Obama administration defends 2nd mass surveillance project

[BobaFett1]

The Obama administration found itself defending -- and beginning to explain -- yet another surveillance effort after leaked documents revealed information about two secret National Security Agency intelligence-gathering programs.
On top of a Guardian newspaper report that revealed how authorities were collecting phone records from millions, a Washington Post report detailed another program that scours major Internet companies including Google and Facebook for data. A former senior NSA official confirmed to Fox News that the program was started in 2007 by the FBI and NSA and allows them to tap into top U.S. Internet companies to pull audio, video and other data.
While civil liberties groups cried foul over the program, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement late Thursday decrying the leak of the materials. He called the disclosure of the program that allows the NSA to collect communications data from Internet companies "reprehensible" and said the phone-records monitoring leak could cause harm to the nation's intelligence gathering activities.
At the same time, he took the rare step of moving to declassify information about the programs as he sought to defend them against criticism.
“The article omits key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties," he said of the Guardian story.
Clapper also said the government was "prohibited from indiscriminately sifting through the telephony metadata acquired under the program.” All information acquired, he said, “is subject to strict, court-imposed restrictions on review and handling. The court only allows the data to be queried when there is a reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization. “
Several hours earlier, a senior administration official also pushed back, saying the Guardian article and Washington Post article about the Internet mining refers to collection under a law that "does not allow the targeting of any U.S. citizen or of any person located within the United States.”
It was not immediately clear how the official defined “targeting.”
“The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress,” the official said. “It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.”
A former NSA official told Fox News the FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) have been tapping into leading U.S. Internet companies to pull audio, video and photographs.
According to the official, the program began in 2007 and is in the second phase. Metadata from the companies is used to identify suspicious individuals and the secondary search goes into content. The official told Fox News that the Utah Data Center is likely a repository for this material.
The classified program is code-named PRISM, the Washington Post reported, and has not been disclosed publicly before. Members of Congress who are aware of the program were reportedly bound by oath to keep it confidential.
According to slides from an internal presentation intended for NSA senior analysts and obtained by the Washington Post, the program accounts for nearly one in seven intelligence reports.
The companies that participate knowingly in the program are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple, the Washington Post reports.
A number of the Internet companies issued statements Thursday night saying they only complied when legally bound to do so.
"Even when the system works just as advertised, with no American singled out for targeting, the NSA routinely collects a great deal of American content," the Washington Post report said. "That is described as "incidental," and it is inherent in contact chaining, one of the basic tools of the trade."
To be immune from lawsuits, companies like Yahoo and AOL are reportedly obliged to accept a directive from the attorney general and national intelligence director to open their service to the FBI's Data Intercept Technology Unit, which acts as a liaison between the companies and the NSA.
According to the slides, there has been “continued exponential growth in tasking to Facebook and Skype."
"With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s 'extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services,'" the Washington Post reports.
Skype can reportedly be monitored for audio when one end of a call is a conventional telephone and also can be monitored for video, chat and file transfers when users connect just by a computer. Google services that can be monitored include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, and search terms.
A spokesperson for Google says the company "cares deeply" about the security of users' data.
"We disclose user data to government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully," the spokesperson said. "From time to time, people allege that we have created a government 'back door' into our systems, but Google does not have a 'back door' for the government to access private user data."
"Protecting the privacy of our users and their data is a top priority for Facebook," the company's chief security officer Joe Sullivan said in a statement. "We do not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers. When Facebook is asked for data or information about specific individuals, we carefully scrutinize any such request for compliance with all applicable laws, and provide information only to the extent required by law."
A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company only provides customer data after receiving a legally binding order or subpoena.
"In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," the spokesperson said. "If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don't participate in it."
Fox News' Catherine Herridge contributed to this report.
Click for more from the Washington Post.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/07/intelligence-officials-reportedly-mining-data-from-us-internet-companies/?intcmp=HPBucket#ixzz2VXsfMPIf

[BobaFett1]

You know the scandals are out of control when even MSNBC, CNN, and other Lib Only Supporters are reporting how bad the scandals are for our country... better late than never... I guess...
Even worse is when their supporters come here to retort and defend on the scandals that they are still catching up on, which everyone else already understands.
You LW Libs need to go back to MSN and CNN to defend there as you are getting beaten like bad, bad Donkeys there too.

[boutons_deux]

All this surveillance started back in dubya's administration, it has unstoppable momentum

Repug Congressman knew all about these surveillance programs, and said nothing until they got the opportunity to bludgeon the WH.

[boutons_deux]

Repugs on surveillance:

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/05/16/no-choice-gop-congressman-cites-national-security-defends-doj-investigation-of-ap-video/

[clambake]

i feel safer already!

[RandomGuy]

(facepalm)

Yet another Bush era bit of stupidity that the current administration has chosen to continue using, as if it makes us better off.

[RandomGuy]

You LW Libs

LW?

[boutons_deux]

(facepalm)

Yet another Bush era bit of stupidity that the current administration has chosen to continue using, as if it makes us better off.

iow, the police/natsec state is unstoppable and out of control of the civilians.

[spursncowboys]

(facepalm)

Yet another Bush era bit of stupidity that the current administration has chosen to continue using, as if it makes us better off.

used it on people calling foreign. Little different.

[RandomGuy]

Although, at some point we have to figure out what and where the limits are, I suppose.

Since the invention of radio, we have listened to other nation's radio broadcasts and that has involved the inevitable stumbling on domestic traffic.

I don't see this as altogether that much different in charactor.

[RandomGuy]

used it on people calling foreign. Little different.

No, read into it a bit more.

THey collect ALL the data, then mine it for the foreign traffic. Subtle, but they still acquire and maintain vast quantities of data on domestic traffic.

[RandomGuy]

While civil liberties groups cried foul over the program, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement late Thursday decrying the leak of the materials. He called the disclosure of the program that allows the NSA to collect communications data from Internet companies "reprehensible" and said the phone-records monitoring leak could cause harm to the nation's intelligence gathering activities.
At the same time, he took the rare step of moving to declassify information about the programs as he sought to defend them against criticism.

We have too many secrets.

I can see keeping some stuff secret, but where do we draw the line?

Does anybody trust a secret court?

I'm not sure I do, unless that has some stiff Congressional oversight.

[Jacob1983]

Gene Hackman was right. http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/product_images/1010/201442.1010.A.jpg

[TSA]

And with a large grain of Canadian salt.....................

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55749#.UbIGL75Mg7k.twitter

DHS insider: It’s about to get very ugly
By Doug Hagmann (Bio and Archives) Friday, June 7, 2013
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606


Washington, D.C.—Something quite unexpected happened just hours ago, in the dark of night, during a two-day layover in Washington, DC. My son and I are scheduled to take part in a seminar outside of Raleigh, North Carolina this weekend, so we combined our travels to include a side-trip to DC for a business meeting we had previously arranged. It was during this layover that something seemingly ripped from the pages of a spy novel took place.



While I was in the middle of a perfectly good and well needed sleep in the very early hours of this morning, I received a message. I cannot disclose how I received this message, at least not now. The discerning reader will understand why, which, by the way, would make a very interesting story alone. The message was extremely clear and precise. I was to meet my high level DHS insider at a very specific location in Washington, DC, at a time when most ‘normal’ people, except third-shift workers are still asleep. And, I was to come alone and make certain that I was not being followed, and I was to leave any cell phone or electronic device behind.

Seriously? I thought, as I was still trying to make sense of it all. Is all this really necessary? Is this really happening? I considered waking my son to accompany me, but opted to follow the instructions to the letter. Besides, I thought, he’s not the most affable middle-of-the-night person. I left a hastily written but detailed note in my hotel room before my departure in the event something happened. I looked at the digital clock on my rental car (my personal car would never survive our long distance trip). It was 3:20 a.m.

The meeting


I felt like I was part of a spy movie set in our nation’s capital. A chill rose up my spine as I waited in the dark of a chilly, misty and foggy pre-dawn morning. I was to meet with my DHS insider source at a time when most of the nation is asleep, at a place I could swear was featured in the movie All the President’s Men. No one and I mean no one knows I’m here, I thought, as I could see one of the most recognizable national landmarks in the distance.

My source appeared out of nowhere, or so it seemed, and handed me a cup of coffee with the astute observation that I looked like I needed it. So tell me, I asked impatiently, why do we have to meet at this time, at this location, and under such specific circumstances? ‘Because this might be our last meeting,’ he stated.

Maybe it was the lack of sleep, the time, the place, or the chill of the misty rain that caused my sense of foreboding. “Explain,” I asked in an almost demanding tone. So he did, without mincing words.

