Glenn Greenwald: 80 page decision from FISA court says NSA is bulk collecting phone c

[Galileo]

Glenn Greenwald: 80 page decision from FISA court says NSA is bulk collecting phone calls of Americans (VIDEO)

On Meet the Press, Glenn Greenwald talked about the FISA court decision that say what the NSA is doing is illegal - the NSA is bulk collecting the transmissions, the conversations of millions of Americans not involved in terrorism. The FISA court says this is a violation of the 4th Amendment and is illegal. This all comes from documents shown to Greenwald by Snowden.

WATCH VIDEO HERE:

http://nomorecocktails.com/post/2013/06/23/Glenn-Greenwald-80-page-decision-from-FISA-court-says-NSA-is-bulk-collecting-phone-calls-of-Americans.aspx

:ihit

[SA210]

.
Way to go Glenn Greenwald. :tu Ouch..

On the Espionage Act charges against Edward Snowden


Who is actually bringing 'injury to America': those who are secretly building a massive surveillance system or those who inform citizens that it's being done?


Glenn Greenwald (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/glenn-greenwald)


The US government has charged (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-charges-snowden-with-espionage/2013/06/21/507497d8-dab1-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html) Edward Snowden (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/edward-snowden) with three felonies, including two under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute enacted to criminalize dissent against World War I. My priority at the moment is working on our next set of stories, so I just want to briefly note a few points about this.

Prior to Barack Obama's inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That's because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130620/18182823551/obama-administration-has-declared-war-leakers-claims-any-leak-is-aiding-enemy.shtml) "noble" and "patriotic" whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said recently (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113219/doj-seizure-ap-records-raises-question-chilling-effect-real) that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency has brought investigative journalism to a "standstill", while James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/21/obama-the-media-and-national-security/only-nixon-harmed-a-free-press-more) that "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom." Read what Mayer and Goodale wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration's threat to the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?

Few people - likely including Snowden himself - would contest that his actions constitute some sort of breach of the law. He made his choice based on basic theories of civil disobedience: that those who control the law have become corrupt, that the law in this case (by concealing the actions of government officials in building this massive spying apparatus in secret) is a tool of injustice, and that he felt compelled to act in violation of it in order to expose these official bad acts and enable debate and reform.

But that's a far cry from charging Snowden, who just turned 30 yesterday, with multiple felonies under the Espionage Act that will send him to prison for decades if not life upon conviction. In what conceivable sense are Snowden's actions "espionage"? He could have - but chose not - sold the information he had to a foreign intelligence service for vast sums of money, or covertly passed it to one of America's enemies, or worked at the direction of a foreign government. That is espionage. He did none of those things.

What he did instead was give up his life of career stability and economic prosperity, living with his long-time girlfriend in Hawaii, in order to inform his fellow citizens (both in America and around the world) of what the US government and its allies are doing to them and their privacy. He did that by very carefully selecting which documents he thought should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld.

That's what every single whistleblower and source for investigative journalism, in every case, does - by definition. In what conceivable sense does that merit felony charges under the Espionage Act?

The essence of that extremely broad, century-old law (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/11/edward-snowden-defence) is that one is guilty if one discloses classified information "with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation". Please read this rather good summary (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/22/us/snowden-espionage-act.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) in this morning's New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled - how these disclosures have "set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance" and "opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/nsa), including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype" - and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring "injury to the United States", or has he performed an immense public service?

The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of "espionage". It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing "injury to the United States" are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus (http://www.ibtimes.com/fisc-will-not-object-release-2011-court-opinion-confirmed-nsas-illegal-surveillance-1305023) aimed at American citizens - and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they're doing (http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2013/06/06/did-intelligence-officials-lie-to-congress-about-nsa-domestic-spying/) - rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.

The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.

What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It's a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws. It's all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they're interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically. The "enemy" they're seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It's the American people.

The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.

