#173: NSA Checks Itself?

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2017

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last week, the National Security Agency (NSA) announced it was ending a surveillance practice known as “about collection.” It’s one piece of a larger puzzle called “Section 702,” the legal authority behind some of the programs first revealed to the public in the Snowden leaks of 2013. While “about collection” is focused on surveillance of foreign communications, Americans’ data are routinely swept up in the process. The data can be queried by the FBI and local law enforcement for domestic purposes, as we discussed in a previous episode. Does the NSA’s announcement indicate that the intelligence agency is cleaning up it's act? Is our government capable of self regulation and oversight? What's the NSA’s motivation here? Evan discusses with friends of the show Neema Guliani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in DC, and Liza Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast on Evan Schwargerber. On today's show is the NSA checking itself before it wrecks itself. Last Friday, NSA announced that it's ending certain surveillance known as about collection. And I've got two of my favorite commenters on privacy issues here to explain
0:21.5	what the hell that is and should anyone care. So joining me to discuss this is Neiman Goliani,
0:26.0	legislative council at the ACLU. That's the American Civil Liberties Union here in D.C.
0:30.4	And Liza Goitin, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice Liberty and National Security
0:35.5	Program. Ladies, thanks so much for joining.
0:43.1	Thanks for having us. My pleasure. So before we jump into a policy discussion, can one of you explain what it is, what it means to say about collection? About collection is a component of
0:50.2	upstream collection. An upstream collection is when the NSA is siphoning communications
0:56.9	off of the internet backbone while they are in transit. And they do that by scanning all of
1:04.1	the traffic, all the international traffic that goes across the internet backbone for certain
1:08.4	selectors that are associated with the targets.
1:11.6	And selectors are often described as things like email addresses, although it could be almost
1:18.6	anything else we don't really know much about it.
1:21.6	So anyway, the NSA scans all of the communications for the selector associated with the target. But what happens with
1:29.6	About Collection is that they are picking up pretty much any transaction that includes the selector. So it
1:36.4	isn't necessarily just communications to or from the target. It includes communications that
1:43.0	merely mention the selector associated with the target.
1:47.2	And when we say the internet backbone, and we're talking in the international context with the NSA,
1:52.4	is this a lot of underwater cables that travel between countries? Are they, when I send the
1:58.3	message to Europe, it's in that moment where it's traveling between the continents that they pick it up.
2:03.1	That's what we mean by upstream.
2:04.8	Well, it's technically on U.S. soil.
2:06.8	It's the part of the Internet backbone that's coming into the United States.
	...

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