The details
“If anyone thinks that what’s going on right now with all of this surveillance of American citizens is to fight some sort of foreign enemy, they’re delusional. If people think that this ‘scandal’ can’t get any worse, it will, hour by hour, day by day. This has the ability to bring down our national leadership, the administration and other senior elected officials working in collusion with this administration, both Republican and Democrats. People within the NSA, the Department of Justice, and others, they know who they are, need to come forth with the documentation of ‘policy and practice’ in their possession, disclose what they know, fight what’s going on, and just do their job. I have never seen anything like this, ever. The present administration is going after leakers, media sources, anyone and everyone who is even suspected of ‘betrayal.’ That’s what they call it, ‘betrayal.’ Can you believe the size of their cahones? This administration considers anyone telling the truth about Benghazi, the IRS, hell, you name the issue, ‘betrayal,’” he said.

“We know all this already,” I stated. He looked at me, giving me a look like I’ve never seen, and actually pushed his finger into my chest. “You don’t know jack,” he said, “this is bigger than you can imagine, bigger than anyone can imagine. This administration is collecting names of sources, whistle blowers and their families, names of media sources and everybody they talk to and have talked to, and they already have a huge list. If you’re not working for MSNBC or CNN, you’re probably on that list. If you are a website owner with a brisk readership and a conservative bent, you’re on that list. It’s a political dissident list, not an enemy threat list,” he stated.

“What’s that exactly mean, being on that list, that is,” I asked, trying to make sense of it all.

“It means that there will be censorship under the color of authority of anyone in the U.S. who is attempting to expose what’s going on in our name. It’s about controlling any damning information from reaching epidemic proportions. It’s damage control to the extreme. It’s about the upcoming censorship of the internet in the name of national security. The plans are already in place. These latest reports about ‘spying eyes’ have turned this administration and others connected to it into something very, very dangerous. They feel cornered and threatened, and I’m hearing about some plans they have to shut down the flow of information that is implicating them of wrongdoing. Time is short,” he stated.

“How are they going to do this? How is it even possible” I asked.

“First, they intend to use the Justice Department to silence journalists like in the Rosen case, but they won’t stop there. They will use a host of national security policies, laws, letters, whatever to take out the bigger threats,” he stated.

Next, they will use some sort of excuse, an external threat, and I believe it will be a combination of the economic collapse and a Mid-East war that will begin in Syria to throttle the information that is accessible on the Internet. And you know what? People will believe it!”

Based on what I’ve seen, most of which I should not have seen, the DHS is co-ordinating efforts with other federal agencies to begin to threaten American citizens with incarceration for non-compliance. You know the old talk of color coded lists? Well, this is what they will be using. People exposing the truth about Benghazi, killing the U.S. Dollar, even those questioning Obama?s legal status and eligibility to be President are the current targets. And they’ve had five long years to get to this point. The ugly truth is that these policies and practices did not start under Obama, but long before. This is about the killing of our Constitutional Republic. The murder of our country and the stripping of our rights. While many have been preoccupied with one issue, few have seen the bigger issue. This is the ‘end game,’ for all the marbles,” he stated.

More to come
“Please,” pleaded my source, “get this information out while you can. Tell people what I’m saying, that we don’t have much time, that after the latest exposure of spying, Obama, Jarrett, Axelrod, and others, including members of Congress, have put their plans into high gear. This is about the Marxist takeover of America. This is about our country being able to survive another July 4th holiday. This is about a world war about to break out that will kill millions of people, all because of the agenda of this administration.”

“They are very dangerous and will do anything and everything to stop the onslaught of negative information that’s being reported by the main stream media. But only about one quarter of the real information is being reported. The other three quarters will be the game changer. But first, tell people what I’ve said. Let them know that more will follow but get this information out right now while the internet is still relatively free. Do it today.”

My source provided additional information, but I am abiding by his wish to get this much out. I am writing now to let people know that we are in for seriously dangerous times ahead. Deadly times. War, and censorship under the color of authority and under the pretext of of national security. It’s about to get a lot uglier. Stay tuned.


Comments
Copyright © Douglas J. Hagmann and Canada Free Press

Douglas J. Hagmann and his son, Joe Hagmann host The Hagmann & Hagmann Report, a live Internet radio program broadcast each weeknight from 8:00-10:00 p.m. ET.

Douglas Hagmann, founder & director of the Northeast Intelligence Network, and a multi-state licensed private investigative agency. Doug began using his investigative skills and training to fight terrorism and increase public awareness through his website.

Doug can be reached at: [email protected]
Older articles by Doug Hagmann

[boutons_deux]

I'm sure that the idea we have of the corruption of the political/military/security/corporate/financial power establishment is 100% naive, nowhere near the truth.

That's why the establishment is coming down so hard on Manning, why the hacker who exposed the Steubenville rapists will get more prison time than the rapists, etc, etc. Power HATES its truth of its corruption being exposed.

[Winehole23]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-infrastructure-a-tyrant-would-need-courtesy-of-bush-and-obama/276635/

[FuzzyLumpkins]

I can see the need for some of these actions especially in light of the Boston attacks which occurred in the days before this order. What I don't get is the need for secrecy in all of this especially from the dickhead that ran under the promise of transparency.

'Of the people' my ass.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-infrastructure-a-tyrant-would-need-courtesy-of-bush-and-obama/276635/

The warrantless assertion is kinda missing the point in my view. There is supposedly some judicial oversight. The action was apporved by a court of law. Do we even know who these judges are though? How they were appointed or the like?

I know that I can look that up and I will but I don't have any clue and I do pay attention to these types of things. Troubling indeed.

[SA210]

:lol I guess the fraud meant Americans were supposed to be "transparent", not him.

[Clipper Nation]

All this surveillance started back in dubya's administration, it has unstoppable momentum

Nice excuse, but if we had actual statesmen in office, this wouldn't be happening, tbh.... unfortunately, the electorate is mostly comprised of partisan sheeple such as yourself who defend all the actions of their party or blame it on the other party, so shady career politicians is all we get....

[scroteface]

Dig in and brace yourselves boys, looks like we're going to war.

[BobaFett1]

:lol I guess the fraud meant Americans were supposed to be "transparent", not him.

Obama folks still blaming Bush. Typical.

[ElNono]

Not a Barry guy, but I do blame Bush Jr too. This is an extension of his 'presidential powers' doctrine.

I can't really even call this a 'scandal' seeing the vast majority of the GOP are actually trying to sugar-coat it instead of speaking against it (ie Boehner with "maybe we need to explain people better why we need to do this"). In other words, they've been well aware of this shit for a long time (and let's not fool ourselves, this is just confirmation of what everyone already suspected).

But don't get it wrong, I called this shit despicable when dubya was in power and I'm still calling it despicable now that Barry is in control.

His "we need to find a balance" is no different than dubya's "with us or against us". It's bullshit and it's no 'balance'. It's full-on "screw the people, we're going to do this whether they like it or not, and we'll keep it in the hush hush because we already know they won't like it".

[Jacob1983]

Barry is supposed to be a liberal. That means that he is supposed to be against this shit. His record as president does not reflect liberal ideas and philosophies.

[ElNono]

Barry is supposed to be a liberal. That means that he is supposed to be against this shit. His record as president does not reflect liberal ideas and philosophies.

These days, 'liberal' and 'conservative' are phony memes to make people pick a team, and make them think they're part of something. Elections have turned into like sporting event. Did he fumble that speech? Ohhhh, look how he winked at that bitch in the second row...

But it's all the same... some of us called Barry's first term as dubya's 3rd term many times...

[Jacob1983]

Obama is basically a moderate Republican.

[ElNono]

Obama is basically a moderate Republican.

Labels are meaningless... you could just as easily say dubya was a moderate liberal (look at the spending, Medicare Part D, stimulus, etc)... plenty of people calling him a RINO, etc.

[ElNono]

Let me add one other thing... what really gets me is the BS I've been reading "oh well, americans don't care about privacy, 85% of them posts all sorts of shit in facebook anyways", which is an incredibly stupid argument.

If people *chooses* to share whatever intimate bullshit, it still *their* choice.

[Jacob1983]

The thing that cracks me up is how people are blind and/or stupid to how similar Obama is to Bush. The similarities are endless.

[boutons_deux]

Let me add one other thing... what really gets me is the BS I've been reading "oh well, americans don't care about privacy, 85% of them posts all sorts of shit in facebook anyways", which is an incredibly stupid argument.

If people *chooses* to share whatever intimate bullshit, it still *their* choice.

The man on the street stuff I've read is that most people don't like, but feel, or know, they can't do anything to stop it. iow, they're disenfranchised from affecting govt actions, directions, they're powerless, which is exactly the same when people are getting screwed by corporations.

[boutons_deux]

NSA memo pushed to 'rethink' 4th Amendment

The National Security Agency pushed for the government to “rethink” the Fourth Amendment when it argued in a classified memo that it needed new authorities and capabilities for the information age.

The 2001 memo (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa25.pdf), later declassified and posted online by George Washington University’s National Security Archive, makes a case to the incoming George W. Bush administration that the NSA needs new authorities and technology to adapt to the Internet era.

