The Criminal N.S.A.

[seemslikeadream]

The Criminal N.S.A.
By JENNIFER STISA GRANICK and CHRISTOPHER JON SPRIGMAN
Published: June 27, 2013


THE twin revelations that telecom carriers have been secretly giving the National Security Agency information about Americans’ phone calls, and that the N.S.A. has been capturing e-mail and other private communications from Internet companies as part of a secret program called Prism, have not enraged most Americans. Lulled, perhaps, by the Obama administration’s claims that these “modest encroachments on privacy” were approved by Congress and by federal judges, public opinion quickly migrated from shock to “meh.”

It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

The administration has defended each of the two secret programs. Let’s examine them in turn.

Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contract employee and whistle-blower, has provided evidence that the government has phone record metadata on all Verizon customers, and probably on every American, going back seven years. This metadata is extremely revealing; investigators mining it might be able to infer whether we have an illness or an addiction, what our religious affiliations and political activities are, and so on.

The law under which the government collected this data, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows the F.B.I. to obtain court orders demanding that a person or company produce “tangible things,” upon showing reasonable grounds that the things sought are “relevant” to an authorized foreign intelligence investigation. The F.B.I. does not need to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed, or any connection to terrorism.

Even in the fearful time when the Patriot Act was enacted, in October 2001, lawmakers never contemplated that Section 215 would be used for phone metadata, or for mass surveillance of any sort. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., a Wisconsin Republican and one of the architects of the Patriot Act, and a man not known as a civil libertarian, has said that “Congress intended to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations.” The N.S.A.’s demand for information about every American’s phone calls isn’t “targeted” at all — it’s a dragnet. “How can every call that every American makes or receives be relevant to a specific investigation?” Mr. Sensenbrenner has asked. The answer is simple: It’s not.

The government claims that under Section 215 it may seize all of our phone call information now because it might conceivably be relevant to an investigation at some later date, even if there is no particular reason to believe that any but a tiny fraction of the data collected might possibly be suspicious. That is a shockingly flimsy argument — any data might be “relevant” to an investigation eventually, if by “eventually” you mean “sometime before the end of time.” If all data is “relevant,” it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.

Let’s turn to Prism: the streamlined, electronic seizure of communications from Internet companies. In combination with what we have already learned about the N.S.A.’s access to telecommunications and Internet infrastructure, Prism is further proof that the agency is collecting vast amounts of e-mails and other messages — including communications to, from and between Americans.

The government justifies Prism under the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. Section 1881a of the act gave the president broad authority to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance. If the attorney general and the director of national intelligence certify that the purpose of the monitoring is to collect foreign intelligence information about any non­American individual or entity not known to be in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can require companies to provide access to Americans’ international communications. The court does not approve the target or the facilities to be monitored, nor does it assess whether the government is doing enough to minimize the intrusion, correct for collection mistakes and protect privacy. Once the court issues a surveillance order, the government can issue top-secret directives to Internet companies like Google and Facebook to turn over calls, e-mails, video and voice chats, photos, voice­over IP calls (like Skype) and social networking information.

Like the Patriot Act, the FISA Amendments Act gives the government very broad surveillance authority. And yet the Prism program appears to outstrip that authority. In particular, the government “may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States.”

The government knows that it regularly obtains Americans’ protected communications. The Washington Post reported that Prism is designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s “foreignness” — as John Oliver of “The Daily Show” put it, “a coin flip plus 1 percent.” By turning a blind eye to the fact that 49-plus percent of the communications might be purely among Americans, the N.S.A. has intentionally acquired information it is not allowed to have, even under the terrifyingly broad auspices of the FISA Amendments Act.

How could vacuuming up Americans’ communications conform with this legal limitation? Well, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Andrea Mitchell of NBC, the N.S.A. uses the word “acquire” only when it pulls information out of its gigantic database of communications and not when it first intercepts and stores the information.

If there’s a law against torturing the English language, James Clapper is in real trouble.

