EFF plan to eliminate mass surveillance

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a non-profit human rights organization founded in July 1990 in the United States to protect the rights enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence due to the advent of new communication technologies. The founders are John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor.

With the cessation of mass surveillance there is a problem. The organization making the most rigorous and deeply penetrating surveillance, the National Security Agency, is bound by US law.
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For Americans, this is good. The laws of the United States and its Constitution protect American citizens and legal residents from surveillance, not supported by a warrant. That is, legally we can resist home observation or mass listening.

In addition, the US Congress is elected by the Americans. It turns out that congressional representatives are obliged to citizens for their jobs, and public voter pressure may affect the adoption of laws in the future - laws that can prevent the most egregious practices of the NSA.

But what about all the other people? 96% of the world's population are citizens of other states and live outside the borders of the United States. They do not vote for congressmen. And US laws protect only the citizens of the country. What can the EFF do to protect the billions of people peeping from the NSA outside the US?

We want to present you a detailed plan for this, on which we have been working for a very long time. Decide whether you want to take part in order to change the world.

The plan is not designed for a couple of weeks or months. This is a battle that will go on for years. The plan will have to be constantly reviewed, when we will gradually understand the tools and agencies involved in mass surveillance, and when an increasing number of people will report abuse in this area.

Introduction: mass surveillance of the NSA, CPS (government communications center) and others

The NSA is trying to gather as much information as possible about the digital activities of people around the world. The approach of the former director of the NSA is simple: “We collect, mark, store. If necessary, we are looking for information. ”

The NSA alone cannot handle this. It relies on a network of international partners helping to gather information — especially on intelligence from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom (collectively known as Five Eyes). In addition, the United States cooperates at different levels with Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Holland, Norway, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, and possibly some other countries. There are countries such as Russia and China, in which observations are conducted independently and without communication with the United States. Some governments (including the US) are spending billions of dollars to develop tools that are used aggressively against innocent people. Some work without much supervision and legal restrictions.

Although whistleblowers and journalists focused on the NSA and CPS, it is not necessary to assume that other states would not like to join them. Agencies always need data and work to expand their capabilities.

We primarily work against the NSA, because we know how they work, and we have the most legal and political tools to influence it. Of course, knowledge of the practice of spying on other agencies in the United States and abroad will not prevent us from interfering with the global epidemic of surveillance. Read materials about the reform of the law on international surveillance and fight against it through encryption on the side of the user .

Mass surveillance is promoted by technology companies, especially large ones. They often have very little attention paid to safety, or it is implemented very poorly. Sometimes they even intentionally help the NSA to collect data on millions of people (for example, AT & T). In other cases, technology companies may legally require that the NSA provide access to their servers.

The NSA works on the basis of several laws and presidential decrees , justifying this mass surveillance. The laws that Congress conducts may reduce these opportunities for them, and the Supreme Court also has the right to slow down the surveillance.

Plan

Since American laws do not protect people of other countries, what can we do to protect non-American Internet users?

Our plan is as follows. Please note that the steps are not sequential - we are working on them in parallel.

1. Put pressure on technology companies to improve the protection of their systems against wiretapping

At present, there are questions about the degree of cooperation between technical companies and the NSA.

In some cases, companies seek to help the NSA. Thanks to whistleblowers, we know that AT & T has a secret room in their building on Folsom Street, San Francisco, where the basilisk optical splitter copies all Internet traffic passing through their networks. And a copy goes straight to the NSA.

Some companies go further, deliberately weakening the security of their systems to facilitate surveillance. From the documents of the NSA it clearly follows.

And what can you say about large companies - Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft? Information comes in different. The data from Snowden indicate that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple are voluntarily participating in the PRISM program. The NSA has access to the servers of these companies, and these companies are involved in spying on users.

In turn, companies deny this and even formed a lobby that seeks to limit this practice to spying on specific people for legitimate purposes, and to stop collecting general data from the Internet.

Not bad for a start, but this is far from what companies can do. Technological companies can strengthen their systems to complicate surveillance, and offer users the ability to encrypt communication at a level at which even their providers will not be able to listen to them. It is also important that companies oppose attempts to create backdoors in their hardware or programs.

