The Program

Part I of a Frontline special report is available here. It's a nice recap of the beginnings of the collect it all program of the NSA, the attempts of people in the past to have it reined in and/or stopped, repercussions for them, and a lead in to the Snowden leaks. Not just reminders of how we got here, and where we are, but revelations of things I had not known about the people involved in trying to get the information out.

You’ve seen the history of how the Bush administration launched an unprecedented surveillance campaign after 9/11 at the National Security Agency, and how Obama later expanded what had become known as “The Program.”

Now find out how the NSA got all that data.

On May 20, FRONTLINE continues the story of mass surveillance in America in part two of United States of Secrets, an investigation into the secret relationship between Silicon Valley and the National Security Agency.

  PBS

Trailer for part 2.


Petition re government attempt to force reporter James Risen to reveal his sources:

You Got a Problem With That?

The White House brushed off questions about any ethical issues on appointing the vice-president's son, Hunter Biden, to a leading post at a Ukrainian gas company.

[...]

"Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family are obviously private citizens, and where they work does not reflect an endorsement by the administration or by the vice-president or president," White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

  RT

Nor does it have anything to do with Joe being US executive.

Curtis Ellis, executive director at American Jobs Alliance, told RT that it is a typical Washington politics to exploit a foreign crisis for personal gain.

Cynic.

The Biden board new appointment came just in time when Gazprom, Russian gas giant, moved Ukraine to a prepaid gas delivery regime and sent Naftogaz, Ukraine’s gas champion, a $1.66 billion bill that is due June 2, or Moscow will halt supplies.

Gazprom is demanding that Kiev pays $485 per 1,000 cubic meters, raised from $268.50 after Moscow was forced to cancel several discounts. Kiev rejects the new price as “politically motivated” and says it will only pay its debt if Gazprom lowers the price back to the previous rate.

Meanwhile, the US may use the critical energy situation in the country to promote its shale energy in Ukraine.

Hey, it’s just good business sense.

That'll Be in the Movie

From a Vanity Fair article about Edward Snowden:

That was the first indication to the White House that there was a leak, but at this stage it seemed to be just a single document. Ackerman told her the paper intended to publish a story based on a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order. Their deadline was 4:30 P.M. Hayden scrambled to assemble a conference call among Janine Gibson, the deputy directors of the N.S.A. and the F.B.I., and the general counsel for the Director of National Intelligence.

When the call finally happened, at 5:15, Gibson described the document and the paper’s intention to publish that night. The government players on the line listened, astonished, according to one person on the call. The document, dated April 25, 2013, and stamped TOP SECRET, outlined the bulk collection of all of Verizon’s customers’ phone records for a period of 90 days. It was a renewal notice—that is, the renewal of a standing court order from the FISA court.

It was a circular conversation, in which the government men were unable to discuss the document, and The Guardian was unwilling to budge unless they outlined a specific security threat that would result from the document’s publication. Gibson pressed; she thought it was possible the government could have done this as a one-off to investigate the Boston Marathon bombing. But for anyone from the intelligence community to even acknowledge the existence of a classified document may be a crime. One man on the line said tersely, “I’m not in the habit of committing felonies.” Gibson, who had practiced her talking points and was steady, stood her ground. “I think you’ll find, madam,” he replied, “that we are much better positioned than you are to say what is a national-security risk.”

“No serious news organization would do this,” said another government voice on the call. To which Gibson replied, “I think you’ll find, sir, that we are much better positioned than you are to say what is a story.”

  Vanity Fair

Greenwald re: New NSA Revelations

Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now! talks about NSA revelations in his new book, extent of NSA data collection, private corporation contracting to the US intelligence arm, and Edward Snowden himself.

Greenwald interview begins at 10:30 mark.

Survey Says

The survey, “The American Journalist in the Digital Age,” was carried out by researchers at Indiana University and is based on interviews with over 1,000 US journalists working for radio and TV stations, newspapers, magazines, wire services, and websites. According to the survey, fewer reporters than ever say they have “almost complete freedom” in selecting stories—a third said that in 2013, compared with 60 percent in 1982—and fewer members of the fourth estate are willing to get their hands dirty in the service of speaking truth to power.

[...]

[F]our out of ten respondents believe that their stories should be approved by the government or corporation they’re reporting on. In every way, journalists are more docile than before, with the survey finding that three quarters of journalists think it is wrong to obtain a job “to gain inside information,” while just 4.5 percent said it's sometimes OK to pay “for confidential information”—bizarrely, more journalists think “badgering unwilling informants” is justified (37.7 percent).

[...]

[A]s the survey suggests, journalists weren’t always so willing to shrug at crimes committed by those in power. Now, though, they are remarkably incurious creatures, with more reporters saying they would like to increase their knowledge of “podcast production” rather than their “knowledge of world affairs.”

[...]

Of those surveyed by the researchers at Indiana University, 92 percent were college graduates (fewer than six out of ten journalists had degrees 40 years ago), and 91.5 percent were white. And while more reporters are women these days, journalism is still by and large an old boys' club, with men representing 62.5 percent of all journalists. The median age of 47 is also the oldest on record; in 1982, the typical journalist was 15 years younger.

