THURSDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2013 • THE BULLETIN
AS
UPDATE:U.S. SURVEILLANCE
NSA said tomineGoogle, Yahoodata abroad By Charlie Savage, Claire Cain Miller and Nlcole Perlroth
r eport Wednesday by T h e Washington Post. NSA colNew Yorh Times News Service lection activities abroad face W ASHINGTON — The fewer legal restrictions and National Security A g ency less oversight than its actions and its British counterpart in the United States. have apparently tapped the Google and Y ahoo said fiber-optic cables connecting Wednesday that they were Google's and Yahoo's over- unaware of government acseas servers and are copying cessing of their data links. vast amounts of email and S arah M e r on , a Yah o o other information, accord- spokeswoman, said that the ing to accounts of documents company had not cooperated leaked by former agency con- with any government agency tractor Edward Snowden. for such i nterception, and I n partnership wit h t h e David Drummond, Google's British agency known as Gov- chieflegal officer,expressed ernment C o m m unications outrage. Headquarters, or GCHQ, the In a statement, the NSA NSA has apparently taken ad- did not directly address the vantage of the vast amounts claim that it had penetrated of data stored in and traveling the companies' overseas data among global data centers, links. But it emphasized that which run all modern online it was focused on "foreign" c omputing, according to a intelligence collection — not
Greg Andersen /The Associated Press file photo
The city of Irwindale, where Huy Fong Foods has a production faclllty for Sriracha hot sauce, has sued to stop production, claiming the chili odor emanating from the plant is a public nuisance.
Hot Continued from A1 As many as 40 trucks a day pull up to unload red hot chili peppers by the millions. Each plump, vine-ripened jalapeno pepper from central California then goes inside on a conveyor belt where it is washed, mixed with garlic and a few other ingredients and roaste d. The p ungent smell o f
peppers and garlic fumes is sent through a carbon-based filtration system that dissipates them beforethey leave the building, but not nearly enough, say residents. "Whenever the wind blows that chili and garlic and whatever else is in it, it's very, very, very strong," Sanchez said. "It
makes you cough." Down the street, her neighbor, Rafael Gomez, said it not only makes him and his kids cough and sneeze, but gives them headaches,burns their throatsand makes their eyes water. If the kids and their dog are playing in the backyard, he brings them inside. If the windows are open, he closes them. "I smelled it a half a mile away the other day when I was picking my kids up at school," he said. The odor is only there for about three months, during the California jalapeno pepper harvest season, which stretches from August to about the end of October or first week of November. "This is the time, as they are crushing the chilies and mixing them with the other ingredients, that the odors really come out," said City Attorney Frank Galante, adding that Irwindale officials have gotten numerous complaints. City officials met with company executives earlier this month and, a l though both sidessay the meeting was cordial, the company balked at shelling out what it said would be $600,000 to put in a new filtration system it doesn't believe it needs. As company of-
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ficials were looking into other alternatives, said director of operations Adam H o l l iday, the citysued. The case goes to court today. "We don't think it should have ever come to this," Holliday said. In one respect, Huy Fong is a victim of its amazing success. Company founder D avid Tran started cooking up his signature product in a bucket in 1980 and delivering it by van to a handful of customers.
Privacy
drafted a bill that would prohibit schools from collecting Contlnued from A1 biometric data to verify who And the flurry of legisla- getsfree lunch and who gets tion has led some compa- off at which bus stop. Vermont nies, particularly technol- has limited the use of data cology companies, to exert lected by license plate readers, their lobbying muscleswhich are used mostly by powith some success — when lice to record images of license proposed measures stand plates. to harm their bottom lines. California, which has long "It can be counterpro- been a pioneer on digital priductive to have multiple vacy laws, has passed three states addressing the same online privacy bills this year. issue, especially with on- One gives children the right line privacy, which c an to erase social media posts, be a national or an inter- another makes it a m i sden ational issue," said Mimeanor to publish identifiable chael Hintze, chief privacy nude pictures online without counsel at Microsoft, who the subject's permission, and added that at times it can a third requires companies to create "burdensome com- tell consumers whether they pliance." For companies, abide by "do not track" signals it helps that state mea- on Web browsers. sures are limited in their But stiff l obbying efforts scope by a f e d eral l aw were able to stop a so-called that prevents states from right-to-know bill proposed in interfering with interstate California this year that stood commerce. to hurt the industry. The bill This year, Texas passed would have required any busia bill, introduced by Stick- ness that "retains a customer's land, that requires warpersonal information" to share rants for emailsearches, a copy of that information at while Oklahoma enacted the customer's request, as well a law meant to protect the as disclose which third parties privacy of student data. At have received the informaleast three states proposed tion. The practice of sharing measures toregulate who customer data is central to inherits digital data, includ- digital advertising and to the ing Facebook passwords, large Internet companies that when a user dies. relyon advertising revenue. "'Right-to-know' is an exSome of the bills extend to surveillance beyond the ample of something that's not web. Eight states, for example, have passed laws this year limiting the use mplements of drones, according to the Vit'rroe '3el i'c,r'i0 r'J American Civil L i berties 70 SW Century Dr., Ste. 145 Union, which has advocatBend, OR 97702• 541-322-7337 ed for such privacy laws. complementshomeinteriors.com In Florida, a lawmaker has
