http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/us...gram.html?_r=0The origins of the current dispute date back more than a year, when the committee completed its work on a 6,000-page report about the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation program. People who have read the study said it is a withering indictment of the program and details many instances when C.I.A. officials misled Congress, the White House and the public about the value of the agency’s brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
The report has yet to be declassified, but last June, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, responded to the Senate report with a 122-page rebuttal challenging specific facts in the report as well as the investigation’s overarching conclusion — that the agency’s interrogation methods yielded little valuable intelligence.
Then, in December, Mr. Udall revealed that the Intelligence Committee had become aware of an internal C.I.A. study that he said was “consistent with the Intelligence Committee’s report” and “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”
It appears that Mr. Udall’s revelation is what set off the current fight, with C.I.A. officials accusing the Intelligence Committee of learning about the internal review by gaining unauthorized access to agency databases.
In a letter to President Obama on Tuesday, Mr. Udall made a vague reference to the dispute over the C.I.A.’s internal report.
“As you are aware, the C.I.A. has recently taken unprecedented action against the committee in relation to the internal C.I.A. review, and I find these actions to be incredibly troubling for the committee’s oversight responsibilities and for our democracy,” he wrote.
The letter gave no details about the “unprecedented action,” but Mr. Udall said that it was important for the committee to “be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our cons utional principle of the separation of powers — without the C.I.A. posing impediments or obstacles as it is today.”
Last edited by Winehole23; 03-06-2014 at 09:55 AM.
“I am very confident that the appropriate authorities reviewing this matter will determine where wrongdoing, if any, occurred in either the executive branch or legislative branch,” Brennan continued, raising a suggestion that the Senate committee itself might have acted improperly.
“Until then I would encourage others to refrain from outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers.”
"important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and congressional overseers."
yeah right!
CIA doesn't GAF about Congress, CIA is its own secret government
lesson learned after the Church Committee: the CIA won't take it lying down this time.
CIA Monitoring Of Senate Computers Referred To Justice Department
The CIA Inspector General’s Office has asked the Justice Department to investigate allegations of malfeasance at the spy agency in connection with a yet-to-be released Senate Intelligence Committee report into the CIA’s secret detention and interrogation program, McClatchy has learned.
The criminal referral may be related to what several knowledgeable people said was CIA monitoring of computers used by Senate aides to prepare the study. The monitoring may have violated an agreement between the committee and the agency.
The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.
White House officials have closely tracked the bitter struggle, a McClatchy investigation has found. But they haven’t directly intervened, perhaps because they are embroiled in their own feud with the committee, resisting surrendering top-secret do ents that the CIA asserted were covered by executive privilege and sent to the White House.
McClatchy’s findings are based on information found in official do ents and provided by people with knowledge of the dispute being fought in the seventh-floor executive offices of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., and the committee’s high-security work spaces on Capitol Hill.
The people who spoke to McClatchy asked not to be identified because the feud involves highly classified matters and carries enormous consequences for congressional oversight over the executive branch.
The CIA and the committee declined to comment.
Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to discuss the matter and referred questions to the CIA and the Justice Department.
In question now is whether any part of the committee’s report, which took some four years to compose and cost $40 million, will ever see the light of day.
The report details how the CIA misled the Bush administration and Congress about the use of interrogation techniques that many experts consider torture, according to public statements by committee members. It also shows, members have said, how the techniques didn’t provide the intelligence that led the CIA to the hideout in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was killed in a 2011 raid by Navy SEALs.
The committee determined earlier this year that the CIA monitored computers — in possible violation of an agreement against doing so — that the agency had provided to intelligence committee staff in a secure room at CIA headquarters that the agency insisted they use to review millions of pages of top-secret reports, cables and other do ents, according to people with knowledge.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) a panel member, apparently was referring to the monitoring when he asked CIA Director John Brennan at a Jan. 9 hearing if provisions of the Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act “apply to the CIA? Seems to me that’s a yes or no answer.”
Brennan replied that he’d have to get back to Wyden after looking into “what the act actually calls for and it’s applicability to CIA’s authorities.”
http://www.nationalmemo.com/cia-moni...ce-department/
the McClatchy scoop: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/0...computers.html
rough and dirty WH gloss: Senate snooped and found out the CIA internal review was substantially in accord with their own, subsequent CIA clarifications notwithstanding.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...51c_story.htmlThe head of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday sharply accused the CIA of violating federal law and undermining the cons utional principle of congressional oversight as she detailed publicly for the first time how the agency secretly removed do ents from computers used by her panel to investigate a controversial interrogation program.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that the situation amounted to attempted intimidation of congressional investigators, adding: “I am not taking it lightly.”