The administration hides the extent of its “incidental” surveillance of Americans behind fuzzy language. When Congress reauthorized the law at the end of 2012, legislators said Americans had nothing to worry about because the surveillance could not “target” American citizens or permanent residents. Mr. Clapper offered the same assurances. Based on these statements, an ordinary citizen might think the N.S.A. cannot read Americans’ e-mails or online chats under the F.A.A. But that is a government ­fed misunderstanding.

A “target” under the act is a person or entity the government wants information on — not the people the government is trying to listen to. It’s actually O.K. under the act to grab Americans’ messages so long as they are communicating with the target, or anyone who is not in the United States.

Leave aside the Patriot Act and FISA Amendments Act for a moment, and turn to the Constitution.

The Fourth Amendment obliges the government to demonstrate probable cause before conducting invasive surveillance. There is simply no precedent under the Constitution for the government’s seizing such vast amounts of revealing data on innocent Americans’ communications.

The government has made a mockery of that protection by relying on select Supreme Court cases, decided before the era of the public Internet and cellphones, to argue that citizens have no expectation of privacy in either phone metadata or in e-mails or other private electronic messages that it stores with third parties.

This hairsplitting is inimical to privacy and contrary to what at least five justices ruled just last year in a case called United States v. Jones. One of the most conservative justices on the Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote that where even public information about individuals is monitored over the long term, at some point, government crosses a line and must comply with the protections of the Fourth Amendment. That principle is, if anything, even more true for Americans’ sensitive nonpublic information like phone metadata and social networking activity.

We may never know all the details of the mass surveillance programs, but we know this: The administration has justified them through abuse of language, intentional evasion of statutory protections, secret, unreviewable investigative procedures and constitutional arguments that make a mockery of the government’s professed concern with protecting Americans’ privacy. It’s time to call the N.S.A.’s mass surveillance programs what they are: criminal.

[semiconscious]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/06/is-this-the-real-reason-for-the-government-spying-on-americans.html

excerpt:

To understand the scope and extent of government spying on all Americans – and the reasons for such spying – you have to understand what has happened to our Constitutional form of government since 9/11.

The United States has been in a declared state of emergency from September 2001, to the present. Specifically, on September 11, 2001, the government declared a state of emergency. That declared state of emergency was formally put in writing on 9/14/2001:

A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001 . . .

That declared state of emergency has continued in full force and effect from 9/11 to the present. President Bush kept it in place, and President Obama has also.

For example, on September 9, 2011, President Obama declared:

CONTINUATION OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY DECLARED BY PROC. NO. 7463

Notice of President of the United States, dated Sept. 9, 2011, 76 F.R. 56633, provided:

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency previously declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2011. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This notice shall be published in the Federal Register and transmitted to the Congress.

The Washington Times wrote on September 18, 2001:

Simply by proclaiming a national emergency on Friday, President Bush activated some 500 dormant legal provisions, including those allowing him to impose censorship and martial law.

The White House has kept substantial information concerning its presidential proclamations and directives hidden from Congress. For example, according to Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy:

Of the 54 National Security Presidential Directives issued by the [George W.] Bush Administration to date, the titles of only about half have been publicly identified. There is descriptive material or actual text in the public domain for only about a third. In other words, there are dozens of undisclosed Presidential directives that define U.S. national security policy and task government agencies, but whose substance is unknown either to the public or, as a rule, to Congress.

this (never-ending?) 'state of emergency' has basically made the constitution irrelevant. this is their legal cover for all they've chosen to do, & continue to do. people continuing to discuss these issues as seen through the lens of 'what's constitutionally correct' are missing the bigger picture. what they need to be asking is: 'why are we still in a state of emergency?'...

[NeonLX]

[quote="semiconscious » Fri Jun 28, 2013 7:53 am"
this (never-ending?) 'state of emergency' has basically made the constitution irrelevant. this is their legal cover for all they've chosen to do, & continue to do. people continuing to discuss these issues as seen through the lens of 'what's constitutionally correct' are missing the bigger picture. what they need to be asking is: 'why are we still in a state of emergency?'...[/quote]

Yes, I do believe that is the fundamental question.

My mainstream liberal friends think I'm a nutter when I say we are living in "enemy-occupied territory". I mean, how could we be, with O'bomber sitting at the preznit's desk?

