National

The Justice Department's Inspector General announced Wednesday that it will be conducting an investigation into how the FBI handles Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications in response to requests from Attorney General Jeff Sessions and members of Congress. 

Why it matters: Back in February, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked the DOJ's watchdog to look into GOP Congressman Devin Nunes' memo that alleged the FBI deceivingly obtained a FISA warrant in order to surveil Trump's foreign policy aide Carter Page. Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff also released a memo last month, defending the FBI's actions.

DOJ watchdog to investigate FBI's handling of FISA warrants

At the request of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Michael Horowitz, Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Justice. Photo: Drew Angerer / Getty 

Politics

Office of Inspector General (OIG)

Technology

Surveillance

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

The Justice Department is in "a preliminary stage" of discussions about requiring tech companies building "tools into smartphones and other devices" that would allow law enforcement investigators to access encrypted data, the New York Times reports.

Why it matters: This has been on the FBI's mind since 2010, and last month the White House "circulated a memo...outlining ways to think about solving the problem," officials told the NYT. Both FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, support finding ways for law enforcement to access data without compromising devices security. 

SVP of Apple's software engineering, Craig Federighi, disagreed that a tool like this is appropriate, telling the NYT: "“Proposals that involve giving the keys to customers’ device data to anyone but the customer inject new and dangerous weaknesses into product security." 

But, but, but: Per NYT, one idea is "receiving particular attention inside the government." This would make smartphones "generate a special access key" when they encrypt their data. The manufacturer would be able to use that key — which would be "stored on the device itself" — to access the data, if required to do so by authorities. 

DOJ eyeing tool to allow access to encrypted data on smartphones

Officials told the Times they're in the "preliminary stage."

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Department of Justice (DOJ)

A stranger might now be watching me

A CCTV camera on the new U.S. Embassy in London

A CCTV camera on the new U.S. Embassy in London. Photo: Richard Baker / In Pictures via Getty Images

Lawmakers in the Senate voted Thursday to approve a bill that extends a key part of a surveillance law for another six years. The House passed the bill last week.

Why it matters: Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is controversial because of concerns the digital surveillance it enables, of foreign nationals located abroad, could pick up communications from Americans without a warrant. The program expires tomorrow if President Trump doesn't sign the bill.

The details: The bill approved 65-34 on Thursday extends Section 702 for six years. Privacy advocates worry it doesn’t do enough to address their concerns and, in fact, opens the door to restarting searches of collected communications based on whether a target is just mentioned.

What’s next: The White House said the president would sign the bill, although he expressed reservations about it in a tweet last week.

Senate sends spy program renewal to Trump’s desk

A bipartisan group of senators holds a news conference about their proposed reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the Russell Senate Office Building. Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

The House of Representatives is pushing forward with a plan re-authorize a major surveillance law on Thursday as its expiration date approaches.

Why it matters: The Section 702 surveillance law is used to justify the digital surveillance of foreign nationals located abroad, but privacy advocates say it also picks up communications produced by American citizens without a warrant. And they say the House bill may result in the expansion of surveillance programs.

House members are scheduled to take a preliminary vote on whether to consider the proposals late Wednesday afternoon.

If it passes, the House will move forward with an expected Thursday vote on a bill that would re-up the law for six years — but also make changes that activists say open the door to re-starting searches based solely on the mention of a target in a collected communication. Lawmakers are planning to vote on an amendment that would institute major reforms to the program but isn't expected to pass.

What's next: Lawmakers in the House and Senate are working quickly ahead of the law's expiration date next Friday. The administration says the president would sign the main bill that the House plans to vote on.

House preps for big surveillance vote

A grayscale photo of the headquarters of the National Security Agency

The headquarters of the National Security Agency. Photo: Brooks Kraft LLC/Corbis via Getty Images

Lawmakers are coming back later this month. So are the big battles over tech policy.

The most urgent: The Section 702 surveillance law — used by the intelligence community to justify warrantless surveillance of electronic communications of foreign nationals located abroad — expires in mid-January, thanks to a short-term extension Congress passed before leaving for the holidays.

That debate pits hard line intelligence hawks against people like Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Wyden, who have threatened a filibuster when faced with the prospect of a long-term extension of the law. In the middle are lawmakers who are pushing for light reforms that won't satisfy the privacy advocates.

Net neutrality: The battle over net neutrality has moved back to Capitol Hill. There are several bills released or in the works that would aim to put compromise net neutrality rules in place after the FCC rolled back regulations that took effect in 2015. Those haven't gotten pickup from Democrats — who are coalescing behind a plan to pull back the FCC's repeal through congressional action.