They haven't learned anything from these disclosures that they didn't already well know. The people who have learned things they didn't already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa) at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order).

And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been "harmed" is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability. If anything is a crime, it's that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/22/snowden-espionage-charges

[SA210]

:lol Hope/Change/Transparency/Anti-Bush

[angrydude]

I know what I wish the next constitutional amendment would be...

[Quadzilla99]

1aMvoaFCMCI

[boutons_deux]

Snowden’s real crime: Humiliating the state (http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/snowdens_real_crime_humiliating_the_state/)
Here's the reason the NSA leaker will never be forgiven or forgotten: He stood up to power and embarrassed it

The law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.

However, as we also know, the state monopolizes and regulates the use of violence in the interests of those who have the most influence over the state: these wealthy men who decide the personification of the state. In the 1600s English North America, this would have been white Englishmen. In the 1910s, Benjamin was interested in the role of workers in challenging the monopoly of state violence.


Understood in this way, the right to strike constitutes in the view of labor, which is opposed to that of the state, the right to use force in attaining certain ends. The antithesis between the two conceptions emerges in all its bitterness in face of a revolutionary general strike. In this, labor will always appeal to its right to strike, and the state will call this appeal an abuse, since the right to strike was not “so intended,” and take emergency measures.


Here is another excerpt from “The Critique of Violence”:

The same may be more drastically suggested if one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.

What makes Snowden so interesting is that it appears that he is an old-fashioned “believer” in the American project — someone who wanted to fight the good fight, to uphold American principles and ideals, as the U.S. government has long professed is also its mission. He contracted to work for defense contractors who in turn worked with the NSA, and for that reason did not begin his (short-lived) post-military career with misgivings about the American imperial project. As he got to see how its affairs were being misconducted, he continued to believe in “doing the right thing.” What also makes Snowden remarkable is his awareness (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower?CMP=twt_gu#More%20fundamentally,%20t he%20%22US%20Persons%22%20protection%20in%20genera l%20is%20a%20distraction) that

the “US Persons” protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.


Whether or not one agrees with his actions, whether or not his politics and ideology mesh with the ideas of the right or the left, it will always be a remarkable sight to a see a lone person stand up to the Leviathan, composed as it is of its myriad eyes — all watching, waiting, to clamp down on any threat, no matter how trivial — to its relentless monopolistic pursuit of violence, and power.


http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/snowdens_real_crime_humiliating_the_state/

iow, America is fucked and unfuckable. The 1% has totally captured and perverted the govt to its own self-preserving, self-enriching ends. You you tea bagger, govt-hating right-wingers still don't get it.

[LnGrrrR]

Good for Snowden and Greenwald. Civil liberties will be Obama's biggest black eye in my opinion, and by far.

[boutons_deux]

Good for Snowden and Greenwald. Civil liberties will be Obama's biggest black eye in my opinion, and by far.

I repeat, the party or person of the President is irrelevant. The MIC/NatSec/PoliceState runs in its own universe, untouchable by civilians hands.

eg, a 2016 President greasebags Jeb or Christie wouldn't roll back ANY of the the MIC/NatSec/PoliceState, (nor would Hilary) and you right wing motherfuckers would be defending it all the way.

[TeyshaBlue]

:lmao

[ElNono]

Good for Snowden and Greenwald. Civil liberties will be Obama's biggest black eye in my opinion, and by far.

black eye is being kind, tbh... it's fucking disgusting...

[Winehole23]

Good for Snowden and Greenwald. Civil liberties will be Obama's biggest black eye in my opinion, and by far.No doubt. Bush didn't dare take it so far.

[boutons_deux]

The Guardian Blocked By The Army After NSA Stories

The Guardian's recent stories about NSA surveillance have been blocked across the entire US Army , the Monterey Herald reported (http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_23554739/restricted-web-access-guardian-is-army-wide-officials) on Thursday night.

