Can We Believe Them?

Under pressure from the secret court that oversees its practices, the NSA said its “upstream” program would no longer grab communications directly from the U.S. internet backbone “about” specific foreign targets — only communication to and from those targets.

This is a major change, essentially abandoning a bulk surveillance program that captured vast amounts of communications of innocent Americans – and turning instead to a still extensive but more targeted approach.

“This change ends a practice that could result in Americans’ communications being collected without a warrant merely for mentioning a foreign target,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement. “For years, I’ve repeatedly raised concerns that this amounted to an end run around the Fourth Amendment. This transparency should be commended. To permanently protect Americans’ rights, I intend to introduce legislation banning this kind of collection in the future.”

  The Intercept

I don't know why I feel skeptical.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Wyden/Udall

Two Democratic senators accused the Obama administration on Tuesday of seeking to “ignore or justify” statements it made to the Supreme Court about warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency, contributing to what they called a “culture of misinformation” by the executive branch.

In a letter to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the senators, Mark Udall of Colorado and Ron Wyden of Oregon, maintained that the Justice Department was not being forthright about what they portrayed as factual misrepresentations to the Supreme Court in 2012. The case involved a challenge to the constitutionality of a law permitting warrantless N.S.A. surveillance.

  NYT

Does This Mean Our Sprint Bill Is About to Double?

The White House has gotten its tab from Sprint for wiretapping expenses and is sending it back with a big old frowny face on it, saying the company is overcharging it by more than $21 million. And by “sending it back,” of course I mean it’s suing Sprint.

[...]

Under the Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act of 1994, telecommunications company must provide the government with wiretapping services when ordered to do so. But those companies don’t have to comply out of pocket and can recoup “reasonable expenses” incurred while wiretapping.

Not included in those, the government claims, are any expenses carriers ring up to modify “equipment, facilities or services” while complying with the 1994 law, under guidelines issued by the Federal Communications Commission in 2006.

  Consumerist

Well, THAT doesn’t make any sense. Could said company then say, “Sorry, our equipment can’t handle that order” ?

“Under the law, the government is required to reimburse Sprint for its reasonable costs incurred when assisting law enforcement agencies with electronic surveillance,” a Sprint spokesman [said]. “The invoices Sprint has submitted to the government fully comply with the law. We have fully cooperated with this investigation and intend to defend this matter vigorously.”

Good luck.

Three Points Regarding the Latest NSA Stories

There are three points worth making about these latest developments.

• First, note how leaders such as Chancellor Angela Merkel reacted with basic indifference when it was revealed months ago that the NSA was bulk-spying on all German citizens, but suddenly found her indignation only when it turned out that she personally was also targeted. That reaction gives potent insight into the true mindset of many western leaders.

• Second, all of these governments keep saying how newsworthy these revelations are, how profound are the violations they expose, how happy they are to learn of all this, how devoted they are to reform.

[...]

If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected [...] ? Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?

• Third,

[...]

Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.

[...]

[I]s there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™?

  Glenn Greenwald

Drip, Drip, Drip

The furore over the scale of American mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden shifted to an incendiary new level on Wednesday evening when Angela Merkel of Germany called Barack Obama to demand explanations over reports that the US National Security Agency was monitoring her mobile phone.

Merkel was said by informed sources in Germany to be "livid" over the reports and convinced, on the basis of a German intelligence investigation, that the reports were utterly substantiated.

[...]

Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, made plain that Merkel upbraided Obama unusually sharply and also voiced exasperation at the slowness of the Americans to respond to detailed questions on the NSA scandal since the Snowden revelations first appeared in the Guardian in June.

[...]

The White House responded that Merkel's mobile is not being tapped. "The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said a statement from Jay Carney, the White House spokesman.

But Berlin promptly signalled that the rebuttal referred to the present and the future and did not deny that Merkel's communications had been monitored in the past.

[...]

The outrage in Berlin came days after President François Hollande of France also called the White House to confront Obama with reports that the NSA was targeting the private phone calls and text messages of millions of French people.

[...]

Hollande insisted that the issue be raised at a summit which, by coincidence, is largely devoted to the "digital" economy in Europe. Hollande also phoned Obama to protest and insist on a full explanation, but received only the stock US response that the Americans were examining their intelligence practices and seeking to balance security and privacy imperatives.

  Guardian

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[...]

The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA.

[...]

Asked on Wednesday evening if the NSA had in the past tracked the German chancellor's communications, Caitlin Hayden, the White House's National Security Council spokeswoman, said: "The United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel. Beyond that, I'm not in a position to comment publicly on every specific alleged intelligence activity."

