NARUC Commissioners to Discuss NSA Surveillance Leaks, Consumer Protection at Annual Meeting
NARUC commissioners will discuss a resolution at their annual meeting this month that would require providers to disclose their actions that facilitate government surveillance. The resolution asks the FCC to order providers to protect consumers by telling them that they “should have no expectation of privacy” (http://bit.ly/1hNKrV8). Indiana Utility Regulatory Commissioner Larry Landis drafted the resolution demanding wireline, wireless and Internet Protocol networks disclose more of their government requests, due to the leaks over the past few months about National Security Agency surveillance, he told us Wednesday. “States have always been defenders of the individual, and I wrote this resolution in the model of individual protection,” said Landis.
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The resolution outlines the NSA surveillance leaks through news clips from ProPublica, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The NSA rules permit the agency to “store any encrypted communication, domestic or foreign, for as long as the agency is trying to decrypt it or analyze its technological features,” said a ProPublica report (http://bit.ly/17botWf). The resolution gives details from the NSA records released in September that show the NSA failed to meet a “court-ordered standard” in its database containing the phone records of “nearly all Americans,” said The Wall Street Journal in an article Landis referenced (http://on.wsj.com/1e8qkxS). Landis acknowledged NSA’s alleged collection of contact lists, and how the NSA is paying “hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications efforts” from an August article from The Washington Post (http://bit.ly/18OyXhG). On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the CIA was paying AT&T more than $10 million a year for the company’s database of phone records for the agency’s counterrorism investigations (http://nyti.ms/1c0U9hW).
The resolution asks the commissioners to “censure” the actions of the network providers who have “supplied data, call and/or text records, Internet data, voice communications, correspondence and materials maintained by those providers on behalf of their customers engaged in the use of social media.” Many American feel as though their privacy rights have been violated, Landis told us. “Americans know that the Internet is not totally secure, but it should be a place where you can be yourself,” he said. “The providers did nothing to counter this expectation of a reasonable right to privacy on the Internet, wireline or wireless networks, and they should have disclosed it.” The public expectations of privacy and confidentiality that were held for decades were “not only open to compromise by certain network providers but the information was turned over to the agencies without any attempt whatsoever to dispute the legitimacy of the requests,” Landis wrote in the resolution.
The NSA surveillance leaks could lead to fewer Americans choosing to use the Internet in order to protect their privacy, said Landis. “Broadband buildout is closing in on ubiquity, but this could compromise the uptake,” he said. “The FCC and the state commissions are charged with removing the barriers to the adoption of broadband, but some are starting to think that this was not the deal we thought that it was.” Landis said he brought up the idea of the resolution during a conference call with the telecom committee, but the reaction toward it was muted. “We will discuss this more at the meeting, and it will have some changes before it gets approved,” he said.
Landis is not targeting NSA contractor Edward Snowden in his draft resolution, he said. “I'm not focusing on if he is a spy or if he committed treason, but there is concern about how he could get all of this information with a security password,” said Landis. This demonstrates that “similar access to any information swept up on any private citizen is accessible to any determined individual with a password and security clearance,” Landis wrote in the resolution. Every decade or so massive security leaks come about through current technologies, said Landis. Snowden’s leaks surprised Landis especially because of the “order of magnitude,” he said.