Artificial Intelligence is widely seen as a strategic technology and has thus engendered national development plans from countries across the globe to promote its progress. For quite some time, the United States has been conspicuously on the sideline. The American AI research community has, by and large, bemoaned the lack of Federal leadership in this space with many calling for a Kennedy-esque “moonshot” plan to come out of Washington to cement American leadership in the AI space. This past month, the Trump White House released the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence to provide direction and support for technological advancement in this space.

The response to the EO from the research community has been muted at best. Far from receiving the requested moonshot with the requisite funding and supporting agencies, this EO mostly lays out principles for AI development to be followed by Federal departments. It directs agencies towards prioritization of AI by using existing funds and to seek out collaboration efforts. Further, it directs the National Science and Technology Council Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (among other agencies) to draw up plans and coordinate efforts among Federal agencies to develop grants, project proposals, and reports to be written on areas of development and collaboration within the next 180 days. Beyond that, there is very little concrete action laid out in the EO, which is why it has been criticized so heavily by those in the research community.

In other words, the research community apparently feels the EO doesn’t go far enough.

In truth, however, even this limited EO goes much too far.

Yes, AI has been hailed as a transformative family of technologies that will bring about a radically improved standard of living for people around the globe. On the other hand, there are numerous potential uses of this technology to inflict incredible harm on individuals, and the risk of abuse becomes greater the more AI research is funded or directed by government agencies. Malinvestment (or “malscience,” in this case) is encouraged by political funding of R&D, and the Pentagon has explicitly stated they seek to use this technology in military applications. Rather than not going far enough, Trump’s Executive Order has already gone too far by explicitly bringing this technology into the political realm because the state is simply too dangerous to grant a leading role in AI development.

Chinese AI Spectre

The obvious backdrop to Trump’s new executive order is the plethora of articles and reports coming out of China regarding the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) high-profile investments and multi-year plans to AI dominance. Most notable is China’s New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (AIDP) released in July 2017 which makes the technology a key priority for government funding.

Citing challenges from an aging population, environmental concerns, and economic growth, the report sees AI as a technology which, “brings new opportunities for social construction.” The report then lays out milestones over the next few years: by 2020 they will be on par with the global leaders in AI development with; 2025 plans to see Chinese companies achieving their own innovative breakthroughs in algorithmic development; 2030 they plan to be the undisputed leader in AI technology. Each milestone contains targets for the core industry and the supporting businesses that comprise the wider, industrial AI ecosystem.

On top of the proposed industrial targets, the Chinese plan lays out a series of research areas such as swarm intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, security, natural language processing, AI hardware and infrastructure among others to focus their efforts on.

The Chinese plan is widely seen as the gold standard in national AI plans; it is comprehensive, lays out specific targets, and discusses ways to accelerate adoption including by forcing enterprises and cities to adopt the technology. Moreover, resources have already been allocated to achieving these goals such as the $15.7 fund earmarked by the city of Tianjin to develop AI and the $500 million lead Chinese AI startups have over US-based startups in receiving VC funding. China’s AI plan and the top-down approach the CCP is pursuing is a major reason why Kai-Fu Lu’s recent book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order , sees China steam rolling to success on the global stage.

AI Winters and Government Funding

The calls for more government funding by AI researchers, however, appear to lack historical perspective. Federal funding of AI projects is hardly anything new. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (now known as DARPA) provided $2.2 million grants (equivalent to $18.2 million in 2019) to MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford University in 1963.¹ These institutions became the pioneers of AI research and had great, early success with new models such as an early precursor to today’s artificial neural networks called the perceptron . Additional optimism came from success in translating Russian to English via machine translation. However, the early optimism of AI dried up quickly when, in 1966, it was reported that machine translation was incapable of sufficiently capturing the nuances of Russian.2  Second, Marvin Minksy’s book Perceptrons proved that these simple, early models were incapable of learning very much at all. This killed research into neural networks for the next decade. The vast majority of funding was government related, and once it was pulled, plunged the field into the first AI winter.

A resurgence came later in the 1980’s as companies in the US, Britain, and Japan began to invest in expert systems – rule-based programs that are a precursor to today’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) movement. This led to a rise in AI labs throughout many companies which were able to automate many simple decisions and reap the rewards associated with greater efficiency. Although the private AI market grew to roughly $1 billion by the end of the decade, these systems were shown to be brittle and unable to extend to more challenging domains.

In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry funded and established the Fifth Generation Computer Systems based on a 10-year plan to develop new computer systems and set Japan as the international leader. This spawned a series of international competitors and plans to stay ahead of the Japanese most notably the European Strategic Program on Research and Information Technology, the Strategic Computing Initiative and Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in the US. The Japanese project failed to deliver on its lofty goals of developing a new computing system as it was overtaken by Sun Systems and Intel despite over $400 billion in funding ($730 billion in 2019).

