PAGE 18A
THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2013
HOUSING
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Website connects students, local landlords
MEGAN KETCHAM
mketcham@kansan.com
Finding the perfect roommate can be difficult, especially as the start of a new semester approaches. For some students, turning to the Internet is the best way to find a roommate or sublease last minute.
The Housing Hawk, a locally owned, Craiglist-type website, seemed to be the best strategy for approximately 17,000 student renters this year. The Housing Hawk allows students to post free ads on the website or its Facebook page. Landlords and management companies in Lawrence also advertise their properties with the Housing Hawk to increase options for students.
Sally Burns founded the website in 2011. Between March and August of this year, the site had about 10,000 students and advertisers use the service.
"I started the Housing Hawk three years ago because I wanted students to have a resource to easily find accurate information about all of their off-campus housing options." Burns said.
Besides providing a student-
friendly resource, Burns said she found benefits in working with landlords that do not advertise as heavily as management companies.
what their options are."
"Students are able to search properties to find housing that they need," she said. "Because I'm local, I'm able to work with some of the smaller landlords to get students a pe
A personal, local presence seems to set the Housing Hawk apart from other websites like it.
Samantha Francis, a junior
"It helps from a individual level to help students meet their needs...It gives students a more full range of options."
SALLY BURNS
Housing Hawk founder
e student-friendly website and
trom Kansas City, Kan., began using the Housing Hawk after attempting to sublease her apartment on Craigslist. Francis said she attributes much of her success to
its trustworthy advertising.
“This website shows people that I am a real person, not a scam,” she said. “I’ve also posted an advertisement on Craigslist for looking for a subleaser, but one of the people who have contacted me ended up being a fraud. I don’t trust Craigslist as much as I do with the Housing Hawk.”
Burns's focus is giving students a personal experience by listening to their situations and needs. She said she tries to find the best choice for each student.
"What differentiates it is that students or renters call me and
explain their situation," Burns said. "It helps from an individual level to help students meet their needs. I'm able to work with small landlords that can't advertise with a major apartment site, but can advertise with me. It gives students a more full range of options."
Edited by Allison Kohn
NATIONAL
NSA declassifies three court opinions
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency declassified three secret court opinions Wednesday showing how in one of its surveillance programs it scooped up as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans not connected to terrorism annually over three years, revealed the error to the court — which ruled its actions unconstitutional — and then fixed the problem.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper authorized the release, part of which Obama administration officials acknowledged Wednesday was prodded by a 2011 lawsuit filed by an Internet civil liberties activist group.
ernment's "upstream" collection of data taken from internal U.S. data sources was unconstitutional.
The court opinions show that when the NSA reported its inadvertent gathering of American-based Internet traffic to the court in September 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the agency to find ways to limit what it collects and how long it keeps it.
Three senior U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday that national security officials realized the extent of the NSAs inadvertent collection of Americans' data from fiber optic cables in September 2011. One of the officials said the problem became apparent during internal discussions between NSA and Justice Department officials about the program's technical operation.
In an 85-page declassified FISA court ruling from October 2011, U.S. District Judge James D. Bates rebuked government lawyers for repeatedly misrepresenting the operations of the NSA's surveillance programs.
"This court is troubled that the government's revelations regarding NSA's acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program," Bates wrote in a footnoted passage that had portions heavily blacked out in the government's disclosure.
The NSA had moved to revise its Internet surveillance in an effort to separate out domestic data from its foreign targeted metadata — which includes email addresses and subject lines. But in his October 2011 ruling, Bates ruled that the gov-
The National Security Agency declassified three secret U.S. court opinions Aug. 21 showing how it scooped up as many as 56,000 emails and other communications by Americans with no connection to terrorism over three years. The NSA revealed the error to the court and changed how it gathered Internet communications.
"They were having a discussion and a light bulb went on," the official said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
The problem, according to the officials, was that the top secret Internet-sweeping operation, which was targeting metadata contained in the emails of foreign users, was also amassing thousands of emails that were bundled up with the targeted materials. Because many web mail services use such bundled transmissions, the official said, it was impossible to collect the targeted materials without also sweeping up data from innocent domestic U.S. users.
The officials did not explain why they did not prepare for that possibility when the surveillance program was created and why they discovered it only after the program was well under way.
Officials said that when they realized they had an American communication, the communication was destroyed. But it was not clear how they determined to whom an email belonged and whether any NSA analyst had actually read the content of the email. The officials said the bulk of the information was never accessed or analyzed.
As soon as the extent of the problem became clear, the officials said, the Obama administration provided classified briefings to both Senate and House intelligence committees within days. At the same time, officials also informed the FISA court, which later issued the three
2011 rulings released Wednesday — with redactions — as part of the government's latest disclosure of documents.
The officials briefed reporters on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to describe the program publicly.
The documents were declassi
fied to help the Obama administration explain some of the most recent disclosures made by The Washington Post after it published classified documents provided by former NSA
But the FISA court's classified rulings have also been at issue in a two-year-old lawsuit filed against the government by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties activist organization. In a decision in June, the FISA court ruled that its authority did not prevent the release of the ear-
"... We can and must do more to protect innocent Americans... from being monitored by our government "
systems analyst Edward Snowden.
One of the intelligence officials briefing reporters said the newly declassified documents should help explain "the reasons why people shouldn't go into a panic over articles they read in the press."
lier 2011 opinion.
MARK UDALL
U.S. Senator, D-Colorado
A senior administration official acknowledged Wednesday that some of the documents released were in response to the lawsuit, while others were released
voluntarily. The official insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the release with a reporter by name.
The release Wednesday of the FISA opinion, two other 2011 rulings and a secret "white paper"
on the NSA's surveillance came less than two weeks after a federal judge in Washington gave government lawyers a time extension in order to decide which materials to declassify. The EFF had been pressing for a summary judgment that would have compelled the government to release the secret FISA rulings, and the government's most recent extension expired Wednesday, the day it released the once-secret FISA court rulings.
While the NSA is allowed to keep the metadata — the address or phone number and the duration, but not the content, of the communication — of Americans for up to five years, the court ruled that when it gathered up such large packets of information, they included emails between American citizens, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
channels, amounting to between 20 million to 25 million emails a year. The agency used statistical analysis to estimate that of those, possibly as many as 56,000 Internet communications collected were sent by Americans or persons in the U.S. with no connection to terrorism.
The NSA disclosed that it gathers some 250 million internet communications each year, with some 9 percent from these "upstream"
The disclosures were greeted with cautious optimism by Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, who has sponsored legislation to curb some of the NSAs surveillance and serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
"I am glad the NSA is taking this step at owning its mistakes, but it is also a sign that we can and must do more to protect innocent Americans with no connection to terrorism from being monitored by our government — whether intentionally or not," Udall said Wednesday. "I will keep fighting to ensure that the NSA is not violating Americans' privacy rights."
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