Self-driving cars: Lawmakers in the Senate have been slowly moving forward with legislation meant to encourage the deployment of self-driving cars, but it's met some resistance from their colleagues. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said shortly before the end of 2017 that she was holding the bill back from being approved through a streamlined process that bypasses debate on the floor of the Senate because she was concerned about the nascent nature of the vehicles.

Sex-trafficking: Supporters of a Senate anti-trafficking measure that would create more legal liability for services that post user generated content online are pushing forward. However, they suffered a setback late last year when a tech-backed alternative proposal moved forward in the House.

Go deeper: There are a number of broader issues that matter to tech, including potential legislation on immigration and infrastructure. Axios' Caitlin Owens has a rundown of what's next on Capitol Hill here.

Surveillance and sex-trafficking on Congress' to-do list

Net neutrality and self-driving cars also to get attention

People walk and jog across the East Plaza of the Capitol as Congress prepares to return from the Christmas recess on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018. Photo: Bill Clark/ CQ/ Roll Call via Getty)

Included in the short-term government funding measure that lawmakers passed on Thursday is an extension of a major surveillance law until mid-January.

Why it matters: The fight over the law — which is used to justify the digital surveillance of foreign nationals located abroad but activists says picks of Americans' communications — will be back very, very soon.

Funding bill extends surveillance powers through January

Intelligence officials urgred lawmakers earlier this year to reauthorize the surveillance law. Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

"China's efforts to snuff out a violent separatist movement by some members of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic group have turned the autonomous region of Xinjiang ... into a laboratory for high-tech social controls that civil-liberties activists say the government wants to roll out across the country," The Wall Street Journal's Josh Chin and Clément Bürge write.

Why it matters: Zhu Shengwu, a Chinese human-rights lawyer who has worked on surveillance cases: "They constantly take lessons from the high-pressure rule they apply in Xinjiang and implement them in the east ... What happens in Xinjiang has bearing on the fate of all Chinese people."

A look inside the testing ground for China’s surveillance state

China's surveillance experiments in one tumultuous region can be rolled out across the whole country.

Paramilitary policemen in an armored vehicle are on duty last month at the Hotan airport in western China's Xinjiang region. Photo: Ng Han Guan / AP

World

Congress is under the gun to reauthorize a major surveillance law in a debate that has been overshadowed by other major policy fights, like net neutrality and the investigation into online Russian election meddling.

Why it matters: The law — known as Section 702 — expires at the end of the year. Intelligence agencies say it would be ultimately catastrophic if it isn't reauthorized. Privacy-minded lawmakers and advocates, however, say that if it is reauthorized without reforms it will perpetuate a sprawling surveillance system that ensnares Americans' information without a warrant.

The law is used by the intelligence community to justify the warrantless surveillance of the electronic communications of foreign nationals located abroad.

Those agencies have pushed aggressively to renew the law without any reforms. But privacy advocates inside and outside of government say that the programs under the law pick up communications belonging to Americans, too.

They've also raised concerns about the way information obtained without a warrant under the law can be used by the FBI in criminal – rather than national security – cases.

There are several bills in Congress that would keep programs under the law going. Some would make significant changes to surveillance authorized by the law, while others have been met with an apoplectic reaction from privacy advocates and their supporters in tech who say these bills could make things worse.

One of those measures could be attached to a must-pass spending bill or move on its own. Lawmakers could also pass a short-term extension to the law and kick the can down the road.

Intelligence officials think, however, that they can continue surveillance under the law for some time even if the law doesn't get reauthorized by the end of the year.

Congress under pressure to reauthorize surveillance law

But the administration will keep spy programs going even when law expires.

The headquarters of the National Security Agency. Photo: Patrick Semansky / AP

Facts Matter

The House Intelligence Committee approved a bill Friday along party lines that would reauthorize a central surveillance law, the Washington Post reports. It does change the law — known as Section 702 — but doesn't satisfy surveillance reform advocates, including in the tech industry.

The law is used to authorize the surveillance of electronic communications by foreign nationals abroad, but advocates worry about the programs picking up communications involving Americans as well.

Why it matters: If lawmakers don't address it, the law will expire at the end of the year.

House panel advances bill on key surveillance measure

Rep. Devin Nunes chairs the House's intelligence committee. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP

President Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. government is starting to see the internet more like China does — as a network that countries can and should control within their borders.

The big picture: Today's global internet has split into three zones, according to many observers: The EU's privacy-focused network; China's government-dominated network; and the U.S.-led network dominated by a handful of American companies. TikTok's fate suggests China's model has U.S. fans as well.

