National

House Democrats on the Oversight Committee called Saturday for the Department of Homeland Security to explain how it has surveilled people protesting the killing of George Floyd.

Driving the news: The committee's probe follows a Drug Enforcement Administration memo, first obtained by BuzzFeed News, that granted the agency temporary heightened powers to "enforce federal criminal laws in the wake of protests arising from the death of George Floyd."

The committee's investigation is also in response to Customs and Border Protection sending a Predator drone into Minneapolis last week to take live footage of protestors.

Details: On May 31, the DEA was granted the temporary power on a nationwide basis to "conduct covert surveillance and protect against threats to public safety" and share collected intelligence with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. The memo authorized the new powers for two weeks.

What they're saying: "This Administration has undermined the First Amendment freedoms of Americans of all races who are rightfully protesting George Floyd’s killing. The deployment of drones and officers to surveil protests is a gross abuse of authority and is particularly chilling when used against Americans who are protesting law enforcement brutality," the lawmakers said in their letter to acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf.

The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Go deeper: Border Patrol recalls predator drone from Minneapolis protests

House Democrats call for investigation into DEA protester surveillance

The  DEA was granted temporary power to "conduct covert surveillance" in response to protests.

A group of masked protesters holding signs cross the Brooklyn Bridge in New York

Protesters walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan on June 6. Photo: Bryan R. Smith/AFP via Getty Images

Politics

George Floyd

Black Lives Matter movement

Surveillance

President Biden has made the COVID-19 crisis and a post-Trump return to national unity and traditional democratic ideals his top priorities. From vaccinations to stimulus to schools, Biden is seeking bipartisan compromise while showing a willingness to use executive authority and bare Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to implement his policies. Republican leaders are navigating deep party divisions over if and how to move beyond former President Trump.

Politics & Policy

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.

Technology

Codebook

In a letter released last month, an ideologically diverse group of senators and congressmen, led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), wrote to the Senate’s sergeant at arms and the House’s chief administrative officer requesting that all calls on unclassified lines between the House and Senate be encrypted, in order to prevent foreign spying.

Why it matters: According to the letter, first reported by The Verge, calls within the Senate were not encrypted until August 2018, making them “vulnerable to interception by any hacker or foreign government that gained access to the Senate’s internal network.” 

Only some phones used by the House offer encryption. And calls between the two legislative chambers are still unencrypted. 

The lawmakers cite the Pentagon’s recent work to encrypt its unclassified networks as an example of the government’s realization of the need to protect sensitive communications from foreign espionage. 

This is a fix that Congress can make on its own through tech upgrades and coordination between the House and Senate.

The fears motivating this request are legitimate. 

For years, U.S. counterintelligence officials were vexed by what they believed was a long-running effort by Russian intelligence officers on U.S. soil to map out, and potentially compromise, the country’s fiber-optic cable network, particularly the points where data transfers occur. 

On at least one occasion, a former official previously told me, U.S. intelligence officials observed a suspected Russian spy actually break into a data closet to tap into a network.

These suspected Russian spies would often engage in what appeared to FBI officials as bizarre behavior — like getting out of their car at a rest stop, circling a tree a few times, and driving away. 

The anomalous sojourns, officials realized, were often near U.S. military bases. 

In the end, U.S. spy hunters concluded that the Russian spooks may have wanted to tap the communications of these military bases — or to exhaustively map them in order to have agents disrupt them in case of a war between the U.S. and Russia. 

The bottom line: Even communications that aren’t classified can be sensitive and have intelligence value. As the prior Russian effort shows, spy services have devoted immense time and energy to mapping out nonclassified communications channels.

Lawmakers want to encrypt Congress' network

Even communications that aren’t classified can be sensitive and have intelligence value.

Illustration of an eye comprised of numbers and symbols.

Congress

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President Trump's call to treat antifa supporters like terrorists could be a green light for high-tech surveillance of dissidents.

Why it matters: It's unlikely the Trump administration can designate antifa as a terrorist group in any legally meaningful way, but the declaration gives law enforcement tacit approval to use a plethora of tech tools to monitor protesters and left-leaning activists.

The big picture: The move comes as the U.S. struggles with a pandemic and nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and the president's opponents are sounding warnings about his strong-armed approach.

