7821 - European Privacy Watchdogs Join Forces to Probe Facebook

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/social-networking/news/european-privacy-watchdogs-join-forces-to-probe-facebook-682515

European Privacy Watchdogs Join Forces to Probe Facebook

Agence France-Presse, 17 April 2015

European data protection authorities have joined forces to probe Facebook's privacy controls, a French watchdog said Thursday, putting the popular US social media giant under fresh pressure.

"There is concerted collective action between five European authorities, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain," said Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin, head of France's CNIL privacy watchdog.

She added that the Netherlands was coordinating the project, which consists of a working group involving representatives from the five countries that will look into Facebook's practices.

Facebook has for years been dogged by concerns over how well privacy is safeguarded online.

Falque-Pierrotin said Facebook's privacy policy was at the heart of discussions, and data protection watchdogs are likely to examine the sharing of data between different apps such as Instagram or Whatsapp, both of which belong to the US giant.

Facebook, whose international headquarters are based in Dublin, for its part said it was acting in compliance with data protection legislation.

"We recently updated our terms and policies to make them more clear and concise, we're confident the updates comply with applicable laws," a Facebook spokeswoman told AFP.

Earlier this month, an Austrian law graduate filed a closely-watched class action suit against the social network for alleged privacy breaches.

Max Schrems and 25,000 other users are suing the social media giant for various rights violations, ranging from the "illegal" tracking of their data under European Union law to Facebook's involvement in the Prism surveillance programme of the US National Security Agency.

Google has also been in the firing line over privacy issues and has had multiple run-ins with authorities in Europe.

In December, for instance, Dutch privacy watchdog DPA warned Google it faced a hefty fine if it did not fix alleged breaches in data protection laws when it uses personal details for targeted advertising.

3459 - Can't act against websites for sharing information on Indians with US: SC - IBN Live

India

Can't act against websites for sharing information on Indians with US: SC

CNN-IBN | Updated Jun 27, 2013 at 07:42pm IST

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New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) against nine internet companies for allegedly sharing information of Indian citizens with US intelligence agencies.

Among the nine internet companies are Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo. The PIL was filed last week to ensure that the rights of internet users are protected.

The apex court said it cannot entertain the petition as Indian agency is not involved in it and allowed the petitioner, former dean of Law Faculty of Delhi University SN Singh, to move any other forum for seeking remedy against Internet companies and the US agency for snooping data resulting in violation of right to privacy.

The bench also said that the court cannot direct Parliament to enact law to safeguard privacy of citizens against such snooping.

In his plea, Singh had alleged that such largescale spying by the US authorities is detrimental to national security and urged the apex court to intervene in the matter.

He had claimed that the Internet companies are sharing information with the foreign authority in "breach" of contract and violation of right to privacy.

Singh had submitted that it is a breach of national security as government's official communications have come under US surveillance as services of private Internet firms are being used by them.

He had sought directions to the Centre to "take urgent steps to safeguard the government's sensitive Internet communications" which are being kept outside India in US servers and are "unlawfully intruded upon by US Intelligence Agencies through US-based Internet companies under secret surveillance program called PRISM".

In his petition, Singh had also sought directions restraining the government and its officials from using US-based Internet companies for official communication and that all such companies, which are doing business in India, must establish their servers here so that they can be regulated as per Indian laws.

The Centre had earlier on June 11 expressed surprise and concern over the snooping and said it will seek information and details from the US over reports that India was the fifth most tracked country by the American intelligence which used a secret data-mining programme to monitor worldwide Internet data.

With Additional Inputs From PTI

3455 - Cypherpunks, Edward Snowden, and the politics of mass surveillance - Live Mint

Cypherpunks, Edward Snowden, and the politics of mass surveillance

Edward Snowden has confirmed that the ‘surveillance dystopia’ Assange had warned of is already here

G. Sampath 

First Published: Tue, Jun 25 2013. 12 27 PM IST

Updated: Tue, Jun 25 2013. 05 18 PM IST

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen... Left to its own trajectory, global civilization will be a post-modern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there,” writes Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, in his latest book Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.