  Guardian

I’ll take that as a “yes”.

NSA LOVEINT

National Security Agency intelligence analysts knowingly and purposely broke rules meant to prevent against unlawful spying on US citizens, the agency said in an admission that contradicts President Obama's claim that violations were accidental.

A report from the NSA inspector general – an internal, independent watchdog – found that analysts ignored “minimization processes” meant to curb any violations.

[...]

NSA Director General Keith Alexander told a New York conference on August 8 that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.”

During an interview with CNN, Obama said he was comfortable telling Americans that the NSA surveillance has been “done the right way.”

“Because there are no allegations, and I am very confident – knowing the NSA and how they operate – that purposefully somebody is out there trying to abuse this program or listen in on people’s email,” he said.

  RT

Because no one has complained about something that’s been kept secret from the public. How very Catch-22.

Signal intelligence [...] is expressed by SIGINT. Analysts monitoring their lovers so often was apparently popular enough to be designated a code of its own: LOVEINT. Officials told The Journal that all employees discovered to have engaged in such activity were either reprimanded or terminated.

“I am reviewing each of these incidents in detail,” Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, said in a statement, after the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg News yesterday that some analysts deliberately ignored restrictions on their authority to spy on Americans.

  Bloomberg

If DiFi is on the case, then the NSA has nothing to worry about.

“Any case of noncompliance is unacceptable, but these small numbers of cases do not change my view that NSA takes significant care to prevent any abuses and that there is a substantial oversight system in place,” Feinstein said.

These cases were known a long time ago. (ABC News 2008) No one seemed to be very concerned at the time.

Since the revelations of confirmed National Security Agency spying in June, three different "investigations" have been announced. One by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), another by the Director of National Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper, and the third by the Senate Intelligence Committee, formally called the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

All three investigations are insufficient, because they are unable to find out the full details needed to stop the government's abuse of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The PCLOB can only request—not require—documents from the NSA and must rely on its goodwill, while the investigation led by Gen. Clapper is led by a man who not only lied to Congress, but also oversees the spying. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which was originally designed to effectively oversee the intelligence community—has failed time and time again.

  EFF

So, don’t worry. We now have the New Boodle Board.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Next Snowden Leaks "Drip"...

The Obama administration has provided almost no public information about the NSA’s compliance record. In June, after promising to explain the NSA’s record in “as transparent a way as we possibly can,” Deputy Attorney General James Cole described extensive safeguards and oversight that keep the agency in check. “Every now and then, there may be a mistake,” Cole said in congressional testimony.

[...]

The NSA audit obtained by The Post, dated May 2012, counted 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.

[...]

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.

[...]

In one instance, the NSA decided that it need not report the unintended surveillance of Americans. A notable example in 2008 was the interception of a “large number” of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.

[...]

The NSA has different reporting requirements for each branch of government and each of its legal authorities. The “202” collection was deemed irrelevant to any of them. “The issue pertained to Metadata ONLY so there were no defects to report,” according to the author of the secret memo from March 2013.

[...]

The NSA uses the term “incidental” when it sweeps up the records of an American while targeting a foreigner or a U.S. person who is believed to be involved in terrorism. Official guidelines for NSA personnel say that kind of incident, pervasive under current practices, “does not constitute a . . . violation” and “does not have to be reported” to the NSA inspector general for inclusion in quarterly reports to Congress.

[...]

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency’s top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other ­facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speak­ing on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

  WaPo

This report even has Diane Feinstein, who is heavily invested both politically and financially in the government’s intelligence mechanisms, backpedaling.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who did not receive a copy of the 2012 audit until The Post asked her staff about it, said in a statement late Thursday that the committee “can and should do more to independently verify that NSA’s operations are appropriate, and its reports of compliance incidents are accurate.”

[...]

Despite the quadrupling of the NSA’s oversight staff after a series of significant violations in 2009, the rate of infractions increased throughout 2011 and early 2012. An NSA spokesman declined to disclose whether the trend has continued since last year.

I think we can take a “declined to disclose” to be a yes answer there.

[An] operation to obtain what the agency called “multiple communications transactions” collected and commingled U.S. and foreign e-mails, according to an article in SSO News, a top-secret internal newsletter of the NSA’s Special Source Operations unit. NSA lawyers told the court that the agency could not practicably filter out the communications of Americans.

Maybe that’s what they told the court, but that’s not what they told us, now is it?

In October 2011, months after the program got underway, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that the collection effort was unconstitutional.

Hmmm. They didn’t get the court’s permission first?

The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy.

[...]

President Obama and other government leaders have emphasized the court’s oversight role in the wake of revelations this year that the government is vacuuming up “metadata” on Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.