Driving the news: Trump tweeted Sunday that the U.S. "will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization."

It wasn't immediately clear what that would entail, as legal experts have noted that there's no existing designation for domestic terror groups, and "antifa" refers to a general commitment to opposing far-right ideology through direct action, not any one organization.

Since antifa is so amorphous, the authorities also have a very free hand in who they decide to include in the group.

Even without any official designation, law enforcement could step up the surveillance of progressive activists' activity and communications. 

Trump ally Rep. Matt Gaetz suggested acting along those lines in a tweet this week seeking to explain his call for antifa adherents to be "hunt[ed] down."

The Justice Department immediately followed up on the president's tweet with a statement by Attorney General William Barr that the FBI's terrorism task forces would investigate participants in the Floyd protests for possible antifa connections.

Where it stands: Police in the U.S. already deploy a variety of tools for conducting surveillance.

Law enforcement agencies around the country contract with Clearview AI, a controversial startup that scrapes billions of images posted around the internet to identify people from sources like security videos.

Police can also obtain Americans' location data to track their movements over time. Wireless carriers, device makers and app developers all have reams of such detailed records.

Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies around the country can also use surveillance devices to track people's location in real time, as the American Civil Liberties Union has long documented.

Of note: Lawmakers and advocacy groups have warned that new contact-tracing technology developed to fight the spread of the coronavirus could be repurposed to track Americans' movements and interactions outside of the pandemic context. Lawmakers have introduced several bills recently to keep that from happening, but their fate is unclear. 

All this comes as efforts to craft comprehensive federal legislation to protect Americans' privacy online have run aground.

Yes, but: The government still faces some checks on its ability to conduct some targeted surveillance. A 2018 Supreme Court ruling, for instance, found that police need to get a warrant before using cell phone location to retrace a suspect's steps.

Still, warrants may be easy to come by from judges sympathetic to the idea that leftists are terrorists. And the U.S. has a long history of finding ways to skirt limits on government surveillance powers.

Be smart: A message from the country's highest office that some American citizens are enemy combatants is sure to resonate with online vigilantes, too.

A New York Times investigation last year showed how easy it is to identify and track individuals using publicly available, ostensibly anonymized data harvested from smartphone apps.

Just this past weekend, Aaron Dessner of rock band The National became the target of an online harassment campaign after being misidentified as an antifa riot instigator because he vaguely resembled a man who appeared in footage of an Ohio protest.

History lesson: In the 1960s and '70s the FBI's COINTELPRO program, exhaustively documented by later congressional investigations, conducted large-scale spying on progressive organizations and leftist activists.

The bottom line: The Trump administration is already eager to ramp up government surveillance capabilities in the name of fighting terrorism. That appetite could easily expand when the alleged terrorists are also domestic opponents of the president.

The slippery slope of protest surveillance

Even without a legal classification, calling dissenters "terrorists" could unleash an arsenal of spying.

Illustration of surveillance cameras surrounding a protester.

Axios Login

As Facebook employees criticized the company for not moving against Trump's posts, Twitter took more action Monday against those using its platform to promote violence.

Driving the news: The company suspended a fake Antifa account linked to a white nationalist group and also flagged a tweet from Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) that it said glorified violence.

Why it matters: The moves show that Twitter, long criticized for failing to crack down on tweets that violate its policies, is taking a more aggressive stance.

Twitter said it had traced the account behind a widely cited tweet calling for violence on Sunday, "ANTIFA_US," to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.

Twitter added a warning label to a tweet from Gaetz that said: "Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?"

Context: As protests about the death of George Floyd spread nationwide over the past week, President Trump and his allies began charging, without evidence, that antifa — a label for a variety of far-left anti-fascist groups and activists — were responsible for the unrest.

On Sunday, Attorney General Bill Barr said the Justice Department and FBI would treat antifa protesters as domestic terrorists.

Our thought bubble: When an account labeled "antifa" turns out to be controlled by a white supremacist group, it's a reminder that things online aren't necessarily what they appear to be — and that a lot of parties see benefit in spreading divisive lies.

The big picture: Twitter's moves come on top of the company's decision last week to flag two tweets from President Trump, one for potentially misleading people on the mechanics of mail-in voting and another for glorifying violence.