[seemslikeadream]

26 senators demand answers from Clapper on surveillance
By Aaron Blake, Published: June 28, 2013 at 11:16 amE-mail the writer

James Clapper (AP Photo)

A group of 26 senators have signed a letter demanding that National Intelligence Director James Clapper publicly answer questions about the federal government’s bulk collection of data – one of the broadest efforts yet to apply pressure on the intelligence community in the aftermath of the disclosures of its surveillance programs.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) organized the effort, which has the support of a bipartisan group of senators comprising more than one-quarter of the chamber — a significant statement from privacy advocates in the Senate.

“We are concerned that by depending on secret interpretations of the PATRIOT Act that differed from an intuitive reading of the statute, this program essentially relied for years on a secret body of law,” the senators wrote in the letter.
The senators also cited Clapper’s much-scrutinized claim before the programs were revealed that the government wasn’t collecting bulk data on millions of Americans. They say misleading statements and secret decisions have “prevented our constituents from evaluating the decisions that their government was making, and will unfortunately undermine trust in government more broadly. The debate that the President has now welcomed is an important first step toward restoring that trust.”
The letter includes seven specific questions that the senators would like Clapper to answer.
The senators who signed the letter are: Wyden, Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Jon Tester (D-Mt.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Dean Heller (R- Nev.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah).

[seemslikeadream]

MONDAY, JUL 1, 2013 11:02 AM CDT
James Clapper is still lying to America
A smoking gun shows Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is a big liar -- and it's not the first time
BY DAVID SIROTA

“James Clapper Is Still Lying”: That would be a more honest headline for yesterday’s big Washington Post article about the director of national intelligence’s letter to the U.S. Senate.

Clapper, you may recall, unequivocally said “no, sir” in response to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asking him: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper’s response was shown to be a lie by Snowden’s disclosures, as well as by reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News (among others). This is particularly significant, considering lying before Congress prevents the legislative branch from performing oversight and is therefore a felony.

Upon Snowden’s disclosures, Clapper initially explained his lie by insisting that his answer was carefully and deliberately calculated to be the “least most untruthful” response to a question about classified information. Left unmentioned was the fact that he could have simply given the same truthful answer that Alberto Gonzales gave the committee in 2006.


Now, though, Clapper is wholly changing his story, insisting that his answer wasn’t a deliberate, carefully calibrated “least most untruthful” response; it was instead just a spur-of-the-moment accident based on an innocent misunderstanding. Indeed, as the Post reports, “Clapper sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 21 saying that he had misunderstood the question he had been asked” and adding that “he thought Wyden was referring to NSA surveillance of e-mail traffic involving overseas targets, not the separate program in which the agency is authorized to collect records of Americans’ phone calls.” In his letter, Clapper says, “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize,” and added that “mistakes will happen, and when I make one, I correct it.”

So Clapper first says it was a calculated move, and now he’s saying it was just an innocuous misunderstanding and an inadvertent error. With that, the public — and the Obama administration prosecutors who aggressively pursue perjurers — are all supposed to now breathe a sigh of relief and chalk it all up to a forgivable screw-up. It’s all just an innocent mistake, right?

Wrong, because in this crime, as Clapper’s changing story suggests, there remains a smoking gun.

Notice this statement from Sen. Wyden about Snowden’s disclosures — a statement, mind you, that the Post didn’t reference in its story yesterday (emphasis added):

“One of the most important responsibilities a Senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions. When NSA Director Alexander failed to clarify previous public statements about domestic surveillance, it was necessary to put the question to the Director of National Intelligence. So that he would be prepared to answer, I sent the question to Director Clapper’s office a day in advance. After the hearing was over my staff and I gave his office a chance to amend his answer.

So Clapper had a full day’s notice of the specific — and impossible to misunderstand — question Wyden asked, and is nonetheless now claiming that in the heat of the moment he spontaneously misunderstood the question. In other words, he’s not coming clean, as the Post story seems to imply. On the contrary, he’s lying about his deliberate lie, which should only make a perjury prosecution that much easier, for it shows intent.

The importance of such a perjury prosecution, of course, should not be lost on our constitutional law professor-turned-president.