The Fifth Generation’s competing projects ended in similar results. For example, the Strategic Computing Initiative spent $1 billion from 1983-1993 ($2.2 billion in 2019) to achieve machine intelligence.3  Although there were some successful spin-off projects (e.g. Carnegie Mellon’s Navlab), the Initiative itself was a failure and was a major contributor to the second AI winter when it collapsed.

If only inefficiency was the only concern of large-scale, government funded AI research! Unfortunately, the White House, Pentagon, Congress, and others have indicated that they have much more destructive ends in mind.

Weaponization of AI

Trump’s Executive Order refers to AI in the context of “national security” nearly a dozen times. The day after the Executive Order was released, the Pentagon released its AI strategy document calling for rapid AI adoption throughout all aspects of the military. The Pentagon had previously contracted with Google to develop Project Maven, a computer vision system to assist object recognition for drone warfare. Google agreed not to renew the contract after dozens of employees resigned in protest and thousands more petitioned the company to refrain from developing weaponized AI tools. This led to Google restricting its defense work , but military projects are still permitted.

Despite the push back that Google has received, other big tech companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM continue to engage in work supporting the weaponization of AI with the Pentagon. These companies too have had to deal with internal discontent and have resorted to moving employees to different projects when they object. Despite the internal challenges, Amazon continues to work with the government on controversial facial recognition programs and Microsoft has continued with a cloud-computing project known as JEDI .

For now, the Pentagon has been unable to attract the talent required to develop AI technologies internally and thus has had to resort to partnering with the likes of the big tech firms. In China, the funding and control of these companies is linked directly to the CCP, which has given rise to the Sesame Credit system. At the risk of sounding cliche, Sesame Credit is an Orwellian system of social control predicated on the complicity of big tech companies and AI to track the citizenry’s purchases and behaviors, incentivizing them to behave in party-approved ways and punishing them when they veer away. Punishments include restrictions on travel, loans, housing, business, and banking. The official goal of the program is to encompass all citizens and , “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”

Perhaps most insidiously, it encourages social ostracization by reducing your score based on the score of those in your network. Thus you are encouraged to drop friends and family from your life if they aren’t behaving in a party-approved manner.

While the US is not China, we are living in a world where the NSA has obliterated 4th Amendment rights and where US presidents assert the legal authority to kill US citizens without charges or a trial. A national AI strategy that further links the US government with the tech companies and researchers puts us one step closer to China, but not as a leader in AI, rather as a country that leverages this technology to suppress people. One can only hope that backlash associated with Project Maven grows with respect to other Pentagon projects leaving the Department of Defense without the capabilities to weaponize AI as they seek.

• 1.Crevier, Daniel, AI: The Tumultuous Search for Artificial Intelligence, (New York, NY: BasicBooks, 1993) pg. 64-65
• 2.“The famous retranslation of ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ as ‘the vodka is good but the meat is rotten’ illustrates the difficulties encountered.” Russell, Stuart J., Norvig, Peter, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall 2009) pg. 21
• 3.Roland, Alex, Shirman, Philip, and Aspray, William, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002) pg. 2

Christian Hubbs is a PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University working in machine learning and optimization. He blogs at datahubbs.com and co-hosts a podcast at artificiallyintelligent.tech.

Three days after the overtly pro-life film, “Unplanned” hit movie theaters nation wide, and one day after reaching #4 in the Box Office, the film’s official Twitter Handle (@UnplannedMovie) was inexplicably suspended, late Saturday morning.

Conservative voices took to Twitter to condemn the suspension, many claiming the move as “par the course” in the social media giant’s attempt to censor conservative thought.

After reporting on the suspension, I reached out to Twitter’s Communication and Press Office for comments on the reason behind it. Their office returned my inquiry an hour later.

According to a Twitter spokeswoman, the suspension wasn’t directly in response to the film’s official twitter account, but due to another linked to it. An algorithm sets in, identifying accounts linked to the one that had violated “Twitter rules”, and suspends them in order to ensure that the offenders don’t evade by turning to another account. After suspending @UnplannedMovie, Twitter reviewed all accounts in question, and on further review, it was clear the film’s official account should not be suspended, even if tied to another that was. According to the spokeswoman, “We (at Twitter) enforce the Twitter Rules impartially for all users, regardless of their background or political affiliation”.

When pressed on why Twitter had not verified this account, along with other influential conservative handles—knowing that verified accounts are protected from unscrupulous report “swarming” by “troll” accounts and knowing that the controversial film had hit theatres, the spokeswoman replied that she had no further comment.