When it came out in late 2012, Cypherpunks may have seemed like a book ahead of its times. After all, even six months ago, how many in the world had heard about the PRISM worldwide surveillance programme of the US National Security Agency (NSA)? Or about Boundless Informant? Or that India was one of the top five countries monitored extensively by the NSA? Or that Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, and several other tech companies shared user data that were supposed to remain private? But a few weeks ago a man named Edward Snowden confirmed to the world that the “surveillance dystopia” Assange had warned “may already be there” is, in fact, already here.

The Snowden saga, far from being an exception that concerns only the American government, points to what nearly all governments have been doing for some time now: snooping on their citizens with no democratic oversight.

The Indian state already has a Central Monitoring System (CMS) that will tap directly into your emails and phone calls with zero oversight by courts or Parliament. In the offline world, surveillance will be taken care of through CCTV cameras, compulsory use of biometric data/identification, elimination of all anonymity wherever possible, and of course, a comprehensive aerial surveillance system that will deploy helicopters and drones to man the skies 24 by 7.

The sheer scale and ambition of state surveillance programmes—with everyone from the US and the UK to India, Saudi Arabia and North Korea eager to get their hands on the latest systems—the exchange of data between private corporations and state agencies, and the extreme secrecy surrounding these operations, should leave no doubt in anybody’s mind about their real (as opposed to the proclaimed) use: control.

Yet it is still common to find conservatives and even liberals framing the whole surveillance issue as one about privacy. Restricting the debate to privacy enables them to argue that one necessarily has to sacrifice some privacy in order to enjoy security. The idiocy and mischief sponsoring this argument is laid bare in Cypherpunks.

Opening with an introduction by Assange titled “A Cryptographic Call to Arms”, Cypherpunks is essentially an edited conversation among Assange and three of his activist/hacker friends, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, and Jeremie Zimmerman, organized into 10 riveting chapters.

The book opens with a discussion on “Increased communication versus Increased Surveillance”, which offers a historical and political overview of the rise of mass surveillance alongside the growth in communication and information flows via the internet. The following chapter elaborates on the “militarisation of cyberspace”, which is “like having a tank in your bedroom. It’s a soldier between you and your wife as you’re texting. We are all living under martial law as far as our communications are concerned, we just can’t see the tanks—but they are there. To that degree, the Internet, which was supposed to be a civilian space, has become a militarized space.”

The discussants then exchange notes on private sector spying, how it collaborates with state surveillance, and the nature of what former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson describes as the “intelligence-industrial complex”. As you’d expect, much of the discussion here is about Google. “Do you know what you looked for two years, three days and four hours ago? You don’t know; Google knows,” notes Muller-Maguhn.

Assange argues that there are three basic freedoms from which all other freedoms derive: freedom of movement, freedom of communication, and freedom of economic interaction. While the three are interlinked, privacy becomes important for freedom of communication (if there’s a threat involved in speaking publicly, then the only way to protect yourself is by communicating privately), and for freedom of economic interaction. The surveillance debate, therefore, is not merely about loss of privacy—it is about an attack on the freedom of whoever is put under surveillance. Therefore, any surveillance can only ever be undertaken for a specific reason and with permission—there can never be any case for mass surveillance of innocent and guilty alike, as is the case now with programmes like PRISM and CMS.

Assange attributes the drive for mass surveillance to the insecurity of the nation state when faced with the burgeoning transnational reach and influence of the Internet—which is beyond the jurisdiction or control of any one state. But then, he asks, what if nation states, and a world divided by national boundaries, are no longer the answer to humanity’s problems?

The outfit he founded, WikiLeaks, is a transnational entity that belongs to no country. It took on the world’s most powerful nation state, bore the brunt of its vengeance, and has survived. The weapon that helped WikiLeaks survive—cryptography—is what Assange recommends to all those who would fight to protect their privacy and freedom in an era when “transnational surveillance and endless drone wars are almost upon us”.

Cryptography is the art and science of making sure that when you want your data to be read only by yourself, nobody else can read it. “The universe believes in encryption,” writes Assange, which is why it is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it. It’s probably also why in many countries, including the US and Russia, it is illegal for individuals to practice cryptography beyond a certain strength—for then they cannot snoop on you.