Why it matters: As the global internet splinters further, the U.S. and China look set to enter a Cold War-style battle for the hearts and minds of global users and developing nations. In this fight, U.S. nationalism may make a weaker case to the world than the ideal of internet freedom and open networks that the U.S. once evangelized.

Driving the news: President Trump's threat to ban TikTok from the U.S. has fast-tracked an effort to force the video-sharing app's Chinese owners to sell it to a U.S. company (Microsoft is in talks).

Be smart: The move puts other foreign-owned companies on notice that the U.S. intends to favor American-owned businesses in the digital world. 

That's a giant break from a long-established bipartisan consensus that American interests are best served by a U.S. marketplace, online and off, managed as a level playing field.

China started this game — it was the first country to self-isolate from the global internet. 

China controls information flows inside its borders, and its "great firewall" keeps most information the government dislikes from entering the country. 

The Chinese government has ensured that its most widely used search and social services are domestically owned, and its laws now require any internet service to share data with the authorities.

Meanwhile, the EU's new privacy rules have created a different kind of internet zone  governed by a stringent set of standards for handling individual user data.

Last month, a major EU ruling struck down the Privacy Shield, an arrangement between the EU and the U.S. that enabled companies to transfer data into and out of EU nations without risk. 

Trump's crackdown on TikTok suggests that the U.S. is now adopting a more China-like perspective on what kinds of actions governments should take toward internet companies, including:

picking winners and losers among companies based on the whims of leaders;

insisting that companies make data available to the government for its needs — as Attorney General William Barr's argument for weak encryption does;

threatening to punish private platforms unless they support political leaders' preferred form of speech regulation.

Yes, but: Concerns over TikTok's willingness to share U.S. user data with the Chinese government are real.

TikTok says it keeps all such data outside of China and the reach of the Chinese government's laws. 

Many security experts view all Chinese-owned businesses as vulnerable to government interference and intelligence demands.

Our thought bubble: During the Cold War, America's reputational advantage over the Soviet Union as a rule-of-law democracy was regularly undercut by U.S. operations to overthrow governments abroad and American failures to guarantee human rights at home. 

The Trump administration's strong-arming of TikTok threatens to similarly squander the U.S.'s high ground as a champion of fair markets and networks.

What's next: Zoom, the videoconferencing service that's become a pandemic staple, could be the next China-linked company to face the White House's wrath. 

Zoom has had its share of security and privacy lapses, but it's a publicly traded U.S. company founded by an American citizen and headquartered in San Jose. 

Its software development operation has been based in China, sparking fears and charges by lawmakers that its code could be somehow compromised.

Go deeper: Dan Primack interviews White House trade adviser Peter Navarro about the TikTok deal on the Axios Re:Cap podcast

The U.S. is now playing by China's internet rules

China believes in nationalist control over digital networks, and increasingly, so does the White House.

Illustration of a computer with an American flag on the screen surrounded by barbed wire. 

TikTok

Axios Finish Line

As companies continue to prepare for the return of their employees to the workplace, they're weighing new types of surveillance in the name of safety.

Why it matters: Just as the coronavirus pandemic has acted as an accelerant for the adoption of remote work, it has also normalized increased surveillance and data collection. In the post-pandemic workplace, our bosses will know a lot more about us than they used to.

What's happening: "We're in this new era of biodata collection," says Amy Webb of the Future Today Institute.

A majority of employers, 51%, have begun or are planning to begin collecting temperature data on employees, according to survey data from Gartner provided to Axios.

60% are collecting self-reported data from employees on symptoms, and another 25% are asking employees to report who they've been in contact with. And 5% of firms say they're going as far as collecting workers' medical histories.

"It is all a form of surveillance," says Brian Kropp, head of Gartner's human resources practice.

"I think most of it doesn’t have nefarious intent," Webb says. "But, that being said, we don’t have clarity on how these data might be accessed by an insurer, for example. There isn't enough regulation or transparency around where data are being stored."

Another form of pandemic-era surveillance that's gaining popularity is the use of temperature-reading infrared cameras to watch over workers and customers.

"When the pandemic took hold, I started seeing more and more companies like Amazon using this technology to help identify sick people in their warehouses. Thermal imaging cameras are beginning to appear in Subway restaurants. Carnival Cruise Lines, whose ships became hot spots for the virus’s spread, said all passengers and crew would be screened when it began sailing again," the New York Times' Jonah Kessel writes.

These cameras are not always accurate and raise a whole host of privacy concerns.

And even those who work from home may have to deal with a rise in surveillance.

Since the start of the pandemic, a slew of companies have asked their newly remote employees to install software that tracks their mouse movements or keystrokes — or which webpages they visit as a way — to ensure they're being productive, NPR reports.