Out of all people, he has to understand that equal protection under the law means treating Clapper (and Alexander, who also lied to Congress) exactly the same way his administration treated pitcher Roger Clemens. Otherwise, the message from the government would be that lying to Congress about baseball is more of a felony than lying to Congress about Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights. Such a message would declare that when it comes to brazen law-breaking, as long as you are personally connected to the president, you get protection rather than the prosecution you deserve.

[seemslikeadream]

Interview with NSA expert James Bamford

James Bamford: “The NSA has no constitutional right to secretly obtain the telephone records of every American citizen on a daily basis, subject them to sophisticated data mining and store them forever.”

No one, it can be argued, knows more about the history of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. The investigative journalist, who served in the Navy and attended law school in his native Boston, has the distinction of having written the first book about the NSA: “The Puzzle Palace: A Report on NSA, America’s Most Secret Agency.”

Since that 1982 best seller, Bamford has written three more books that delve into the NSA: “Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency” (2001); “A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies” (2004); and “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret N.S.A. From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America” (2008).



A former distinguished visiting professor at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, Bamford now lives in Washington, D.C., and London.

He answered questions by email about the NSA in light of the recent case of Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the agency who leaked details of classified mass surveillance programs, including PRISM, which collects metadata from Internet sites.

Q: What do you make of Edward Snowden’s actions?

A: With regard to the information he released on domestic surveillance, I consider him a whistleblower. He revealed details of massive violations by the NSA of the privacy rights of all Americans. The NSA has no constitutional right to secretly obtain the telephone records of every American citizen on a daily basis, subject them to sophisticated data mining and store them forever. It’s time government officials are charged with criminal conduct, including lying to Congress, instead of going after those exposing the wrongdoing.

Q: What has changed the most about the NSA since your last book, “The Shadow Factory,” came out in 2008?

A: The agency has expanded enormously, in terms of size, power and invasiveness since “The Shadow Factory” was published. As I wrote in my Wired magazine cover story last year, the agency has been going on a massive building spree, expanding eavesdropping locations around the world, including one for 4,000 intercept operators at its facility near Augusta, Ga. In addition, it is in the process of building a gigantic one million square-foot surveillance center in Utah where it will store billions of records, phone calls, email and Google searches, many of them involving Americans.



The agency has also increased enormously in power. In my current July 2013 cover story in Wired, I write about Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of NSA, and how he has become the most powerful figure in the history of American intelligence. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign or the depth of his secrecy. As a four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force and the Second Army.

Q: The NSA predicted, as you wrote in “The Shadow Factory,” that it would be “plowing through phone calls, e-mails, and other data at more than a quadrillion operations a second,” breaking the so-called petaflop barrier. A mere quadrillion operations a second — is that child’s play these days?

A: As I wrote in my Wired cover story last year, the NSA is secretly building the world’s fastest and most powerful computer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the U.S. developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Having broken the petaflop barrier, they are now working on a computer with exaflop speed, one quintillion (1018) operations a second, and the next goal will be zettaflop (1021) and yottaflop. Beyond yottaflop, names have not yet been invented.



Q: In “The Shadow Factory,” you wrote that the NSA’s watch list — “of people, both American and foreign, thought to pose a danger to the country” — once had only 20 names on it, then rose to “an astonishing half a million.” Do you know what the figure is now?

A: The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list, known as TIDE, now contains about 875,000 names.

Q: PRISM has reportedly given the NSA access to exabytes of confidential data. To give readers some perspective, roughly how much information is contained in an exabyte? How many books could fit in one?

A: An exabyte is about 960,767,920,505,705 pages of text or about 4,803,839,602,528 books containing 200 pages.

Q: Privacy concerns aside, one of the problems with collecting all this data, you have written, is that “the NSA is akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,” a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored, but not a single word understood.” What does the NSA need to do to make practical use of this data?

A: The problem is the bigger you build the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle. Thus, despite all this collection, the NSA missed the Boston bombing, the underwear bomber and the Times Square bomber. And most, if not all, of the “successes” they point to could have been discovered using much less invasive surveillance. Thus, they should collect less hay and give analysts better training in ways to find needles.