Assange envisions the Internet as a free, platonic realm that could be fortified “behind a cryptographic veil.” He wants the netizens of the world to unite and “create new lands barred to those who control physical reality, because to follow us into them would require infinite resources. And in this manner to declare independence.”

“Cypherpunks advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change,” says a small note explaining the term at the beginning of this book. While cryptography is one part of it, the politics and values of cypherpunk can be an even more effective weapon and rallying point against the abuses of power that lead up to, and can be the outcomes of, mass surveillance.

The fundamental cypherpunk position is summed up in the motto: privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful. Obviously, the reality today is the exact opposite, which is why much of civil-political action is about using one’s freedom of expression to force transparency and accountability on the powerful. This was also what Snowden attempted to do, as he explains in this video interview .

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. History has borne out the truth of this observation, and will do so again if we let it. Though Assange insists that “this book is not a manifesto”, it is worthy of being one. Cypherpunks is a must-read for anyone and everyone who has an email account and/or uses a mobile phone.

   

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3443 - For Their Eyes Only - Computer World

For Their Eyes Only

By Arun Kumar, 19-Jun-2013

Most governments and some organizations are using IT to play Big Brother. Are technological advancements and legislative indifference pushing privacy to extinction?

With the progress in technology, which admittedly no one should grudge, what hope does the common man have about protecting his or her individual privacy?

In the movie Ocean’s Eleven, there is a scene towards the end when Julia Roberts tells Andy Garcia, “You of all people should know that in your hotel there is always someone watching.” How ironic that what happens in reel life is transpiring in real life.

For those of you not fully acquainted with the latest happenings, here is a primer on some recent revelations. The US government, through a top-secret programme called PRISM, has got direct access to the servers of Internet giants such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, AOL, Facebook etcetera, which allows government officials to collect material—including search history, e-mail content, file transfers, live chats, and more. Not just that. There is also a top-secret court order compelling telecom provider Verizon to turn over the telephone records of millions of US customers. 

These details were revealed by the UK newspaper The Guardian. And what is interesting is that this program is not something new. It has been in existence since 2007. It’s just that we are finding about it after six years.

Though all the companies whose servers are being tapped for private or confidential data—according to The Guardian—vehemently deny knowledge of any such program, the fact is that with or without their knowledge, such an operation has been going on for the last six years.

However, make no mistake. This kind of snooping is not just limited to the US government—which ostensibly in its quest to gather all possible information to track terrorist activities is—trampling all over an individual’s privacy. 

Almost every government worth its salt does similar things. The only difference is that while some are sophisticated and secretive in their approach, others, like the Indian government, are simply blatant and arrogant about it. And we would be naïve to believe that only governments engage in these kinds of activities. Businesses are not far behind and are equally guilty of the same.

However, what makes this kind of a “Big Brother” activity possible is the advancement in technology, which enables faster, easier, and ironically, even secure communications. At the same time, the very technology also provides governments or big businesses with deep pockets and even deeper connections with access to personal and private communication details of unsuspecting citizens.

This was highlighted about a dozen years ago in 2000 by A. Michael Froomkin, professor of Law at the University of Miami School of Law, in a paper aptly titled The Death of Privacy?, published in the Stanford Law Review. In his paper, Froomkin states, “The rapid deployment of privacy-destroying technologies by governments and businesses threatens to make informational privacy obsolete.”

He goes on to describe a range of current technologies and activities to which the law has yet to respond effectively, which include routine collection of transactional data, automated surveillance in public places, and deployment of biometric technology among others. He concludes by saying, “Given the rapid pace at which privacy-destroying technologies are being invented and deployed, a legal response must come soon, or it will indeed be too late.”

And since the paper was published, the use of technology to monitor, track, and analyze almost every movement and communication of people has only increased. Just imagine the number of cameras that are installed at airports, traffic signals, inside and outside public and private buildings, the various databases like National Population Register, UID, and wiretaps like Radia tapes. And surely, there are more such examples.