The paper has made huge waves, of course, with its series of explosive stories about the NSA's highly classified surveillance programs. Though it has always maintained an American presence, its visibility has skyrocketed (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/08/guardian-us-nsa-scoops_n_3407785.html) in the wake of the scoops.

The Herald talked to an Army spokesman, who confirmed that the Guardian's website had been blocked since the stories first emerged.

The Army, the spokesman said, was weeding out "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks" so that employees would not be able to see any classified information.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/army-blocks-the-guardian_n_3515374.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=062813&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry

[leemajors]

https://i.chzbgr.com/maxW500/5780323328/h195E8A7F.jpg

[boutons_deux]

How Barrett Brown shone light on the murky world of security contractors


Any attempt to rein in the vast US surveillance (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/surveillance) apparatus exposed byEdward Snowden (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/edward-snowden)'s whistleblowing will be for naught unless government and corporations alike are subject to greater oversight. The case of journalist and activist Barrett Brown is a case in point.

Brown made a splash in February 2011 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/17/wikileaks-internet) by helping to uncover "Team Themis" (http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Team_Themis), a project by intelligence contractors retained by Bank of America to demolish the hacker society known as Anonymous (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/anonymous) and silence sympathetic journalists like Glenn Greenwald (now with the Guardian, though then with Salon). The campaign reportedly involved a menagerie of contractors: Booz Allen Hamilton, a billion-dollar intelligence industry player (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/edward-snowden-investigate-booz-allen) and Snowden's former employer; Palantir (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125200842406984303.html), a PayPal-inspired and -funded outfit that sells "data-mining and analysis software that maps out human social networks for counterintelligence purposes"; and HBGary Federal (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/spy/all/), an aspirant consultancy in the intelligence sector.

The Team Themis story began in late 2010, when Julian Assange warned (http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/) WikiLeaks would release documents outlining an "ecosystem of corruption [that] could take down a bank or two." Anticipating that it might be in Assange's sights, Bank of America went into damage-control mode (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/business/03wikileaks-bank.html)and, as the New York Times reported, assembled "a team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials … scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public." To oversee the review, Bank of American brought in Booz Allen Hamilton.

Days later, Bank of America retained the well-connected law firm of Hunton & Williams (http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/hunton_williams_wikileaks_chamber/), which was reportedly recommended by the Department of Justice (http://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Data-intelligence-firms-proposed-a-systematic-attack-against-WikiLeaks/12751/). Hunton & Williams promptly emailed (http://www.salon.com/2011/02/15/hunton_williams_wikileaks_chamber/) HBGary Federal, Palantir and Berico; they, in turn, "proposed various schemes to attack" WikiLeaks and Greenwald. In fact, Hunton & Williams had first contacted the three tech firms in October 2010 (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/02/spy/), at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce to find out if it was being attacked by labor union-backed campaigners.
etc ...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/surveillance-us-national-security

The amalgam of corporate plus govt power is unassailable, enable by the heavily travelled revolving door between the two power centers. I figure they are going to take Greenwald down. sooner or later.

[Winehole23]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/28/senators-letter-james-clapper

[SA210]

:lmao Like a boss

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc1/q72/s720x720/998685_631732463506190_1740082107_n.jpg

[boutons_deux]

NSA releases lies and propaganda

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/images/prism-slide-6.jpg

etc

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/?hpid=z1

[boutons_deux]

George W. Bush Defends PRISM: 'I Put That Program In Place To Protect The Country' Former President George W. Bush defended PRISM, the Internet spying program that began under his administration but remained secret until The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?hpid=z1) and The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data) revealed its existence last month.

"I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed," Bush told CNN in an interview airing Monday (http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/01/politics/bush-interview/?hpt=po_c1). "I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
PRISM began under Bush in 2007 and has continued under the Obama administration. The program allows the National Security Administration to collect internet and email data from the nation's biggest technology companies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/george-bush-prism_n_3528249.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=070113&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry

[SA210]

George W. Bush Defends PRISM: 'I Put That Program In Place To Protect The Country'

Former President George W. Bush defended PRISM, the Internet spying program that began under his administration but remained secret until The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html?hpid=z1) and The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data) revealed its existence last month.

