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While the Moscow Board of Adjustment approved New Saint Andrews College's conditional use permit application to allow the college to expand into the former Cadillac Jack's building on North Main Street, an appeal to the board's decision could be imminent.

Moscow's assistant community development director, Mike Ray, said his office has already fielded a number of calls and emails asking about the appeal process, and he anticipates an appeal will be made. The appeal period, which starts Tuesday, will last 10 days, meaning any objections must be filed by May 11.

Ray said the Board of Adjustment will meet at 5:30 p.m. Monday in the council chambers at City Hall to approve a relevant criteria and standards document, which will reflect the board's Tuesday decision, and finalize the conditional use permit's approval. Afterward, appeals can be filed by anyone.

To appeal, the appellant is required to submit a letter to the city stating his or her reasons for the appeal and to pay a $220 appeal fee, Ray said.

The City Council would then address the appeal. No new public testimony would be allowed at that time except for comments from the appellant, Ray said. The councilors would also refer to Tuesday night's Board of Adjustment meeting for information. Ray said the City Council would be allowed to sustain the Board of Adjustment's decision, reverse the board's decision or remand the decision back to the Board of Adjustment.

The CUP would allow NSA to convert the former CJ's building at 112 N. Main St. into a music conservatory. It would be allowed a maximum enrollment of 300 full-time equivalent students and 44 full-time equivalent faculty and staff. The facility would include five classrooms/studios, nine offices, a multi-purpose room, a student lounge and a music conservatory with seating for 680 occupants, according to the Board of Adjustment packet for Tuesday night's meeting.

NSA President Benjamin Merkle said 165 students are enrolled at the college's existing campus on Main Street.

The board approved the conditional use permit with two conditions related to parking that city staff recommended. NSA must provide 47 off-street parking spaces within approximately half of a mile of the property, subject to the approval of the zoning administrator.

NSA will be allowed to phase in the off-street parking requirement by providing 50 percent of the required parking mitigation upon occupancy of the building and the remainder when NSA's enrollment reaches 150 students, or five years from the date of the issuance of the Certificate of Occupancy of the building, whichever comes first.

Moscow Mayor Bill Lambert said he is fine with the private Christian college expanding downtown and he is happy someone plans to use the former CJ's building again. He said the proposed expansion is an emotional issue on both sides.

"It's a good use of the building as far as I'm concerned," Lambert said.

He said parking seemed to be the biggest concern and the Board of Adjustment appeared to address that with its conditions.

"I think they've been good for downtown businesses ... for restaurants and places like that," Lambert said of NSA students.

Some residents said Tuesday night that they believed colleges belong outside the Central Business Zoning District, but Lambert said he does not have a problem with allowing educational institutions downtown. He said NSA is a small school, unlike the University of Idaho.

City Councilman John Weber said his only conflict with the proposed expansion is that the former CJ's building might not be subject to property taxes. He said he would prefer to see a business that would be required to pay property taxes to occupy the building.

"Every year we're fighting the budget as all towns do and I would like to see more commercial development that pays property taxes and things like that," Weber said. "So it can be beneficial to the town as far as infrastructure and things like that."

Alyssa Hartford, Latah County senior residential appraiser, said NSA owns two buildings downtown. One of them, which fronts Friendship Square at 109 W. Fourth St., is partially exempt from property taxes since a portion of the building includes a restaurant. The other building at 409 S. Main St. is fully exempt from property taxes because it is used for educational purposes, Hartford said.

She said if NSA expanded to North Main Street, it would possibly qualify for a property tax exemption. The school could file as a property used for school or educational purposes and submit its application to the Board of County Commissioners, which would make a decision.

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Appeals to NSA college expansion could be coming - Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Section 702 -- the statute that allows the NSA to collect internet communications and data in bulk -- is up for renewal at the end of this year. The NSA, thanks to Ed Snowden, faced more of an uphill battle than usual when renewing Section 215 (bulk metadata collections). For the first time in its existence, the NSA ended up with a compromise (the USA Freedom Act), rather than a straight renewal.

The Intelligence Community appears to be trying to get out ahead of straight renewal opponents. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released a Section 702 Q&A at millennial watering hole Tumblr. By returning its own soft serve questions with canned talking points, the ODNI is hoping to show just how lawful its upstream collection is.