After Twitter's action on the mail-in voting tweet, Trump issued an executive order designed to curb the power of social networks to curate speech.

Yes, but: Many people on the left feel Twitter hasn't gone far enough and should delete Trump's offending posts, if not his account entirely. Some on the right, meanwhile, view Twitter's actions as censorship.

Twitter acts against violent messages

The company suspended a fake Antifa account linked to a white nationalist group.

screenshot of a blocked antifa twitter account

Twitter

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Media

Customs and Border Protection sent a drone into Minneapolis on Friday to take live footage of protestors at the request of federal law enforcement, a CBP spokesperson told Axios.

What's happening: Demonstrations have surged in the city for three days as people protest and mourn the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after at least one police officer knelt on his neck on Monday. Protestors set fire to a Minneapolis police station on Thursday night.

Details: The aircraft, as first reported by Vice, was identified as an unmanned predator drone by an investigative reporter with The Project on Government Oversight.

It was launched from the Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota and later returned there, after law enforcement deemed it no longer necessary, the spokesperson said.

CBP did not clarify why officers found the drone unnecessary or which agency requested it.

What they're saying: CBP said its Air and Marine Operations division "routinely conducts operations with other federal, state, and local law enforcement entities to assist law enforcement and humanitarian relief efforts.

“No government agency should be facilitating the over-policing of the Black community, period. And CBP has no role in what’s happening in Minneapolis at all," Neema Singh Guliani, a senior legislative counsel for the ACLU, said in a statement on Friday. "This rogue agency’s use of military technology to surveil protesters inside U.S. borders is deeply disturbing, especially given CBP’s lack of clear and strong policies to protect privacy and constitutional rights."

"We need greater restraints on government use of sophisticated technologies to spy on the public. This is not the moment to expand such spying," Adam Schwartz, an EFF senior staff attorney, told Axios.

Go deeper... In photos: Protests over George Floyd's death grip Minneapolis

Border Patrol recalls drone from Minneapolis protests

Massive protests have surged in the city for three days after the death of George Floyd.

A line of cops stand next to a concrete barrier

Police and State Patrol officers in Minnesota, Minneapolis on May 29. Photo: Steel Brooks/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Customs and Border Patrol

Axios AM

Axios on HBO: Palantir CEO Alex Karp on leaving Silicon Valley (Clip) | HBO

Palantir is "getting close" to a decision on whether to move the company out of California, CEO Alex Karp said in an interview for "Axios on HBO."

The state of play: "We haven't picked a place yet, but it's going to be closer to the East Coast than the West Coast. ... If I had to guess, I would guess something like Colorado."

The big picture: Karp blamed the "increasing intolerance and monoculture" of Silicon Valley. In recent years, employee action has pushed several large corporations, including Google, away from government contracts that staffers felt violated human rights.

Some of Karp's own staff were unhappy with Palantir signing a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he told "Axios on HBO."

"I've had my favorite employees yell at me," he said. "I've had some of my favorite employees leave."

"I had people protesting me. People protesting me, some of whom I think asked really legitimate questions. I've asked myself if I were younger, at college, would I be protesting me? And you know, it depends?"

"The most valid criticism that they have is, essentially, that if you are involved in anything, that one instance of injustice, does it tarnish all instances of justice?"

Between the lines: Palantir joins Elon Musk's Tesla as high-profile companies are publicly considering leaving California.

"I've been distanced [from Silicon Valley] for the last 15 years. And so I'm used to being social distanced in the Valley. And now social distancing has become a way of life."

"I’m not worried about Elon leaving anytime soon," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week.

Palantir CEO hits Silicon Valley "monoculture," may leave California

Karp blamed the "increasing intolerance" of Silicon Valley.

Axios on HBO

Business

Data privacy

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

Axios on HBO: Palantir CEO Alex Karp on work for ICE (Clip) | HBO

Palantir CEO Alex Karp told "Axios on HBO" that there have "absolutely" been moments he wished the company hadn't taken a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

"Did I suffer? ... I've had some of my favorite employees leave," Karp told "Axios on HBO."

Karp said "no, no, no" when asked if he wished they'd never taken the contract.

The big picture: Palantir has worked with ICE dating back to 2014 during the Obama administration. Such government contracts have stirred up employee protests at a number of Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

In the "Axios on HBO" interview, Karp defended the company's government contracts, saying he gives special preferences to the U.S. and its Western allies.

