- By Susanne Posel – February 19, 2015
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corporations, cybersecurity, government, surveillance
Susanne Posel ,Chief Editor Occupy Corporatism | The US IndependentFebruary 19, 2015
Google is in opposition to the Department of Justice (DoJ) plans to expand federal authority to search and seize digital information from corporations in order to hack “any facility” globally.
Richard Salgaldo, director of law enforcement and information security
for Google, wrote to the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Criminal Rules (ACCR) at the DoJ, explaining that his corporation is “in opposition to the proposed amendment to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 41.”Saldago continued
: “The serious and complex constitutional concerns implicated by the proposed amendment are numerous and, because of the nature of Fourth Amendment case law development, are unlikely to be addressed by courts in a timely fashion.”This rule governs the “search or seizure issuance and execution of a search warrant under special circumstances.”
The DoJ responded by accusing opponents to the rule change as “misreading the text of the proposal or misunderstanding current law”.
David Bitkower, deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a memorandum in 2014: “The proposal would not authorize the government to undertake any search or seizure or use any remote search technique not already permitted under current law. [Investigators are] careful to avoid collateral damage when executing remote searches, just as [they are] careful to avoid injury to persons or damage to property in the far more common scenario of executing physical warrants.”
Google accuses the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) of trying to obtain new powers regarding search warrants that could create a “monumental and highly complex constitutional, legal and geopolitical concerns that should be left to Congress to decide.”
The revision to the rule would enable FBI agents to raid severs anywhere and hand over to the government “unfettered global access to vast amounts of private information”.
Google warns that government searches could happen remotely and the FBI could easily “conceal their location” through encryption services such as Tor. “This concern is not theoretical. … [T]he nature of today’s technology is such that warrants issued under the proposed amendment will in many cases end up authorizing the government to conduct searches outside the United States.”
The National Association of Assistant US Attorneys (NAAUSA) wrote to Judge Reena Raggi, chair of the ACCR, in support of the change to rule 41 with the hopes of “establishing a court-supervised framework through which law enforcement may successfully investigate and prosecute crimes involving botnets and internet anonymizing technologies.”
The NAAUSA continued
: “… suspects are increasingly using sophisticated anonymizing technologies and proxy services designed to hide their true IP addresses. This creates significant difficulties for law enforcement to identify the district in which the electronic information is located.”Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) commented : ““The government is seeking a troubling expansion of its power to surreptitiously hack into computers
, including using malware. Although this proposal is cloaked in the garb of a minor procedural update, in reality it would be a major and substantive change that would be better addressed by Congress.”Arnie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel for Access told the judicial panel: “I empathize that it is very hard to get a legislative change. However, when you have us resorting to Congress to get increased privacy protections, we would also like to see the government turn to Congress to get increased surveillance authority.”
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