The company quickly grew and he moved it to a factory in the nearby city of Rosemead. When it outgrew that facility two years ago he came to Irwindale, bringing about 60 full-time jobs and 200 more seasonal ones to the city of about 1,400 people. He says his privately held business took in about $85 million last year. H is recipe for Sriracha isso simple that the Vietnamese immigrant has never bothered to conceal it: chili pepper, garlic, salt, sugar and vinegar. "You could make it yourself at home," he told a visitor during a tour of the plant on Tuesday. But, he added with a twinkle in his eye, not nearly as well as he can. The secret, he said, is in getting the freshest peppers possibleand processing them immediately. The result is a s auce so fiercely hot it makes Tabasco and Picante seem mild, though to those with fireproof palates and iron stomachs it is strangely addictive. Thirtythree yearsafter Tran turned out his f irst bucketful, Sriracha's little plastic squeeze bottles with their distinctive green caps are ubiquitous in restaurants and home pantries around the world. Even Galante, who is suing Huy Fong Foods, speaks highly of the sauce. "It is a good product. The c ity has no i ssue with t h e product," he said. "They just want them to upgrade, as good neighbors, and not negatively affect the residents."
domestic and pushed back against the notion that it was collecting abroad to "get around" legal limits imposed by domestic surveillance laws. It also said it was "not true" that it collects "vast quantities" o f A m e r i cans' data using that method. Companies like Google that operate Internet services send huge amounts of data through fiber-optic lines between their data centers aroundthe world. The companies believed the data flowing among centers was secure. But Google said last month that it began the process of encrypting this internal traffic before reports
at least three years, GCHQ had been working to gain access to traffic in and out of data centersoperated by Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft's Hotmail. The program, described as having been developed in close collaboration with the NSA, was said to have achieved "new a ccess opportunities" i n t o Google's systems by 2012, according to G CHQ d ocuments provided by Snowden. But it was not clear what that meant. The Post said that under a system code-named MUSCULAR, GCHQ was storing data taken in from the interception of NSA spying leaked during in a rolling three- to five-day the summer and accelerated " buffer," during w hich t h e the effort since then. two agencies decoded it and The New York Times re- filtered out information they ported in September that for wanted to keep.
workable," said Jim Halpert, a lawyer with the national firm DLA Piper, who leads an industry coalition that includes Amazon, Facebook and Verizon. "It covers such a broad range ofdisclosures. We advocated against it." M ore than a y e a r a g o , the White House proposed a consumer privacy bill o f rights, but Congress has not yet taken on the legislation. And a proposed update to the 27-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act has stalled. The proposal would require l a w enf o r cement agencies to obtain a warrant, based on probable cause, before they could read through emails. Several legislators said they felt compelled to act because Congress had not. "They don't act in the best interest unless it's in their best interest," said Daniel Zolnikov, a first-time legislator in M o ntana. Zolnikov, a Republican, suggested that the lack of action was because of lobbying efforts from "special interests" on Capitol Hill. So Zolnikov took up the privacy issue in his state house: M ontana became th e f i r st state in the nation this year to pass a law that requires police to obtain a search warrant before it can track a suspect's whereabouts t h rough c e l lphone records.
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According to a survey conducted in July by th e Pew Internet Center, most Americans said they believed existing laws were inadequate to protect their privacy online, and a clear majority reported making great efforts to mask their identities online. Some of those surveyed said they cleared browsing h i stories, deleted social media posts or used virtual networks to conceal their Internet Protocol addresses — and a few even said they u sed encryption tools. John Pezold, a Republican representative i n Ge o r gia, said that issues like creating jobs were morepressing than privacy for many of his constituents. But he said the issue of digital privacy was beginning to bubble up, especially because ofthe recent reports on eavesdropping by the federal government. "They're becoming increasingly wary that their lives are going to be no longer their own," said Pezold, who plans to introduce a broad consumer privacy bill in the next legislative session. "We have got to protect that."
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