American telephone metadata was only found to have played a role in initiating 1.8 percent of investigations, with a total contribution from NSA surveillance to investigations coming to 7.5 percent of cases. Traditional investigative methods (informants, community tips, targeted intelligence) provided 59.6 percent of impetus for those investigations, the report states.
Facebook, Wal-Mart and other companies planning to use facial-recognition scans for security or tailored sales pitches are working to build the rules for how images and online profiles can be used, according to Newsday. The U.S. Department of Commerce will start meeting with industry and privacy advocates in February to draft a voluntary code of conduct for using facial recognition products, and the draft will be ready by June.
Within days of reports about the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance efforts, it was revealed that French intelligence services operated a similar system with minimal oversight, The New York Times reports. Last week, with little public debate, the French legislature approved a law that critics fear would expand electronic surveillance of French residents and businesses. The provision was quietly passed as part of a routine military spending bill, and it defines the conditions under which intelligence agencies may gain access to or record telephone conversations, emails, Internet activity, personal location data and additional electronic communications, the article reports.
Following the controversial disclosures of National Security Agency surveillance practices, a presidential task force is on the verge of proposing a dramatic overhaul of the agency, CBS News reports. The task force’s draft report is due Sunday, and will be released for public review before the end of the year. The goal, the article says, is to roll out the new NSA procedures in January, most of which will be enacted through internal administration procedural changes.
Cellphone carriers answered at least 1.1 million requests from law enforcement agencies seeking information on caller locations, text messages and other data for use in investigations last year, according to the carriers’ reports.
Eight major technology companies, including Google, Facebook and Twitter, are joining forces to call for tighter controls on government surveillance, according to The Associated Press. The companies say in an open letter to President Barack Obama that while they sympathize with national security concerns, recent revelations make it clear that laws should be carefully tailored to balance them against individual rights.
Close to 1.5 percent of the Internet’s top websites track users without their knowledge or consent, even when visitors enable their browser’s Do Not Track options, according to a research team in Europe.
Close to 60 percent of Americans polled oppose the NSA’s collection of data on telephone and Internet usage, and a similar majority opposes the legal process supervised by a secret federal court that oversees the government’s classified surveillance, the AP report says.
In a New York Times/CBS NewsPoll, a week after the Boston Marathon attack, which was unraveled after the release of video footage of the two suspects flushed them out of hiding, 78 percent of people said surveillance cameras were a good idea.
State police in Virginia recorded and collected the whereabouts of potentially millions of people in an effort to monitor attendees at political rallies in 2008 and 2009, according to Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