In one key paragraph, NSA wrote that its new phase meant the U.S. must reevaluate its approach toward signals intelligence, or “SIGINT,” and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGINT as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today,” it wrote. “The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/nsa-memo-4th-amendment-92416.html

the police/natsec state is apolitical, runs on its own logic, objectives, and enriches itself with many $10Bs/year without interference from either party, exactly like the MIC.

You right-wingers would be approve or at worst be silent, indifferent about NSA privacy raping if a Repug were President, trashing opponents as weak on terrorism, aiding the enemy, traitors, etc, all of which we heard from y'all here and from Repugs when FISA was in the news under dubya.

[boutons_deux]

N.S.A. ENFORCES ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY ON CONSCIENCE


The National Security Agency moved swiftly and forcefully today to remind its employees of its longstanding zero-tolerance policy on conscience, warning that any violation of that policy would result in immediate termination.

“When you sign on to work at the N.S.A. you swear to uphold the standards of amorality and soullessness that this agency was founded upon,” said N.S.A. director General Keith B. Alexander. “Any evidence of ethics, decency, or a sense of right and wrong will not be tolerated. These things have no place in the intelligence community.”

To enforce the policy, General Alexander said that once a month all N.S.A. employees will be wired to a computer to take full inventory of what is going on in their minds: “We want to be sure they are spending their free time playing Call of Duty, not reading the Federalist Papers.”

The N.S.A. director attempted to reassure the American people that despite “unfortunate recent events,” the agency remains “one of the most heartless and cold-blooded organizations on the face of the earth.” He added, “We refuse to let one good apple spoil the whole bunch.”

He said that going forward, the N.S.A. would try to recruit people who had already demonstrated “a commitment to invading people’s privacy” by working at Google or Facebook.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2013/06/nsa-enforces-zero-tolerance-policy-on-conscience.html?mbid=nl_Borowitz%20(135)

[BobaFett1]

The man on the street stuff I've read is that most people don't like, but feel, or know, they can't do anything to stop it. iow, they're disenfranchised from affecting govt actions, directions, they're powerless, which is exactly the same when people are getting screwed by corporations.

boutons you tow the company line every post you do.

[SA210]

.
:lmao Glenn Greenwald ftw


https://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/936387_204038089747686_1465094636_n.jpg

[Th'Pusher]

Tangential but interesting: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part1/frankel.html

[TDMVPDPOY]

this nsa program...makes rupert murdock phone tapping amateurish

[boutons_deux]

One American Who Isn’t For Sale

So it’s true, as filmmaker Michael Moore once warned us, the Carlyle Group is Big Brother. That’s the $176 billion private equity firm that once employed former President George H.W. Bush, his Secretary of State James A. Baker III and a host of political luminaries that would put any other list of America’s ruling elite to shame. Plenty of Democrats too, including former President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff Mack McLarty and Arthur Levitt, the man Clinton appointed to head the SEC during the creation of the housing bust.

It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government’s immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation’s citizenry. This is systematic snooping through the telephone and Internet records of hundreds of millions of Americans conducted by Snowden and others in Booz Allen’s employ who had the highest access to our most private personal data while working at a for-profit company.

Our data is their commerce, and ever since 9/11, observing us has become mega lucrative. “Booz Allen Hamilton,” The New York Times reported Sunday, “has become one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the United States almost exclusively by serving a single client: the government of the United States.” The word “serving” might be pushing it here, since 98 percent of the firm’s revenue of $5.8 billion last year came from the taxpayers, who are the same folks being spied upon.

Heck, Booz Allen knows all about those taxpayers, since back in 1998, during the Clinton presidency, the firm was hired to “modernize” the IRS. “We made some very dramatic changes in the way the IRS is organized,” Booz Allen’s CEO claimed at the time. How perfect: Make tax collection more efficient and less painful, so the suckers might not notice when you scoop up the loot at the other end.
Of course, to those swinging through the revolving door between the government and its defense contractors, it must be difficult to draw a distinction between their changing roles. James R. Clapper, the chief intelligence official in the Obama administration, who is now investigating this security lapse, was himself a top Booz Allen executive. And it should be of little surprise that John M. McConnell, currently vice chairman of Booz Allen, was previously the chief intelligence official in the George W. Bush administration. It’s crony capitalism at its patriotic best.

“The national security apparatus has been more and more privatized and turned over to contractors,” Danielle Brian, executive director of the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight, told the Times. “This is something the public is largely unaware of, how more than a million private contractors are cleared to handle highly sensitive matters.”

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/one_american_who_isnt_for_sale_20130611/

[Winehole23]

The warrantless assertion is kinda missing the point in my view. There is supposedly some judicial oversight. The action was apporved by a court of law. Do we even know who these judges are though? How they were appointed or the like?

I know that I can look that up and I will but I don't have any clue and I do pay attention to these types of things. Troubling indeed.the government's interpretations of law are secret, and so is most of the oversight. FISA rarely denies applications for wiretaps, btw.

[Winehole23]

there is hope. abuse of power can provoke judicial reaction. anyone recall this old chestnut?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

[Winehole23]

FISA rarely denies applications for wiretaps, btw.btw, doesn't a surreptitious mass electronic dragnet make court supervision moot?

[Spur-Addict]

The administration that implemented this capability was wrong, and the administration that continues to utilize it is wrong. We should all agree that everyone is at fault, and get rid of it. In the end that's what matters.

[boutons_deux]

get rid of it
US: No plans to end broad surveillance program

A senior U.S. intelligence official on Monday said there were no plans to scrap the programs that, despite the backlash, continue to receive widespread if cautious support within Congress

http://news.yahoo.com/us-no-plans-end-broad-surveillance-program-073602699.html

the militarized-police/natsec state is unstoppable.

Apparently, Greenwald has a LOT MORE secrets to reveal.

[Spur-Addict]

US: No plans to end broad surveillance program

A senior U.S. intelligence official on Monday said there were no plans to scrap the programs that, despite the backlash, continue to receive widespread if cautious support within Congress

http://news.yahoo.com/us-no-plans-end-broad-surveillance-program-073602699.html

the militarized-police/natsec state is unstoppable.

Apparently, Greenwald has a LOT MORE secrets to reveal.



A nice big fuck you to everyone.

[Winehole23]

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/stopwatching-us-launch/

[symple19]

http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/11/stopwatching-us-launch/

Good for them. While this Snowden saga is still in the early stages, it would appear that Ellsberg may be onto something


In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20full-width-1%20bento-box:Bento%20box:Position1) – and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers). http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-stasi-america

[boutons_deux]

If the current police state would have been in force at the time of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg would still be in prison.

[Winehole23]

Mere hours after President Barack Obama said Friday morning that he welcomes a debate on the federal government's highly classified surveillance programs, his Department of Justice tried to squash the release of a secret court opinion concerning surveillance law.
A 2011 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruling found the U.S. government had unconstitutionally overreached in its use of a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The National Security Agency uses the same section to justify its PRISM online data collection program. But that court opinion must remain secret, the Justice Department says, to avoid being "misleading to the public."


The DOJ was responding to a lawsuit filed last year by the Electronic Frontier Foundation seeking the release of a 2011 court opinion that found the government had violated the Constitution and circumvented FISA, the law that is supposed to protect Americans from surveillance aimed at foreigners.


The DOJ had been given a Friday deadline to submit the filing (http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/DOJ-Opposition.pdf), well before the revelation of the PRISM program's existence in The Washington Post and The Guardian on Thursday.


The part of the FISA law addressed in the opinion in question, Section 702, is the same one the NSA is now using (http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa) to scoop up email and social media records through its PRISM program.


But the court that released the opinion under dispute is no ordinary legal body. Made up of federal judges on loan from other courts, FISC conducts its highly classified business in secret. Its rulings, too, are classified -- which means Americans don't know how the law governing surveillance is being interpreted.


The Justice Department would like to keep things that way. Its filing asked the court to keep its ruling smacking down unconstitutional surveillance under seal, and to prevent disclosure of even part of its contents.

"Any such release would be incomplete and quite possibly misleading to the public about the role of this Court and the issues discussed in the opinion," the Justice Department wrote.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/justice-department-prism_n_3405101.html?1370644410

[boutons_deux]

Google to Gov: Can We Spill?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2013/06/google_to_gov_can_we_spill.php?utm_source=feedburn er&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tpm-news+%28TPMNews%29

[velik_m]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/11/european_parliament_denounces_prism.html


"We are failing the EU citizens and we should be ashamed of ourselves," Sophie In 't Veld, a Dutch member of the ALDE group. She criticised the Commission and the "doublespeak" of member states. "Obama said to his citizens: 'Don't worry, we are not spying on you as citizens, we are only spying on foreigners.' But this is us." She added: "What kind of special relationship is that?"

[velik_m]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0


WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged.
...

[boutons_deux]

What Snowden Said

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/17880-focus-what-snowden-said

[FuzzyLumpkins]

the government's interpretations of law are secret, and so is most of the oversight. FISA rarely denies applications for wiretaps, btw.