“We also have federal judges that we’ve put in place who are not subject to political pressure,” Obama said at a news conference in June. “They’ve got lifetime tenure as federal judges, and they’re empowered to look over our shoulder at the executive branch to make sure that these programs aren’t being abused.”

[...]

The leader of the secret court that is supposed to provide critical oversight of the government’s vast spying programs said that its ability to do so is limited and that it must trust the government to report when it improperly spies on Americans. The chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often the government’s surveillance breaks the court’s rules that aim to protect Americans’ privacy.

  WaPo

How handy. And so, you’re saying Obama is a liar. We’re shocked.

I also think more troubling is that last year, the NSA retained more than 3,000 files of telephone call records in defiance of an FISC order (!). How many calls involving how many people were on each file is unknown, by the way.

[...]

[M]ainly this is on the NSA, which is to say, on the administration. President Obama pledged last Friday to make these surveillance programs “more transparent.” He argued, “It’s not enough for me as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them, as well.”

Yet the administration did not disclose, say, the lapses Gellman reported. In fact, the NSA retroactively placed an on-the-record interview with its director of compliance off the record, according to Gellman. It did this after Obama’s speech extolling the importance of and promising transparency. In a sense, we got his wished-for transparency. We can see right through him now. .

  New Republic

UPDATE: Two leading Democrats respond.

A Brief History of NSA Eavesdropping

Looking back, the NSA and its predecessors have been gaining secret, illegal access to the communications of Americans for nearly a century. On July 1, 1920, a slim balding man in his early thirties moved into a four-story townhouse at 141 East 37th Street in Manhattan. This was the birth of the Black Chamber, the NSA’s earliest predecessor, and it would be hidden in the nondescript brownstone. But its chief, Herbert O. Yardley, had a problem. To gather intelligence for Woodrow Wilson’s government, he needed access to the telegrams entering, leaving, and passing through the country, but because of an early version of the Radio Communications Act, such access was illegal. With the shake of a hand, however, Yardley convinced Newcomb Carlton, the president of Western Union, to grant the Black Chamber secret access on a daily basis to the private messages passing over his wires—the Internet of the day.

[...]

While [today’s NSA program] UPSTREAM captures most of the telecommunications—about 80 percent according to [former NSA employee William] Binney—there are still gaps in the coverage. That is where the PRISM program comes in. With PRISM, the NSA is able to go directly to the communications industry, including the major Internet companies, to get whatever they miss from UPSTREAM. According to the top secret inspector general’s report, the “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 US companies,” adding that the US has the “home field advantage as the primary hub for worldwide telecommunications.”

[...]

In the end, both UPSTREAM and PRISM may be only the tips of a much larger system. Another new document released by Snowden says that on New Year’s Eve, 2012, SHELLTRUMPET, a metadata program targeting international communications, had just “processed its One Trillionth metadata record.” Started five years ago, it noted that half of that trillion was added in 2012. It also noted that two more new programs, MOONLIGHTPATH and SPINNERET, “are planned to be added by September 2013.”

  New York Review of Books

This is a nicely-written article on the eavesdropping programs of the NSA since its inception, and the government’s lies to Congress and public about those programs (or even the existence of them).

Tucked within it is this:

For years, the agency also had a nationwide bulk e-mail and Internet metadata collection and storage program, although that was ended in 2011 for “operational and resource reasons,” according to the director of national intelligence.

But according to a joint statement issued on July 2 by senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, the real reason the program was shut down was that the NSA was “unable” to prove the usefulness of the operation. “We were very concerned about this program’s impact on Americans’ civil liberties and privacy rights,” they said, “and we spent a significant portion of 2011 pressing intelligence officials to provide evidence of its effectiveness. They were unable to do so, and the program was shut down that year.”

I never ever believe it when the government says they’ve shut down a nefarious program. What they’ve always done is rework it. They may have stopped injecting poor black men suffering from syphilis with placebos so they could study the course of the disease (sure), but you can bet they’re doing something just as unethical in every field of science, and periodically, we get wind of it. And they certainly didn’t stop their “Total Awareness” operation, even though they were forced to “shut down” the official TIA program.

White House Desperation?

Circling the wagons or just a power play?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Big Brother - the Next Installment

“The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and email in their databases. What these programs are are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things: it searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered; and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or connected to that IP address do in the future. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst.”

[...]

Following up on Edward Snowden’s earlier claim that he could wiretap anybody as a low-level defense contractor—a claim denied by NSA officials and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers—Glenn Greenwald appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and claimed that his forthcoming reporting would prove exactly that. “It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool,” Greenwald said of the program Snowden used, “exactly the type that Mr. Snowden described. NSA officials are going to be testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, and I defy them to deny that these programs work exactly as I’ve just said.”