[...]

Less than a quarter of those surveyed said they were “very satisfied” with their jobs, compared with 49 percent in 1971.

  

Maybe they ought to ask themselves if their brand of journalism has anything to do with that.

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

Compromised

Six months after it was written to restrain the National Security Agency’s sweeping domestic surveillance, a privacy bill cleared a major legislative obstacle on Wednesday, even as its advocates worried that the compromises made to advance the bill have weakened its constraints on mass data collection.

[...]

Supporters in and outside of Congress concede the latest compromises have left the USA Freedom Act less protective of civil liberties than it was when introduced in October. Its distinctions from a rival bill written by the leaders of the House intelligence committee, the NSA’s strongest Capitol Hill advocates, are somewhat blurred, prompting civil libertarians to become less enthusiastic of a measure they have championed as a fix to the broad NSA powers exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[...]

[T]he revised USA Freedom Act permits the government to get phone data two “hops,” or degrees of separation, from the target of the order, which can mean millions of call records reaped from a single court order. The legal standard for that order, for counterterrorism purposes, will be “reasonable articulable suspicion” of connection to an agent of a foreign power, the NSA’s desired framework.

Significantly, the new version of the USA Freedom Act all but stripped out a provision preventing the NSA from combing through its foreign communications dragnets for Americans’ information, something Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon dubbed the “backdoor search provision,” an absence that has deeply upset supporters.

[...]

Section 215 of the Patriot Act is the provision cited by the NSA and blessed by the secret Fisa Court for bulk data collection.

[...]

As amended, the USA Freedom Act would push back the expiration of Section 215 to the end of 2017, when Section 702 is set to expire. The current expiration is 1 June of next year. Some legislators are already whispering that allowing Section 215 to expire wholesale in 2015 is a preferable reform.

[...]

Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who sponsored the USA Freedom Act in the Senate, hailed the committee vote, but said he was concerned that the text does not reform the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s national-security letters and makes insufficient changes on transparency and to the Fisa Court.

“I will continue to push for those reforms when the Senate Judiciary Committee considers the USA Freedom Act this summer,” Leahy said in a statement.

  Guardian

The original version would have banned all bulk collection by the government, the new version still allows the government to request records up to two degrees away from the target of an inquiry as long as they get the approval of a judge on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The earlier version would also have barred the NSA from gaining access to the content of Americans’ communications if collected while the agency is targeting sources believed to be abroad, dubbed “backdoor searches” by critics. The ACLU sent a letter to the judiciary committee leadership Wednesday that laid out ongoing concerns with the new version of the bill, including worries about how long the government is allowed to keep data after it obtains it. A series of amendments put forward by California Democrat Zoe Lofgren during the markup illustrated just how far the bill had moved from the original version. Lofgren proposed an amendment that would have barred “backdoor searches” that was easily voted down, with legislators indicating that any changes would alter the delicate compromise that had been reached. Sensenbrenner, referring to Lofgren’s proposal to ban backdoor searches, said the bill was on “the fast track,” and Lofgren’s amendment would “blow up” the bill’s chances of passage. Lofgren also proposed an amendment that would have raised the standard for requesting records from the “reasonable articulable suspicion” to probable cause, the same standard required for obtaining a warrant.

[...]

That amendment was not only voted down – Lofgren’s colleagues began to lecture her on legal precedent regarding the reduced standard for third-party records. Ironically, that argument figured heavily in the Obama administration’s defense of the very metadata collection program the new legislation is designed to end.

New York Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, one of the authors of the compromise, agreed with Lofgren that more protections for third-party records was needed but that her proposal was “not right” for the moment because of the need to preserve the agreement on the new legislation.

The committee did restore language proposed by Washington Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene, which made it easier for private companies to disclose details about government requests for data.

Senator Leahy, who chairs the Senate judiciary committee, said in a statement following the vote that he would seek to restore some of the provisions in the original proposal he authored with Sensenbrenner.

[...]

As it stands, the new, less sweeping version of the USA Freedom Act is now much closer to a rival proposal put together by the House intelligence committee.

  MSNBC

Chevron's Pockets Are Deeper Than Yours - and Ecuador's

[Law firm] Patton Boggs today abandoned the Ecuadorian rain forest residents on whose behalf it had fought zealously to hold Chevron responsible for contamination in the northeastern oil-producing region of the Andean country. It’s almost unheard of, however, for a major law firm to humiliate itself in the fashion Patton Boggs has done in the face of Chevron’s threat to pursue pending fraud allegations against the Washington (D.C.) firm. Patton Boggs did not admit to any wrongdoing in connection with the settlement.

[...]

Patton Boggs also agreed to provide Chevron with supportive documents and testimony and to pay the company $15 million as a tangible symbol of its abasement.

[...]