Earlier this month, in an effort to counter the increasing unease of many conservatives using his social media platform, CEO and Co-Founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey sat with podcaster Joe Rogan for a three-hour interview. Concerns were raised, including refusal to “verify” conservative accounts (in other words, provide an official “blue checkmark”, confirming that account to belonging to influential accounts), the use of specific algorithms to allegedly “shadowban” conservative accounts (not allowing followers to read or reply to “tweets”) and suspensions of conservative accounts due to mass-complaint tactics (or swarming) of those on the left. Although the responses of Dorsey, and the global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety at Twitter—Vijaya Gadde—seemed reasonable at first, conservatives quickly fired back with evidence—including video. Saturday’s suspension without cause, has called into question the Twitter CEO’s expressed desire — that his social media platform be one of “open and civil dialogue.”

For now, those at @UnplannedMovie, although justifiably concerned about prejudicial targeting of their social media accounts—even from the platforms themselves— seem happy for the resulting “free publicity”.

A bill introduced in the Vermont House would require Vermont law enforcement agencies to obtain legislative approval before acquiring or using surveillance technology. Passage of the bill would take the first step toward limiting the unchecked use of surveillance technologies that violate basic privacy rights and feed into a broader national surveillance state.

Rep. Narnara Rachelson (D-Burlington) introduced House Bill 470 (H.470) on Feb. 27. The legislation would require Vermont law enforcement agencies to get legislative approval before acquiring or using surveillance technology including facial or tattoo recognition software, genetic DNA testing, stationary license plate readers, cell site simulators, and international mobile subscriber identity-catchers. Law enforcement agencies would also have to get legislative approval before purchasing, trading, or obtaining information from private or public entities gained from the use of such technology.

Access

Local police have access to a mind-boggling array of surveillance equipment. As it now stands, many law enforcement agencies can obtain this high-tech, extremely intrusive technology without any approval or oversight. The federal government often provides grants and other funding sources for this spy-gear, meaning local governments can keep their purchase “off the books.” Members of the community, and even elected officials, often don’t know their police departments possess technology capable of sweeping up electronic data, phone calls and location information.

In some cases, the feds even require law enforcement agencies to sign non-disclosure agreements, wrapping surveillance programs in an even darker shroud of secrecy. We know for a fact the FBI required the Baltimore Police Department to sign such an agreement when it obtained stingray technology. This policy of nondisclosure even extends to the courtroom, with the feds actually instructing prosecutors to withdraw evidence if judges or legislators press for information. As the Baltimore Sun reported, a Baltimore detective refused to answer questions about the department’s use of stingray devices on the stand during a trial, citing a federal nondisclosure agreement.

As privacysos.org put it, “The FBI would rather police officers and prosecutors let ‘criminals’ go than face a possible scenario where a defendant brings a Fourth Amendment challenge to warrantless stingray spying.”

H.470 would prevent state and local police in Vermont from obtaining technology without public knowledge and would provide an avenue for concerned residents to oppose and stop the use of some spy gear.

Impact on Federal Programs

Information collected by local law enforcement undoubtedly ends up in federal databases. The feds can share and tap into vast amounts of information gathered at the state and local level through fusion centers and a system known as the “information sharing environment” or ISE. In other words, stingrays create the potential for the federal government to track the movement of millions of Americans with no warrant, no probable cause, and without the people even knowing it.

Fusion centers were sold as a tool to combat terrorism, but that is not how they are being used. The ACLU pointed to a bipartisan congressional report to demonstrate the true nature of government fusion centers: “They haven’t contributed anything meaningful to counterterrorism efforts. Instead, they have largely served as police surveillance and information sharing nodes for law enforcement efforts targeting the frequent subjects of police attention: Black and brown people, immigrants, dissidents, and the poor.”

Fusion centers operate within the broader ISE. According to its website, the ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These analysts, operators, and investigators…have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies.” In other words, ISE serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered without a warrant. Known ISE partners include the Office of Director of National Intelligence which oversees 17 federal agencies and organizations, including the NSA. ISE utilizes these partnerships to collect and share data on the millions of unwitting people they track.

The federal government encourages and funds surveillance technology including ALPRs, drones and stingrays at the state and local level across the U.S. In return, it undoubtedly gains access to a massive data pool on Americans without having to expend the resources to collect the information itself. By requiring approval and placing the acquisition of spy gear in the public spotlight, local governments can take the first step toward limiting the surveillance state at both the local and national level.

In a nutshell, without state and local cooperation, the feds have a much more difficult time gathering information. This represents a major blow to the surveillance state and a win for privacy.

The passage of H.470 would take an important first step toward limiting the use of surveillance technology by addressing it at the local level.

WHAT’S NEXT

H.470 was referred to the House Committee on Judiciary where it must pass by a majority vote before moving forward in the legislative process.