"I put that program in place to protect the country. One of the certainties was that civil liberties were guaranteed," Bush told CNN in an interview airing Monday (http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/01/politics/bush-interview/?hpt=po_c1). "I think there needs to be a balance, and as the president explained, there is a proper balance."
PRISM began under Bush in 2007 and has continued under the Obama administration. The program allows the National Security Administration to collect internet and email data from the nation's biggest technology companies.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/george-bush-prism_n_3528249.html?utm_hp_ref=daily-brief?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=070113&utm_medium=email&utm_content=NewsEntry




Too bad the "change" candidate brought us Bush's 4th term

[cheguevara]

I repeat, the party or person of the President is irrelevant. The MIC/NatSec/PoliceState runs in its own universe, untouchable by civilians hands.

eg, a 2016 President greasebags Jeb or Christie wouldn't roll back ANY of the the MIC/NatSec/PoliceState, (nor would Hilary) and you right wing motherfuckers would be defending it all the way.

So when Bush + Cheney are in power, they are the culprits. But when Obama and Biden are in power they are irrelevant.

got it :rolleyes

[boutons_deux]

So when Bush + Cheney are in power, they are the culprits. But when Obama and Biden are in power they are irrelevant.

got it :rolleyes

you said that, I didn't. gfy

[cheguevara]

you said that, I didn't. gfy


Dubya.... Dickhead.... Rummy.... whaa whaaa whaa

you made a carreer of crying about these "irrelevant" guys :lol

[SA210]

Glenn Greenwald: Obama Targeting Edward Snowden ‘To Intimidate Future Whistle Blowers’


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V42zVVt3rg8

[boutons_deux]

The Most Secretive Court in America May Also Be the Most Conservative

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a unique judicial body, not only in terms of its procedures but in terms of the political leanings of its judges, who comprise a panel so uniformly Republican that the five-justice right-wing majority on the current Supreme Court appears positively liberal in comparison.


Unlike other judicial appointments, which must be publicly confirmed by the Senate, the chief justice of the Supreme Court appoints the 11 U.S. District Court judges who sit on the surveillance court for staggered seven-year terms, along with three other federal circuit court judges who staff the FISA Court of Review, which hears appeals that the government may file on the few surveillance applications that are denied. Appeals from the Court of Review (http://epic.org/privacy/terrorism/fisa/fisc.html) can be made only to the Supreme Court. There have been none to date.

The surveillance court’s secrecy begins with the surveillance applications that it hears on an “ex parte” basis. At a hearing for this court, the targets of surveillance are not given an opportunity to appear, nor is the government required to present evidence of the kind of specific probable cause needed to obtain a search warrant in an ordinary criminal case. Rather, under FISA, to obtain an order permitting it to read the content of a communication, the government needs to present evidence only that the surveillance target is a foreign power or an agent of one.

Orders like the one directed at Verizon Business Services under Section 215, authorizing the government to seize but not read entire telephone metadata bases, require an even lesser showing of individualized suspicion. The Verizon order was approved by Roger Vinson, a senior federal district court judge who normally sits in the panhandle region of Florida. A Reagan appointee and former Navy lieutenant, Vinson gained notoriety (http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/01/31/141721/vinson-frc/) in 2011 as the “tea party’s judge” for lifting language from a legal brief filed by the archconservative Family Research Council, and declaring the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional.

Although Vinson’s term on the surveillance court expired in May, the panel’s current roster (http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/court2013.html) of 11 includes 10 judges who were appointed to their federal district court positions by Republican presidents. The Court of Review, which rarely convenes as so few surveillance applications are denied, has one Republican and one Democratic appointee, along with one vacancy.