But, in which direction have the legislations progressed since then? Unfortunately, in the exact opposite direction. Governments are only enacting laws that require citizens to divulge more data or give the government the right to snoop—such as the FISA Amendments Act in the case of the US government.

So, with the progress in technology, which admittedly no one should grudge, and no hope in sight as far as laws and regulations are concerned, what hope does the common man  have about protecting his or her individual privacy? 

Well, the answer is simple—in today’s world there is no such thing as privacy. It's dead. You can only run, but can’t hide.Remember, there is always someone watching, and perhaps even listening.

3436 - In the dark about ‘India’s Prism’ - The Hindu

In the dark about ‘India’s Prism’

Deepa Kurup

AP Supporters of Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret information about U.S. surveillance programs, display umbrellas with " Shame on NSA" written as they march to the Consulate General of the United States in Hong Kong on June 15, 2013 as they accused the U.S. government of infringing people's rights and privacy.

Last weekend, even as the world was reeling from the shocking expose on the National Security Agency’s clandestine surveillance programme, Prism, the Indian wing of the hackers’ collective Anonymous announced a multi-city protest against what they termed “the Indian prism”.

Though the protests did not take off here, the issue they were raising is one that has defenders of online privacy and Internet freedom crying foul. Their contention is that the Centralised Monitoring System (CMS), which reportedly went operational this April, facilitates a “Prism-like” project that allows the government to snoop on phone calls, mobile and Internet traffic.

But is CMS the ‘Big Brother’ project that it’s being made out to be? Maybe. Maybe not. The fact is that till date, the actual nature of the programme remains a top secret. There is very little in the public domain that sheds light on the project itself, let alone what kind of monitoring it entails, what type of data it attempts to tap, collect or analyse, the technological aspects, and limitations and safeguards.

Includes Internet?

For starters, there is little clarity on whether the CMS deals with Internet traffic. Recently, at a Google Hangout, Union Communications Minister Milind Deora spoke about CMS as a system that only intercepts phone data; it allows the government to directly access phone data of suspects (based on other intelligence sources) without having to approach the telecom service provider each time. His argument was that far from being an invasion of privacy, the intention was to protect the privacy of individuals from private companies (telecos).

Nowhere does he mention monitoring of Internet traffic, even as he clarifies that CMS was an afterthought to the ‘leak’ in the corporate lobbyist Niira Radia phone tapping case, which had industrialist Ratan Tata taking the government to court.

What we know

First talked about shortly after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, CMS was touted as a one-stop solution to the “decentralised nature” of intelligence gathering in the country. Developed by the Department of Telecommunications’ Telecom Enforcement, Resource and Monitoring (TREM) Cell along with the Centre for Development of Telematics, the Rs. 170 crore facility reportedly has a large server in Delhi.

Again, there is little known about the technical capabilities of this facility.

The only known official word on the nature of content that will be monitored here is in the form of a 2009 reply in the Rajya Sabha, where the then IT Minister Gurudas Kamat explained that CMS would monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country.

He said that this was in the interest of protecting secrecy of the system as it does away with “manual interventions”, instead “these functions will be performed on secured electronic link and there will be minimum manual intervention.” It was clarified that the interception would be real time or “instant as compared to the existing system which takes a very long time”.

The stated benefits of this, according to the Rajya Sabha transcripts uploaded on the PIB site, were to create central and regional database to help central and State enforcement agencies in interception and monitoring, eliminating “manual intervention” by telecom service providers enabling “direct electronic provisioning”, “filter and alert creation on target numbers”, and analysis of call data records and data mining.

‘Faster’

But, how is this remarkably different from what’s already being done now?

“The promise is that the entire operation will enable intelligence gathering to be much faster. It isn’t that all this data can’t be accessed now; [with CMS] the process of accessing this will be in real time. At least that’s what is being promised,” says a senior government official.

Further, the official argues, law enforcers have to go through the regular processes of getting permission, either from the Home Ministry or the courts, for any interception. “Technically, this does little more than make the actual process of accessing the information faster. Also, the telecom service providers now don’t have to be consulted every time a surveillance request must be made, as that part will be centralised.”