Yesterday, a Florida House committee passed a bill that would ban warrantless location tracking and the use of stingray devices to sweep up electronic communications in most situations. The proposed law would not only protect privacy in Florida, but it would also hinder one aspect of the federal surveillance state.

Rep. Jackie Toledo (R-Tampa) and Rep. John Cortes (D-Kississimee) introduced House Bill 1405 (H1405) on March 5. The legislation would help block the use of cell site simulators, known as “stingrays.” These devices essentially spoof cell phone towers, tricking any device within range into connecting to the stingray instead of the tower, allowing law enforcement to sweep up communications content, as well as locate and track the person in possession of a specific phone or other electronic device.

H1405 would require police to get a search warrant based on probable cause before acquiring real-time or historical GPS location data, and before using any type of mobile tracking device in most situations. Police already must get a court order before intercepting cell phone communication content. Requiring a warrant for location tracking would effectively end warrantless stingray use in Florida. The legislation would also require police to get a warrant before accessing stored location data from a service provider.

On March 26, the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee approved H1405 by a 13-0 vote.

The bill does include some exceptions to the warrant requirement. Police could use stingray devices in an emergency situation that involves the immediate danger of death or serious injury, or the escape of a prisoner, and in situations where “real-time location tracking before a search warrant authorizing such tracking can, with due diligence, be obtained.” In these situations, police would still be required to obtain a warrant within 48 hours.

A similar bill is working its way through the Florida Senate.

IMPACT ON FEDERAL SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS

The federal government funds the vast majority of state and local stingray programs, attaching one important condition. The feds require agencies acquiring the technology to sign non-disclosure agreements. This throws a giant shroud over the program, even preventing judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys from getting information about the use of stingrays in court. The feds actually instruct prosecutors to withdraw evidence if judges or legislators press for information. As the Baltimore Sun reported in April 2015, a Baltimore detective refused to answer questions on the stand during a trial, citing a federal non-disclosure agreement.

Defense attorney Joshua Insley asked Cabreja about the agreement.

“Does this document instruct you to withhold evidence from the state’s attorney and Circuit Court, even upon court order to produce?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cabreja said.

As privacysos.org put it, “The FBI would rather police officers and prosecutors let ‘criminals’ go than face a possible scenario where a defendant brings a Fourth Amendment challenge to warrantless stingray spying.”

The experience of a Pinellas County, Florida, man further highlights the shroud of secrecy around the use of stingray devices, along with the potential for abuse of power inherent in America’s law enforcement community.

The feds sell the technology in the name of “anti-terrorism” efforts. With non-disclosure agreements in place, most police departments refuse to release any information on the use of stingrays. But information obtained from the Tacoma Police Department revealed that it uses the technology primarily for routine criminal investigations.

Some privacy advocates argue that stingray use can never happen within the parameters of the Fourth Amendment because the technology necessarily connects to every electronic device within range, not just the one held by the target. And the information collected by these devices undoubtedly ends up in federal databases.

The feds can share and tap into vast amounts of information gathered at the state and local level through fusion centers and a system known as the “information sharing environment” or ISE. In other words, stingrays create the potential for the federal government to track the movement of millions of Americans with no warrant, no probable cause, and without the people even knowing it.

Fusion centers were sold as a tool to combat terrorism, but that is not how they are being used. The ACLU pointed to a bipartisan congressional report to demonstrate the true nature of government fusion centers: “They haven’t contributed anything meaningful to counterterrorism efforts. Instead, they have largely served as police surveillance and information sharing nodes for law enforcement efforts targeting the frequent subjects of police attention: Black and brown people, immigrants, dissidents, and the poor.”

Fusion centers operate within the broader ISE. According to its website, the ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These analysts, operators, and investigators…have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies.” In other words, ISE serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered without a warrant. Known ISE partners include the Office of Director of National Intelligence which oversees 17 federal agencies and organizations, including the NSA. ISE utilizes these partnerships to collect and share data on the millions of unwitting people they track.

The federal government encourages and funds stingrays at the state and local level across the U.S., thereby undoubtedly gaining access to a massive data pool on Americans without having to expend the resources to collect the information itself. By placing restrictions on stingray use, state and local governments limit the data available that the feds can access.

In a nutshell, without state and local cooperation, the feds have a much more difficult time gathering information. Passage of H1405 would strike a major blow to the surveillance state and would be a win for privacy.

WHAT’S NEXT

H1405 will now move to the House Justice Appropriations Subcommittee where it must pass by a majority vote before moving forward in the legislative process.

The push to turn America’s cities into Chinese-style surveillance networks has found a new partner in Detroit, Michigan.

The only difference between what is happening in San Diego and what is happening in Detroit is, they are not using the same smart street lights to spy on everyone. Detroit uses Intellistreets a company known to have strong ties to Homeland Security.