What to watch: Past studies have shown us that many workers aren't willing to put up with employer data collection. In a 2019 Gartner survey, 23% of workers said it was unacceptable for employers to ask for medical data.

But now, the desire to stay safe at work could quickly change those opinions and clear the lane for robust workplace surveillance.

Go deeper: When going back to work isn't safe

The coronavirus is ushering in a new era of surveillance at work

The pandemic is normalizing increased surveillance and data collection at work.

Illustration of a giant camera looking at a tiny worker.

Business

After a record economic expansion, the coronavirus pandemic sent the U.S. economy into a recession as unemployment soared to staggering heights. The country now faces urgent questions about how much stimulus is needed for reeling consumers and businesses, and what a recovery might look like.

Economy & Business

Codebook

The sometimes militarized government response to nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd has shone a light on the scope of the surveillance and enforcement apparatus that can be mobilized quickly against U.S. civilians.

The state of play: Since the protests began, extraordinary emergency authorities have been granted to the Drug Enforcement Agency to police demonstrators, including through “covert surveillance,” according to a DEA memo leaked to BuzzFeed. 

It is not clear what this entails, but the DEA has planes outfitted with “stingray” devices that can suck up phone data in bulk.

Other agencies: Attorney General Bill Barr has mobilized a dizzying array of federal law enforcement agencies to police demonstrations in Washington and elsewhere.

This includes representatives of the “Secret Service, National Guard, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Park Police ... Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration, National Guard, Coast Guard, Federal Protective Service,” according to a Department of Homeland Security memo leaked to Yahoo News. 

The New York City Police Department has even requested drones from the Coast Guard.

Even U.S. foreign intelligence agencies could be roped into the domestic turmoil. 

As Jenna McLaughlin, Sean Naylor and I reported at Yahoo News, at a recent “virtual town hall,” employees of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is primarily focused on military intelligence, raised concerns over word that a Defense Intelligence Agency task force was created to focus on the unrest.

According to sources, the DIA director denied any specific domestically focused task force but acknowledged that the agency was looking at any “foreign nexus” to the protests. 

A DIA spokesperson told Yahoo News that the agency had created “an internal coordination group to respond to increased and appropriate Department requests for information” regarding the unrest. 

The bottom line: Revelations of illegal surveillance of protesters and activists during the Vietnam War era created great scandal and upheaval and catalyzed many of today’s most important laws and prohibitions governing domestic intelligence-gathering. Now the test is whether the U.S. government unlearned that lesson in the decades since.

What to watch: On Tuesday, 35 House Democrats sent law enforcement agencies a letter demanding an end to protest surveillance.

Protest responses raise domestic surveillance concerns

Federal law enforcement agencies were deployed to police demonstrations throughout the U.S.

Illustration of surveillance cameras surrounding a protester. 

Get insights on the collision of cybersecurity and policy and why it matters

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Until now, the vast majority of information collected about us has remained untouched — there was just too much to make sense of it all.

What's happening: Artificial intelligence allows data that might once have gone unnoticed to now be detected, analyzed and logged in real time. It's already started supercharging surveillance at work, in schools and in cities.

Police are experimenting with facial recognition — either to help solve specific cases, or to compare the faces of passersby against a database of suspects. This week, a U.K. court upheld real-time facial recognition there.

In New York City, software can detect crime patterns over time and across boroughs, linking events in a way humans never could.

And in schools, cameras automatically watch for unusual behavior, and microphones listen for "aggressive" sounding voices.

The big picture: Humans have monitored each other as long as we've lived in communities — to punish free riders and troublemakers.

But now, cheap, powerful machines are taking the place of human watchers, disrupting a long-held social contract.

Unlike in China, where high-tech surveillance is a tool of fear and control, systems in the West are not centralized for now, curbing the scope of data gathering.

And tech companies like Facebook and Google have perfected online versions of automated surveillance for profit, in the form of products we can no longer live without.

Details: Software can identify and track faces, skin color, clothing, tattoos, walking gait and various other physical attributes and behaviors. But it's been plagued with bias and inaccuracy problems that primarily harm people of color.

From facial expressions and body movements, AI can extrapolate emotions like happiness and anger — a process built on shaky scientific evidence.

The impact: This quiet shift from passive watching to active surveillance is chipping away at our ability to remain anonymous in physical and virtual spaces.

Blending into the crowd is no longer an option if every face in that crowd is captured, compared against a driver's license photo and logged.

Constant AI surveillance threatens to erode the all-important presumption of innocence, says Clare Garvie, a privacy expert at Georgetown Law.