Every time Obama opens his mouth about freedom and security I wish that Ben Franklin could reach through time and punch him in the face.

[TeyshaBlue]

Every time Obama opens his mouth about freedom and security I wish that Ben Franklin could reach through time and punch him in the face.

:lol

[velik_m]

(Reuters) - German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi.
...

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/11/cnews-us-usa-security-germany-idCABRE95A0T820130611

[symple19]

Hope the Germans shit all over him. Maybe some protesters will even turn out. Not like that would happen here in the states...

[velik_m]

http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/sites/default/files/images/googlespying_0.jpg

EDIT: in the same kind of spirit: http://hay.github.io/googleeyes/

[boutons_deux]

the natsec/police state cares even less about Old Europe than it does about Human-Americans. its irreversible, unstoppable.

gotta kill every raghead terrorist, each of which can destroy America from 1000s of miles away.

[velik_m]

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/crime/fl-phone-records-fisa-broward-20130612,0,5434900.story

:lol This is getting more fun by the minute

[Jacob1983]

Jeremy Scahill beating the shit out of this on Jay Leno right now. He called Bush and Cheney "cartoonish villains" but also blasted Obama as well.

[symple19]

Snowden stating the obvious "US government has been hacking Hong Kong and China for years." http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259508/edward-snowden-us-government-has-been-hacking-hong-kong-and-china

What's funny is that he's doing it right after Xi was in Cali to meet with Barry (who was going to make issue with the Chinese leader over their own hacking operations) :lmao :lmao

Here's a related story from FP detailing the operations of the NSA's elite cyber hacking group...Interesting stuff

Inside the NSA's Ultra-Secret China Hacking Group (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/10/inside_the_nsa_s_ultra_secret_china_hacking_group)

[symple19]

I hate our government as well as the two parties that operate it more and more every day

[BobaFett1]

Every time Obama opens his mouth about freedom and security I wish that Ben Franklin could reach through time and punch him in the face.

:lol

[Winehole23]

In researching the stunning pervasiveness of spying by the government (it’s much more wide spread (http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/is-the-government-also-monitoring-the-content-of-our-phone-calls.html)than you’ve heard even now), we ran across the fact that the FBI wants software programmers to install a backdoor in all software. (http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/now-fbi-wants-back-door-to-all-software/)

Digging a little further, we found a 1999 article by leading (http://www.heise.de/mediadaten/english.shtml) European computer publication Heise which noted that the NSA had already built a backdoor into all Windows software (http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/5/5263/1.html):


A careless mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA “help information” trapdoor (http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/2/2898/1.html) into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.


The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren [an expert in computer security (https://2013.macworldiworld.com/connect/speakerDetail.ww?PERSON_ID=B71CE9F5FC22190FA2EF297 8E4C25EC9)]. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.


***
Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5 (http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/nts/downloads/recommended/sp5/allsp5.asp). He found that Microsoft’s developers had failed to remove or “strip” the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called “KEY”. The other was called “NSAKEY”.


Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to “Advances in Cryptology, Crypto’99″ conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the “NSA” key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users’ knowledge.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/06/government-built-spy-access-into-most-popular-consumer-program-before-911/?

[Winehole23]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/2/

[boutons_deux]

Top National Security Experts: Spying Program Doesn’t Make Us Safer, and Spying Leaks Don’t Harm America (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/top-national-security-experts-spying-program-doesnt-make-us-safer-and-spying-leaks-dont-harm-america.html)
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/06/top-national-security-experts-spying-program-doesnt-make-us-safer-and-spying-leaks-dont-harm-america.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capi talism%29

[symple19]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/2/

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting

[rjv]

“those who give up essential liberties to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.” ben franklin

“The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.” james madison

“Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the seeds of every other….No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” james madison

[Jacob1983]

People are sheep. Obama is doing shit that annoys the hell out of liberals yet they blindly obey, support, and love him. It's pathetic.

[Sportcamper]

We live in what's called an open society, which of course means they open our emails, open our phone records, and open our medical records.

[boutons_deux]

" liberals yet they blindly obey, support, and love him

You Lie

[TeyshaBlue]

We live in what's called an open society, which of course means they open our emails, open our phone records, and open our medical records.

*rimshot*

[Jacob1983]

That is true about American society. The government monitors everything and anything you do. When you use your computer, house phone, cell phone, or tv, do you really think no one is watching and/or monitoring what you're doing on those devices?

[ElNono]

Well, I can't complain tbh... we have a military-grade encryption consumer product, and I've just been told we sold 11 copies yesterday alone... :lol

[CavsSuperFan]

.

[Winehole23]

Russ Tice worked as an offensive National Security Agency (NSA) agent from 2002 to 2005, before becoming a source for this Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times article (http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7040) exposing NSA domestic spying. This week he appeared on the Boiling Frogs Show (http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/06/19/podcast-show-112-nsa-whistleblower-goes-on-record-reveals-new-information-names-culprits/) and detailed how he had his hands "in the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts" during his 20 years as a U.S. intelligence analyst.

Tice claimed that he held NSA wiretap orders targeting numerous members of the U.S. government, including one for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.


"In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-some-year-old senator from Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It's a big White House in Washington D.C. That's who the NSA went after. That's the President of the United States now."
Tice added that he also saw orders to spy on Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen. David Petraeus, and a current Supreme Court Justice.
That sounds like a lot of abuse of the rules that govern (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant) NSA domestic spying. And that's exactly what Tice is claiming.


"The abuse is rampant and everyone is pretending that it's never happened, and it couldn't happen. ... I know [there was abuse] because I had my hands on the papers for these sorts of things: They went after high-ranking military officers; they went after members of congress — Senate and the House — especially on the intelligence committees and the armed services committees, lawyers, law firms, judges, State Department officials, part of the White House, multinational companies, financial firms, NGOs, civil rights groups ..."
Tice told Sibel Edmonds (http://truth-out.org/news/item/10754-classified-life-sibel-edmonds-story)' radio show that back in 2005 the NSA didn't have the processing power, infrastructure, and storage to collect everything (http://www.businessinsider.com/expert-says-the-nsa-is-probably-spying-on-you-2013-6), but a source inside the NSA today confirmed to him that increased capabilities (http://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-of-the-nsas-utah-data-center-2013-6) allow the spy agency to copy "every domestic communication in this country, word for word, content, every phone conversation, every email — they are collecting everything in bulk and putting it in databases."


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nsa-spied-on-barack-obama-2004-russ-tice-2013-6#ixzz2X3ciibQT

[Winehole23]

Yet another Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) judge has blasted United States intelligence officials for disregarding the court’s guidelines for domestic surveillance of American e-mail metadata traffic, a program that ran for around a decade before ending in 2011.


“[National Security Agency’s] record of compliance with these rules has been poor,” wrote Judge John D. Bates (http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/dcd/bates) in a 117-page opinion (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDPRTT%202.pdf) (PDF) whose date was redacted. The opinion is just one of a series of documents released and declassified late Monday evening (http://icontherecord.tumblr.com/post/67419963949/dni-clapper-declassifies-additional-intelligence) by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).


“Most notably, NSA generally disregarded the special rules for disseminating United States person information outside of NSA until it was ordered to report such disseminations and certify to the FISC that the required approval had been approved. The government has provided no meaningful explanation why these violations occurred, but it seems likely that widespread ignorance of the rules was a contributing factor.”http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/judge-nsa-exceeded-the-scope-of-authorized-acquisition-continuously/

[Winehole23]

In the August 2013 release (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/judge-nsa-systematically-violated-its-own-privacy-requirements/), Judge Reggie Walton lambasted the government’s mistakes on the business records metadata collection program.


According to his newly-released March 2009 FISC order (PDF) (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/section/pub_March%202%202009%20Order%20from%20FISC.pdf), the court required the NSA to only access the vast metadata archive when there is a “reasonable, articulable suspicion that the telephone identifier is associated with [REDACTED]” as of February 2009. (Presumably that association has something to do with a terrorism or national security threat.)

That same 2009 FISC order says that the government had not lived up to the court’s requirements.

Before the FISC’s initial authorization of the metadata sharing program in May 2006, the NSA developed an "alert list process" that compared telephone numbers to incoming data from its "business record (BR)" collection.


Thus, since the earliest days of the FISC-authorized collection of call-detail records by the NSA, the NSA has, on a daily basis, accessed the BR metadata for purposes of comparing thousands of non-RAS approved telephone identifiers on its alert list against the BR metadata in order to identify any matches. Such access was prohibited by the governing minimization procedures under each of the relevant Court orders, as the government concedes in its submission.

