Policy Observatory
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reauthorized the NSA program for another 90 days at a request from the government. The order expires on 27 February 2015. However, President Barack Obama announced reforms to the program earlier this year, including a plan to stop NSA from collecting and holding the data from operators in bulk.
Obama instructed that other than in an emergency, phone metadata could only be queried after a judicial finding that there was a reasonable, articulable suspicion that the selection term was linked to an approved international terrorist organization. The two changes to the program have been made since February this year, according to officials.
Last month, the USA Freedom Act ran into difficulties in the Senate, and could not be moved towards a final vote. The setback could delay any NSA reform until next year.
Assistant commissioner Tim Morris says ombudsman would prevent pirates being targeted, but ombudsman says his office would have no formal oversight role in proposed scheme
Authorities are not interested in using the Abbott government’s proposed data retention scheme to go after internet pirates and would be prevented from doing so by the commonwealth ombudsman, the assistant commissioner of the Australian federal police, Tim Morris, has said.
Morris also said any changes to the way metadata is collected and used would have to be approved by the ombudsman.
The Australian's government proposed data retention scheme won’t be used to go after internet pirates, says Tim Morris the federal police assistant commissioner.
Morris told a technology conference on Sunday that the $400m scheme, under which Australians’ metadata would be retained by internet service providers for up to two years, was essential to fight cybercrime and terrorism.
Phone numbers, the time and duration of calls, email addresses and, potentially, URLs would all be stored, but Morris reiterated that the AFP was “not interested in someone sitting down in their lounge room torrenting Game of Thrones”.
France's government is pressing a surveillance bill that would give French intelligence services legal backing to vacuum up metadata in hopes of preventing an imminent terror attack.
The bill "would pave the way for extremely intrusive surveillance practices with no judicial pre-authorization," the organization Amnesty International said in a statement.
The bill was proposed long before the deadly Paris attacks by Islamic extremists earlier this year, but the government says it takes on added urgency with each person who radicalizes and turns against France.
Following two actions for annulment brought independently, the Belgian Constitutional Court ruled yesterday against the mass collection of communications metadata. This ruling falls in line with a recent ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) invalidating the directive behind Belgian law.
As the French Council of State is set to render a first decision on this burning issue this Friday 1, Privacy International (PI) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) have submitted a third party intervention aiming to support the legal challenges brought by FDN, the FDN Federation and La Quadrature du Net. The goal: repeal the provisions enforcing the generalised retention of metadata in France and allow the ECJ to fulfill its role of guardian of fundamental rights.