  Mediaite

They're Hopping Like Rabbits Now

But not on the big stuff. Little hops. Bunnies.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is pushing to fast-track legislation that would require police to obtain a warrant before accessing emails and other private online messages.

Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-Vt.) goal is for the Senate to unanimously approve his bill before the August recess, according to one of his committee aides. Any opposition could delay a vote until after Congress returns in the fall.

[...]

Leahy's bill would not affect the NSA programs, but it would curb the ability of local and federal law enforcement officials to access private online messages.

[...]

Under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986, police only need a subpoena, issued without a judge's approval, to force Internet companies to turn over emails that have been opened or that are more than 180 days old.

  The Hill

A subpoena issued without a judge’s approval?

   ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Moving on Snowden

Confirming a report in the Washington Post newspaper, the US official said that a sealed criminal complaint had been lodged with a federal court in the US state of Virginia and a provisional arrest warrant had also been issued.

Snowden was charged with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person, the document said.

[...]

Meanwhile, an Icelandic businessman linked to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said on Thursday he had readied a private plane in China to fly Snowden to Iceland if Iceland's government would grant asylum.

  al Jazeera

NPR this morning is spreading the rumor that Snowden is in police custody in Hong Kong. We shall see.

[D]uring the Obama presidency, there are now seven [Espionage Act prosecutions]: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

[...]

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.

[...]

[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 aimed at American citizens - and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they're doing - 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.

  Glenn Greenwald

What a delicious dilemma this all provides for Republicans in Congress. They thought that they wanted nothing more than to get rid of Barack Obama. And now that they have a possible chance to impeach on the grounds Snowden has provided, they can’t, because they find themselves on his side.

“I think it’s very surprising to accuse someone of espionage who hasn’t worked for a foreign government, who didn’t covertly pass information to an adversary [or] enemy of the United States, who didn’t sell any top secret information,” [Glenn] Greenwald told Hayes, arguing that Snowden “simply went to newspapers, asked newspapers to very carefully vet the information to make sure that the only thing being published are things that informed his fellow citizens but doesn’t harm national security. That is not espionage in any real sense of the word.”

[...]

“I don’t think you’ll find very many people who argue that he should not be charged with any sort of criminal offense,” Greenwald responded. “I think when he did what he set out to do that he understood that it was in violation of the law. He felt like it was a noble act, justified under basic theories of civil disobedience, and that he expected to be charged with a crime.”

[...]

“[The Espionage Act] is a 1917 statute enacted under Woodrow Wilson to criminalize opposition to World War I,” Greenwald continued. “It has been used very, very sparingly throughout American history until the Obama administration, which has embraced it with extreme vigor as a means of punishing and prosecuting whistleblowers, and so in that regard, I think it’s unsurprising.”

[...]

“If this administration were equitable and consistent in trying to punish people who leak classified information, you could look at this act and say, ‘I think it’s excessive but at least it’s consistent,’” Greenwald continued, saying various administration officials were not prosecuted despite leaking top-secret or classified information that made the White House look good.

  Raw Story

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The NSA Is Keeping Our Records for a Very Good Reason

A pair of classified government documents [...] signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and posted by the Guardian on Thursday show that NSA analysts are able to listen to Americans' intercepted phone calls without asking a judge for a warrant first.

[...]

Analysts are expected to exercise "reasonable judgment" in determining which data to use, according to the documents, and "inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years." The documents also refer to "content repositories" that contain records of devices' "previous Internet activity," and say the NSA keeps records of Americans' "electronic communications accounts/addresses/identifiers" in an apparent effort to avoid targeting them in future eavesdropping efforts.

  CNET

Emphasis mine.

On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a carefully-worded statement in response to a CNET article and other reports questioning when intelligence analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. Clapper said: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress."

Clapper's statement was viewed as a denial, but it wasn't. Today's disclosures reveal why: Because the Justice Department granted intelligence analysts "proper legal authorization" in advance through the Holder regulations.

This interpretation of  “proper legal authorization” sounds a lot like the “due process” the administration claims is given to people on the president’s kill list.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why Didn't Ed Snowden Go Through "Proper" Channels?

Like a "good" American. Let these guys tell you.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

And, just for the YWA record, there have been media/government claims that Snowden is a braggart and a liar; that he couldn’t do the things he said he could do. William Binney would like you to know otherwise:

Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.

So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.