The government’s submission suggests that its non-compliance with the Court’s orders resulted from a belief by some personnel within the NSA that some of the Court’s restrictions on access to the BR metadata applied only to “archived data,” i.e., data residing within certain databases at the NSA. That interpretation of the Court’s Orders strains credulity. It is difficult to imagine why the Court would intend the applicability of the RAS requirements—a critical component of the procedures proposed by the government and adopted by the Court—to turn on whether or not the data being access has been “archived” by the NSA in a particular database at the time of the access. Indeed, to the extent that the NSA makes the decision about where to store incoming BR metadata and when the archiving occurs, such an illogical interpretation of this Court’s Orders renders compliance with the RAS requirement merely optional.




Walton also noted that the government was collecting mostly data on non-suspect US persons:



[N]early all of the call detail records collected pertain to communications of non-US persons who are not the subject of an FBI investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information, are communications of US persons who are not the subject of an FBI investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, and are data that otherwise could not be legally captured in bulk by the government. Ordinarily, this alone would provide sufficient grounds for an FISC judge to deny the application.




The judge said that the court has approved the government’s metadata collection program due to sworn testimony that these programs were necessary and that there were “specific oversight requirements.”

“To approve such a program, the Court must have every confidence that the government is doing its utmost to ensure that those responsible for implementation fully comply with the Court’s orders,” he wrote. “The Court no longer has such confidence.”

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/nsa-no-one-had-a-full-understanding-of-2009-call-checking-program/

[Winehole23]

Judge Kollar-Kotelly outlined very specific guidelines for the intelligence community to use this information, in particular what may be one of the earliest uses of the “reasonable articulable suspicion” (RAS) (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/nsa-no-one-had-a-full-understanding-of-2009-call-checking-program/) standard. As she concluded:


Such information shall be accessed only through queries using the contact chaining [REDACTED] methods described at page 43 above. Such queries shall be performed only on the basis of a particular known [REDACTED] after the NSA has concluded, based on the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent persons act, that there are facts giving rise to a reasonable articulable suspicion that [REDACTED] is associated with [REDACTED] provided, however, that [REDACTED] believed to be used by a US person shall not be regarded as associated with [REDACTED] solely on the basis of activities that are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.



That RAS definition is more clearly outlined in a another document that was also declassified on Monday evening.


A document (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANED019.%20NSA%20OGC%20Training%20Materia...d%2 0to%20OI%20on%202-20-09.pdf) (PDF) dated August 29, 2008, a “Memorandum for the Deputy Program Manager for Counterterrorism Special Projects, Analysis and Production,” specifically illustrates this standard.



The “reasonable articulable suspicion” standard embodied in the Court’s Orders requires that before an analyst may use a telephone number or electronic identifier as a “seed” address to query the database of records, he/she must be able to articulate some fact or set of facts that causes him/her to suspect that the number is associated with [REDACTED]. This formulation means that analysts are not free to use a telephone number or electronic identifier based merely on a hunch or guess but must instead base their decisions on specific facts that would cause a reasonable person to form such a suspicion.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/judge-nsa-exceeded-the-scope-of-authorized-acquisition-continuously/

[Winehole23]

The Supreme Court on Monday passed up an opportunity to weigh in on the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's collection of a massive database containing information on virtually every telephone call made to, from or within the United States.


The justices' action makes it unlikely the high court will provide a definitive answer on the question during its current term.


Acting without comment or indication of dissent on Monday, the justices turned down a petition (http://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/111813zor_7mi8.pdf) from the Electronic Privacy Information Center seeking to have the Supreme Court perform a direct review of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order authorizing the call-tracking program under the PATRIOT Act—a controversial anti-terrorism statute passed a few weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/11/justices-turn-down-surveillance-case-177733.html#.UooswQrbY4w.twitter

[Winehole23]

The surveillance issue could reach the high court through a variety of other vehicles. The Justice Department pointed to three civil lawsuits filed in U.S. District Courts by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and conservative legal activist Larry Klayman.


In addition to the civil lawsuits, the government has disclosed the use of the NSA call-tracking database in at least two criminal cases. The defendants in those cases could use their criminal appeals to pursue constitutional challenges to the surveillance program, with those challenges also having the potential to reach the Supreme Court.

same

[Winehole23]

One thing the July 24, 2004 Colleen Kollar-Kotelly opinion (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANEDPRTT%201.pdf) and the May 23, 2006 phone dragnet application (http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/1118/CLEANED016.%20REDACTED%20BR%2006-05%20Exhibits%20C%20%28Memo%20of%20Law%29%20and%20 D-Sealed.pdf) reveal is that the government and the court barely considered the First Amendment Freedom of Association implications of the dragnets.
The Kollar-Kotelly opinion reveals the judge sent a letter asking the government about “First Amendment issues.” (3) Way back on 57, she begins to consider First Amendment issues, but situates the in the querying of data, not the creation of a dragnet showing all relationships in the US.
In this case, the initial acquisition of information is not directed at facilities used by particular individuals of investigative interest, but meta data concerning the communications of such individuals’ [redacted]. Here, the legislative purpose is best effectuated at the querying state, since it will be at a point that an analyst queries the archived data that information concerning particular individuals will first be compiled and reviewed. Accordingly, the Court orders that NSA apply the following modification of its proposed criterion for querying the archived data: [redacted] will qualify as a seed [redacted] only if NSA concludes, based on the factual and practical considerations of everyday life on which reasonable and prudent persons act, there are facts giving rise to a reasonable articulable suspicion that a particularly known [redacted] is associated with [redacted] provided, however, that an [redacted] believed to be used by a U.S. person shall not be regarded as associated with [redacted] solely on the basis of activities that are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. For example, an e-mail account used by a U.S. person could not be a seed account if the only information thought to support the belief that the account is associated with [redacted] is that, in sermons or in postings on a web site, the U.S. person espoused jihadist rhetoric that fell short of “advocacy … directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and … likely to incite or produce such action.” Brandnberg v. Ohio

By focusing on queries rather than collection, Kollar-Kotelly completely sidesteps the grave implications for forming databases of all the relationships in the US.

Then, 10 pages later, Kollar-Kotelly examines the First Amendment issues directly. She cites Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press v. AT&T to lay out that in criminal investigations the government can get reporters’ toll records. Predictably, she says that since this application is “in furtherance of the compelling national interest of identifying and tracking [redacted terrorist reference], it makes it an easier case. Then, finally, she cites Paton v. La Prade to distinguish this from an much less intrusive practice, mail covers.


The court in Paton v. La Prade held that a mail cover on a dissident political organization violated the First Amendment because it was authorized under a regulation that was overbroad in its use of the undefined term “national security.” In contrast, this pen register/trap and trace surveillance does not target a political group and is authorized pursuant to statute on the grounds of relevance to an investigation to protect against “international terrorism,” a term defined at 50 U.S.C. § 1801(c). This definition has been upheld against a claim of First Amendment overbreadth. [citations omitted]


Of course, a mail cover is not automated and only affects the targeted party. This practice, by contrast, affects the targeted party (the selector) and anyone three hops out from him. Thus, even if those people are, in fact, a dissident organization (perhaps a conservative mosque), they in effect become criminalized by the association to someone only suspected — using the Terry Stop standard (the same used with stop-and-frisk) — of ties (but not even necessarily organizational ties) to terrorism.

Here’s how it looks in translation, in the 2006 application:


It bears emphasis that, given the types of analysis the NSA will perform, no information about a telephone number will ever be accessed or presented in an intelligible form to any person unless either (i) that telephone number has been in direct contact with a reasonably suspected terrorist-associated number or is linked to such a number through one or two intermediaries. (21)


So: queries require only a Terry Stop standard, and from that, mapping out everyone who is three degrees of association — whose very association with the person should be protected by the First Amendment — is fair game too.
Imagine if Ray Kelly had the authority to conduct an intrusive investigation into every single New Yorker who was three degrees of separation away from someone who had ever been stop-and-frisked. That’s what we’re talking about, only it happens in automated, secret fashion.

http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/11/19/from-six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon-three-degrees-of-terry-stop/

[Winehole23]

On Monday, three Somali immigrants — an imam, a cabdriver and an employee of a money-transmitting business — were sentenced to federal prison in San Diego for sending money to a terrorist group in their homeland. It is the only prosecution the government has said resulted exclusively from its collection of American telephone records beginning in late 2001.http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-nsa-surveillance-20131120,0,5456940,print.story

[Winehole23]

well, how about them apples?

[Winehole23]

An analysis of 225 terrorism cases (http://natsec.newamerica.net/nsa/analysis) inside the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has concluded that the bulk collection of phone records by the National Security Agency “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”


In the majority of cases, traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case, according to the study by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit group.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-phone-record-collection-does-little-to-prevent-terrorist-attacks-group-says/2014/01/12/8aa860aa-77dd-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html

[Winehole23]

the electronic dragnet diminishes our privacy, but doesn't make us safer:


The head of the British electronic spy agency GCHQ (http://www.gchq.gov.uk/Pages/homepage.aspx), Robert Hannigan, created a minor flap last week in an article (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/c89b6c58-6342-11e4-8a63-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3IIyqY8gK) he wrote for the Financial Times. In effect, Hannigan argued that more robust encryption procedures by private Internet companies were unwittingly aiding terrorists such as the Islamic State (IS) or al Qaeda, by making it harder for organizations like the NSA and GCHQ to monitor online traffic. The implication was clear: The more that our personal privacy is respected and protected, the greater the danger we will face from evildoers.