What started out as a voluntary police-cam share program in Saginaw, Michigan has morphed into a massive 1000 surveillance camera network which includes 500 businesses in Detroit.

Detroit’s Project Green Light, spies on people in real-time at gas stations, retail stores and public housing.

A map of Project Green Light’s surveillance cameras, shows the true extent of police spying in Detroit and it looks an awful lot like the map of San Diego’s IQ street lights.

What makes Detroit’s spying so disturbing, is that the city wants the public to help fund their program.

The Detroit Free Press said, Mayor Mike Duggan sent out a ‘citizen petition drive’ soliciting money from home owners and businesses to help pay for a new multi-million dollar surveillance program.

“In order to continue making Detroit a safe place to live, work, and play, we are asking you to gather signatures from your neighbors pledging support for the Neighborhood Real-Time Intelligence Program.”

Motorola’s hand in helping turn our cities into Chines-style surveillance centers is deplorable.

Motorola Solutions and the Detroit Police Department have worked together to create their own “Neighborhood Real-Time Intelligence Program” (NRTIP) which spies on residents 24 hours a day. (To learn more about Motorola and Project Green Light click here.)

An article in the Neighborhoods.org revealed that police departments are creating their own ‘real-time intelligence centers’.

Detroit Police Department Lieutenant Sonia Russell said, “the difference between us and a fusion center is that we’re not on the state level. All the products that we have here are on the same level as being a fusion center with counter-terrorism, with the statistical data, with the crime patterns and trends, with the camera footage,” she said. “That’s what’s unique about us, we got everything right here, and a lot of real time crime centers don’t have that. We’re able to do all the things that a fusion center can do.”

I am torn between calling Detroit, America’s second Chinese-style surveillance city or New Orleans which has the dishonor of being “America’s largest spying network.”

The true extent of police spying is much worse that what is being reported, especially if you include Ring doorbells and Nest cameras which turn entire neighborhoods into mini-surveillance networks.

I think what puts Detroit in second place, is law enforcement’s social media spying.

Local police mimic China by spying on everyone’s social media

The ‘Neighborhoods’ article also revealed that Detroit’s NRTIP spies on everyone’s social media and receives secret hot lists from Project Green Light.

“Project Green Light is a considerable portion of how they track crime in the city, using their hot list – the area around a recent crime – as a way to prioritize where they should be monitoring and focusing their efforts.”

“The screens on the front wall are feeds from Project Green Light locations and dumping cameras. One analyst scrolled through Twitter and other social media to check for any threats or mentions of crime.”

Big Brother’s justification for turning our cities into mirror images of China is summed up by Crime Analyst Breanna Lingo who said, ” If you were a victim of crime one day, there could be an extra eye watching to really help.”

Does it make you feel safer knowing that law enforcement is using the same tactics that China uses? Do we really need police spying on everyone in real-time to make us feel safer?

Once again, the Facebook team has shown their true colors by betraying the trust of millions of users, and offering up access to their most personal and private information for profit. The Silicon Valley leader has been caught violating their own data sharing policies, for the benefit of some of their most prestigious clients. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Sony and Netflix have been enjoying the special privilege of being able to read, write and even delete Facebook users’ private messages. Isn’t that something?

The tech industry has been involved in countless scandals as of late; whether its conspiring to throw elections, censoring conservative content or violating user privacy, Big Tech is at the helm of controversy. It is no wonder then, that massive amounts of people are leaving Facebook and other social media platforms.

Facebook sells out users and their data

A shocking investigation led by The New York Times has revealed that Facebook has been giving at least 150 of the world’s largest companies unbridled access to its users’ personal information. As the report reveals, these companies have been privy to a far more intrusive level of personal data than Facebook has ever been willing to admit.

Info Wars reports:

The Times interviewed over 60 people including current and former employees of Facebook and its partners, former government officials and privacy advocates – and reviewed over 270 pages of Facebook’s internal documents while performing technical tests and analysis to monitor what data Facebook has been handing out like candy.

The Times investigation uncovered an internal Facebook document, in which the company emphasized that “personal data is the most prized commodity of the digital age,” and it is being traded by some of the most powerful companies in the world.

In what is possibly the largest Facebook scandal to date, the personal information of over 400 million users was given away to hundreds of the world’s most influential companies, including Microsoft, Google and other partners, for free. Facebook traded information on its users, and violated their perceived and expected levels of privacy, to support industry relations and to advance the company’s own agenda.

Supposedly, this exchange was intended to benefit everyone — except perhaps Facebook users, who are nothing more than guinea pigs in the social media mind control experiment.