It also hopes to obscure something that's been around since the 2008 FISA Amendments Act: backdoor searches. Other government agencies have had the ability to peruse the NSA's collections, which were ostensibly gathered solely for national security use. The FBI is the most frequent backdoor searcher, seeing as it has rebranded as a counterterrorism unit over the past several years, which has allowed it to expand its surveillance capabilities and increase exploitation of the NSA's data stores.

The ODNI's Q&A document sort of admits this, but tries to downplay the implications of allowing a domestic law enforcement agency free access to national security-focused surveillance intake.

The governments minimization procedures restrict the ability of analysts to query the databases that hold raw Section 702 information (i.e., where information identifying a U.S. person has not yet been minimized for permanent retention) using an identifier, such as a name or telephone number, that is associated with a U.S. person. Generally, queries of raw content are only permitted if they are reasonably designed to identify foreign intelligence information, although the FBI also may conduct such queries to identify evidence of a crime. As part of Section 702s extensive oversight, DOJ and ODNI review the agencies U.S. person queries of content to ensure the query satisfies the legal standard. Any compliance incidents are reported to Congress and the FISC.

It still sort of sounds like a backdoor search, even with supposed strict oversight, but the ODNI adds a footnote claiming it isn't:

Queries of Section 702 data using U.S. person identifiers are sometimes mischaracterized in the public discourse as backdoor searches.

Oh, that crazy "public discourse." Won't it get anything right? Here's Emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler to explain what the ODNI won't.

While its true that NSA and CIA minimization procedures impose limits on when an analyst can query raw data for content (but not for metadata at CIA), thats simply not true at FBI, where the primary rule is that if someone is not cleared for FISA themselves, they ask a buddy to access the information. As a result and because FBI queries FISA data for any national security assessment and with some frequency in the course of criminal investigations. In other words, partly because FBI is a domestic agency and partly because it has broader querying authorities, it conduct a substantial number of queries as opposed to the thousands done by CIA.

Wheeler goes on to point to the Privacy and Civil Liberty Oversight Board's (RIP) report on Section 702 as evidence of this common FBI practice. While the PCLOB mostly punted on Section 702, finding it to be less blatantly-unconstitutional than the Section 215 program, it still found the FBI perused raw NSA collections quite frequently, both for foreign intelligence information and evidence of criminal activity. The PCLOB was unable to assess how frequently these "none dare call it a backdoor" searches occurred because the FBI has no way of tracking how often it dips into the NSA's collections. With no data and no reporting, it's pretty disingenuous to claim there's effective oversight over the Section 702 program.

Marcy Wheeler also noticed something unusual in the brand new FISC Section 702 report -- newly-required by the USA Freedom Act. According to the numbers released by the FISA Court, zero 702 applications were approved in 2016.

Wheeler points out the process for Section 702 approval runs much like that of Section 215, with applications either being approved by the FISA court or sent back for fixes. Once approved, extensions can be requested, but only for up to 60 days at a time. As she notes, the last 702 submission wouldn't have been able to coast through 2016 without a renewal.

The prior approval before last year was November 6, 2015, so it would only have had to have been extended 2 months to get into this year. So that seems to suggest there was at least a three month (application time plus extension) delay in approving the certifications for this year.

Note, too, that the report shows the only amicus appointed last year was Marc Zwillinger for a known PRTT application, so this hold up wasnt even related to an amicus complaint.

In any case, this may reflect significant issues with 702.

The Snowden documents -- along with some from other unidentified leakers -- generated far more scrutiny of Section 702 than the NSA has ever experienced. It's not tough to imagine at least a couple of FISA judges being surprised with the scope of what they were approving. The number of submissions is redacted, but the footnote attached makes it clear the government submitted more than one application. This span with zero approvals dates back to the middle of last year, so it's been a bit of a dry run for the NSA.

The NSA has run into issues before with Section 702, the last time being in 2011, when the FISA court found the "upstream collection" of internet data to be "deficient on constitutional and statutory grounds." The NSA obtained extensions and apparently modified the order until it reached the FISA court's standards. This long delay between approvals could suggest the NSA is back in constitutionally-deficient waters, which definitely isn't where it wants to be as the program heads for renewal.

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NSA Makes Pitch For Section 702 Approval While Its 702 Requests Aren't Being Approved By The Court - Techdirt

April 26, 2017

An NSA spying blimp known as the Hover Hammer was seen by several residents of Maryland, according to The Intercept.