How AI police surveillance treats people of color

Deep Dive: The end of anonymity

Data that might once have gone unnoticed can now be detected, analyzed and logged in real time.

Illustrated collage of a man being revealed from behind graph paper.

Future

Deep Dive - Surveillance

Automation and AI

Data privacy

Public spaces are under constant surveillance from AI cameras, cellphone towers and advertisers that can follow people from home to work and back again.

But life inside the home, too, is increasingly transparent to watchful outsiders, the result of mushrooming internet-connected devices that consumers are setting up in their dens and bedrooms.

What's happening: Internet-connected devices can pick up your voice, interests, habits, TV preferences, meals, times home and away, and all sorts of other sensitive data. The gadgets send all this back to the tech companies where they were made.

The big picture: Constant surveillance at home is not yet a reality — but it's the direction we're moving in, says Jay Stanley, senior policy counsel at the ACLU.

Three main groups are peering into the home: tech companies, hackers and the government.

Companies receive data from "smart" things inside your home; hackers try to intercept it; governments can get it straight from the tech firms with a subpoena.

And most of this watching is enabled by the watched — residents who bring AI assistants, connected thermostats, video doorbells, "smart" appliances and even Wi-Fi lightbulbs into their own homes.

There are still "dumb" alternatives to nearly every internet-connected thing. You can still buy a toaster that does not have Alexa in it, or a lightbulb that's switched on with, well, a switch.

But year by year, the trade-off is becoming more dramatic. Keeping internet-connected tech out of your home will leave you increasingly far behind the convenience curve.

In some cases, it's not even up to you. Apartments are starting to come with connected devices preinstalled — to the horror of some privacy-conscious residents.

The massive spread of these devices introduce "enormous potential for abuse, for discrimination, and for shifts in power away from the individual and toward companies and agencies," says Stanley.

But people are increasingly OK being watched, as long as they get something out of it. According to an Axios/Survey Monkey poll, 70% of people are comfortable living with "smart home" devices.

What to watch: The home is still a sanctuary under the law — but the lines around it have become blurry.

"Technology can't change the fact that our homes are a key safe haven for our right to privacy, but it does make us vulnerable in new ways," says Jake Laperruque, a senior counsel at the Project on Government Oversight.

Police need a warrant to search your home — but they can ask Amazon to hand over recordings from your kitchen-counter Echo without even telling you.

But in recent rulings, the Supreme Court has placed new limits on digital snooping without a warrant.

The steady erosion of privacy at home

IoT devices can pick up your voice, interests, habits, TV preferences, meals and all sorts of other sensitive data.

Illustration of a house with a magnifying glass revealing binary code

There are millions of surveillance cameras in the U.S., but not nearly enough eyes to watch them all. When you pass one on the street, you can rightly expect your actions to go unnoticed in the moment; footage is instead archived for review if something goes wrong.

What's happening: Now, AI software can flag behavior it deems suspicious in real-time surveillance feeds, or pinpoint minute events in past footage — as if each feed were being watched unblinkingly by its own hyper-attentive security guard. The new technology, if it spreads in the U.S., could put an American twist on Orwellian surveillance systems abroad.

Big picture: In a new report today, ACLU surveillance expert Jay Stanley describes a coming mass awakening of millions of cameras, powered by anodyne-sounding "video analytics."

Collecting data has become dirt cheap, but attention has remained a scarce, expensive resource — especially for analyzing video, Stanley says. That's what is changing.

"The danger is that video analytics would be used to make sure that if you do anything, it will never be missed," Stanley tells Axios. That would be a significant departure from today's largely unmonitored cameras.

"We're right on the cusp of this technology really becoming real."

Quick take: This new software democratizes high-powered surveillance — once the purview of wealthy governments and organizations. Companies are selling it effectively as "surveillance in a box" for far cheaper than hiring video analysts.

Police, retailers, railroads and even carmakers are installing various shades of this software. And we've written about its use in schools.

The full extent of its deployment, or even how well the technology lives up to its marketing promises, isn't entirely clear.

What's certain is that there's demand for it. Analysts predict that the video analytics market, which was worth $3.23 billion in 2018, will grow to $8.55 billion in 2023.

How it works: The software is marketed as being able to: 

Detect specific events like people hugging, smoking, fighting or drinking, or instead automatically detect "anomalies" — deviations from the usual goings-on in a certain feed, like a car driving the wrong way or a person loitering at an odd hour.

Search historical footage by clothing or even skin color and "summarize" countless hours of footage into a single image or a short clip.

Determine a person's emotional state or even make assumptions about their personality, based only on their face and body movements.

AI is "awakening" surveillance cameras

New technology can constantly watch for "anomalies" in live feeds.

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