Parliamentary oversight of security and intelligence agencies in the EU

One of the reasons for the lack of posts on this blog the past months is that I co-authored this large study (446 pages), together with Aidan Wills, for the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (LIBE). The study came out today, and also includes a number of attachments written by national [...]

MI5 short of surveillance officers says minister

The BBC reports that the UK government has revealed MI5 does not have enough spies to allow it to abolish control orders immediately. Security Minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones said the  Security Service needed to recruit and train more surveillance officers. Ministers want to introduce a lighter touch regime, which depends on more surveillance, by the [...]

US Director of National Intelligence disclosed budget request

For Fiscal Year 2012, “The aggregate amount of appropriations requested for the National Intelligence Program is $55 billion,” according to a February 14 ODNI news release. The new disclosure was required by the FY2010 intelligence authorization act (sec. 364).  That legislation permitted an optional Presidential waiver of disclosure if necessary on national security grounds, but [...]

Newly Released Documents Detail FBI’s Plan to Expand Federal Surveillance Laws

EFF just received documents in response to a 2-year old FOIA request for information on the FBI’s “Going Dark” program, an initiative to  increase the FBI’s authority in response to problems the FBI says it’s  having implementing wiretap and pen register/trap and trace orders on new communications technologies. The documents detail a fully-formed and  well-coordinated [...]

Russian Federation Invests in Enhanced Surveillance

On January 28, 2011, Russian media outlets reported that on January 11, 2011, the government had issued a resolution approving a two-year program of investing in high technology in the field of security. The program, which was recommended by the President’s Commission on Modernization and Technological Development, entrusts the FSB with the responsibility of spending [...]

House Republicans seek to extend Patriot Act

On Friday, the House of Representatives scheduled a vote next week on legislation that would extend the provisions of the so-called Patriot Act, without modification, until Dec. 8, instead of letting them expire at the end of this month. The move is designed to give the House Judiciary Committee, now under Republican management, time to [...]

Federal judge dismisses government surveillance suit for lack of standing

[JURIST] A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment Monday in favor of the government in CCR v. Obama, ruling that the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) lacked standing to challenge the legality of information obtained by Bush-era warrantless surveillance programs. CCR argued that the Terrorist Surveillance [...]

NGO report claims that data retention in Germany is not effective

According to the report: With data retention in effect, more serious criminal acts (2009: 1,422,968) were registered by police than before (2007: 1,359,102), and serious offences were cleared less often (2009: 76.3%) than before the retention of all communications data (2007: 77.6%). User avoidance behaviour can explain the counterproductive effects of blanket data retention on [...]

New Study Documents Growing Role for Private Companies in Policing Online Communications

A new EDRI study finds that powers traditionally employed by law enforcement agencies and the judiciary “are silently being delegated by governments to ISPs and corporations under the guise of industry “self-regulation”. The report details significant efforts to entrust intermediaries with policing powers, surveys the impact of “voluntary ‘self-regulation’” on online content and draws attention [...]

UK’s review of counter-terrorism and security powers

The redacted review considered six key counter-terrorism and security powers: The detention of terrorist suspects before charge, including how we can reduce the period of detention below 28 days Section 44 stop and search powers and the use of terrorism legislation in relation to photography The use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 [...]