The bizarre saga stems from a February 2011 judgment in an Ecuadorian trial court that Chevron is culpable for decades of oil contamination in that country. The liability verdict was upheld by Ecuador’s Supreme Court, but the $19 billion in damages was halved to $9.5 billion.

Chevron refused to pay, arguing that the architect of the judgment, New York plaintiffs’ attorney Steven Donziger, fabricated evidence, coerced Ecuadorian judges, and participated in the ghostwriting of supposedly neutral expert reports and the February 2011 ruling itself. Chevron formalized those allegations in a U.S. civil racketeering suit against Donziger that produced a March 2014 verdict against the plaintiffs’ lawyer. Donziger denies wrongdoing and has appealed.

[...]

Patton Boggs [had] signed on as co-counsel with Donziger, agreeing to use its expertise and influence to help enforce the Ecuadorian judgment in courts around the world. That led to Chevron’s accusing the law firm of participating in the racketeering conspiracy pinned on Donziger by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. Patton Boggs, in turn, accused Chevron and its main outside law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, of abusive tactics. In the wake of Judge Kaplan’s March ruling against Donziger, however, Patton Boggs decided to throw in the towel.

[...]

Apart from Patton Boggs, a number of other former Donziger allies, including lawyers, scientific experts, and financiers, have disavowed their past relationships with the plaintiffs’ attorney and their allegations against Chevron.

  Business Week

Oh, for Fuck's Sake

The US Defense Department is conducting a counterterrorism program investigation of virtual currencies like Bitcoin and other new technologies, including smartphones and social media, to better understand if they pose security threats.

Run by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), a division of the Pentagon that analyzes terrorism and irregular warfare capabilities, the program recently ended its open call for vendors that could help the US military understand the technologies and any threats they could potentially pose, the International Business Times reported.

  RT

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

Brakes on the NSA?

The House Judiciary Committee voted 32-0 to advance legislation that would put a halt to the National Security Agency’s controversial bulk collection of internet and telephone records, exposed last year by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[...]

Under the provisions of the bill, the NSA would be required to prove to the courts that an individual is somehow connected with terrorism before it could gain access to their personal information.

[...]

Now that the issue of NSA surveillance has gained forward momentum in Congress, it will be taken up next by the House Intelligence Committee, which has been kicking around its own NSA bill, entitled “FISA Transparency and Modernization Act,” before moving on to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which last year expressed support of the existing NSA program.

[...]

As for scaling back the powers of the NSA, should Congress fail to pass a bill into law this year, the provision underlying the NSA phone records collection (Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act) will expire in June 2015.

At that point, it will then be up to Congress and the president to decide whether to renew the legislation.

  RT

So can we expect a terror attack within the next year?

And What a Surprise

In Afghanistan, his presence was enough to cause prisoners to tremble. Hundreds in his organization’s custody were beaten, shocked with electrical currents or subjected to other abuses documented in human rights reports. Some allegedly disappeared.

And then Haji Gulalai disappeared as well.

[...]

Because of his reputation for brutality, Gulalai was someone both sides of the war wanted gone. The Taliban tried at least twice to kill him. Despite Gulalai’s ties to the CIA and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, United Nations officials and U.S. coalition partners sought to rein him in or have him removed.

[...]

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gulalai was among a core group of Pashtuns recruited by the CIA to help the agency and U.S. Special Operations teams seize Kandahar

[...]

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gulalai was among a core group of Pashtuns recruited by the CIA to help the agency and U.S. Special Operations teams seize Kandahar.

[...]

Today, Gulalai lives in a pink two-story house in Southern California, on a street of stucco homes on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

  WaPo

Well, he’ll probably be moving now.

Despite a substantial record of human rights abuses, Gulalai was able to bypass immigration barriers faced by Afghans whose work for the United States made them potential targets of the Taliban. Many have been turned away because of security objections submitted in secret by U.S. spy agencies.

[...]

CIA officials said the agency played no role in bringing Gulalai into the country. Officials at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security would not comment on his relocation or immigration status, citing privacy restrictions.

That’s rich. He has privacy rights, but, as we’ve seen from the NSA leaks, you don’t.

“They killed my cousins, four or five uncles, that’s why we came out here,” said [Gulalai’s son Raqib] Achakzai, who indicated that he works as a contractor for the U.S. military in North Carolina. He declined to discuss details of the family’s departure from Afghanistan, however, saying, “These are questions I’m not about to answer.”

Probably wouldn’t be wise.

CIA officials denied any involvement.

Of course.

Once in the country, Gulalai was granted asylum, said an official familiar with the case.

Asylum is designed to grant safe haven to foreigners who are likely to be arrested, tortured or killed if they return home. But U.S. law bars the granting of asylum to those who have persecuted others.

[...]

Gulalai has made several return trips to Afghanistan in recent months to sell property there, family members and associates said. If true, the visits could undermine the argument that Afghanistan had become too dangerous for him, potentially complicating his asylum claim

[...]

Gulalai secured permanent resident status in the United States last year and is moving toward citizenship.

And he should fit right in.

Kamal Achakzai aka Haji Gulalai