emptywheel

702 bill the House just passed codifies the government's ability to use 702 to collect DOMESTIC communications from Tor and VPNs and use them for 8 enumerated crimes. https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/10/23/the-senate-intelligence-committee-702-bill-is-a-domestic-spying-bill/ …

Those crimes are: -death -kidnapping -serious bodily harm -child porn -critical infrastructure -cyber (including the horrible CFAA) -transnational crime (which will include drug dealing) -human trafficking (which can include prostitution)

Worse still, it also lets the government use this Tor exception to spy on anyone or anything the AG deems related to national security. This authority is, under this bill, non reviewable. That means Jeff Sessions gets UNREVIEWABLE authority to spy on anyone using Tor.

65 Democrats just voted in favor of Jeff Sessions having that unreviewable authority. http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2018/roll016.xml …

I'm actually very sympathetic to arg FBI should have a way to access Tor and VPN traffic (they use subpoenas for the latter for regular old crimes); I suspect getting this authority has been key to success w/Dark Markets. But not doing so in a pretend foreign spying bill.

If Congress debated and passed "The Tor Spying Bill of 2018," it'd pass easily. And if they did so, defendants would get notice of that spying. Not so now. They'll never learn about it.

So effectively, on top of everything else that's wrong with this bill, it codifies the government moving criminal investigations under the jurisdiction of a secret court.

So can Jeff Sessions determine that my calling Trump a butt-head is a threat to national security? And no judge could then stop me being spied on?