The same companies are aware of surveillance requests that are kept secret from the press and ordinary people. These companies have every chance to fight for their users in court (as Yahoo did ). Companies are spending millions to pay for lobbying laws that are convenient for them. Instead, they could help reforms and anti-shadowing laws.

How can we make companies fight surveillance in court and strengthen their systems against surveillance? We are trying to achieve transparency and inform about all cases in which companies play on the side of the government. Therefore, we are proud to support the Reset the Net campaign, which should encourage companies to protect user data. Also look at the HTTPS Everywhere campaigns and our work on email encryption, as well as the Who Has Your Back campaign.

We need to cultivate responsibility for those who develop products that people trust in valuable private data. Those who create computers, network equipment, programs, etc., should be well aware of their responsibility to users who trust them. They must refuse to create backdoors and eliminate existing ones if they find them. We must put public pressure on them, forcing them to bear this responsibility to the fullest.

2. Create a global movement that promotes encryption on the user side

It will be difficult for technical giants to protect our digital lives and change laws and rules, and this will happen slowly. But everyone can start using encryption in a few minutes. Encrypted chat rooms, mail, secure web and document transfer are powerful ways to complicate mass surveillance.

If you do not have your own team of engineers, which will show you how to use encryption in and out, then for you we have created the resource Surveillance Self Defense, explaining in detail how to use encryption. It is intended for people who want to do it, but do not know how. We will continue to distribute and translate these materials, and carry out a campaign to promote them.



The more people around the world are aware of the threat and will understand what can be done to protect themselves, and what kind of help we can expect from companies and the government, the better we will be able to propagate the necessary changes.

3. Encourage the creation of secure communication tools.

Many secure tools are inconvenient for ordinary users. Those that are comfortable, usually unsafe. We want to change this so that people do not have to trade security for convenience. We are running a Campaign for Secure and Usable Crypto, and have made the “ Messaging Security Evaluation ” page, where we rated them according to several criteria. We want to encourage the creation of new technologies that will be both safe and easy to use for ordinary people, while agitating large companies to adopt practices that enhance safety.

4 Reform of the decree 12333

Most people don't know about him, but decree 12333 allows the NSA to monitor people outside the United States. Although Congress is considering amendments to the “Patriot Act” [a federal law adopted in the United States in October 2001, which gives the government and the police broad powers to oversee citizens], there was almost no debate about decree 12333. The decree was initiated by Reagan in 1981, and we launched a campaign to reform it.

5 Develop guiding legal principles on the possibility of observation and the preservation of privacy with the help of scientists and legal professionals around the world

The campaign was started before the Snowden case. It began with the document “ International Principles of the Application of Human Rights to the Supervision of Communications ”. The “13 principles,” as they are called, must work both locally and globally. They explain why the way to legalize mass surveillance is wrong. We hope to prove that mass surveillance is not needed and its use is disproportionately large.

6. To find international partners who can help with the surveillance reform on the ground, and offer them support and advertising.

The goal is to encourage and support activists and lawyers around the world who agree with the 13 Principles, and support their actions to combat increased surveillance. We are already working, for example, with activists from Australia, Mexico and Paraguay.

Especially the EFF focuses on working with countries that share similar information with US services. With our partners we share with us known tactics, strategies and methods of fighting and disclosing such vicious actions.

In some countries, such a struggle is difficult in a political and social sense, and activists are branded as supporters of pedophiles and terrorists. In at least one of the countries we work with, anonymity is prohibited by the constitution. For some of our partners, a public debate on this topic is fraught with a loss of freedom or even worse consequences.

7. Stop the uncontrolled spread of NSA powers

Decree 12333, although giving some authority to the NSA, besides it, there are other laws. The NSA often unfairly claims that certain laws allow them to monitor all Internet users with little or no supervision over the actions of the NSA itself. Among these documents are the FISA Amendments Act [act of spying on people who are not US citizens] and the Patriot Act.



Our team of lawyers deals with the fight against such abuses. We prove in court that surveillance without appropriate warrants is illegal and unconstitutional.

