Swordsmyth
01-10-2019, 06:55 PM
Utah state legislators will soon begin debate on a bill that would require law enforcement to get a warrant before accessing data stored in the cloud.
While such legislation should not be necessary and should not be news, in this era of nearly unlimited and unchecked growth of the federal surveillance state, a bill such as the one offered in Utah is both necessary and newsworthy.
This is particularly true in light of the gradual migration of all personal and public electronic information from databases stored on local servers to off-site servers colloquially referred to as “the cloud.” As I reported (https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/29339-nsa-moving-data-to-a-cloud-based-service-such-as-that-built-and-used-by-amazon-google) in June 2018:
Nearly all the data collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) is being transferred to the cloud. The database — Intelligence Community GovCloud — is reportedly classified and will help the federal surveillance organization to “connect the dots” among the scores of systems currently employed by the agency to store and sort data.
“Right now, almost all NSA’s mission is being done in [GovCloud], and the productivity gains and the speed at which our analysts are able to put together insights and work higher-level problems has been really amazing,” NSA Chief Information Officer Greg Smithberger told NextGov.
Smithberger explained GovCloud as a single integrated “big data-fusion environment,” technology that would allow the NSA and the myriad federal agencies participating in the surveillance of electronic communications to share data seamlessly and much more efficiently than before. The Central Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are two of the 16 agencies that will be given access to the cloud and the personal data stored there.
Utah State Representative Craig Hall is the primary sponsor of the surveillance bill (HB 57), which would require “issuance of a search warrant to obtain electronic information or data,” including data transmitted “to a remote computing service.” The bill explicitly applies these restrictions to “government entities.”
Rather than a complete re-writing of Utah’s law covering warrantless surveillance, Representative Hall’s proposal amends the Beehive State’s current surveillance statutes.
One notable provision of the current law is the prohibition on the deployment of so-called Stingray devices.
The function of the “Stingray” technology reveals its threat to the liberties of the law-abiding. The suitcase-sized stingray masquerades as a cell tower to trick cellphones into connecting to it. It can give police tracking identifiers for phones within a mile or more, depending on terrain. Given the mobility of the device, police who use it can triangulate a target’s location with better accuracy than if they relied on data transferred by traditional cell towers.
Utah is home to a statewide fusion center called the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center, which attracted the attention (https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/22488-utah-fusion-center-says-gadsden-flag-a-visual-indicator-of-domestic-extremists) of conservative media for issuing a bulletin in 2016 that informed the state’s law-enforcement agencies that the display of a “Gadsden Flag” is a “visual indicator” of “domestic extremists.”
Although the new bill would not mandate the shuttering of the fusion centers, it would apply the warrant requirement to them.
The newly proposed bill in Utah would not, sadly, completely restore the Fourth Amendment’s barricades between government and the individual, but it would, if passed, make it harder for law enforcement to collect data without a warrant.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/31151-utah-bill-would-ban-warrantless-access-to-data-stored-in-the-cloud
While such legislation should not be necessary and should not be news, in this era of nearly unlimited and unchecked growth of the federal surveillance state, a bill such as the one offered in Utah is both necessary and newsworthy.
This is particularly true in light of the gradual migration of all personal and public electronic information from databases stored on local servers to off-site servers colloquially referred to as “the cloud.” As I reported (https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/computers/item/29339-nsa-moving-data-to-a-cloud-based-service-such-as-that-built-and-used-by-amazon-google) in June 2018:
Nearly all the data collected by the National Security Agency (NSA) is being transferred to the cloud. The database — Intelligence Community GovCloud — is reportedly classified and will help the federal surveillance organization to “connect the dots” among the scores of systems currently employed by the agency to store and sort data.
“Right now, almost all NSA’s mission is being done in [GovCloud], and the productivity gains and the speed at which our analysts are able to put together insights and work higher-level problems has been really amazing,” NSA Chief Information Officer Greg Smithberger told NextGov.
Smithberger explained GovCloud as a single integrated “big data-fusion environment,” technology that would allow the NSA and the myriad federal agencies participating in the surveillance of electronic communications to share data seamlessly and much more efficiently than before. The Central Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency are two of the 16 agencies that will be given access to the cloud and the personal data stored there.
Utah State Representative Craig Hall is the primary sponsor of the surveillance bill (HB 57), which would require “issuance of a search warrant to obtain electronic information or data,” including data transmitted “to a remote computing service.” The bill explicitly applies these restrictions to “government entities.”
Rather than a complete re-writing of Utah’s law covering warrantless surveillance, Representative Hall’s proposal amends the Beehive State’s current surveillance statutes.
One notable provision of the current law is the prohibition on the deployment of so-called Stingray devices.
The function of the “Stingray” technology reveals its threat to the liberties of the law-abiding. The suitcase-sized stingray masquerades as a cell tower to trick cellphones into connecting to it. It can give police tracking identifiers for phones within a mile or more, depending on terrain. Given the mobility of the device, police who use it can triangulate a target’s location with better accuracy than if they relied on data transferred by traditional cell towers.
Utah is home to a statewide fusion center called the Utah Statewide Information and Analysis Center, which attracted the attention (https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/item/22488-utah-fusion-center-says-gadsden-flag-a-visual-indicator-of-domestic-extremists) of conservative media for issuing a bulletin in 2016 that informed the state’s law-enforcement agencies that the display of a “Gadsden Flag” is a “visual indicator” of “domestic extremists.”
Although the new bill would not mandate the shuttering of the fusion centers, it would apply the warrant requirement to them.
The newly proposed bill in Utah would not, sadly, completely restore the Fourth Amendment’s barricades between government and the individual, but it would, if passed, make it harder for law enforcement to collect data without a warrant.
More at: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/31151-utah-bill-would-ban-warrantless-access-to-data-stored-in-the-cloud