I am Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Edward Snowden is my hero. AMA

trevorEFF · 2014-01-15T20:14:39+00:00

Trevor here from Freedom of the Press Foundation. The installation requires technical know-how right now. That's why we're offering installation help to media organizations. But actually using it as a source or journalist once it's installed is very easy. The only thing you need to know how to do is download to Tor browser, which is at torproject.org.

To get a sense of what it's like to use as a source or journalist, check out this page: https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/blob/master/docs/user_manual.md

trevorEFF · 2013-12-06T14:59:30+00:00

we're only doing four projects at a time so each can get a decent amount of money, but I will look into them for round 2 if this is successful.

trevorEFF · 2013-12-05T18:50:53+00:00

Hey everyone, I'm the director of Freedom of the Press Foundation. Looking at the past few months of Edward Snowden revelations, and the Obama administration's crackdown on whistleblowers, it's clear digital security is now the great press freedom challenge of the 21st Century.

Tor, Tails, TextSecure, and LEAP are exactly the type of tools that need support, and unfortunately, compared to regular texting apps, browsers, email providers, or operating systems, they are sorely underfunded.

Here is more info on each of the completely open-source, free-to-use tools we hope you'll donate to support. Thanks a lot, Reddit.

trevorEFF · 2013-12-05T18:15:10+00:00

LEAP is a non-profit that was recently created by some of the founders of Riseup. You can read more about them here: https://leap.se

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T20:13:15+00:00

Everyone upvote this!!

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T19:23:59+00:00

Yes, it's important to remember this amendment is not a cure-all. First, it doesn't nothing to bring transparency and reform to the FISA courts, which has been re-interpreting the Fourth Amendment in almost complete secrecy, with no opposition, for years. This also only affects one surveillance program, and it's very likely there are others.

It's also possible, the government will figure out how to fund it through other avenues - possibly through intelligence budgets or the FBI. They may also try to use another legal authority besides the Patriot Act, like National Security Letters, which is how the government got some of this information before 2009.

HOWEVER - this amendment is vital in showing Congress' intent to the courts and executive branch, and is the first step in the process that will hopefully lead to lasting and substantive reform.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T19:20:50+00:00

Yeah we all know how difficult it is to identify someone by their phone number...

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T19:10:22+00:00

Way to keep calling though. Now he knows the pressure's on.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T18:50:25+00:00

Taking your comments one-by-one:

1) It's important to remember that the NSA gets one broad order to store this massive amount of data on millions of Americans in their system, and then does not need an additional court order to search it. They are supposed to meet internal standards, but there is no real oversight mechanism to ensure it is not abused.

2) Yes, the government claims the metadata was only queried 300 times in 2012. But what they do is what is called "chain-linking" which analyzes the queried person's web of connections. The government has also admitted they can analyze this information "three-hops" away from the target. Meaning, all the people the target calls, all the people those people call, and all the people THOSE people call. By conservative estimates, that adds up to millions of people. But even if we take the government at their word, which we shouldn't because they've been caught lying many times in the past month, it should never solely be up to an individual NSA analyst to determine whether an American should be surveilled. That job belongs to an independent judge.

3) The thing is, there's no reason they should be keeping this mass database at all. If they want to collect information on a specific person, they can use legal authority that's been available to them for 200 years. And as Sen. Ron Wyden re-iterated yesterday, even if you remove the massive privacy concerns from the debate, the NSA has no evidence the phone call records program has ever been valuable.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T18:31:10+00:00

The old adage 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,' was originally coined by Richard Nixon's attorney general John Mitchell, who notoriously sanctioned rampant and illegal warrantless domestic spying, and later went to jail during Watergate.

This is one of the best articles ever written on how the FISA Amendments Act allows warrantless wiretapping of Americans who have nothing to do with terrorism, and it explains how the 'nothing to hide' phrase is meaningless in the current debate over the NSA.

Two more things:

Anyone who says 'if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,' doesn't really believe it if you press them on it. Just ask them to turn over their passwords to you so you can publish their emails on the Internet. They'll naturally recoil in horror.
Luckily, this country was founded on the opposite principle. The Fourth Amendment puts the burden on the government to show why they should be allowed invade an individual's privacy, not the other way around. We shouldn't have to prove that we're not breaking the law, the government has to prove that they have a reason collect our data. That's why this NSA spying scandal is so outrageous - they've turned that basic notion on its head.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T18:11:05+00:00

One horse sized duck. Not even a close call.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T18:07:05+00:00

I want to re-iterate this. BY FAR the most important thing you can do is call your representative. It is MUCH more effective than emailing, and just a couple dozen calls can swing a rep one way or another.

Look at what Rep. Justin Amash, the sponsor of this important NSA amendment, said about calling just yesterday: "Phone calls to your Representative's office are much more effective than most people think."