Some of the more notable Republican stalwarts on the current surveillance panel and the Court of Review include:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_most_secretive_court_in_america_may_also_be_th e_most_conservative_20130/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Truthdig+Truthdig%3A+Drilling +Beneath+the+Headlines

[boutons_deux]

The bad joke called 'the FISA court' shows how a 'drone court' would work

Newly released data show that the government submitted 1,789 eavesdropping requests last year, and none was rejected

In the mid-1970s, an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse (http://archive.org/details/finalreportofsel01unit) by the US government of its eavesdropping powers: listening in on the telephone calls of civil rights leaders, reading the mail of political opponents, spying on anti-war groups. The supposed lesson learned from this was that political leaders will inevitably abuse their surveillance (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/surveillance) powers if they are permitted to exercise them in the dark and without meaningful oversight.

The "solution" was the enactment of a law - the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) - that made it a criminal offense (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1809) for government officials to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of Americans without first obtaining a warrant from the newly created Fisa court (http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/fisa-court).

From the start, the Fisa court was a radical perversion of the judicial process. It convened in total secrecy and its rulings were classified. The standard the government had to meet was not the traditional "probable cause" burden imposed by the Fourth Amendment but a significantly diluted standard (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/m013006.pdf). There was nothing adversarial about the proceeding: only the Justice Department (DOJ) was permitted to be present, but not any lawyers for the targets of the eavesdropping request, who were not notified. Reflecting its utter lack of real independence, the court itself was housed in the DOJ.

And, and was totally predictable, the court barely ever rejected a government request for eavesdropping. From its inception, it was the ultimate rubber-stamp court (http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html), having rejected a total of zero government applications - zero - in its first 24 years of existence, while approving many thousands. In its total 34 year history - from 1978 through 2012 - the Fisa court has rejected a grand total of 11 government applications, while approving more than 20,000.

Despite how obedient and compliant this court always was, the Bush administration decided in late 2001 that it would have its National Security Agency (NSA) intercept the calls and emails of Americans without bothering to obtain the Fisa court approval required by the criminal law, claiming - with a straight face - that complying with the law was "too cumbersome" in the age of Terrorism. Once this lawbreaking was revealed by the New York Times in late 2005, the response from the DC political class was not to punish the responsible government officials for their lawbreaking, but rather to enact a new law (called the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinstein-obama-democrats-eavesdropping) that, in essence, simply legalized the warrantless eavesdropping scheme of the Bush administration.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/03/fisa-court-rubber-stamp-drones

[boutons_deux]

Technology, Not Law, Limits Mass Surveillance

Improved technology enabled the NSA’s mass surveillance programs. Future improvements will make collecting data on citizens easier and easier.

Recent revelations about the extent of surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency come as no surprise to those with a technical background in the workings of digital communications. The leaked documents show how the NSA has taken advantage of the increased use of digital communications and cloud services, coupled with outdated privacy laws, to expand and streamline their surveillance programs. This is a predictable response to the shrinking cost and growing efficiency of surveillance brought about by new technology. The extent to which technology has reduced the time and cost necessary to conduct surveillance should play an important role in our national discussion of this issue.

The American public previously, maybe unknowingly, relied on technical and financial barriers to protect them from large-scale surveillance by the government. These implicit protections have quickly eroded in recent years as technology industry advances have reached intelligence agencies, and digital communications technology has spread through society. As a result, we now have to replace these “naturally occurring” boundaries and refactor the law to protect our privacy.

Each of the NSA programs recently disclosed by the media is unique in the type of data it accesses, but they all share a common thread: they have been enabled by a massive increase in capacity and reduction in cost of surveillance techniques.