Under this “trade,” Facebook gave companies access to users’ most private information, including their personal messages. Companies like Netflix were even granted the ability to read and delete users’ messages. Since the Times report, Netflix has stated that it never read anyone’s private messages and claims the company never requested such intrusive access.

What happened to privacy?

While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly promised that users “have complete control” over what and how much data they share, this shocking investigation has proven that simply isn’t true. Countless companies have gained access to all sorts of user data — including Facebook’s unique user IDs, which is a serious safety risk.

As Info Wars reports:

Facebook was able to circumvent a 2011 consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which barred the company from sharing user data without explicit permission, because Facebook considered the partners extensions of itself – “service providers that allowed users to interact with their Facebook friends.” This allowed the company to grant such unprecedented access to everyone’s information. The partners were reportedly prohibited from using the personal information from purposes outside the scope of their agreement, however there has been little to no oversight.

Facebook has been taking advantage of this little loophole for years. The FTC has repeatedly come under fire for failing to act, even though agency officials admit that this “loophole” shouldn’t even exist.

See more coverage of the latest privacy violations by Big Tech at Surveillance.news.

Sources for this article include:

InfoWars.com

TheGuardian.com

On Wednesday, a Vermont House committee held a hearing on a bill that would ban “material support or resources” for warrantless federal surveillance programs. This is an essential step every state needs to take at a time when the federal government seems unlikely to ever end unconstitutional spying on its own.

A bipartisan coalition of 12 representatives led by Rep. Felisha Leffler (R-Enosburg Falls) introduced House Bill 493 (HB493) on Feb. 28. Under the proposed law, a Vermont government entity or law enforcement officer could not “assist, participate with, or provide material support or resources to enable or facilitate a federal agency in the collection of a person’s protected user information.” In effect, it would bar state officials, including police, from assisting federal agencies with collecting private electronic communications data except under three conditions.

1. Pursuant to a probable cause warrant.
2. Pursuant to a judicially recognized exception to the warrant requirement.
3. With the person’s specific consent.

HB493 is similar to a Michigan law that went into effect last summer, and passed out of committee in Missouri last week.

Vermont could become the third state to take action to prohibit support for warrantless federal surveillance. In 2014, California took a smaller first step when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill banning the state from participating in, or providing material support or resources to any federal agency engaged in the “illegal and unconstitutional collection of electronic data or metadata.” The California law needs additional steps for effectuation by defining specifically what actions constitute “illegal and unconstitutional.” The Michigan law and HB493 go further by prohibiting specific state actions and give the movement to stop unconstitutional federal surveillance more momentum.

FEDERAL SPYING CONTINUES

According to a report leaked by a Republican congressional aide, the NSA recently ended a bulk phone data collection program operated under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. But make no mistake, surveillance continues under other “authorities.” The program that is reportedly not being used is only a fraction of the NSA dragnet, and the Patriot Act is only one source of “authority” for federal spying. In fact, officials have admitted that “a great deal of communications-related information collected under the executive order 12333.” This Reagan-era EO provides even less oversight and transparency than Section 215.

And despite concerns about warrantless surveillance in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, Congress has done nothing to rein in NSA spying. In fact, it has expended it. For instance, in January 2018, Congress reauthorized the FISA Sec. 702.

As Andrew Napolitano explained, “the FISA-created process permits a secret court in Washington to issue general warrants based on the government’s need to gather intelligence about national security from foreigners among us. It pretends that the standard is probable cause of foreign agency, but this has now morphed into the issuance of general warrants whenever the government wants them.”

A typical FISA warrant authorizes government surveillance on all landlines, mobile devices and desktop computers in a given area. While the process was created to monitor foreign agents, it sweeps up reams of data belonging to Americans.

Before approving a six-year extension of Section 702, the House voted to kill an amendment that would have overhauled the surveillance program and addressed some privacy concerns. Provisions in the amendment would have required agents to get warrants in most cases before hunting for and reading Americans’ emails and other messages that get swept up under the program.

Just one day after Trump signed the extension into law, news came out about the infamous FISA memo. This memo was available to members of the House Intelligence Committee prior to the vote to reauthorize FISA. None of this information was made available to Congress at large. Most telling, every single Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee voted to reauthorize Sec. 702, and in a heartwarming show of bipartisanship, six of the nine Democratic representatives on the committee joined their colleagues.

This is yet another indication we can’t count on Congress to limit its spy-programs.

PRACTICAL EFFECT

The feds can share and tap into vast amounts of information gathered at the state and local level through fusion centers and a system known as the “information sharing environment” or ISE. In other words, stingrays create the potential for the federal government to track the movement of millions of Americans with no warrant, no probable cause, and without the people even knowing it.