To residents of Maryland, catching an occasional glimpse of a huge white blimp floating in the sky is not unusual. For more than a decade, the military has used the state as a proving ground for new airships destined for Afghanistan or Iraq. But less known is that the test flights have sometimes served a more secretive purpose involving National Security Agency surveillance.

Back in 2004, a division of the NSA called the National Tactical Integration Office fitted a 62-foot diameter airship called the Hover Hammer with an eavesdropping device, he continued, adding that The agency launched the three-engine airship at an airfield near Solomons Island, Maryland.

From there, the blimp was able to vacuum up international shipping data emanating from the Long Island, New York area,' Gallagher explained, citing a classified document published on Monday. The spy equipment on the airship was called Digital Receiver Technology a proprietary system manufactured by a Maryland-based company of the same name which can intercept wireless communications, including cellphone calls.

The report continuedby saying, Unsurprisingly, privacy groups have expressed concerns about the prospect of the blimps being used domestically to spy on Americans. However, military officials have often been quick to dismiss such fears.

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NSA blimp spied on US citizens - TRUNEWS

A new document made public this week via Edward Snowdens leak of NSA documents reveals a fascinating aim of signals intelligence program: The agency, it turns out, monitored international scientific developments in hopes of detecting nefarious genetic engineering projects more than a decade ago.

SIGINT is intelligence collected by monitoring electronic and communications signals. In 2013, documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the agencys reliance on this kind of intelligence to provide insight into the capabilities and intentions of foreign entities, as well as domestic targets. In the years since, documents have continued to trickle out of the Snowden leak that shed additional light on those efforts.

One such document made public by The Intercept this week describes a use of NSA signals intelligence not previously known to the public. In 2004, an NSA cryptanalyst intern described looking for information about genetic sequencing in the signals intelligence collected by the agency.

The ultimate goals of this project are to gain general knowledge about genetic engineering research activity by foreign entities, she wrote, and to identify laboratories and/or individuals who may be involved in nefarious use of genetic research.

Working for the Office of Tradecraft for Analysis, her job was developing algorithms to answer specific questions from metadata, looking for genetic sequences in signals and then presumably trying to figure out what kind of research activity those sequences indicated. This shouldnt be altogether surprisingafter all, senior intelligence officials have gone on record calling genetic engineering a weapon of mass destruction.

Given the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this dual-use [genetic engineering] technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications, an annual worldwide threat assessment report from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and half a dozen other U.S. spy and fact-gathering operations said last year. Also last year, genome editing was added to the list of national security threats for the first time.

Last years report noted that new discoveries move easily in the globalized economy, as do personnel with the scientific expertise to design and use them, and pointed out the possibility of using the cutting-edge gene-editing technique CRISPR to edit the DNA of human embryos.

The leaked NSA documents, though, are dated long before CRISPR came on the scene. More than a decade ago, the government was concerned that foreign entities might be using genetic engineering for evil, be it creating brutal bioweapons or engineered super soldiers.

The single document gives no indication as to whether the program has continued. But elsewhere, there are signs that the intelligence community has only ramped up its efforts to keep tabs on potentially threatening scientific developments. The FBI, the Pentagon, and the United Nations bioweapons office all have efforts aimed at monitoring and studying potentially destructive uses of CRISPR. As technology advances, its safe to assume those efforts arent going to go away.

[The Intercept]

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Leaked Documents Reveal the NSA Spying on Scientists to Find ... - Gizmodo

Forbes

Russian Cybercriminals Are Loving Those Leaked NSA Windows Weapons Forbes It's been little over a week and a half since a hacker crew called the Shadow Brokers released a batch of tools believed to have belonged to the NSA, designed to break through the defences of Windows systems. Whilst Microsoft mysteriously patched its ... NSA backdoor detected on >55000 Windows boxes can now be remotely removedArs Technica How leaked NSA spy tools created a hacking free-for-all - Apr. 25 ...CNNMoney Leaked NSA tools, now infecting over 200000 machines, will be weaponized for yearsCyberScoop TechTarget -LifeZette -TrendinTech -TechNet Blogs - Microsoft all 66 news articles »

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Russian Cybercriminals Are Loving Those Leaked NSA Windows Weapons - Forbes