Where’s the debate?

Critics of this project do not buy the government’s line that the project is necessary to protect them from private players. The biggest sore point is the fact that there is neither public information on CMS nor has a debate been called for before it is implemented. Further, they point out that in the absence of laws on privacy, such a project could lead to “gross violations of individual liberty”.

Says Pranesh Prakash, lawyer with the Centre for Internet and Society, “The biggest problem with the centralised monitoring system is that it is being introduced without any public discussion or mechanism of parliamentary accountability, as though issues of the nation’s security and incursions into individual privacy should not concern us.”

Similar endeavours

That the CMS could involve a monitoring system that keeps tabs on, harvests and applies analytics to user metadata or simply snoops on Internet traffic is not altogether inconceivable. Take for instance, tenders called for similar Internet monitoring programmes by States including Karnataka, Maharashtra and Assam.

A public tender called by the special branch of the Assam police, uploaded on tech news portal NextBigWhat, calls explicitly for the kind of monitoring system that privacy activists have been warning about. The tender calls for creating an “automated system” with Internet monitoring solutions, where the “deployment architecture” will include “10 GB probes deployed [on] ISP premises, strategically or tactically deployed at various tapping points in the ISP network”.

The document, in its mission brief, states that each Internet service provider (ISP) site shall host at least one aggregation server for all the probes, where the information will be collated and transferred to a master aggregation server. The aim, it clarifies, is to “collect, filter and analyse data” in real time.

On metadata, the document states that the information must be retained for at least a year; and clearly states that it should be able to monitor unstructured content such as emails, chats and transcribed call logs.

Mr. Prakash says: “The tenders floated by various State governments, including Assam, Delhi and Karnataka, show that State-level surveillance might even exceed central-level surveillance, and these ‘Internet monitoring systems’ are just as worrisome and they too lack public accountability.”

Keywords: NSA, Prism, Internet, Surveillance, Social security, Anti-terrorism, Protest, Edward Snowden

Printable version | Jun 17, 2013 11:25:28 AM | 

3407 - India should not delay enacting a Privacy Act - Live Mint

India should not delay enacting a Privacy Act

It is time the government stopped twiddling its thumbs and took action

Livemint  

First Published: Mon, Jun 10 2013. 07 32 PM IST

Illustration: Shyamal Banerjee/Mint

By modern standards of civility governments snooping on citizens is considered abhorrent behaviour. The admission by the US government that it has been collecting billions of pieces of information world-wide, especially personal data and emails, has thus been greeted by shock and anger. Indian citizens, too, have been subjected to this sweep, carried out under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa.

It is time the government of India stopped twiddling its thumbs and took strong measures such as enacting a Privacy Act to protect the rights of citizens.

An 8 June report by The Guardian suggests that 6.3 billion reports were collected from India. The investigation followed reports that the US has been monitoring communications between US and foreign nationals over the Internet for years under a project called “prism”. The Guardian said it has acquired classified documents about a data-mining tool called “boundless informant” that was used by the US National Security Agency that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

Reacting to earlier reports on the same issue, US director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper, issued a media release on 6 June, stating that The Guardian and The Washington Post articles “contain numerous inaccuracies”, but acknowledged that, “section 702 is a provision of Fisa that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-US persons located outside the US...” The US government simultaneously clarified that the usage of such information or metadata (analytics of the humungous amounts of data intercepted) is used only after a due legal process.

Nevertheless, this assurance provides little comfort given that around 40 countries filter the Internet to varying degrees, including democratic and non-democratic governments. YouTube and Gmail (both from Google), BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd, WikiLeaks, Skype (now a Microsoft product), Twitter and Facebook have all been censored, at different times, in China, Iran, Egypt and even India.

In April, the Union government began rolling out a central monitoring system, or CMS, which will enable it to monitor all phone and Internet communication in the country. Human Rights Watch in a 7 June media release described CMS as “chilling, given its reckless and irresponsible use of the sedition and Internet laws”.