Q: In “The Shadow Factory,” you quote the late Sen. Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said the NSA’s data collection “could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” What do you make of Church’s comments today?

A: He was enormously prescient and we should have heeded his warning.

[justdrew]

It seems to be there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to trust these private companies operating these systems to not abuse them. None whatsoever. These companies are probably FULL of people who've been compromised and coerced into providing info to any and ever malefactor in society from "the mob" to whatever.

I consider it HIGHLY LIKELY that these systems are being used to assemble Blacklists

[Luther Blissett]

It seems to be there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to trust these private companies operating these systems to not abuse them. None whatsoever. These companies are probably FULL of people who've been compromised and coerced into providing info to any and ever malefactor in society from "the mob" to whatever.

I consider it HIGHLY LIKELY that these systems are being used to assemble Blacklists

The contemporary equivalent of a blacklist, something akin to the way the populace is softly abused as opposed to the old method of hangings in the square. The blacklist version of our "what is fascism" thread.

[seemslikeadream]

U.S. intelligence community is out of control
By David Rothkopf, Special to CNN
updated 9:50 AM EDT, Tue July 2, 2013
Some did it for the money, some did it for idealism, others didn't do it at all. The U.S. has seen a number of high profile leak scandals including the Pentagon Papers during the administration of President Richard Nixon. Click through to see more high-profile intelligence leaking cases.

David Rothkopf: The U.S. intelligence community is being slammed as overreaching
He says more news of spying, on United States' European allies, has drawn shock and anger
He says it's out of control, with poor oversight and disregard for laws and U.S. values
Rothkopf: There are real threats, but intelligence community hasn't shown spying is only answer
Editor's note: David Rothkopf writes regularly for CNN.com. He is CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Follow him on Twitter.
(CNN) -- It's hard to think of a time in the history of America's intelligence community when it has been more battered by accusations of over-stepping or mismanaging its mission: to secretly gather information to support the activities of the U.S. government
The list of recent revelations grew over the weekend with allegations that America has been systematically spying on its European allies. Reports in the European press, apparently drawn from documents provided by Edward Snowden, suggested that America spied on the European Union, France, Italy, Greece and other close international friends, listening in on encrypted fax transmissions and planting bugs and other devices at 38 embassies and missions in Washington and New York, as well as locations in Europe.

