How the US government spies on people who protest -- including you

What's stopping the American government from recording your phone calls, reading your emails and monitoring your location? Very little, says surveillance and cybersecurity counsel Jennifer Granick. The government collects all kinds of information about you easily, cheaply and without a warrant -- and if you've ever participated in a protest or attended a gun show, you're likely a person of interest. Learn more about your rights, your risks and how to protect yourself in the golden age of surveillance.

We are all activists now.

(Applause)

Thank you.

I'll just stop here.

(Laughter)

From the families who are fighting
to maintain funding for public schools,

the tens of thousands of people
who joined Occupy Wall Street

or marched with Black Lives Matter

to protest police brutality
against African Americans,

families that join rallies,

pro-life and pro-choice,

those of us who are afraid

that our friends and neighbors
are going to be deported

or that they'll be added to lists

because they are Muslim,

people who advocate for gun rights
and for gun control

and the millions of people
who joined the women's marches

all across the country this last January.

(Applause)

We are all activists now,

and that means that we all have something
to worry about from surveillance.

Surveillance means
government collection and use

of private and sensitive data about us.

And surveillance is essential

to law enforcement
and to national security.

But the history of surveillance

is one that includes surveillance abuses

where this sensitive information
has been used against people

because of their race,

their national origin,

their sexual orientation,

and in particular,
because of their activism,

their political beliefs.

About 53 years ago,

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
gave his "I have a dream" speech

on the Mall in Washington.

And today the ideas behind this speech
of racial equality and tolerance

are so noncontroversial

that my daughters
study the speech in third grade.

But at the time,

Dr. King was extremely controversial.

The legendary and notorious
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed,

or wanted to believe,

that the Civil Rights Movement
was a Soviet communist plot

intended to destabilize
the American government.

And so Hoover had his agents
put bugs in Dr. King's hotel rooms,

and those bugs picked up conversations
between civil rights leaders

talking about the strategies and tactics
of the Civil Rights Movement.

They also picked up sounds of Dr. King

having sex with women
who were not his wife,

and J. Edgar Hoover
saw the opportunity here

to discredit and undermine
the Civil Rights Movement.

The FBI sent a package of these recordings

along with a handwritten note to Dr. King,

and a draft of this note
was found in FBI archives years later,

and the letter said,

"You are no clergyman and you know it.

King, like all frauds,
your end is approaching."

The letter even seemed
to encourage Dr. King to commit suicide,

saying, "King, there is
only one thing left for you to do.

You know what it is.

You better take it before
your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self

is bared to the nation."

But the important thing is,

Dr. King was not abnormal.

Every one of us has something
that we want to hide from somebody.

And even more important,

J. Edgar Hoover wasn't abnormal either.

The history of surveillance abuses

is not the history
of one bad, megalomaniacal man.

Throughout his decades at the FBI,

J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed the support
of the presidents that he served,

Democratic and Republican alike.

After all, it was John F. Kennedy
and his brother Robert Kennedy

who knew about and approved
the surveillance of Dr. King.

Hoover ran a program
called COINTELPRO for 15 years

which was designed
to spy on and undermine civic groups

that were devoted
to things like civil rights,

the Women's Rights Movement,

and peace groups and anti-war movements.

And the surveillance didn't stop there.

Lyndon Baines Johnson,

during the election campaign,

had the campaign airplane
of his rival Barry Goldwater bugged

as part of his effort
to win that election.

And then, of course, there was Watergate.

Burglars were caught

breaking into the Democratic
National Committee headquarters

at the Watergate Hotel,

the Nixon administration was involved
in covering up the burglary,

and eventually Nixon
had to step down as president.

COINTELPRO and Watergate
were a wake-up call for Americans.

Surveillance was out of control

and it was being used
to squelch political challengers.

And so Americans rose to the occasion

and what we did was
we reformed surveillance law.

And the primary tool we used
to reform surveillance law

was to require a search warrant

for the government to be able to get
access to our phone calls and our letters.

Now, the reason why
a search warrant is important

is because it interposes a judge

in the relationship
between investigators and the citizens,

and that judge's job is to make sure

that there's good cause
for the surveillance,

that the surveillance
is targeted at the right people,

and that the information that's collected

is going to be used
for legitimate government purposes

and not for discriminatory ones.

This was our system,

and what this means is

that President Obama
did not wiretap Trump Tower.

The system is set up to prevent
something like that from happening

without a judge being involved.

But what happens when we're not talking
about phone calls or letters anymore?

Today, we have technology

that makes it cheap and easy
for the government to collect information

on ordinary everyday people.

Your phone call records

can reveal whether you have an addiction,

what your religion is,

what charities you donate to,

what political candidate you support.

And yet, our government
collected, dragnet-style,

Americans' calling records for years.

