic example of the dangers of governments buying private company stocks: CALPERS. That huge (State) government pension fund has, for all the best reasons, invested in a broad range of American companies, and it has invested in some of them heavily.

Like all significant owners, CALPERS is using the influences of its stakes to push those companies to act on its imperatives. Unfortunately, CALPERS’ imperatives are government imperatives, and these are not necessarily sound business imperatives.

The Federal government doesn’t need to expand that negative risk.

An Illustration

Posted on by
Reply

A businessman in the People’s Republic of China, Ren Zhiqiang—who also is a member of the Communist Party of China—has been for some time an outspoken critic of PRC President Xi Jinping’s handling of the nation’s COVID-19 epidemic, a mishandling that allowed an early infection to blow out of control within the PRC and to become a global pandemic.

Outspoken critic: among other things, Ren wrote a widely disseminated essay that took issue with a 23 Feb speech by Xi. He wrote of a

“crisis of governance” within China’s Communist Party and blamed restrictions on freedom of speech and the press for slowing down the response to combat the novel coronavirus, thereby worsening the outbreak.

And

…after analyzing the President’s [Xi’s] speech he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor[.]”

Then Ren posted on Weibo

When does the people’s government turn into the party’s government? … Don’t waste taxpayers’ money on things that do not provide them with services.

Then his post was deleted, his Weibo account blocked. Ren also has been put on “probation” from the CPC.

And now he’s gone missing, making his point beautifully.

Close

Posted on by
Reply

…but no cigar.  Senator Mike Lee (R, UT) has some thoughts on fixing the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and its secret FISA Court.  He’s on the right track, but his ideas fall short.

Lee wants to fix the FISA Court and tighten the parameters under which it operates. This Star Chamber cannot be fixed; it must be disbanded and the sections creating and empowering it must be rescinded from the FISA altogether.

There remains a need to guard against and to respond to espionage and interference efforts, and there remains a need for that response to involve investigations of American citizens who might be involved in those foreign assaults.  There remains a need to keep many of our responses and investigations secret—for a time—so as not to tip off the targets of our investigations, whether they’re foreign or American.

Counterbalancing that is the even more crucial need to protect Americans’ individual liberties, including those being investigated.  Especially the latter need protection; they’ve not been shown to have done anything wrong, but public suspicions would ruin the reputations of those actually innocent.

Our present Article III courts already are well-versed in handling secret warrants where necessary for domestic criminal investigations and for sealing records until it’s useful to release them or after sufficient time has passed that their release will not harm an ongoing investigation.  FISA warrants can be handled here.

Many of Lee’s other ideas, with some adjustments, will work just fine in a sealed Article III court.

He wants to expand the role of an amicus in FISA warrant applications beyond warrants involving a novel or significant interpretation of law.

amicus should advocate for the privacy and civil liberties of the person targeted.

The role needs to be expanded further. This new amicus should overtly act as Devil’s advocate and seek to expose weaknesses in the warrant application with a view to getting the application denied. The target legitimately cannot be present, yet in most domestic criminal cases, the target has opportunities to contest the warrant, even if only after the fact.  Such a contest needs to be present with FISA warrants, as well.

Lee wants relevant agencies to be required to provide all information in their possession as part of the application, including any exculpatory evidence. The FBI Director and the Attorney General should be required to certify that this has been done, and there needs to be heavy sanctions applied to the agents, the Director and the AG if this requirement has been found, after the warrant’s submittal, to have gone unsatisfied. It’s almost never enough merely to punish the workers directly responsible; too often they acted improperly because they were actively allowed to or because they were permitted to by too lax supervision.

It’s critical that we take these kinds of measures in response to the failures of and abuses from the present FISA setup so that this sort of violation of United States citizens never happen again.