NSA’s arrangement with just a few key telecom providers enables the collection of phone records for over 300 million Americans without the need to set up individual trap-and-tracer registers for each person. PRISM provides programmatic access to the contents of all e-mails, voice communications, and documents privately stored by a handful of cloud services such as Gmail, Facebook, AOL, and Skype. A presidential directive, PPD20, permits “offensive” surveillance tools (i.e hacking) to be deployed anywhere in the world, from the convenience of a desk at CIA headquarters in Langley. Finally, Boundless Informant, the NSA’s system to track its own surveillance activities, reveals that the agency collected over 97 billion pieces of intelligence information worldwide in March 2013 alone. The collection, storage, and processing of all this information would have been unimaginable through analog surveillance.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/516691/technology-not-law-limits-mass-surveillance/

[boutons_deux]

GG ripping Clapper a HUGE ANUS

James Clapper, EU play-acting, and political priorities

The first NSA story to be reported was our June 6 article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order) which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright lied to the US Senate (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/misinformation-on-classified-nsa-programs-includes-statements-by-senior-us-officials/2013/06/30/7b5103a2-e028-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html) - specifically to the Intelligence Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs - when he said "no, sir" in response to this question from Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

That Clapper fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself has now been forced by our stories (http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/policy-and-strategy/308979-clapper-apologies-for-erroneous-statement-to-congress-on-us-data-collection) to admit that his statement was, in his words, "clearly erroneous" and to apologize. But he did this only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other words, what he's sorry about is that he got caught lying to the Senate. And as Salon's David Sirota adeptly documented on Friday (http://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/this_man_is_still_lying_to_america/), Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.

How is this not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a felony (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001), punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense. Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress as part of the Iran-contra scandal (http://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/10/us/ex-spy-chief-is-convicted-of-lying-to-congress-on-iran-contra-affair.html) and other controversies (http://articles.latimes.com/1985-04-20/news/mn-21740_1_rita-lavelle), and sports stars have been prosecuted (http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500290_162-6787425.html) by the Obama DOJ based on allegations they have done so.

Beyond its criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight. Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security officials.

But Clapper isn't the only top national security official who has been proven by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and the Congress about surveillance programs. As an outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/misinformation-on-classified-nsa-programs-includes-statements-by-senior-us-officials/2013/06/30/7b5103a2-e028-11e2-b2d4-ea6d8f477a01_story.html) this week documented:

"[D]etails that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading, erroneous or simply false."


Please re-read that sentence. It's not just Clapper, but multiple "senior US officials", whose statements have been proven false by our reporting and Edward Snowden's disclosures. Indeed, the Guardian previously published (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining) top secret documents disproving the claims of NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander that the agency is incapable of stating how many Americans are having their calls and emails invaded without warrants, as well as the oft-repeated claim from President Barack Obama (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/19/fisa-court-oversight-process-secrecy) that the NSA is not listening in on Americans' calls without warrants. Both of those assertions, as our prior reporting and Miller's article this week demonstrates, are indisputably false.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/03/clapper-lying-snowden-eu-bolivia

As I've stated here many times, CIA/NSA is a huge govt unto itself, $10Bs to play with, running amok, in total secrecy, with no effective oversight, and probably with enough data on enough Congressmen to blackmail any of them into silence, like J Edgar Hoover did.

That's why Snowden/Greenwald are true American heroes (but will they NO EFFECT on the unstoppable NSA/CIA rogue government)

[boutons_deux]

James Clapper Says He Forgot About the Patriot ActJames Clapper, the mendacious national intelligence director who last month told NBC News that he gave the “least untruthful answer” in a March Senate hearing about the extent of government spying on U.S. citizens revised that assessment to “erroneous” Tuesday.


The most senior intelligence officer in the country wants Americans to believe he suffered a memory lapse when he gave the answer to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden. Wyden had asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No, sir … not wittingly.”

Clapper wrote in letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee published Tuesday that he “simply didn’t think” of the NSA programs of dragnet phone surveillance when he testified in March that the agency did “not wittingly” spy on Americans’ communications. He said “his staff acknowledged the error to Senator Wyden’s staff soon after the hearing,” and that he “can now openly correct it because the existence” of a portion of the government’s surveillance program “has been declassified.”

