[bestbits] Fwd: Taking the Transparency Push Global

Thu Sep 26 10:25:23 EDT 2013

Hi Michael,

I can only speak from CDT's perspective, but we've been heavily involved 
in the push for transparency about the data the NSA is compelling from 
Internet and telephone companies in the US (and were supportive of GNI's 
outreach to the Freedom Online Coalition governments as well). The US 
companies are currently censored by US law from disclosing information 
about national-security-related requests, and without better information 
about the scope or extent of requests made, or number of users affected, 
all we have to inform public debate about substantive reforms are the 
NSA's assurances that these programs are critical to stopping terrorist 
threats to the US.

A letter 
<https://www.cdt.org/files/pdfs/weneedtoknow-transparency-letter.pdf> to 
Congress that we helped to coordinate asks specifically that companies 
be able to report the number of government requests for info about users 
under specific legal authorities (like PATRIOT 215), the number of 
individuals, accounts, or devices for which info was requested under 
each authority, and the number of requests that sought communications 
content, basic subscriber info, and/or other data -- the idea being that 
pushing for industry-wide consistency in how this information will be 
reported, and requiring the government to release parallel data itself, 
will make it that much harder to game the system.

Of course, the endgame is substantive legal and regulatory reform to 
restrict the NSA in these practices. (If you're interested, we outline 
our concrete reform agenda for the US system in this testimony 
<https://www.cdt.org/files/pdfs/LIBEtestimony24September.pdf> CDT 
recently provided in the EU -- it's a long doc but pages 12-13 summarize 
all the moving pieces.)  I see the transparency push as a key component 
to these advocacy efforts, in terms of organizing proponents of reform, 
ensuring that we have solid facts to help sway those in the middle, and 
to push back on opponents who are willing to accept the NSA's "it's all 
necessary" hand-waving.

Best,
Emma

-- 
Emma J. Llansó
Policy Counsel
Center for Democracy & Technology
1634 I Street NW, Suite 1100
Washington, DC 20006
202-407-8818 | @cendemtech <https://twitter.com/#%21/CenDemTech> | 
@ellanso <https://twitter.com/#%21/ellanso>

On 9/25/13 4:23 PM, michael gurstein wrote:
> Taking the Transparency Push Global
>
> Perhaps someone could enlighten me on this…
>
> I know that pursuing this is a major pre-occupation of various US 
> Internet corps (Google, Facebook etc.) and I can see that getting this 
> made public might help them get off the hook a bit (look how few the 
> requests given the number of users we have/items we process etc.
>
> What I don't understand is why civil society should be interested in 
> this at all since there seem to be an almost infinite number of ways 
> of gaming this (according to various Snowden documents i.e. one 
> reqyest covering all communications between x and xxxistan for the 
> month of January)
>
> Surely CS is concerned with findings ways of managing these practices 
> rather than getting better information on specific items of activity 
> etc.etc.
>
> M
>
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> *Subject:* [bestbits] Fwd: Taking the Transparency Push Global
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>     *Subject:* *Taking the Transparency Push Global*
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>       GNI Writes to Governments Seeking Surveillance Transparency
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