It's a serious issue, and democracies that want to respect individual privacy while simultaneously keeping citizens safe are going to have to do a much better job of reassuring us that vast and (mostly) secret surveillance capabilities overseen by unelected officials such as Hannigan won't be abused. I tend to favor the privacy side of the argument, both because personal freedoms are hard to get back once lost, but also because there's not much evidence (http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/do_nsas_bulk_surveillance_programs_stop_terrorists ) that these surveillance activities are making us significantly safer. They seem to be able to help us track some terrorist leaders, but there's a lively debate among scholars over whether tracking and killing these guys is an effective strategy (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09636410903369068#preview).

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/11/10/counterterrorism_spying_nsa_islamic_state_terroris t_cve

[Winehole23]

For starters, they'd have to rely more heavily on tried-and-true counterterrorism measures: infiltrating extremist organizations and flipping existing members, etc., to find out what they were planning, head attacks off before they occurred, and eventually roll up organization themselves. States waged plenty of counterterrorism campaigns before the Internet was invented, and while it can be difficult to infiltrate such movements and find their vulnerable points, it's not exactly an unknown art. If we couldn't spy on them from the safety of Fort Meade (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_George_G._Meade), we'd probably be doing a lot more of this.


Second, if we didn't have all these expensive high-tech capabilities, we might spend a lot more time thinking about how to discredit and delegitimize the terrorists' message, instead of repeatedly doing things that help them make their case and recruit new followers. Every time the United States goes and pummels another Muslim country -- or sends a drone to conduct a "signature strike" -- it reinforces the jihadis' claim that the West has an insatiable desire to dominate the Arab and Islamic world and no respect for Muslim life. It doesn't matter if U.S. leaders have the best of intentions, if they genuinely want to help these societies, or if they are responding to a legitimate threat; the crude message that drones, cruise missiles, and targeted killings send is rather different.


If we didn't have all these cool high-tech hammers, in short, we'd have to stop treating places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria as if they were nails that just needed another pounding, and we might work harder at marginalizing our enemies within their own societies. To do that, we would have to be building more effective partnerships with authoritative sources of legitimacy within these societies, including religious leaders. Our failure to do more to discredit these movements is perhaps the single biggest shortcoming of the entire war on terror, and until that failure is recognized and corrected, the war will never end.

same

[boutons_deux]

"do more to discredit these movements"

there's no $100Ms for the MIC in that activity. only hard core shooting wars are what enrich the MIC

[boutons_deux]

...

[Winehole23]

mass surveillance means US companies will lose out on billions in cloud computing, due to lost trust:


A new report by a non-aligned United States think tank warns the American cloud computing industry could take a major earnings hit, thanks to former NSA employee Edward Snowden's revelations of indiscriminate government mass surveillance.


In the report [PDF (http://www2.itif.org/2013-cloud-computing-costs.pdf)], the Information Technology and Innovation foundation (ITIF) said if non-American companies decided the risks of storing data with US firms outweighed the benfits, the collection of electronic data from third-paties "will likely have immediate and lasting impact on the competitiveness on the US cloud computing industry".


A significant amount of revenue is at stake for US companies, the ITIF estimated.


At the low end, US cloud computing providers could lose US$21.5 billion (A$24 billion) in revenue over the next thre years; that estimate is based on a modest ten per cent loss of the overseas market to European and Asian competitors.
Should the worst-case scenario come true with a fifth loss of market foreign market share while retaining its current domestic customer base, US cloud providers stand to shed US$35 billion (A$39.2 billion) by 2016 the ITIF said.
Read more: http://www.itnews.com.au/news/us-cloud-computing-industry-faces-us35-billion-prism-fallout-352419#ixzz3kn2HOMUU

[Winehole23]

Guardian confirms: US tech giants compromised by NSA


Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/microsoft) – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.


It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/youtube) in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

[Winehole23]

The document also shows the FBI acts as an intermediary between other agencies and the tech companies, and stresses its reliance on the participation of US internet firms, claiming "access is 100% dependent on ISP provisioning".

[Winehole23]

"It's shocking enough just that the NSA is asking companies to do this," he said. "The NSA is part of the military. The military has been granted unprecedented access to civilian communications.


"This is unprecedented militarisation of domestic communications infrastructure. That's profoundly troubling to anyone who is concerned about that separation."

[hater]

:lol obama

What a fucking joke. He pretty much half assing it for the last few years

[hater]

There is absolutely no difference between way china handles their IT vs US. No difference with a communist country :lol

[Winehole23]

:lol obama

What a fucking joke. He pretty much half assing it for the last few yearsdisagree. with respect to domestic surveillance he stepped on the gas.

[hater]

disagree. with respect to domestic surveillance he stepped on the gas.

Imo. The people around him did. He's just a prop nowadays.

[Winehole23]

Tell that to GOP majorities that want to defund Planned parenthood. It ain't so.

Power of the Prez is still considerable. Your personal dislike of the man doesn't make it less so.

[TeyshaBlue]

Hope. Change.

[Winehole23]

Continuity. Handing off power intact or enhanced to the next guy. Obama is a Tory.

[Winehole23]

one way the NSA is breaking encryption:


There have been rumors for years that the NSA can decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted Internet traffic. In 2012, James Bamford published an article (http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/) quoting anonymous former NSA officials stating that the agency had achieved a “computing breakthrough” that gave them “the ability to crack current public encryption.” The Snowden documents also hint at some extraordinary capabilities: they show that NSA has built extensive infrastructure to intercept and decrypt VPN traffic and suggest that the agency can decrypt at least some HTTPS and SSH connections on demand.


However, the documents do not explain how these breakthroughs work, and speculation about possible backdoors or broken algorithms has been rampant in the technical community. Yesterday at ACM CCS, one of the leading security research venues, we and twelve coauthors presented a paper that we think solves this technical mystery (https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy.pdf).


The key is, somewhat ironically, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, an algorithm that we and many others have advocated as a defense against mass surveillance. Diffie-Hellman is a cornerstone of modern cryptography used for VPNs, HTTPS websites, email, and many other protocols. Our paper shows that, through a confluence of number theory and bad implementation choices, many real-world users of Diffie-Hellman are likely vulnerable to state-level attackers.


For the nerds in the audience, here’s what’s wrong: If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But there was a very important detail that got lost in translation between the mathematicians and the practitioners: an adversary can perform a single enormous computation to “crack” a particular prime, then easily break any individual connection that uses that prime.


How enormous a computation, you ask? Possibly a technical feat on a scale (relative to the state of computing at the time) not seen since the Enigma cryptanalysis during World War II. Even estimating the difficulty is tricky, due to the complexity of the algorithm involved, but our paper gives some conservative estimates. For the most common strength of Diffie-Hellman (1024 bits), it would cost a few hundred million dollars to build a machine, based on special purpose hardware, that would be able to crack one Diffie-Hellman prime every year.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/

[Winehole23]

NSA could afford such an investment. The 2013 “black budget (https://www.eff.org/files/2013/11/25/2013-08-30_cryptome_congressional_budget_2013.pdf)” request, leaked as part of the Snowden cache, states that NSA has prioritized “investing in groundbreaking cryptanalytic capabilities to defeat adversarial cryptography and exploit internet traffic.” It shows that the agency’s budget is on the order of $10 billion a year, with over $1 billion dedicated to computer network exploitation, and several subprograms in the hundreds of millions a year.

[Winehole23]

NSA bulk surveillance of metadata to end at midnight tonight, White house says:


The U.S. National Security Agency will end its daily vacuuming of millions of Americans' phone records by Sunday and replace the practice with more tightly targeted surveillance methods, the Obama administration said on Friday.


As required by law, the NSA will end its wide-ranging surveillance program by 11:59 p.m. EST Saturday (4:59 a.m. GMT Sunday) and expects to have the new, scaled-back system in place by then, the White House said.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/27/us-usa-nsa-termination-idUSKBN0TG27120151127#SoVdF4d2OhlPuX0E.97

[Winehole23]

A presidential review committee concluded the surveillance regime did not lead to a single clear counter terrorism breakthrough that could be directly attributed to the program.


Metadata collected by the NSA over the past five years will be preserved for "data integrity purposes" through February 29, the White House said.


After that the NSA will purge all of its historic records once pending litigation is resolved.