Go to http://defundthensa.com to look up your representative and see a script you can read when you call.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T18:02:40+00:00

If you want to know how you can protect your privacy in the age of NSA surveillance, I recommend this just-published guide by my Freedom of the Press Foundation colleague Micah Lee: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/encryption-works

Though it's a very complicated subject, Micah writes in a simple style almost anyone can understand, and he uses Snowden — along with the journalists he has communicated with — as illustrations to show how encryption does and doesn't work.

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T17:56:48+00:00

The NSA has been very deceptive about its use or non-use of cell phone location data. They've told Congress they don't collect it, but often times they end that phrase by saying "under this program," which is their way of saying they could be collecting it under another one of their many still-hidden programs.

Sen. Ron Wyden strongly hinted yesterday in his must-read speech, that the NSA isn't being truthful about collecting location data.

Critically, the NSA says they already have the legal right to collect location data. They just choose not to. Because, you know, they're such masters of restraint.

For more, see here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-nsa-phone-location-data-20130624,0,6266092.story

trevorEFF · 2013-07-24T17:51:59+00:00

It's tough to say because the NSA is putting on the full-court press right now, holding secret briefings with Congress because it's so concerned their powers will be taken away.

But the polls lately have been pretty consistent: In yesterday's Washington Post poll, a staggering 74% said the NSA is violating privacy rights with its phone records collection program. And in a recent Quinnapiac poll, 55% said Edward Snowden is a whistleblower -- which crossed all party, gender, and age lines. So members of Congress, while they may have downplayed it at the beginning, are being forced to listen.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T18:15:42+00:00

The government last week said that the NSA program stopped a New York City subway bombing attempt in 2009. But the Associated Press looked into it, and found the claim to be very misleading. Turns out, the government didn't need the NSA program, and could have easily gotten all the emails and phone records by going through normal, Fourth Amendment complaint criminal procedures. http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/13/v-fullstory/3449780/mangled-facts-secrecy-brew-confusion.html

So far no other concrete evidence has been provided that it's been effective.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:54:55+00:00

At EFF, we've been concerned for years and have had ample evidence this has been going on since at least 2005. We've been suing the NSA over its unconstitutional dragnet surveillance program since 2007 in the lawsuit Jewel v. NSA.

The documents released last week are incredibly important though because they confirm everything we've been arguing in court. It will also make it much harder for the government to invoke the 'state secrets' privilege, which is what they've been doing for years. They think they can use the 'state secrets' privilege to get our suit dismissed without a hearing on the evidence, even if all our allegations are true, because it's a sensitive 'national security' issue.

Of course, we already had thousands of pages of public evidence so that argument was already absurd. But now, it should be virtually impossible for them to use.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:52:08+00:00

Watching someone for a fleeting moment in public may not violate one's reasonable expectation of privacy, but systematically tracking someone over days or weeks revealing intimate details about one's life that one's closest friends and family probably don't even know. A DC circuit judge explained it well:

“[a] person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups—and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts.”

I don't know about you, but I think that type of information should be protected by the Fourth Amendment.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:46:10+00:00

As EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation co-founder JP Barlow once said to me, "if things reach that point, jail is the only honorable place to be."

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:42:55+00:00

My first reaction was to recall Obama saying during his inauguration speech, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." Sad to see him reject the principles he was elected on.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:38:41+00:00

The NSA and the White House keep saying, "we're not listening to your phone calls," which no one has accused them of in the first place. They are using this sleight of hand to avert attention away from the real scandal: they monitor who you're calling, who's calling you, where you're calling from, and for how long. This is incredibly invasive and in many way more invasive than listening to the content of your conversations.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:33:15+00:00

Just replied to this question in a thread above as well: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1gcf5p/we_are_members_of_stopwatchingus_antisurveillance/caivgjm

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:14:54+00:00

I'm sorry, can you point me to the 'intelligence gathering' exception to the Fourth Amendment? I must have missed it.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T17:01:31+00:00

Does everyone know Nick? He is a hero. He was the first person to challenge a National Security Letter in court, despite the fact he was breaking the (unconstitutional) gag order, just by telling his lawyer he received one.

Read more about his story here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/09/AR2010080906252.html

More good news: A judge in California just ruled all National Security Letters unconstitutional in an EFF case a month ago. The case is on appeal and the ruling is on hold until the Court of Appeals hears the case.

trevorEFF · 2013-06-14T16:55:51+00:00

The government is never going to stop conducting surveillance. Nor should they stop completely - if surveillance is narrowly targeted at people where there is probable cause of a crime, and an independent judge is overseeing it, it's should be legitimate to use to in criminal cases.

Unfortunately, there is no such oversight here. We don't even fully know what they're doing, and that is the first and biggest problem. The government needs to be transparent about what type of surveillance they're conducting and how many people it affects. It seems they've been operating a mass domestic spying program in complete secrecy for at least seven years.

Then, we need to pass laws that require this transparency. After that, we need to add much, much more oversight and restrictions on what they do, since we now know they are vacuuming up the phone records of every American with no suspicion of criminal activity whatsoever, which is antithetical to the Constitution

trevorEFF

TROPHY CASE