CIA is beyond the reach of govt and laws. It's its own govt, and lawless. "a few good men" defending America don't need no steenkin laws
we'll see
CIA-apologist, defender Feinstein pissed her beloved CIA spied on her committee.
not if the CIA has its way, and it will
CIA is forbidden to spy domestically. There's nothing ambiguous about it. It's illegal, to say nothing of the separation of powers issue.
it is now well known that the CIA spies on US citizens, collecting their phone call metadata and very probably LOTS of other info. nobody in court, CIA lies, obfuscates to Congress.
Everyone's down with the spying, until they're the ones being spied on.
Clearly Feinstein's situation:
CIA spy on Americans? yawn, CIA is great
CIA spy on me? no
http://reason.com/24-7/2014/03/12/ci...utional-crisisSenate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein's speech on the Senate floor yesterday, where she suggested that the CIA may have violated the Cons ution by monitoring her committee’s computers and seeking a criminal investigation into staffers has yielded her support from across the aisle. Republican Lindsey Graham called the allegations "Richard Nixon stuff," offering that "the legislative branch should declare war on the CIA" if Feinstein's allegations are true. Republican John McCain also slammed the CIA chief, saying he had never had much confidence in him and calling Feinstein’s allegations “disturbing.” He said the allegations worthy of an independent investigation because of “allegations of bias” that exist on both sides of the aisle. Other Republican senators, like Saxby Chambliss and Marco Rubio, questioned Feinstein’s allegations, insisting they didn’t know the facts and that the story is likely “more complicated” than Feinstein is making out to be. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, meanwhile, called Feinstein out as a hypocrite for only caring about government spying when it involves her staffers.
Karma's a Feinstein.
Oh , Republicans defending privacy.
How will Boots take this... Not lying down by God.
NSA Aiming To Infect 'Millions' Of Computers Worldwide With Its Malware; Targets Telco/ISP Systems Administrators
from the so,-telco-sys-admins-are-now-'national-security-threats'-or-did-I-miss-t dept
The NSA is still working hard to make the world's computer usage less safe. The latest leak published by The Intercept shows the agency plans to infect "millions" of computers worldwide with malware, making it easier for the NSA to harvest data and communications from these compromised machines.
The classified files – provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – contain new details about groundbreaking surveillance technology the agency has developed to infect potentially millions of computers worldwide with malware “implants.” The clandestine initiative enables the NSA to break into targeted computers and to siphon out data from foreign Internet and phone networks.
The methods detailed include the agency masquerading as a Facebook server and sending out laced spam emails in order to subvert users' computers and give the NSA access to local files as well as control of webcams and microphones. Not only does the agency actively work to delay bug fixes in order to exploit systems, but its ongoing malware mission ensures that using a computer and/or accessing the web will always be more dangerous than it should be.
Mikko Hypponen, an expert in malware who serves as chief research officer at the Finnish security firm F-Secure, calls the revelations “disturbing.” The NSA’s surveillance techniques, he warns, could inadvertently be undermining the security of the Internet.
“When they deploy malware on systems,” Hypponen says, “they potentially create new vulnerabilities in these systems, making them more vulnerable for attacks by third parties.”
The NSA has argued previously that its malware targets are strictly national security threats. But the evidence provided here undermines this defense of NSA malware
deployment.
In one secret post on an internal message board, an operative from the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate describes using malware attacks against systems administrators who work at foreign phone and Internet service providers. By hacking an administrator’s computer, the agency can gain covert access to communications that are processed by his company. “Sys admins are a means to an end,” the NSA operative writes.
The internal post – led “I hunt sys admins” – makes clear that terrorists aren’t the only targets of such NSA attacks. Compromising a systems administrator, the operative notes, makes it easier to get to other targets of interest, including any “government official that happens to be using the network some admin takes care of.”
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/201...strators.shtml
karma? here's karma
Pennsylvania trooper fatally shoots pregnant wife in the head while cleaning his gun
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/1...e+Raw+Story%29
right-wingers are against NSA only because there's Dem in WH.