Read more at Reutershttp://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/27/us-usa-nsa-termination-idUSKBN0TG27120151127#DaW9qMMUlh4JpzlF.99

[Winehole23]

one work-around:




Instead analysts must now get a court order to ask telecommunications companies like Verizon Communications to enable monitoring of call records of specific people or groups for up to six months.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/11/27/us-usa-nsa-termination-idUSKBN0TG27120151127#DaW9qMMUlh4JpzlF.99

[Winehole23]

Judge Napolitano on erosion of the 4th Amendment:


The government was secretly gathering data on all of us and using warrants that were not based on probable cause and that did not specifically describe the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized. When members of Congress realized that they, too, were being spied upon, the outrage grew. That outrage and anger metastasized into a new law enacted earlier this year, called the USA Freedom Act, which took effect this week. That law, its supporters have argued, will tame the National Security Agency into constitutional compliance and keep its 60,000 agents and contractors out of our private affairs. In fact, it is now worse.

The new law permitted the expiration of Section 215 of the Patriot Act – the section used by the NSA to justify its collection of undifferentiated bulk data about everyone. But it also requires the telecoms and Internet service providers to retain their records for five years, and it gives the NSA instant access to those records whenever it needs them.


How can the NSA get instant access to your emails and phone calls?


Quite easily. Both the Patriot Act and the USA Freedom Act unconstitutionally do away with the probable cause requirement for warrants. Those two laws permit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue warrants based on the standard of "governmental needs" rather than probable cause. This is a profoundly unconstitutional standard, and one that has resulted in spying on all people all the time.http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2015/12/02/the-spies-who-ruin-us/

[boutons_deux]

Judge Napolitano on erosion of the 4th Amendment:

http://original.antiwar.com/andrew-p-napolitano/2015/12/02/the-spies-who-ruin-us/

iow, America is fucked by the military police/surveillance/spook state and is unfuckable. No way the "no warrant" will ever get rolled back officially, but if it ever does, then police state will just keep on doing the snooping.

[Winehole23]

Obama to expand intra-governmental sharing of raw data hoovered up by the NSA:


The Obama administration is on the verge of permitting the National Security Agency to share more of the private communications it intercepts with other American intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections to them, according to officials familiar with the deliberations.

The change would relax longstanding restrictions on access to the contents of the phone calls and email the security agency vacuums up around the world, including bulk collection of satellite transmissions, communications between foreigners as they cross network switches in the United States, and messages acquired overseas or provided by allies.


The idea is to let more experts across American intelligence gain direct access to unprocessed information, increasing the chances that they will recognize any possible nuggets of value. That also means more officials will be looking at private messages — not only foreigners’ phone calls and emails that have not yet had irrelevant personal information screened out, but also communications to, from, or about Americans that the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence programs swept in incidentally.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama-administration-set-to-expand-sharing-of-data-that-nsa-intercepts.html

[Winehole23]

The bulk e-mail metadata program group (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2511338-savage-nyt-foia-nsa-release-11-10-2015.html) confirmed that even though the N.S.A. said it had turned off that program in late 2011, it did so only after it had figured out how to achieve similar results (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/us/politics/records-show-email-analysis-continued-after-nsa-program-ended.html) using data obtained in other ways. And the warrantless surveillance program group (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2712306-Savage-NYT-FOIA-IG-Reports-702-2.html) shed light on the role played by telecommunications providers in actively performing the sifting and filtering of data packets required for upstream Internet surveillance (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/17/us/report-says-networks-give-nsa-less-data-than-long-suspected.html) on behalf of the N.S.A. rather than passively turning over all the packets for the N.S.A. to hunt through itself.http://www.charliesavage.com/?p=1325

[Winehole23]

One document among the bulk phone metadata program group (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2271057-savage-nyt-foia-nsa-ig-fisa-br-reports.html) — turned over to us in unredacted form by mistake — disclosed the identities of the participants in the bulk phone records program (AT&T, Sprint and Verizon)

[Winehole23]

We filed the second lawsuit (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3104928-Savage-NYT-FOIA-complaint-Sept-8-2016.html) yesterday against the Justice Department. Assigned to Judge Lewis Kaplan, it combines requests for several post-9/11 legal policy matters the department has handled:




[*=left]The first document it seeks is a May 4, 2005, memo signed by Pat Rowan, a national security lawyer in the Bush Justice Department, about the department’s discovery obligations when using evidence obtained or derived from the Stellarwind warrantless surveillance and bulk data collection program in court against a criminal defendant.
[*=left]

[*=left]Discussion: A big issue regarding the N.S.A.’s warrantless surveillance program, both before and after Congress legalized it, is whether and when criminal defendants who face evidence obtained or derived from it should get notice from prosecutors about where that evidence came from. This is important because they have legal standing to challenge the lawfulness of the surveillance that gathered the evidence. To date, the government has successfully prevented a definitive examination of the merits of Stellarwind; in 2006, a district court judge ruled that it was illegal, but an appeals court vacated that ruling on the technical grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing. No criminal defendant was ever notified that some evidence came from the program, and the Obama administration, in a previous FOIA lawsuit we brought for a Justice Department inspector general report about Stellarwind, redacted much of a lengthy portion about possible Brady violations – that is, instances in which prosecutors may have unlawfully withheld evidence from the defense that could have helped it – regarding the program. But that report included an unredacted sentence referring to the existence of this memo.
[*=left]


[*=left]The second document is the “Standard Minimization Procedures for FBI Electronic Surveillance and Physical Search Conducted Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” that were approved by the Attorney General on October 22, 2008 and later submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
[*=left]

[*=left]Discussion: The FBI’s minimization procedures for FISA information are its rules for sharing and disseminating information gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — and, since 2007, the warrantless surveillance program governed by the Protect America and the FISA Amendments Act. The government has issued later versions of these procedures, but not this set, which should help show how the practice of “backdoor searching,” or government agents looking at private communications previously collected without a warrant for Americans who have become the subject of their suspicions, began. See this post (http://www.charliesavage.com/?p=1013) for more discussion of what we already know about how this got going.

[Winehole23]

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/two_good_essays.html

[Winehole23]

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) — the statute the government uses to engage in warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications — is scheduled to expire in December 2017. In anticipation of the coming legislative debate over reauthorization, Congress has already begun to hold hearings (https://www.c-span.org/video/?409335-1/senate-judiciary-committee-holds-hearing-fisa-reauthorization). While Congress must address many problems with the government’s use of this law to surveil and investigate Americans, the government’s use of “Upstream” surveillance to search Internet traffic deserves special attention. Indeed, Congress has never engaged in a meaningful public debate about Upstream surveillance — but it should.


First disclosed as part of the Snowden revelations, Upstream surveillance involves the NSA’s bulk interception and searching of Americans’ international Internet communications — including emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic — as their communications travel the spine of the Internet between sender and receiver. If you send emails to friends abroad, message family members overseas, or browse websites hosted outside of the United States, the NSA has almost certainly searched through the contents of your communications — and it has done so without a warrant.


The executive branch contends that Upstream surveillance was authorized by the FAA; however, as others have noted (https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/pclob_fisa_sect_702_hearing_-_jameel_jaffer_testimony_-_3-19-14.pdf#page=21), neither the text of the statute nor the legislative history support that claim. Moreover, as former Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris recently explained, Upstream raises “challenging (http://www.lawandsecurity.org/Portals/0/Documents/Kris_TrendsPredictions.pdf#page=11)” legal questions about the suspicionless searching of Americans’ Internet communications — questions that Congress must address before reauthorizing the FAA.

[Winehole23]

Despite what many lawmakers appear to believe, counterterrorism and national security are not the only permitted justifications for surveillance under section 702. Surveillance can occur for any foreign intelligence purpose (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/pdf/uscode50/lii_usc_TI_50_ST_36_CH_VI_SE_1881a.pdf#page=3), including the collection of information about a foreign power or territory that is related to “the conduct of the foreign affairs of the United States (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/pdf/uscode50/lii_usc_TI_50_ST_36_CH_I_SE_1801.pdf#page=2).” Such broadly worded language permits surveillance far beyond that related to counterterrorism. For example, when protesters gather as part of the Arab Spring or to protest a government policy, the reasons for their complaints “relate” to US foreign affairs. Information about other countries’ economic policies, which could affect global markets, “relates” to US foreign affairs (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras), as well. In 2015 alone, there were an estimated 94,368 targets under section 702, and the public does not know what fraction of those targets, many of whom communicate with Americans, were actually targeted for counterterrorism-related (https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/ODNI%20CY15%20Statistical%20Transparency%20Report. pdf) purposes.


Moreover, foreign intelligence need not even be the main purpose of section 702 collection. Collection under section 702 is valid so long as a “significant purpose” of the collection is to obtain foreign intelligence information. The primary purpose of the collection can be for another purpose entirely, such as investigating alleged tax evasion. The “significant purpose” loophole could also enable the FBI to use section 702 to direct warrantless surveillance for criminal investigations (although only the NSA can make actual targeting decisions, the FBI is permitted to “nominate” (https://www.pclob.gov/library/702-Report.pdf) surveillance targets of its own).