Portions of the letter were reported by The Washington Post on Monday.
—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly (http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly).

The Guardian:


In the full letter, Clapper attempted to explain the false testimony by saying that his recollection failed him. “I simply didn’t think of Section 215 of the Patriot Act,” he wrote to committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California) on 21 June, referring to the legal provision cited to justify the mass collection of Americans’ phone data, first disclosed by the Guardian.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/james_clapper_says_he_forgot_about_the_patriot_act _20130703/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Truthdig+Truthdig%3A+Drilling +Beneath+the+Headlines

[SA210]

Ron Paul Blasts NSA Defenders On Piers Morgan: 'You're Justifying Dictatorship!'


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9gqIPJgN_E

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/q71/1001140_495894370479047_789963854_n.jpg

[boutons_deux]

libertarians like Paul pere et fils are fellow travellers with racists.

[SA210]

:lmao:lmao:lmao:lmao:lmao:lmao:lmao



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsV26bhQp5w

[boutons_deux]

the Pauls, fringe, racist, 1%-promoting assholes with no impact on anything, anywhere.

[boutons_deux]

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A.

In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation’s surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org) the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.

The rulings, some nearly 100 pages long, reveal that the court has taken on a much more expansive role by regularly assessing broad constitutional questions and establishing important judicial precedents, with almost no public scrutiny, according to current and former officials familiar with the court’s classified decisions.

The 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, was once mostly focused on approving case-by-case wiretapping orders. But since major changes in legislation and greater judicial oversight of intelligence operations were instituted six years ago (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/washington/18spycnd.html), it has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues and delivering opinions that will most likely shape intelligence practices for years to come, the officials said.

? “We’ve seen a growing body of law from the court,” a former intelligence official said. “What you have is a common law that develops where the court is issuing orders involving particular types of surveillance, particular types of targets.”
In one of the court’s most important decisions, the judges have expanded the use in terrorism cases of a legal principle known as the “special needs” doctrine and carved out an exception to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of a warrant for searches and seizures, the officials said.


The special needs doctrine was originally established in 1989 by the Supreme Court in a ruling allowing the drug testing of railway workers, finding that a minimal intrusion on privacy was justified by the government’s need to combat an overriding public danger. Applying that concept more broadly, the FISA judges have ruled that the N.S.A.’s collection and examination of Americans’ communications data to track possible terrorists does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment, the officials said.

That legal interpretation is significant, several outside legal experts said, because it uses a relatively narrow area of the law — used to justify airport screenings, for instance, or drunken-driving checkpoints — and applies it much more broadly, in secret, to the wholesale collection of communications in pursuit of terrorism suspects. “It seems like a legal stretch,” William C. Banks (http://cisat.syr.edu/fellow/william-c-banks/), a national security law expert at Syracuse University, said in response to a description of the decision. “It’s another way of tilting the scales toward the government in its access to all this data.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

[boutons_deux]

Chief Justice Roberts Is Awesome Power Behind FISA Court

Chief justice of the U.S. is a prettybig job. You lead the Supreme Court conferences where cases arediscussed and voted on. You preside over oral arguments. When inthe majority, you decide who writes the opinion. You get a coolrobe that you can decorate with gold stripes (http://www.flickr.com/photos/23165290@N00/7237652512/).

Oh, and one more thing: You have exclusive, unaccountable,lifetime power to shape the surveillance state.
To use its surveillance powers -- tapping phones or readinge-mails -- the federal government must ask permission of thecourt set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. AFISA judge can deny the request or force the government to limitthe scope of its investigation. It’s the only plausible check inthe system. Whether it actually checks government surveillancepower or acts as a rubber stamp is up to whichever FISA judgepresides that day.