Cybersecurity experts caution that while US and European Union citizens have recourse to law under their own domestic privacy policies, India has no such safeguard. The obvious agency to take a lead in the design, framing and enactment of such a law is, of course, the Union government. But it is hard to expect the government to take any initiative in the matter as—like any government—it would want to have the capabilities to intercept private communication of citizens. 

On 25 April 2011, the government in a media release admitted that provisions for authorization of interception are contained in section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, read with Rule 419 (A) of the Indian Telegraph Rules, 1951, as well as in section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, read with the Information Technology (Directions for Interception or Monitoring or Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009.

The release also pointed out that the Supreme Court, in its order of 18 December 1996, had upheld the constitutional validity of interceptions and monitoring under section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, but added that telephone tapping would infringe the Right to Life and Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression enshrined in articles 21 and 19(1)(a), respectively, of the Constitution of India, unless permitted under the procedure established by law.

However, these guidelines are implemented more by way of an exception rather than as a rule.

The trouble here is that while the law is clear, it has multiple exceptions built into it that allow the government to do as it pleases. The safeguards thought of by the judiciary are not sufficient to protect the privacy of citizens. It is too much to hope that the government will adhere to privacy norms on its own. Three things need to happen in case India is ever to have a reasonable chance at a decent privacy law. One, citizen awareness and activism have to assume a much higher level than what prevails now. Two, public representatives—legislators, especially in Parliament—have to realize that privacy is a right that is at par with other rights and should not be trampled at will. Finally, at an appropriate juncture, the higher judiciary should take a look at the issue carefully once again. Continuous judicial scrutiny of the government is, for now, the only viable option to check abuses of privacy.

Does India need a privacy law? Tell us at views@livemint.com

3404 - Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret

Government Says Secret Court Opinion on Law Underlying PRISM Program Needs to Stay Secret

In a rare public filing in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Justice Department today urged continued secrecy for a 2011 FISC opinion that found the National Security Agency's surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act to be unconstitutional.  Significantly, the surveillance at issue was carried out under the same controversial legal authority that underlies the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.

EFF filed a suit under the Freedom of Information Act in August 2012, seeking disclosure of the FISC ruling.  Sens. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall revealed the existence of the opinion, which found that collection activities under FISA Section 702  "circumvented the spirit of the law” and violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But, at the time, the Senators were not permitted to discuss the details publicly. Section 702 has taken on new importance this week, as it appears to form the basis for the extensive PRISM surveillance program reported recently in the Guardian and the Washington Post. 

The government sought to block EFF’s FOIA suit by arguing that only the FISC, itself, can release the opinion.  In an effort to remove that roadblock, EFF filed a motion with the FISC on April 22 seeking the surveillance court’s consent to disclosure, should the document be found to be otherwise subject to release under FOIA.  In its response filed with the FISC today, the government offers a circular argument, asserting that only the Executive Branch can de-classify the opinion, but that it is somehow prohibited by the FISC rules from doing so.

The government’s argument is guaranteed to make heads spin. DOJ earlier argued that it lacks discretion to release the FISC opinion without the FISC's consent, but DOJ now argues that if the FISC were to agree with EFF, “the consequence would be that the Government could release the opinion or any portion of it in its discretion.”  But FISC material is classified solely because the Executive Branch demands that it be, so release of the opinion has always been a matter of Executive discretion. 

Frankly, it’s difficult to understand what DOJ is saying. The Government seems to have a knee-jerk inclination towards secrecy, one that often – as in this case – simply defies logic. The government's bottom line is this: their rules trump the public's statutory rights. But it's not the province of the Executive branch to determine which rights citizens get to assert. 

The events of the past week have demonstrated that the public is angry about the NSA's domestic surveillance program. EFF hoped the public outcry might lead the government to rethink its position in this case (and, notably, DOJ has in two other EFF cases). But, for now, the government is digging in its heels and refusing to budge. But a democracy demands more. When the government acts unconstitutionally, the public has a fundamental right to review, understand, and correct that government action. Despite the DOJ's filing today, EFF intends to keep fighting against the government's secret surveillance practices.