8. Make laws and surveillance procedures more transparent.

One of the problems in the fight against surveillance is that we do not know those details that are unknown to us. Whistleblowers uncover some facts, but what if procedures and practices are being conducted that we don’t know about at all? What if the NSA works with some agencies and collects information using methods that we have never heard of?

It is incredibly difficult to change the world of surveillance when we do not have a general picture of what the government is doing and how it justifies these actions in terms of laws.

In this regard, we:

- We are working on reforming the classification system of government actions
- use the act of free access to information to gain access to government documents
- we help partners in other countries put pressure on the United States so that they have to somehow justify their activities
- we conduct educational activities, talking about the benefits of revelations and their important role in our struggle. This and support organizations like Wikileaks, and people like Mark Klein, Edward Snowden and others.

Global Platform - Global Solutions

Mass surveillance affects people around the world, even where there is no access to the Internet. But laws and courts are divided by country. This means that we need a whole set of tactics to fight. This plan should give you an idea of ​​how US laws and regulations affect people around the world and how we can protect people outside the US.

We are fighting not only with some elements of the American administration - we are also opposed to the unsightly state of today’s privacy, and against the desire of corporations to lay their hands on the media surveillance.

We are constantly improving our plan, but we wanted to help our friends understand how we think so that you can figure out how a few of our small campaigns fit into a common strategy: to protect private communication for people all over the world.

For your part, you can join a local organization fighting for digital rights - there are already many in every country. If you don’t have them in your country, talk to us about how to organize it. You can send inquiries to companies requiring you to increase your protection against espionage from the government, and support companies that go for it. You can subscribe to the petition for decree 12333 and tell more people about it. You can use encryption to protect and increase the cost of mass surveillance, and teach your friends and colleagues. You may refuse to support or cooperate with surveillance attempts and promote privacy protection in the organizations in which you are a member.

Appendix: Laws and decrees that need to be changed

The best way to end mass NSA surveillance is to change the laws of the United States so that they clearly talk about the illegality of surveillance without warrants. However, it is not easy. The NSA relies on a set of different laws and decrees to justify its actions.

These are the ones about which we can confidently say about the change.

Section 215 of the Patriotic Act entitled “Business Records”

Read the law

What it does : Simply put, the government can force any “items” that are “relevant” to the investigation.

Why it matters : the NSA uses this section as an excuse for the massive collection of telephone records of millions of Americans. There are also proposals to collect other information - financial records and data on bank cards.

How to stop : One way is to carry out a decree similar to the Freedom Act, which would clearly say that such use of section 215 is illegal. He was not able to be held in the Senate in 2014, so he needs to be re-conducted in 2015.

The second way is to prevent the renewal of this section of the Patriot Act, which automatically becomes obsolete every few years. The next renewal is due in June 2015, provided that Congress re-authorizes this section. We are conducting a major campaign to prevent this authorization.

Section 702 FISA Amendments Act

Read

What it does : this section is designed specifically to enable the NSA to conduct surveillance without warrants in the United States if the intended observation targets are located abroad.

Why it matters : The NSA relies on this section to support the PRISM program. On the one hand, the NSA obliges Internet giants to provide communication between users, and on the other hand, it connects to traffic through AT & T and other providers. Acting in this way, the NSA not only listens to the objectives of observation, but also “accidentally” gathers the communication of millions of people, both Americans and foreigners.

How to stop : there are no promising decrees. We are working on spreading information about it. By 2017, when this section will need re-authorization, we will prepare a campaign to destroy it.

Decree 12333

Read

What it does: The presidential decree refers to what the NSA does and according to what right the intelligence agencies conduct the majority of their operations.

Why is important: this decree is the main point of support for the NSA, which it uses to justify its surveillance, including mass surveillance, abroad.

How to stop: President’s presidential decree may cancel. Therefore, we are campaigning for President Obama to issue a new decree confirming the rights of people around the world and end mass surveillance.

Pressure through financing

Each year, Congress approves the defense budget. During the discussion, there are heated debates about the need to finance a particular activity, during which it is possible to adopt an amendment that will cancel any form of surveillance.