David Rothkopf
The timing is not great: the eve of scheduled trade talks with the Europeans, a priority of the Obama administration. The new reports have caused a furor across the continent, stoking the uproar caused by earlier Snowden-related revelations that America has been listening in on millions of German calls and e-mails.
Top officials, like Secretary of State John Kerry, shrugged it off by saying allies often spy on each other, and others, like former Director of the NSA and CIA Gen. Michael Hayden, noted that some friends spied on us. But the damage was done to important relationships and to the Obama administration's prior claims that it would conduct itself according to a different standard than past U.S. governments.
All nations collect intelligence, Obama says
"Officials have bought into the post 9/11 paranoia...and come to accept that even the possibility of a meaningful attack on the U.S. warrants disregard for U.S. laws and international agreements."
This all comes on the heels of reports that the overreach of the intelligence community begins at home. While it will be cold comfort to our NATO allies that we are only treating them as we do our own people, the details of programs that warehouse massive amounts of phone metadata and e-mail traffic were the first shock waves produced by the Snowden leaks.
But the problems go beyond what Snowden leaked to the very fact that a comparatively junior contractor could gain top level clearances and access to so much information. Indeed, it is deeply disturbing that hundreds of thousands of private contractors had Top Secret clearances and that, as we have learned, many may have gone through inadequate screening procedures or been inadequately managed.
Earlier news -- about the scope of U.S. drone programs managed by the intelligence community, "kill lists," extra-judicial targeting of perceived threats, the scope of America's cyberwarfare programs against enemies in Iran (Stuxnet), China and elsewhere -- have already called the role of the community into question. Just last week NBC News reported that a senior U.S. military leader very close to President Obama and his national security team, Gen. James Cartwright, was a target of a leak investigation concerning Stuxnet..
These are all stories of a culture of secrecy and of arrogance that has simply gone too far. Perhaps each and every one of these missions began with a reasonable national security goal. But because so much of the planning and execution takes place behind closed doors or in situations in which the term "oversight" is laughably applied to wink-and-a-nod rubber stamping of initiatives, it is perhaps more surprising we have seen so few scandals than that we are dealing now with what seems like so many.
Consider: According to the U.S. government's own figures, last year the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court received 1,789 applications for approval of government spying operations and OK'd all but one. Since 2001, according to a report in Salon based on government figures collected by the Federation of American Scientists, more than 15,000 applications were approved and only 10 denied. The Supreme Soviet of Cold War Russia was a less effective rubber stamp.
Bush on Snowden: He damaged country Obama misleading U.S. on surveillance? Baer: I am skeptical over NSA claims Schiff: The NSA needs to declassify more
The FISA Court is just one of the feeble oversight mechanisms that apparently did not do its job. Congressional and executive branch officials have bought into the post 9/11 paranoia and hopped up threat mentality and come to accept that even the possibility of an attack on the United States warrants disregard for U.S. laws and international agreements. Not to mention the principles of respect for individual liberties and reasonable constraints on government power on which the United States was established.
This was well illustrated when NSA Director Keith Alexander argued that the agency's massive surveillance programs were warranted because they allegedly stopped "over 50" terror attacks, with scant reference to the size of the attacks, the real risk posed, whether other means to stop them that didn't involve massive surveillance might exist, or to the possibility that the damage done to civil liberties might be worse than that which might have been produced had the terror plans gone forward.
Opinion: Why we're all stuck in the digital transit zone with Snowden
Indeed, senior U.S. officials have told me that, in their view, a primary motivator for accepting all these programs was fear that resisting would hold dire political consequences for them, should an attack occur. In other words, in the modern U.S. intelligence community, CYA has become more important than CIA.
There are real threats out there. And, yes, other nations spy on us. Terrorists use new technologies to target American interests and citizens and must be contained. Cyberwarfare poses a growing threat to the United States as well as other nations.
All these facts require analysis and countermeasures by the U.S. government. Some require the United States to go on offense. But what the revelations show is a series of errors of overreach and bad judgment, not that all our programs should be eliminated. The problem here is one of scale and of profoundly compromised and twisted values.
That problem itself is complicated and exacerbated by America's emergence as the world's first cybersuperpower. As such, we have sought to flex our technological muscles not only in ways that make us safer but that introduce a new form of constant, low-grade, invisible conflict that makes Cold War spy games seem quaint in their narrowness--even if their stakes were much higher. In the past, I've called this Cool War—neither cold nor hot but dangerous nonetheless, not just to our enemies but also to our friends, our interests and our values.
Edward Snowden broke the law and if the United States can bring him in, he deserves to be prosecuted. But the ones who should be in their own hot seat are those who created, approved and rationalized into existence the sprawling, seemingly uncontainable global intelligence and cyberwarfare apparatus that is as much of a threat to the kind of country we want to be as any terrorist group.
Opinion: Why can the U.S. do about Snowden?
The problem for us, of course, is the only people with the power to restore balance and common sense limitations to these programs are the ones who let them get so out of control in the first place.

[beeline]

Audio at link:

http://mobandmultitude.com/2013/07/02/the-nsa-comes-recruiting/


The NSA Comes Recruiting

Some students and I had an exchange with NSA recruiters today. The audio and a rough transcript below.

The NSA came to recruit at a language program at the University of Wisconsin where I am spending my summer learning a language. Two recruiters, a redhead who looked more like a middle-aged 2013 NSA flyer copymother (listed as “NSA_F” below) and a portly, balding man (“NSA_M”), began to go through slides explaining the NSA and its work.

I had intended to go simply to hear how the NSA is recruiting at a moment when it’s facing severe challenges, what with the Edward Snowden and all. Dismayingly, however, a local high school teacher had thought it was good to bring 5 of his students to the session. They were smartly dressed, some of them even wearing ties as if there might be a job interview, young faces in a classroom of graduate students. They sat across from me at the roundtable. It was really their presence that goaded me–and I think a couple of other students–into an interaction with the recruiters.

