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

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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 do ents show how the NSA has taken advantage of the increased use of digital communications and cloud services, coupled with outdated privacy laws, to expand and streamline their surveillance programs.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 do ents 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...-surveillance/

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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 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 - 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 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 do ented on Friday, 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, 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 and other controversies, and sports stars have been prosecuted 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 this week do ented:

"[D]etails that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously classified NSA do ents 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 top secret do ents 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 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/commentisf...den-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)

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James Clapper Says He Forgot About the Patriot Act

James 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.

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/eartothegrou...+the+Headlines

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

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

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

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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 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 cons utional 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 ins uted six years ago, 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, 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...nted=all&_r=1&

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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.

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 Ins ute. “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,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/...isa-court.html

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https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...linkedin.shtml

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Brits, dubya/ head'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...?from=homepage

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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 uncons utional. 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 cons utionality 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/...ogram-20150828

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"the program in question is discontinued later this year"

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

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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.