Heard all kinds of defenses of FISA, etc from right-wingers when dubya was Pres.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/After watching DiFi’s speech, the course of action Milibank recommends:
If the White House wishes to repair the damage, it would declassify without further delay the report done by Feinstein’s committee — along with the Panetta Review. If the White House won’t, Feinstein’s panel and others would be justified in holding up CIA funding and nominations and conducting public hearings.Agreed. But here is Rubio, equating the Senate investigation staffers with CIA lawyers, as if there was some kind of equivalence:
Well, again, because I’m a member of that committee, I’m — others may choose to be more forthcoming about — but I try to protect the nature of the work we do in that committee. Let me just say that I think that story has two sides; I think it’s a bit more complicated than what’s being put out there by Senator Feinstein or others. I think at the end of the day there should be an impartial investigation as to what happened. And you may end up finding out that both sides are to blame, that both sides committed mistakes … But there should be an impartial investigation of it, and I think until that point people should reserve judgment. But I would just caution that I don’t think anyone has a clean hand and I think it’s important for the full truth to come out. I think people may be surprised to learn that, in this case, there were no good guys and maybe two or three bad ones.Notice the attempt to claim that “both sides” have “unclean hands” – as if perpetrating torture is somehow equivalent to a vital oversight function of the Congress. Then there’s a veiled threat – gleefully touted by Eli Lake – that the CIA could retaliate against a sitting president by leaking information to try and damage him:
“Any agency can undermine just about anyone,” said Pete Hoekstra, who served as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the first two years of Bush’s second term. “We saw that under the Bush administration, there were leaks coming out all over the place. You never knew where they were coming from and some of them were coming from the intelligence community and the objective was to embarrass President Bush.”Just take a moment to ponder that empirical prediction. It assumes that the CIA is an en y independent of the president, who is the head of the executive branch. It assumes that the CIA will act against the president if it feels exposed or slighted. Nothing could more baldy illustrate the desperate need to cut this anti-democratic and anti-cons utional power-center down to size. When an agency lies to the White House over torture, when it spies on the Senate investigating its torture program, it has become a rogue threat to our political system. I fear that Obama’s pusillanimity on accountability for war crimes has merely emboldened them to further illegality.
If the CIA and the broader intelligence community come to feel the same way about Obama, the White House could find itself as under siege as Bush was in his second term. Then Obama would not only have to face opposition to his foreign policy from Republicans in Congress, but also the bureaucracy of spies that know many of his darkest secrets.
erson weighs in:
We are no longer in a predictable fight between two branches of government anticipated by the framers.
karma? here's karma
Pennsylvania trooper fatally shoots pregnant wife in the head while cleaning his gun
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/1...e+Raw+Story%29
How is this even remotely related to the thread? And how is that even remotely karma? If I were anti-gun I'd be able to present a much better case than you've tried over the years.
Problem you have here is I'm not a right winger by any means, I just love guns and am annoyed by stupid liberals like yourself. There are good liberals out there, just like there are good conservatives, but both are very rare.right-wingers are against NSA only because there's Dem in WH.
Heard all kinds of defenses of FISA, etc from right-wingers when dubya was Pres.
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/...bert-eatinger/I may sound like a bit of a Straussian here, but the absence of a name in this particularly pointed part of Senator Feinstein’s epic speech yesterday drew enormous attention to it. Money quote from DiFi:
There is no legitimate reason to allege to the Justice Department that Senate staff may have committed a crime. I view the actingThe general counsel’s name is Robert Eatinger, a key figure in the authorization of torture in the US. As I noted yesterday, it’s a testament to how devoted the CIA is to its torture program that, long after it was disbanded, it promoted the lawyer who defended it and was an integral part of it to be the acting chief counsel for the entire agency (while Obama’s nominee for the job remains bottled up in the Senate). So who is this guy? Here’s one key fact:
general counsel’s referral as a potential effort to intimidate this staff—and I am not taking it lightly.
I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center—the unit within which the CIA managed and carried out this program.
From mid-2004 until the official termination of the detention and interrogation program in January 2009, he was the unit’s chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study.
Eatinger was one of two CIA lawyers who reportedly told the director of the CIA’s clandestine service in 2005 there were no legal
requirements for the agency to hold onto 92 videotapes that showed the abusive tactics used by its interrogators against Al-Qaeda prisoners. Although Eatinger and the other lawyer did not specifically sanction it, the CIA official, Jose Rodriguez, later ordered the tapes destroyed.
Rodriguez’s destruction of the tapes in late 2005 in an industrial-strength shredder came despite objections by the Bush administration’s White House counsel and the director of national intelligence. The CIA director at the time, Michael Hayden, assured senators that Rodriguez hadn’t destroyed evidence because there were still written cables describing what the videotapes showed, but Feinstein said Tuesday the cables downplayed the brutality of the program.
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