Roughly half an hour into the session, the exchange below began. I began by asking them how they understood the term “adversary” since the surveillance seems to be far beyond those the American state classifies as enemies, and their understanding of that ties into the recruiters’ earlier statement that “the globe is our playground.” I ended up asking them whether being a liar was a qualification for the NSA because:

@Madi_Hatter a 2008 slideshow for college seniors considering CIA careers asked potential applicants: “Are you good at manipulating people?”

— David Mehnert (@Savants) July 2, 2013

The NSA’s instrumental understanding of language as well as its claustrophobic social world was readily apparent. One of the recruiters discussed how they tend to socialize after work, dressing up in costumes and getting drunk (referenced below). I can imagine that also exerts a lot of social pressure and works as a kind of social closure from which it would be difficult to escape. The last thing I want to point out –once again– their defense seems to be that it’s legal. What is legal is not just.

Someone else happened to record it on an iPhone, hence the audio quality. It’s been edited mainly to cut garbled audio or audio that wouldn’t have made sense and edit out questions and comments from people who didn’t explicitly say it was ok to post their audio.You’ll hear the sound drop out for a second to mark the cuts.

Rough Transcript

Me: You said earlier that the two tasks that you do: one is tracking down the communications of your adversaries and the other is protecting the communications of officials. So, do you consider Germany and the countries the US has been spying on to be adversaries or are you, right now, not speaking the truth?

Me: I mean do you consider European countries, etc, adversaries or are you, right now, not telling us the truth and lying when you say that actually you simply track – you keep focusing on that, but clearly the NSA is doing a lot more than that, as we know, so I’m just asking for a clarification.

NSA_F: I’m focusing on what our foreign intelligence requires of [garbled] so, I mean you know, You can define adversary as enemy and clearly, Germany is not our enemy but would we have foreign
national interest from an intelligence perspective on what’s going on across the globe. Yeah, we do. That’s our requirements that come to us as an intelligence community organization from the policymakers, from the military, from whoever –our global so–

Me: So adversary –adversaries you actually mean anybody and everybody. There’s nobody then by your definition that is not an adversary. Is that correct?

NSA_F: That is not correct.

Me: Who is not an adversary?

NSA_F: Well, ok. I can answer your questions but the reality is—

Me: No, I’m just trying to get a clarification because you told us what the two nodes of your work are but it’s not clear to me what that encompasses and you’re being fairly unclear at the moment. Apparently it’s somebody who’s not just an enemy. It’s something broader than that. And yet, it doesn’t seem to encompass everyone.

NSA_M: So for us, umm, our business is apolitical. Ok. We do not generate the intelligence requirements. They are levied on us so, if there is a requirement for foreign intelligence concerning this issue or this region or whatever then that is. If you wanna use the word adversary, you ca– we
This is not a tampon.

This is not a tampon.

might use the word ‘target.’ That is what we are going after. That is the intelligence target that we are going after because we were given that requirement. Whether that’s adversary in a global war on terrorism sense or adversary in terms of national security interests or whatever – that’s for policymakers, I guess to make that determination. We respond to the requirements we are given, if that helps. And there’s a separation. As language analysts, we work on the SIG INT side of the house. We don’t really work on the information assurance (?) side of the house. That’s the guy setting up, protecting our communications.

Me: I’m just surprised that for language analysts, you’re incredibly imprecise with your language. And it just doesn’t seem to be clear. So, adversary is basically what any of your so-called “customers” as you call them –which is also a strange term to use for a government agency– decide if anybody wants, any part of the government wants something about some country, suddenly they are now internally considered or termed an ‘adversary.’ That’s what you seem to be saying.

[Pause]

NSA_M: I’m saying you can think about it using that term.

NSA_F: But the reality is it’s our government’s interest in what a foreign government or foreign country is doing.

Me: Right. So adversary can be anyone.

NSA_M: As long as they levy their requirement on us thru the right vehicle that exists for this and that it is defined in terms of a foreign intelligence requirement, there’s a national framework of foreign intelligence – what’s it called?

NSA_F: nipa

NSA_M: the national prioritization of intelligence framework or whatever that determines these are the issues that we are interested in, these are how they are prioritized.