In 2012, the Republican
National Convention

highlighted a new technology
it was planning to use,

facial recognition,

to identify people
who were going to be in the crowd

who might be activists or troublemakers

and to stop them ahead of time.

Today, over 50 percent of American adults

have their faceprint
in a government database.

The Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

concocted a plan

to find out what Americans
were going to gun shows

by using license plate detectors

to scan the license plates of cars

that were in the parking lots
of these events.

Today, we believe that over 70 percent
of police departments

have automatic license plate
detection technology

that they're using to track people's cars
as they drive through town.

And all of this information,

the license plates, the faceprints,

the phone records,

your address books, your buddy lists,

the photos that you upload
to Dropbox or Google Photos,

and sometimes even
your chats and your emails

are not protected
by a warrant requirement.

So what that means is we have
all of this information on regular people

that's newly available
at very low expense.

It is the golden age for surveillance.

Now, every parent is going
to understand what this means.

When you have a little baby

and the baby's young,

that child is not able
to climb out of its crib.

But eventually your little girl gets older

and she's able to climb out of the crib,

but you tell her,
"Don't climb out of the crib. OK?"

And every parent knows
what's going to happen.

Some of those babies
are going to climb out of the crib.

Right? That's the difference
between ability and permission.

Well, the same thing is true
with the government today.

It used to be that our government
didn't have the ability

to do widespread, massive surveillance
on hundreds of millions of Americans

and then abuse that information.

But now our government has grown up,

and we have that technology today.

The government has the ability,

and that means the law
is more important than ever before.

The law is supposed to say

when the government
has permission to do it,

and it's supposed to ensure
that there's some kind of ramification.

We notice when those laws are broken

and there's some of kind of
ramification or punishment.

The law is more important than ever
because we are now living in a world

where only rules
are stopping the government

from abusing this information.

But the law has fallen down on the job.

Particularly since September 11
the law has fallen down on the job,

and we do not have
the rules in place that we need.

And we are seeing
the ramifications of that.

So fusion centers
are these joint task forces

between local, state
and federal government

that are meant to ferret out
domestic terrorism.

And what we've seen
is fusion center reports

that say that you might be dangerous

if you voted for a third-party candidate,

or you own a "Don't Tread On Me" flag,

or you watched movies that are anti-tax.

These same fusion centers have spied
on Muslim community groups' reading lists

and on Quakers who are resisting
military recruiting in high schools.

The Internal Revenue Service
has disproportionately audited

groups that have "Tea Party"
or "Patriot" in their name.

And now customs and border patrol

is stopping people
as they come into the country

and demanding our social
networking passwords

which will allow them
to see who our friends are,

what we say

and even to impersonate us online.

Now, civil libertarians like myself

have been trying to draw
people's attention to these things

and fighting against them for years.

This was a huge problem
during the Obama administration,

but now the problem is worse.

When the New York Police Department

spies on Muslims

or a police department
uses license plate detectors

to find out where
the officers' spouses are

or those sorts of things,

that is extremely dangerous.

But when a president repurposes the power

of federal surveillance
and the federal government

to retaliate against political opposition,

that is a tyranny.

And so we are all activists now,

and we all have something
to fear from surveillance.

But just like in the time
of Dr. Martin Luther King,

we can reform the way things are.

First of all, use encryption.

Encryption protects your information

from being inexpensively
and opportunistically collected.

It rolls back the golden age
for surveillance.

Second, support surveillance reform.

Did you know that if you have a friend

who works for the French
or German governments

or for an international human rights group

or for a global oil company

that your friend is a valid
foreign intelligence target?

And what that means is that when
you have conversations with that friend,

the US government
may be collecting that information.

And when that information is collected,

even though it's
conversations with Americans,

it can then be funneled to the FBI

where the FBI is allowed
to search through it

without getting a warrant,

without probable cause,

looking for information about Americans

and whatever crimes we may have committed

with no need to document
any kind of suspicion.

The law that allows some of this to happen

is called Section 702
of the FISA Amendments Act,

and we have a great opportunity this year,

because Section 702
is going to expire at the end of 2017,

which means that
Congress's inertia is on our side

if we want reform.

And we can pressure our representatives

to actually implement
important reforms to this law

and protect our data
from this redirection and misuse.

And finally, one of the reasons
why things have gotten so out of control

is because so much
of what happens with surveillance --

the technology, the enabling rules
and the policies

that are either there
or not there to protect us --

are secret or classified.

We need transparency,
and we need to know as Americans

what the government is doing in our name

so that the surveillance that takes place
and the use of that information

is democratically accounted for.

We are all activists now,

which means that we all have something
to worry about from surveillance.

But like in the time
of Dr. Martin Luther King,

there is stuff that we can do about it.

So please join me, and let's get to work.

Thank you.

(Applause)