#161: Spying on the World

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2017

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Innocent Americans don’t like getting spied on by their government. But should they care when their government spies on foreigners? Countries do this all the time for intelligence purposes, right? Congress even authorized our government to do this in Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. But in the Digital Age, it’s increasingly common for large swaths of the American public to communicate with people outside the country. That leads to U.S. residents being caught in the foreign surveillance dragnet, and their communications collected without a warrant. Current laws allow the NSA and other agencies to share information with your local police department. Could you end up in jail without due process? As Section 702 nears its December expiration date, should Congress reform the law, or just reauthorize it as is? Meanwhile, what does the European Union think? Will fears over American surveillance lead nations to “localize their Internet?” Evan is joined by Jake Laperruque, Privacy Fellow at the Constitution Project and Ashkhen Kazaryan, Legal Fellow at TechFreedom. For more, see Jake’s blog post on Section 702.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Sportsdriver. On today's show, foreign surveillance and intelligence. While most innocent Americans probably don't like getting spied on, their thoughts about how we spy on foreigners might be different. A lot of people say, look, we live in dangerous times and we need to have foreign intelligence and we need to spy on other countries in order to stay safe.
0:22.6	But what happens when Americans are crawled up in that dragnet and is foreign surveillance
0:26.6	actually just foreign when the internet is borderless and cross-atlantic data flows are happening
0:32.6	seamlessly all the time.
0:33.6	Joining me to discuss this topic, our two guests, Jake Loparouk, Privacy Fellow at the Constitution
0:38.6	Project. Jake, thanks for joining. Hi, thanks so much for having me. And Tech Freedom Zone, Ash Kizarian,
0:43.3	legal fellow, Ash, thanks for joining. Thank you. I'm really excited to hear you guys explain this.
0:51.0	So, Jake, you've been on the show before, and we've talked about the issue of foreign surveillance
0:55.7	and how after 9-11, the wall between national security and local law enforcement has kind of been eroded.
1:04.1	And things that might have been associated just with terrorism are used in cases involving drugs or maybe arson or things like that.
1:11.8	So just briefly, for listeners who didn't hear that episode, can you summarize what you
1:16.2	mean by a chain link fence between federal enforcement and local law enforcement and how
1:22.6	we've really seen the wall between these two things go away after 9-11?
1:29.1	Right. So before 9-11,
1:35.5	intelligences and agencies were very much separated in a process called stove piping. Basically, the concept was to stop any agency from becoming too powerful and also to keep the missions
1:40.6	very separate to keep what the FBI was doing, away from what the CIA was doing,
1:44.7	away from what the NSA was doing. After 9-11, the 9-11 commission concluded that that was not a
1:51.9	great system, that that helped us from sort of connecting the dots and seeing how certain
1:56.0	intelligence items were related. So they effectively took down the wall and since then there's been a big
2:01.9	prior to information sharing and making sure that all these intelligence agencies have
2:06.8	access to foreign intelligence information all the time without restriction. The big concern
2:12.2	is that is that some of these agencies like the FBI have dual missions with law enforcement,
	...

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