[Winehole23]

Delete your Yahoo account:

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/04/delete-your-yahoo-account/

[Winehole23]

Asked whether Twitter had ever received such a directive aimed at its messaging system, Nu Wexler, the company’s public policy communications chief, replied that “Federal law prohibits us from answering your question, and we’re currently suing the Justice Department for the ability to disclose more information about government requests.” Twitter filed the lawsuit (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-twitter-nsa-idUSKCN0HW1V520141007) in 2014.

[ducks]

Jake tapper CNN
The night belonged to pence

[Winehole23]

So much for CNN being in the tank for Hilary

[Winehole23]

mass surveillance is big business. our government doesn't do it all on its own. ISPs and various telecom companies have helped.

this article focuses on a NZ company, Endace:


Documents from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, previously disclosed (https://theintercept.com/2015/09/25/gchq-radio-porn-spies-track-web-users-online-identities/) by The Intercept, have shown how GCHQ dramatically expanded its online surveillance between 2009 and 2012. The newly obtained Endace documents add to those revelations, shining light for the first time on the vital role played by the private sector in enabling the spying.https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/

[Winehole23]

thanks to the US Senate, FBI warrants to hack your computer are no longer limited by jurisdiction:



The amendments to Rule 41 are now law (http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/308088-last-ditch-effort-to-prevent-change-to-rule-41-fails), thanks to Sen. John Cornyn, who prevented bills (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161122/10381536112/bill-introduced-to-push-back-approval-dojs-proposed-rule-41-changes.shtml) opposing (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160519/10200734487/senators-wyden-paul-introduce-smh-bill-to-stop-massive-expansion-govt-computer-hacking.shtml) the immediate adoption of the changes from being debated.


Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Chris Coons (D-Del) took to the floor and unsuccessfully asked for unanimous consent to either pass or formally vote on three bills to delay or prevent updates to the process used by law enforcement to get a warrant to hack suspects' computers.

“We simply can’t give unlimited power for unlimited hacking,” Daines argued.

But the bid to prevent the imminent changes to Rule 41 ended quickly. After Wyden spoke, Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) immediately objected to all three bills, without waiting to hear from Coons and Daines.



But Cornyn alone can't be blamed for this outcome. A vast majority of senators did nothing to prevent the proposed changes from becoming law -- even though the decision has been in their hands since the Supreme Court's approval (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160429/04233634312/supreme-court-approves-rule-41-changes-putting-fbi-closer-to-searching-any-computer-anywhere-with-single-warrant.shtml) in April.

The FBI and others will be able to take advantage of the removal of jurisdictional limits to search computers anywhere in the world using a single warrant issued by a magistrate judge. It will also be granted the same power for use in the disruption of botnets -- in essence, searches/seizures of devices owned by US citizens suspected of no wrongdoing.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161201/12214736168/thanks-to-months-doing-nothing-senate-allows-dojs-rule-41-changes-to-become-law.shtml

[Winehole23]

In an effort to address concerns, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell wrote a blog post this week arguing that the benefits given to authorities from the rule changes outweighed any potential for "unintended harm."

[Winehole23]

US courts undercounting wiretaps?


Albert Gidari of Just Security/Center for Internet and Society has been looking into the US Courts' wiretap reports (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140703/10502127773/us-courts-wiretap-report-shows-wiretaps-are-drugs-law-enforcement-warrants-rejected-only-03-time.shtml) for 2014 and 2015. The problem with these reports is that nothing adds up. As he wrote for Just Security last year (https://www.justsecurity.org/24427/wiretap-numbers-add/), there's a huge discrepancy between the numbers reported by the US Courts Administrative Office and those reported by the service providers complying with the orders.


These numbers should be much closer than they are. If a wiretap is issued by a court, then the recipient service provider should report being served with one wiretap order. But that's not what has happened. The US Courts AO reported 3,554 federal and state wiretap orders in 2014. Service providers, however, reported receiving 10,712 wiretap orders for that same year.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161130/17240036164/gap-between-wiretaps-reported-us-courts-recipient-service-providers-continues-to-grow.shtml

[Winehole23]

Once again, it seems a reporting process ordered by Congress but left to another agency to enforce (with zero consequences for noncompliance) is resulting in discrepancies between the "official" numbers and those reported by the private sector. It looks and feels just like the FBI's collection of officer-involved shootings: incomplete, inaccurate, and wholly dependent (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151210/09545933050/fbi-to-replace-terrible-voluntary-police-shooting-reporting-system-with-new-voluntary-police-shooting-reporting-system.shtml) on government entities self-reporting data they'd rather not make public.

[Winehole23]

one last kick in the pants from Obama:


However, under the rules, if analysts stumble across evidence that an American has committed any crime, they will send it to the Justice Department.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/us/politics/nsa-gets-more-latitude-to-share-intercepted-communications.html

[Winehole23]

more secret domestic spying


The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose.

“However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries,” the board said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/senators-cia-has-secret-program-that-collects-american-data/2022/02/10/017b6932-8ad8-11ec-838f-0cfdf69cce3c_story.html

[Winehole23]

According to Wyden and Heinrich’s letter, the CIA’s bulk collection program operates outside of laws passed and reformed by Congress, but under the authority of Executive Order 12333, the document that broadly governs intelligence community activity and was first signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.



“It is critical that Congress not legislate without awareness of a ... CIA program, and that the American public not be misled into believe that the reforms in any reauthorization legislation fully cover the IC’s collection of their records,” the senators wrote in their letter. There was a redaction in the letter before “CIA program.”

[Winehole23]

Domestic electronic surveillance has been normalized by every one of GWB's successors, but this is old fashioned cloak and dagger shit.


For years, the Department of Homeland Security has run a virtually unknown program gathering domestic intelligence, one of many revelations in a wide-ranging tranche of internal documents reviewed by POLITICO. Those documents also reveal that a significant number of employees in DHS’s intelligence office have raised concerns that the work they are doing could be illegal. Under the domestic-intelligence program, officials are allowed to seek interviews with just about anyone in the United States. …. The inner workings of the program — called the ‘Overt Human Intelligence Collection Program’ — are described in the large tranche of internal documents POLITICO reviewed from the Office of Intelligence and Analysis. Those documents and additional interviews revealed widespread internal concerns about legally questionable tactics and political pressure. The documents also show that people working there fear punishment if they speak out about mismanagement and abuses. One unnamed employee — quoted in an April 2021 document — said leadership of I&A’s Office of Regional Intelligence “is ‘shady’ and ‘runs like a corrupt governmenthttps://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/06/dhs-domestic-intelligence-program-00085544

[boutons_deux]

Domestic electronic surveillance has been normalized by every one of GWB's successors, but this is old fashioned cloak and dagger shit.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/06/dhs-domestic-intelligence-program-00085544

Orwell was amazingly prescient about a 70+ years in the future

[boutons_deux]

Domestic electronic surveillance has been normalized by every one of GWB's successors, but this is old fashioned cloak and dagger shit.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/06/dhs-domestic-intelligence-program-00085544

... but somehow DHS/FBI/etc failed to stop the J6 rape of the Capitol. They certainly knew what was going to happen, but, I guess, were mostly sympathetic to the project.

We know cops watch blacks and browns very closely but let white insurrectionists slide by, even join them

[Winehole23]

Different year, same shit. The Patriot Act should be repealed, but that's not gonna happen.

The US Congress is improving the infrastructure of fascism, and Brandon will sign it, if passed.

1734249943932563505

1734249949565513812

[Winehole23]

"Defense bill passes Senate"

1735128948424560689

[Winehole23]

Section 702 reauthorized, extending the post 9/11 regime of domestic mass surveillance.

1781545883529625937

[Winehole23]

Private businesses can be forced to narc on their customers.


Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already allows the government to compel communications companies like Google and Verizon to turn over information. This terrible bill would expand (https://amendments-rules.house.gov/amendments/ECSP_xml240408185822057.pdf) that to any service provider with access to equipment like routers, and let the government order them to help it monitor communications.


That means virtually any vendor who enters your home, or any business you visit, could be forced to become an involuntary government agent. That should chill you to the bone.

Congress masked the bill’s destructive impact by exempting hotels, coffee shops and a few other places. That’s cause for alarm, not relief. It admits that, without an exemption, they too could be commandeered by the FBI. Those not specifically exempted still can be.

But you may never know if they are. Under the bill, they’re gagged from telling anyone.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/letters-to-the-editor/2024/04/16/dick-durbin-surveillance-power-fisa-college-affordabilty-trump-letters

[Thread]

Section 702 reauthorized, extending the post 9/11 regime of domestic mass surveillance.

1781545883529625937

We ain't got a thing on Russia, eh, Winester? Six of 1---Half dozen of the other.

[Thread]

Private businesses can be forced to narc on their customers.

https://chicago.suntimes.com/letters-to-the-editor/2024/04/16/dick-durbin-surveillance-power-fisa-college-affordabilty-trump-letters


We ain't got a thing on Russia, eh, Winester? Six of 1---Half dozen of the other.