Fusion centers were sold as a tool to combat terrorism, but that is not how they are being used. The ACLU pointed to a bipartisan congressional report to demonstrate the true nature of government fusion centers: “They haven’t contributed anything meaningful to counterterrorism efforts. Instead, they have largely served as police surveillance and information sharing nodes for law enforcement efforts targeting the frequent subjects of police attention: Black and brown people, immigrants, dissidents, and the poor.”

Fusion centers operate within the broader ISE. According to its website, the ISE “provides analysts, operators, and investigators with information needed to enhance national security. These analysts, operators, and investigators…have mission needs to collaborate and share information with each other and with private sector partners and our foreign allies.” In other words, ISE serves as a conduit for the sharing of information gathered without a warrant. Known ISE partners include the Office of Director of National Intelligence which oversees 17 federal agencies and organizations, including the NSA. ISE utilizes these partnerships to collect and share data on the millions of unwitting people they track.

Because the federal government relies heavily on partnerships and information sharing with state and local law enforcement agencies, the passage of HB493 would potentially hinder warrantless surveillance in the state. For instance, if the feds wanted to engage in mass surveillance on specific groups or political organizations in Vermont, it would have to proceed without state or local assistance. This would likely prove problematic.

State and local law enforcement agencies regularly provide surveillance data to the federal government through ISE and Fusion Centers. They collect and store information from cell-site simulators (AKA “stingrays”), automated license plate readers (ALPRs), drones, facial recognition systems, and even “smart” or “advanced” power meters in homes.

Passage of HB493 would set the stage to end this sharing of warrantless information with the federal government. It would also prohibit state and local agencies from actively assisting in warrantless surveillance operations.

By including a prohibition on participation in the illegal collection and use of electronic data and metadata by the state, HB493 would also prohibit what NSA former Chief Technical Director William Binney called the country’s “greatest threat since the Civil War.”

The proposed law would effectively ban the state from obtaining or making use of electronic data or metadata obtained by the NSA without a warrant.

Reuters revealed the extent of such NSA data sharing with state and local law enforcement in an August 2013 article. According to documents obtained by the news agency, the NSA passes information to police through a formerly secret DEA unit known Special Operations Divisions and the cases “rarely involve national security issues.” Almost all of the information involves regular criminal investigations, not terror-related investigations.

In other words, not only does the NSA collect and store this data. using it to build profiles, the agency encourages state and local law enforcement to violate the Fourth Amendment by making use of this information in their day-to-day investigations.

This is “the most threatening situation to our constitutional republic since the Civil War,” Binney said.

NSA FACILITIES

The original definition of “material support or resources” included providing tangible support such as money, goods, and materials and also less concrete support, such as “personnel” and “training.” Section 805 of the PATRIOT Act expanded the definition to include “expert advice or assistance.”

Practically-speaking, the legislation will almost certainly stop the NSA from ever setting up a new facility in Vermont.

In 2006, the agency maxed out the Baltimore-area power grid, creating the potential, as the Baltimore Sun reported, for a “virtual shutdown of the agency.” Since then, the NSA aggressively expanded in states like Utah, Texas, Georgia and elsewhere, generally focusing on locations that can provide cheap and plentiful resources like water and power.

For instance, analysts estimate the NSA data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, will use 46 million gallons of water every day to cool its massive computers. The city supplies this water based on a contract it entered into with the spy agency. The state could turn off the water by voiding the contract or refusing to renew it. No water would effectively mean no NSA facility.

What will stop the NSA from expanding in other states? Bills like HB493. By passing this legislation, Vermont would become much less attractive for the NSA because it would not be able to access state or local water or power supplies. If enough states step up and pass the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, we can literally box them in and shut them down.

LEGAL BASIS

HB493 rests on a well-established legal principle known as the anti-commandeering doctrine. Simply put, the federal government cannot force states to help implement or enforce any federal act or program. The anti-commandeering doctrine is based primarily on five Supreme Court cases dating back to 1842. Printz v. U.S. serves as the cornerstone.

“We held in New York that Congress cannot compel the States to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program. Today we hold that Congress cannot circumvent that prohibition by conscripting the States’ officers directly. The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program. It matters not whether policy making is involved, and no case by case weighing of the burdens or benefits is necessary; such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.”

There is a saying attributed to the French banker Nathan Rothschild that “Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes its laws.” Conservative opinion in the United States has long suspected that Rothschild was right and there have been frequent calls to audit the Federal Reserve Bank based on the presumption that it has not always acted in support of the actual interests of the American people. That such an assessment is almost certainly correct might be presumed based on the 2008 economic crash in which the government bailed out the banks, which had through their malfeasance caused the disaster, and left individual Americans who had lost everything to face the consequences.