Palantir CEO reflects on work with ICE

"Did I suffer? ... I've had some of my favorite employees leave."

Immigration

Axios Future

Employers emerging from lockdown are looking to new COVID-19 screening tools to help workers get back on the job.

Why it matters: Neither employees nor customers are likely to return to businesses if they fear infection, so there needs to be some way to separate the sick from the well. But many new screening services are untested, and could open the door to intrusive health surveillance.

Driving the news: Dozens of states have begun at least a limited form of reopening, but putting workers and customers back in offices and restaurants will raise the risk of new outbreaks unless the potentially infectious can be identified.

As a result, medical security is going to need to become a part of overall workplace security, says Mark Ein, chairman of Kastle Systems, the leading U.S. provider of commercial security. "In the same way we've secured buildings for 50 years, we think we need to create a safe environment for the ecosystem of a commercial building, which includes the owners, the tenants, the visitors and suppliers."

What's happening: A number of companies are already rolling out new digital tools designed to identify possible COVID-19 cases at the point of entry for workplaces.

Kastle is introducing KastleSafeSystems, which will use touchless access controls, symptoms tests and thermal cameras for temperature screening. Once inside the office, workers can be monitored using intelligent video cameras to investigate close contacts in the case of an infection and reinforce social distancing within the workplace.

The biometric ID company CLEAR, best known for providing expedited security in airports, is offering a new Health Pass service via the company's app that will link an employee's digitally-verified identity with health data. 

The financial services firm PwC has developed a contact-tracing app that allows the company to identify employees who may have been exposed to COVID-19-positive colleague in the workplace. 

Background: In normal times, anti-discrimination rules would prohibit employers from requiring employees to undergo medical exams. 

But in March, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that because of the coronavirus, employers would be permitted to screen workers' temperatures.  

Health data collected about an employee for employer-sponsored health plans is protected but there aren't clear regulations or laws yet to protect health data that would be collected for COVID-19 screening purposes.

The catch: It's far from clear how effective any of these tools will be.

While the FDA is temporarily permitting companies to market infrared thermal cameras that have not yet been approved by health authorities for workplace temperature checks, such devices are often inaccurate. 

And even if they work, they wouldn't necessarily catch infected employees who are asymptomatic — as many COVID-cases are — or who have yet to show symptoms but are still infectious.

Linking screening services directly to COVID-19 tests would improve their accuracy, but the U.S. is still a long way from ubiquitous testing. And there's no guarantee a positive antibody test means a worker would be safe from getting sick or sickening others.

Beyond issues with effectiveness, these new services present challenges to autonomy and privacy.

It's difficult to see how truly voluntary COVID-19 screening apps would be if employees wouldn't be allowed to work without using them.

Services that track employees movements within a workplace would help enforce social distancing and trace any office outbreaks, but would also introduce an invasive new level of automated surveillance.

Basing the right to work on perceived immunity status could create a new kind of workplace discrimination in the name of public health. "The people who can’t [work] will say, ‘This is unfair,’ and they’ll be right,” Hank Greely, a bioethicist at Stanford Law School, told the New York Times. 

Just as 9/11 led to more invasive security in airports and other vulnerable spaces, most indications are the pandemic will lead to more pervasive health surveillance abetted by new digital tools.

In a recent report forecasting life after the virus, Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work envisioned the creation of a massive Health Security Agency that would mandate automated illness scanning for any building, space, or country. "The surveillance infrastructure that has been built over the last number of years is going to come down on us like an iron curtain," Benjamin Pring, the center's head, told Axios in a recent interview.

"We can build anything," says Karin Giefer, senior vice president at the digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient. "The question we should be asking is whether we should."

The bottom line: Digital surveillance offers the possibility of speeding the safe reopening of the economy. But if it is implemented poorly, it will come with a cost. 

The brave new world of digital coronavirus screening

We need to determine whether new screening tools actually work — and then ask whether they should.

Illustration a barcode that reads Covid-19 being scanned by aaa laser in the shape of red cross

Future

Coronavirus

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Health Care

Automation and AI

The U.S. faces a range of health care flashpoints — unaffordable drugs, opioids, vaping — as we debate whether to adopt universal care. For now, the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, but Republicans want to issue it a final death blow.

