Jennifer Granick's blog

TL;DR: A little bit, but not enough.

Yesterday, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued a massive report about the legally and technologically complicated government surveillance program operating under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act Read more about Did PCLOB Answer My Eight Questions About Section 702?

Today, the Eleventh Circuit rejected the exceedingly common law enforcement practice of warrantlessly tracking suspects’ physical location using cell phone tower data. The opinion, United States v. Davis, is both welcome and overdue. Defendants who have and will be physically tracked without a warrant have new legal support to challenge that surveillance. Read more about Eleventh Circuit Says No to Warrantless Cell Tracking, Calls Other Metadata Programs Into Question

Over at Just Security, I have a post about the latest iteration of the USA Freedom Act. Basically, civil liberties groups are withdrawing support for the bill because it no longer clearly ends bulk collection of metadata and other information under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSL statutes, and the intelligence pen/trap statute as the bill was supposed to do.  I explain the language changes that gutted the bill, and lament the state of Congress. Read more here.  Read more about USA Freedom Act: Oh, Well. Whatever. Nevermind.

Over at Just Security, I have a post about Ladar Levinson's legal tribulations connected to DOJ's efforts to get his service's encryption key. Read more about Lavabit’s Owner Goes Public: His Legal Ordeal Makes For Bad Law

Yesterday I attended a conference at the Hoover Institution on “Intelligence Challenges.” I also spoke on a panel in the morning about Civil Liberties. A version of my prepared remarks is below. Ben Wittes has an interesting post on the event. 

____________ Read more about Comments from the Hoover Institution Event on Intelligence Challenges

Over at Just Security I have an analysis of the USA Freedom Act as changed by a recent Manager's Amendment. Basically, I conclude that the Manager's Amendment fails to prohibit "back door searches" for US person information caught up in the NSA dragnet, which was supposedly one of the mail goals of the original bill.  Read more about Manager’s Amendment Puts Back Door Searches Back In USA Freedom Act

Yesterday afternoon, the White House put out a statement describing its view of vulnerability disclosure: the contentious issue of whether and when government agencies should disclose their knowledge of computer vulnerabilities. Over at Just Security, I highlight some parts of the announcement for further thought. Read more about White House Makes Reassuring Noises On 0-Day Policy

Over at Just Security, I have a new piece on the Washington Post's interesting story about the increasingly aggressive role some federal magistrate judges are playing in policing criminal investigations involving digital media. Read more about Let The Sun Shine In: WaPo and the Magistrates' Revolt

Today the Fourth Circuit refrained from deciding the first legal challenge to government seizure of the master encryption keys that secure our communications with web sites and email servers.  Nevertheless, the Court upheld contempt of court sanctions, because of the Lavabit owner’s foot dragging during proceedings. Lavabit had failed to raise the substantive issues below, it decided, thus precluding appellate review. Read more about Fourth Circuit Upholds Contempt Against Lavabit, Doesn’t Decide Gov’t Access to Encryption Keys

Today I filed comments with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) in connection with its hearing on section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. That law is the legal basis for the PRISM surveillance program and involves warrantless collection of communications contents via targeting non-U.S. individuals or entities reasonably believed to be located abroad. I've written previously about questions the PCLOB should investigate with regards to section 702. Read more about My Comments On NSA Spying to PCLOB

Today, the European Court of Justice struck down the European Union’s 2006 Data Retention Directive. That policy required member states to force communications companies to store citizens' telecommunications data for six to 24 months. Read more about Big Privacy Win in the EU

Last week, the New York Times reported that the U.S. is spying on router company Huawei to get information about the Chinese government and to learn how to surveil our allies and other countries that might purchase Huawei routers.  On Just Security, I refute the argument of some that it is not “in the public interest to reveal how democracies spy on dictatorships”. Read more about Huawei Hacking is a Security Scandal

The Internet is under threat, mostly from governments. We need companies to help people stand up to government threats, but companies cannot solve the problems for us. This is what I told the audience on Thursday, at an event co-hosted by CIS and the Program on Liberation Technology. Read more about Government Threats To The Internet: Commentary on the Drummond Talk

Tomorrow, all five members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about their recent report concluding that the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk collection of phone records under section 215 is illegal and ill-advised. Meanwhile, the PCLOB is gearing up to report in a few months its conclusions regarding mass surveillance of the content of Internet transactions under section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act Read more about Eight Questions On Mass Surveillance For The PCLOB

Today, Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society joins Greenpeace, Mozilla, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Libertarian Party, and an array of ideologically diverse groups in The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance. Read more about CIS & The Day We Fight Back