Accounts of the status of a long-awaited surveillance bill differed drastically last week, with top Republicans suggesting the bill may hit the House floor in 2014 while a Democrat declared it dead. Don’t expect any major House Intelligence Committee surveillance proposals any time soon, a Democratic committee member told us. House Republican leadership killed an overhaul the committee was developing, choosing instead to defer to the House Judiciary Committee, where the more “aggressive” USA Freedom Act is under consideration, said Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn. The Intelligence and Judiciary committees share jurisdiction over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). But Republicans have pushed back against this idea and insisted the bill will be alive and well in 2014.
The author of a wide-ranging surveillance overhaul vigorously defended the bill and called Tuesday for votes in both houses of Congress. Speaking at a Georgetown Law Center event, House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., criticized a series of what he considered abuses his USA Freedom Act, HR-3361, would fix. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., worked with Sensenbrenner and introduced its companion, S-1599. House and Senate leaders should “give Pat Leahy and me an up-or-down vote on the Freedom Act,” declared Sensenbrenner, the original Patriot Act author. “And I bet when we get that, we'll win.”
AT&T agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle allegations it violated the False Claims Act when it knowingly overbilled the Telecommunications Relay Services (TRS) Fund, the Justice Department said Thursday. The fund compensates IP Relay service providers for placing calls on behalf of hearing-impaired individuals. Justice had alleged that from December 2009 through December 2011, up to 80 percent of the calls AT&T claimed reimbursement for were ineligible because they didn’t originate in the U.S., or weren’t made by hearing- or speech-impaired people. AT&T’s communication assistants knew the service was being used largely by Nigerian fraudsters, Justice said. AT&T had entered into a consent degree in May with the FCC resolving similar allegations (CD May 8 p11), which were related to today’s announcement, Justice said. AT&T agreed then to pay $18.25 million to settle the FCC investigation. “We will not tolerate abuse of this system,” said Michele Ellison, chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau. “While we continue to deny the allegations, we concluded that the most productive course was to resolve what was left of the litigation through a voluntary settlement,” an AT&T spokesman said. “This concerns an exceptionally small line of business that we no longer offer."
Lawmakers outlined potential fixes to allegedly overbroad surveillance activities of the U.S. government, speaking during a Cato Institute event Wednesday. They said they object to intelligence agencies’ bulk collection of phone metadata and alleged broad lack of transparency and accountability. The members of Congress focused on a new piece of legislation pending introduction -- the USA Freedom Act, which would end bulk collection of phone metadata, among other changes (CD Oct 4 p10), and is to be sponsored by House Judiciary Crime and Terrorism Subcommittee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and House Judiciary Committee ranking member John Conyers, D-Mich.
The Senate Intelligence Committee now has two warring proposals for how to update U.S. surveillance law. Both were debated Thursday during an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. One proposal would end bulk metadata collection, while the other is more moderate and largely upholds the current program, despite advocating certain limits. Three top intelligence officials defended the government’s phone metadata surveillance.
A False Claims Act violation in connection with the FCC’s E-rate program was settled Tuesday when Larry Lehmann of Giddings, Texas, agreed to pay $400,000 to settle the allegations, said the Department of Justice in a press release (http://1.usa.gov/12YfKIy). The Houston Independent School District (HISD) was one of the applicants that received E-rate subsidies from 2004 to 2006, and Lehmann, CEO of Acclaim Professional Services, partnered with other companies to provide E-rate-funded equipment and services to HISD during this time period, said Justice. The U.S. alleged that Lehmann provided gifts and loans to HISD employees and helped to devise a scheme for HISD to outsource some of its employees to Acclaim, which allowed them to work for HISD while passing on the cost to the E-rate program. Lehmann’s settlement is part of a broader investigation by the U.S. of E-rate funding requests submitted by HISD and the Dallas Independent School District, said DOJ.
Fallout from the revelations of U.S., and now U.K., spying continues in Europe as high-level government officials began setting up an EU-U.S. group to discuss the allegations, the European Parliament said it will start an in-depth probe into the surveillance programs and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes warned that American cloud security providers will lose business if they don’t safeguard customers’ privacy. However, it appears that the turmoil won’t stall talks on the transatlantic trade and investment treaty (TTIP), prompting criticism from privacy advocates.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced a bill to extend Fourth Amendment privacy protections to electronic communications and require warrants for government agencies to obtain such information. The Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act (S-1037) aims to provide “much needed clarity and reassert Fourth Amendment protections for records held by third parties,” said Paul in a news release Thursday. “In today’s high-tech world, we must ensure that all forms of communication are protected,” he said. “Congress has passed a variety of laws that decimate our Fourth Amendment protections. In effect, it means that Americans can only count on Fourth Amendment protections if they don’t use e-mail, cell phones, the Internet, credit cards, libraries, banks, or other forms of modern finance and communications.” Separately, 57 groups representing civil liberties and public interest groups said in a letter sent Friday to Attorney General Eric Holder the Justice Department’s “overreaching subpoena of AP phone records sets a dangerous precedent.” “The Obama administration promised a new era of openness and transparency. Your actions, which expand secrecy and intimidate those trying to shed more light on our government, run counter to that promise,” the letter said. The groups asked Holder to provide a “full accounting” of the department’s targeting of journalists and whistleblowers and “explain its overreach in this matter.” Signers included the ACLU, Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Library Association and Common Cause.
Lucent Technologies World Services will pay the U.S. $4.2 million in a settlement over False Claims Act allegations. The U.S. claimed the company had submitted misleading testing certifications to the U.S. Army connected to its construction and modernization of Iraq’s emergency communications system, the Department of Justice said Friday. The army awarded the Alcatel-Lucent subsidiary a $250 million contract in March 2004 to build Iraq’s Advanced First Responder Network, a 911-style emergency response and first responder communications system, Justice said. The settlement also resolves a December 2008 “whistleblower” lawsuit filed by Geoffrey Wilson, the former contract manager for the project. He will receive $758,000 from the settlement for suing in a Washington state federal court on behalf of the U.S. under the False Claims Act (http://xrl.us/bnq8me).
Three National Security Agency whistleblowers offered statements in support of an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) lawsuit against warrantless surveillance. In a filing Monday in Jewel v. NSA, the former intelligence analysts said the agency has or is getting the ability “to seize and store most electronic communications passing through its U.S. intercept centers, such as the ’secret room’ at the AT&T facility in San Francisco,” the EFF said. The foundation’s legal director, Cindy Cohn, said: “Government lawyers have been arguing that our case is too secret for the courts to consider, despite the mounting confirmation of widespread mass illegal surveillance of ordinary people. Now we have three former NSA officials confirming the basic facts.” They are William Binney, Thomas Drake and Kirk Wiebe. Binney and Wiebe were cleared in a federal investigation of leaks to the New York Times about the surveillance, and charges against Drake were dropped, EFF said. Their new statements were made in connection with a motion for partial summary judgment asking a U.S. district judge in San Francisco to reject state-secrets objections by the government and apply the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.