Health

Governments around the world have turned to high-tech solutions like smartphone tracking and Bluetooth bracelets to slow the novel coronavirus' spread. For both practical and cultural reasons, however, the U.S. is unlikely to try such methods.

The big picture: The U.S. plainly needs more tools for slowing the spread of COVID-19. But a lack of testing supplies, the absence of nationwide strategies and policies, an individualistic culture, and concerns over civil liberties all stand in the way of adopting these techniques.

In Taiwan, authorities used a mobile phone-based "virtual fence" to enforce a quarantine by tracking the location of people who have been exposed to the virus.

In Singapore, authorities have been tracking the spread of the disease by requiring residents to load their phones with a contact-tracing mobile app that they're now making available to developers worldwide.

Hong Kong uses bracelets, tied to smartphones via Bluetooth, to try to keep tabs on some in quarantine and foreigners entering the country.

In Thailand, tourists from certain countries were given a mobile phone SIM card with a special app to make health declarations and enable tracking.

Israel earlier this month approved monitoring the cell phones of those infected with the virus.

Yes, but: Without widespread testing in the U.S., it's not clear who would be tracked or for what purpose.

Plus, the U.S. lacks a coordinated national response to the virus, with much of the effort to "flatten the curve" coming at state and local levels.

Civil liberties advocates argue that invasive uses of technology, once introduced for well-meaning ends, are difficult to roll back and could lead to a more permanent erosion of privacy rights in the U.S.

"It's essential that government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are based on the recommendations of public health experts — and vetted by civil liberties and human rights experts," said Fight for the Future's Evan Greer, whose group is calling on governments to avoid turning to mass surveillance to fight the disease. "Real-time location data is incredibly sensitive information that can put people in imminent danger if it's leaked, shared improperly, or abused."

Technology can still play a role in U.S. efforts against the virus.

Mobile operators in Italy, Germany, and Austria are sharing anonymous aggregated data with health authorities. Facebook has also said it would share some data with researchers, and that could be more palatable in the U.S. than individual tracking. But again, without widespread testing, such data is probably less useful.

A consortium of tech companies, national labs and universities are tapping supercomputers to help identify drugs that could be useful in treating COVID-19.

In the absence of extensive testing data, companies are also trying to use other types of info. Smart thermometer maker Kinsa has been sharing maps of people's temperatures, while other groups are trying to analyze the limited virus data to see who might be most vulnerable.

3D printing can contribute to providing scarce medical supplies and ventilator parts, with HP and Carbon among those trying to fill the void, along with grassroots efforts.

And of course, as we reported yesterday, the internet has proven a vital lifeline for the millions of people who are staying at home in an effort to slow the disease's spread.

Go deeper: Singapore's Big Brother fights against coronavirus

Why the U.S. won't deploy high-tech coronavirus trackers

Without widespread testing in the U.S., it's not clear who would be tracked or for what purpose.

illustration of a finger swiping on a phone

The FCC plans to propose fines against wireless carriers totaling roughly $200 million for improperly sharing customers' location information with outside parties, according to people familiar with the matter.

Why it matters:  Lawmakers and others have been calling for agency action for over a year after revelations that location data from AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint made its way to a resale market used by bounty hunters.

Details: The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the four major carriers  — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint — would face proposed fines from the FCC, although the companies will be able to challenge the fines before they can be finalized.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) raised alarm bells in 2018 that wireless companies were sharing customers' location data with a phone service provider to prisons that allowed its clients to track cell phone locations.

Wyden called the proposed fines "comically inadequate" in a statement Thursday. 

"Based on today’s news reports, it seems clear Chairman Pai has failed to protect American consumers at every stage of the game — this issue only came to light after my office and dedicated journalists discovered how wireless companies shared Americans’ locations willy nilly," Wyden said.

What's next: The proposed penalties are expected to be made public Friday. The agency and the wireless companies declined comment.

FCC to propose fining wireless carriers for location sharing

Companies could face a total of roughly $200 million in proposed penalties.

Photo of FCC members at a House hearing with chairman Ajit Pai at far left

FCC commissioners, with chairman Ajit Pai at left, testify before a House committee in Dec. 2019. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

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. 

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.

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