The 11 FISA judges, chosen from throughout the federalbench for seven-year terms, are all appointed by the chiefjustice. In fact, every FISA judge currently serving wasappointed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who will continuemaking such appointments until he retires or dies. FISA judgesdon’t need confirmation -- by Congress or anyone else.

No other part of U.S. law works this way. The chief justicecan’t choose the judges who rule on health law, or preside overlabor cases, or decide software patents. But when it comes tosurveillance, the composition of the bench is entirely in hishands and so, as a result, is the extent to which the NationalSecurity Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation can spyon citizens.

“It really is up to these FISA judges to decide what thelaw means and what the NSA and FBI gets to do,” said Julian Sanchez, a privacy scholar at the Cato Institute. “So Roberts issingle handedly choosing the people who get to decide how muchsurveillance we’re subject to.”

.“He’s been very state oriented,” Clancy said. “He’s done verylittle writing in the area, but to the extent he has, almostwithout exception, he’s come down in favor of the police.”

Roberts’s nominations to the FISA court are almostexclusively Republican. One of his first appointees, forinstance, was Federal District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida (http://topics.bloomberg.com/florida/),who not only struck down the Affordable Care Act’s individualmandate, but struck down the rest of the law, too. (The SupremeCourt disagreed.) Vinson’s term expired in May, but the partisantilt on the court continues: Only one of the 11 members is aDemocrat.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-07-02/chief-justice-roberts-is-awesome-power-behind-fisa-court.html

[Winehole23]

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130617/13482623512/discovering-names-secret-nsa-surveillance-programs-via-linkedin.shtml

[boutons_deux]

Brits, dubya/dickhead's partners in crime in the Iraq invasion, intimidating Greenwald's non-journalist, non-terrorist Brazilian partner.

Britain Detains Partner of Reporter Tied to Leaks

The partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist for The Guardian who has been publishing information leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, was detained for nine hours by the British authorities under a counterterrorism law while on a stop in London’s Heathrow Airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil, Mr. Greenwald said Sunday.

Mr. Miranda, Mr. Greenwald said, was told that he was being detained under Section 7 of the British Terrorism Act, which allows the authorities to detain someone for up to nine hours for questioning and to conduct a search of personal items, often without a lawyer, to determine possible ties to terrorism. More than 97 percent of people stopped under the provision are questioned for under an hour, according to the British government.

“Holding and properly using intelligence gained from such stops is a key part of fighting crime, pursuing offenders and protecting the public,” the statement said.

police ... told Mr. Miranda that they would obtain permission from a judge to arrest him for 48 hours,

The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs, and data storage devices — and have not returned them,

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/08/19/world/europe/britain-detains-partner-of-reporter-tied-to-leaks.html?from=homepage

[Winehole23]

A federal court on Friday lifted an injunction against the National Security Agency's bulk spying program, overturning a lower court's 2013 stayed decision that had deemed the surveillance program "almost Orwellian" and likely unconstitutional. A panel of three Republican-nominated judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that a conservative activist and civil-liberties groups did not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the program, first exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden two years ago.


The judges reaffirmed Friday that the plaintiff did not demonstrate the "concrete and particularized" injury required to be able to sue because he could not prove that his own metadata was caught up in the NSA's dragnet. The panel did not rule directly on the legality of the program.


Earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a separate case that the NSA dragnet was illegal and not what Congress intended—a determination that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees the NSA's activities, recently dismissed.


The split decisions appear to raise the possibility that the mass-surveillance program could wind up before the Supreme Court. But the decision also appears to only be relevant for a short period of time before the program in question is discontinued later this year.http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/federal-court-overturns-ruling-against-nsa-mass-surveillance-program-20150828

[boutons_deux]

"the program in question is discontinued later this year"

who the fuck believes that or anything from the NSA/CIA/FBI? :lol

[Winehole23]

strains credulity, given the powers and rights foolishly ceded to the executive branch since 9/11, to say nothing of the willing collaboration of Verizon and AT&T in the NSA's electronic dragnet.