  USA Today

Squirming

Update on the Nadler story:

Since the scandal broke, Nadler has walked back his comments in a statement. "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant," the New York Democrat told Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski.

  Yahoo

Perhaps, legally, you mean. Otherwise at any rate, the government can collect any of the information without warrants and hold it until it decides to request a specific warrant to look at it. And I assume that means the government can record the content of your phone calls and stash it.   And, even in the unlikely event that is untrue, it is definitely true that the government has been collecting the metadata on calls, which can tell them who you are, who you call and who they call. This business about not knowing exactly what you are saying is meaningless distraction.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Minimal Intrusion

Facebook announced late Friday that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 requests from all levels of government in the U.S., from local law enforcement to classified national security requests, in the second half of 2012 alone. Microsoft said Friday that it received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests from all levels of government in that same time period, while Apple disclosed in a statement late Sunday that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement from December 2012 through May 2013.

  TPM

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We Don't Need No Steenkeen Court Order

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

  CNET

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


UPDATE 6/17:

Since the scandal broke, Nadler has walked back his comments in a statement. "I am pleased that the administration has reiterated that, as I have always believed, the NSA cannot listen to the content of Americans’ phone calls without a specific warrant," the New York Democrat told Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski.

  Yahoo

Perhaps, legally, you mean. Otherwise at any rate, it can collect any of the information and hold it until it decides to request a specific warrant. And I assume that means the government can record the content and stash it. Which, even in the unlikely event that is untrue, it is definitely true that the government has been collecting the metadata on calls, which can tell them who you are, who you call and who they call. This business about not knowing exactly what you are saying is meaningless distraction.

James Bamford Overestimates Americans

As someone who has written many books and articles about the agency, I have seldom seen the NSA in such a state. Like a night prowler with a bag of stolen goods suddenly caught in a powerful Klieg light, it now finds itself under the glare of nonstop press coverage, accused of robbing the public of its right to privacy.

[...]

Last year in my Wired cover story on the enormous new NSA data center in Utah, Bill Binney, the man who largely designed the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping system, warned of the secret, nationwide surveillance. He told how the NSA had gained access to billions of billing records not only from AT&T but also from Verizon.

[...]

I also wrote about Adrienne J. Kinne, an NSA intercept operator who attempted to blow the whistle on the NSA’s illegal eavesdropping on Americans following the 9/11 attacks. “Basically all rules were thrown out the window,” she said, “and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” She only told her story to me after attempting, and failing, to end the illegal activity with appeals all the way up the chain of command to Major General Keith Alexander, head of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command at the time.

[...]

Without documents to prove their claims, the agency simply dismissed them as falsehoods and much of the mainstream press simply accepted that. “We don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” Alexander said in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute last summer, by which time he had been serving as the head of the NSA for six years.

  James Bamford at Wired

Which is precisely why people like Ed Snowden are forced to leak documents.

The only surprise is that we haven’t seen more such disclosures. General Alexander will surely use all his considerable power to prevent them. Don’t be surprised if he fails.

And don’t be surprised if he succeeds. I don’t think it’s a surprise at all that more people haven’t come forward. Most Americans who earn a comfortable living don’t rock the boat. And those few of greater conscience are able to see case after case of people whose lives are turned upside down and who either live in fear of arrest and detention or are already there for leaking government criminality.

And These Are the Guys Running Things

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. --Mark Twain

If he were still alive, I'm pretty sure he'd have stopped wondering.

Senate employees and contractors who believe they may have inadvertently accessed or downloaded classified information via non-classified Senate systems, should contact the Office of Senate Security for assistance.

The Senate Security Office sent an email around the Hill Friday afternoon asking Senate employees and contractors to try to ignore the fact that top-secret, highly-classified documents are now floating around the Web freely [...] The email asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already read them.

[...]

Rules are rules — even if they make little sense in light of current circumstances and seem like a serious impediment for the staffers tasked with supporting senators who need to have a policy debate about the revelations in the leaks.

  Forbes

To say the least. Censorship run amok and making no sense whatsoever.

The Department of Defense sent around a similar email earlier this week, as reported by Wired. It appears to be standard — if inane — procedure after classified docs go viral. In 2010, U.S. agencies asked unauthorized employees not to access the classified material that came pouring out of Wikileaks in the form of videos and State Department cables.

The Quintessential Discussion

If you have time for only one article or discussion about the Snowden leaks and the state we're in, this is the one you're looking for.  Daniel Ellsberg and Brad Friedman.

I urge you to listen to the whole thing (mp3 at the beginning of the article).  Thirty or forty minutes of your time.  It will be linked in the sidebar permanently.  Or at least until the cyber Gestapo take it down.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.