Be that as it may, if there were a modern version of the Rothschild comment it might go something like this: “Give me control of the internet and no one will ever more know what is true.” The internet, which was originally conceived of as a platform for the free interchange of information and opinions, is instead inexorably becoming a managed medium that is increasingly controlled by corporate and government interests. Those interests are in no way answerable to the vast majority of the consumers who actually use the sites in a reasonable and non-threatening fashion to communicate and share different points of view.

The United States Congress started the regulation ball rolling when it summoned the chief executives of the leading social media sites in the wake of the 2016 election. It sought explanations regarding why and how the Russians had allegedly been able to interfere in the election through the use of fraudulent accounts to spread information that might have influenced some voters. In spite of the sound and fury, however, all Congress succeeded in doing was demonstrating that the case against Moscow was flimsy at best while at the same creating a rationale for an increased role in censoring the internet backed by the threat of government regulation.

Given that background, the recent shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and at mosques in Christchurch New Zealand have inevitably produced strident demands that something must be done about the internet, with the presumption that the media both encouraged and enabled the attacks by the gunmen, demented individuals who were immediately labeled as “white supremacists.” One critic puts it this way, “Let’s be clear, social media is the lifeblood of the far-right. The fact that a terror attack was livestreamed should tell us that this is a unique form for violence made for the digital era. The infrastructure of social media giants is not merely ancillary to the operations of terrorists — it is central to it [and] social media giants assume a huge responsibility to prevent and stop hate speech proliferating on the internet. It’s clear the internet giants cannot manage this alone; we urgently need a renewed conversation on internet regulation… It is time for counter-terrorism specialists to move into the offices of social media giants.”

It’s the wrong thing to do, in part because intelligence and police services already spend a great deal of time monitoring chat on the internet. And the premise that most terrorists who use the social media can be characterized as the enemy du jour “white supremacists” is also patently untrue. Using the national security argument to place knuckle dragging “counter-terrorism specialists” in private sector offices would be the last thing that anyone would reasonably want to do. If one were to turn the internet into a government regulated service it would mean that what comes out at the other end would be something like propaganda intended to make the public think in ways that do not challenge the authority of the bureaucrats and politicians. In the US, it might amount to nothing less than exposure to commentary approved by Mike Pompeo and John Bolton if one wished to learn what is going on in the world.

Currently I and many other internet users appreciate and rely on the alternative media to provide viewpoints that are either suppressed by government or corporate interests or even contrary to prevailing fraudulent news accounts. And the fact is that the internet is already subject to heavy handed censorship by the service providers, which one friend has described as “Soviet era” in its intensity, who are themselves implementing their increasingly disruptive actions to find false personas and to ban as “hate speech” anything that is objected to by influential constituencies.

Blocking information is also already implemented by various countries through a cooperative arrangement whereby governments can ask search engines to remove material. Google actually documents the practice in an annual Transparency Report which reveals that government requests to remove information have increased from less than 1,000 per year in 2010 to nearly 30,000 per year currently. Not surprisingly, Israel and the United States lead the pack when it comes to requests for deletions. Since 2009 the US has asked for 7,964 deletions totaling 109,936 items while Israel has sought 1,436 deletions totally 10,648 items. Roughly two thirds of Israeli and US requests were granted.

And there is more happening behind the scenes. Since 2016, Facebook representatives have also been regularly meeting with the Israeli government to delete Facebook accounts of Palestinians that the Israelis claim constitute “incitement.” Israel had threatened Facebook that non-compliance with Israeli deletion orders would “result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.” Facebook chose compliance and, since that time, Israeli officials have been “publicly boasting about how obedient Facebook is when it comes to Israeli censorship orders.” It should be noted that Facebook postings calling for the murder of Palestinians have not been censored.

And censorship also operates as well at other levels unseen, to include deletion of millions of old postings and videos to change the historical record and rewrite the past. To alter the current narrative, Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook all have been pressured to cooperate with pro-Israel private groups in the United States, to include the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL is working with social media “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate” by blocking “hate language,” which includes any criticism of Israel that might be construed as anti-Semitism by the new expanded definition that is being widely promoted by the US Congress and the Trump Administration.

Censorship of information also increasingly operates in the publishing world. With the demise of actual bookstores, most readers buy their books from media online giant Amazon, which had a policy of offering every book in print. On February 19, 2019, it was revealed that Amazon would no longer sell books that it considered too controversial.

Government regulation combined with corporate social media self-censorship means that the user of the service will not know what he or she is missing because it will not be there. And once the freedom to share information without restraint is gone it will never return. On balance, free speech is intrinsically far more important than any satisfaction that might come from government intrusion to make the internet less an enabler of violence. If history teaches us anything, it is that the diminishment of one basic right will rapidly lead to the loss of others and there is no freedom more fundamental than the ability to say or write whatever one chooses, wherever and whenever one seeks to do so.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest.