[Infowarrior] - Keeping Uncle Sam from spying on citizens

[Richard Forno]

December 16, 2009 4:00 AM PST
Keeping Uncle Sam from spying on citizens
by Elinor Mills
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10415899-245.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Editor's note: This is the third in a series of articles discussing  
how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and  
state governments.

During the first Gulf War, Greg Nojeim went to Washington National  
Airport to observe Arab Americans being pulled out of lines and put  
through security checks that weren't required of other passengers. The  
evidence he gathered was used by his employer, the American-Arab Anti- 
Discrimination Committee, to sue Pan Am World Airways on allegations  
of racial profiling.

Now an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT),  
he's still fighting attempts to use national security as a  
justification to violate people's constitutional rights and invade  
their privacy.

Specifically, he analyzes proposed legislation, lobbies and testifies  
before Congress, and provides advice to companies and the government  
on civil liberties issues that arise in the technology world to  
protect the privacy of consumer activities and communications.

"For about the last 15 years, my career has focused on the  
intersection of privacy, law enforcement and national security,"  
Nojeim said. "When I started at the ACLU in 1995, it was just a few  
weeks after the Oklahoma City bombing. Wiretapping and government  
surveillance were at the center of my issue portfolio. And Congress  
has been focused on those issues for years."

Nojeim is director of the Project on Freedom, Security, and Technology  
at the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit CDT. He has tackled government  
data mining, the Patriot Act, and wireless wiretapping, working to  
limit the threat that surveillance by officials and law enforcement  
poses to consumer privacy. He brought together a coalition of groups  
that worked to remove proposals from a 1996 antiterrorism law that  
would have given law enforcement increased wiretap authority to access  
records without court orders and broaden the type of records accessed.  
Nojeim is concerned about the ramifications of a government policy  
that allows officials to eavesdrop on citizens without proper  
justification.

"Who wants to live in a world where the government can listen in on  
every communication without any evidence of crime?" he said. "The  
consequences of that are that people won't communicate freely and the  
country would be very different as a result. Imagine how your  
conversation with a close personal friend would change if you knew  
someone else was listening. That's what is at stake. That's what needs  
to be protected."

Nojeim also is bothered by possible side effects from new measures  
designed to improve the country's ability to fend off cyberattacks,  
particularly a proposal to allow a government agency to access  
information held by companies--even if protected by a privacy statute-- 
when the agency believes the information is relevant to cybersecurity.  
This means the government could use a broad cybersecurity  
justification and ask ISPs and other service providers to turn over  
private e-mails of citizens. Officials are normally restricted by  
certain conditions such as requirements to provide probable cause that  
a crime was committed or access is otherwise warranted.

"I'm referring specifically to the Cybersecurity Act, which says that  
[the Department of] Commerce would become the new clearinghouse for  
cybersecurity information and that it could, in that role, gain access  
to that information notwithstanding any law," he said.

"Imagine how your conversation with a close personal friend would  
change if you knew someone else was listening. That's what is at  
stake. That's what needs to be protected."
--Greg Nojeim, CDT attorney
"It could force companies to release sensitive, confidential, and  
proprietary information to the government and it could force companies  
to release private information about consumers' communications to the  
government, as well," he added.

Officials and lawmakers aren't malicious or targeting average  
citizens, Nojeim said. They're just not thinking through the  
consequences of their proposals in their zeal to fight terrorism and  
prevent cyberattacks, he said. "Or, they don't put enough weight on  
the civil liberties interest at stake," he said.

Nojeim was born in 1959 in Syracuse, N.Y., to first-generation  
Lebanese-American parents. His mother worked as an accounts manager at  
a large corporation and his father worked on computers for the U.S.  
Air Force. The fourth of five sons, Nojeim was class president and  
valedictorian in high school and played soccer. He graduated from the  
University of Rochester in 1981 with a B.A. in political science. He  
went to law school at the University of Virginia and worked in mergers  
and acquisitions at a private firm after that, taking a break at one  
point to travel around the world for a year.

Collegiate advocacy
His interest in the nonprofit world began when he joined the American  
Civil Liberties Union in college. He later volunteered at the American- 
Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and then worked as the  
director of legal services there, conducting much of the group's work  
in the areas of immigration, civil, and human rights. When the office  
started getting calls from people complaining about racial profiling  
at airport security lines, he and other staffers spent hours at the  
airport to monitor the situation. The lawsuit filed against Pan Am was  
settled when the airline ceased flying due to its bankruptcy.

 From there, Nojeim went to the ACLU, which had assisted the ADC with  
the airport profiling case. He worked at the ACLU for 12 years before  
joining the CDT in May 2007.

Nojeim is disappointed that the Patriot Act was passed while he was at  
the ACLU. The law dramatically expanded government power in the most  
dangerous ways for civil liberties, such as cutting down on judicial  
oversight of the exercise of investigative power and increasing the  
secrecy in which the powers are used, he said. For instance, before  
the act was passed, the FBI had to prove that hotel, car rental, and  
other records it sought for national security reasons pertained to the  
travel of a terrorist or spy. After the law was passed, the FBI can  
access records on anyone merely by showing that the records are  
relevant to an investigation. The Patriot Act also gives the FBI  
authority to conduct a secret search of a home or office for regular  
crimes and not just for foreign intelligence purposes.

But things might be turning around. The CDT and other civil liberties  
groups have been able to convince Congress to consider reforming a  
part of the law that gave the FBI the authority to issue "National  
Security Letters" (NSL) ordering ISPs and other types of businesses to  
turn over sensitive customer records. A measure before the U.S. House  
of Representatives would require that records sought with an NSL  
pertain to somebody who is either a terrorist or a spy or someone  
known to be in contact with a terrorist or spy, Nojeim said. For  
Americans with no ties to such individuals, the FBI can require a  
company to turn over its financial information and communications only  
after judicial review or with a subpoena in a criminal investigation,  
he said. The issue is likely to be resolved in the spring, he added.

"The Patriot Act changed the NSL statutes so that they can be used to  
seek records about anyone, not just about terrorists and spies and  
other 'agents of foreign powers,'" he said.

'Quiet warrior'
 From his office a few blocks from the White House, Nojeim organizes  
the staff softball team and writes humorous reports on the team's  
activities when he's not doing the more serious work of trying to  
block the government from overstepping its authority.

"He's got a really off-beat sense of humor and he's a bit of a  
mischief maker in terms of the humor he shows to his colleagues," said  
Tim Sparapani, Facebook director of public policy, whom Nojeim hired  
at the ACLU. "He's doing deadly serious work and yet he sees the humor  
and the irony in a lot of situations, and that always makes his  
colleagues enjoy working with him."

"He's a very bright guy and coupled with that he's got a huge heart  
and a dedication to the law," said Albert Mokhiber, a lawyer at the  
firm of Mokhiber & Moretti and former president of the ADC who hired  
Nojeim to work there.

Nojeim is passionate about protecting individuals' constitutional  
rights but is also particularly effective working on issues that  
easily incite anger and strong emotion in others because he is  
measured and calm, his former colleagues said.

"This made him extremely useful for the work we were doing because  
there was a lot of emotion and passion in civil rights and human  
rights issues," Mokhiber said. "It has been very easy to violate civil  
and constitutional rights of Arab-Americans because there was this  
perception that we are the other; that we are the enemy, and that's  
not the case."

Nojeim stands out as a humble and relatively apolitical activist in a  
town noted for its egos and power games, according to Sparapani. "Greg  
is one of those quiet warriors," he said.

"He's probably the most important privacy advocate and Arab-American  
advocate that people don't know about. Greg does everything quietly  
behind the scenes," Sparapani said. "Greg was never somebody who  
needed to make friends in Washington. That helped him distinguish  
himself as an advocate. He calls them like he sees them."


Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET  
News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in  
Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service,  
and the Associated Press.