Me: Your slide said adversary. It might be a bit better to say “target” but it’s not just a word game. The problem is these countries are fairly –I think Afghanistan is probably not shocked to realize they’re on the list. I think Germany seems to be quite shocked at what has been going on. This is not just a word game and you understand that as well as I do. So, it’s very strange that you’re selling yourself here in one particular fashion when it’s absolutely not true.

NSA_F: I don’t think we’re selling ourselves in an untrue fashion.

Me: Well, this is a recruiting session and you are telling us things that aren’t true. We also know that the NSA took down brochures and fact sheets after the Snowden revelations because those brochures also had severe inaccuracies and untruths in them. So, how are we supposed to believe what you’re saying?

[pause]

Student A (female): I have a lifestyle question that you seem to be selling. It sounds more like a brochure smallercolonial expedition. You know the “globe is our playground” is the words you used, the phrasing that you used and you seem to be saying that you can do your work. You can analyze said documents for your so-called customers but then you can go and get drunk and dress up and have fun without thinking of the repercussions of the info you’re analyzing has on the rest of the world. I also want to know what are the qualifications that one needs to become a whistleblower because that sounds like a much more interesting job. And I think the Edward Snowdens and the Bradley Mannings and Julian Assanges of the world will prevail ultimately.

NSA_M: I’m not sure what the –

Me: The question here is do you actually think about the ramifications of the work that you do, which is deeply problematic, or do you just dress up in costumes and get drunk? [This is in reference to an earlier comment made by the recruiters in which NSA_F said: they do heady work and then they go down to the bar and dress up in costume and do karaoke. I tweeted it earlier.]

NSA_M: That’s why, as I was saying, reporting the info in the right context is so important because the consequences of bad political decisions by our policymakers is something we all suffer from.

Student A: And people suffer from the misinformation that you pass along so you should take responsibility as well.

NSA_M: We take it very seriously that when we give info to our policy makers that we do give it to them in the right context so that they can make the best decision with the best info available.

Student B: Is that what Clapper was doing when he perjured himself in front of Congress? Was he giving accurate information when he said we do not collect any intelligence on the US citizens that it’s only occasionally unintentionally or was he perjuring himself when he made a statement before Congress under oath that he later declared to be erroneous or at least, untruthful the least truthful answer? How do you feel personally having a boss whose comfortable perjuring himself in front of Congress?

NSA_F: Our director is not general Clapper.

Student B: General Alexander also lied in front of Congress.

NSA_F: I don’t know about that.

Student B: Probably because access to the Guardian is restricted on the NSA’s computers. I am sure they don’t encourage people like you to actually think about these things. Thank God for a man like Edward Snowden who your organization is now part of a manhunt trying to track down, trying to put him in a little hole somewhere for the rest of his life. Thank god they exist.

Student A: and why are you denigrating anything else with language? We don’t do this; we don’t do that; we don’t read cultural artifacts, poetry? There are other things to do with language other than joining this group, ok. [last line of this comment was directed at the high school students.]

NSA_M: This job is not for everybody. Academia is a great career for people with language.

Me: So is this job for liars? Is this what you’re saying? Because, clearly, you’re not able to give us forthright answers. Given the way the way the NSA has behaved, given the fact that we’ve been lied to as Americans, given the fact that fact sheets have been pulled down because they clearly had untruths in them, given the fact that Clapper and Alexander lied to Congress — is that a qualification for being in the NSA? Do you have to be a good liar?

NSA_F: I don’t consider myself to be a liar in any fashion and the reality is I mean, this was billed as if you are potentially interested in an NSA career come to our session. If you’re not, if this is your personal belief and you’re understanding of what has been presented then there is nothing that says you need to come and apply and work for us. We are not here — our role as NSA employees is not to represent NSA the things that are in the press right now about the NSA. That’s not our role at all. That’s not my area of expertise. I have not read–

Me: Right, but you’re here recruiting so you’re selling the organization. I mean I’m less interested in what your specialized role is within in the NSA. I don’t care. The fact is you’re here presenting a public face for the NSA and you’re trying to sell the organization to people that are as young as high schoolers and trying to tell us that this is an attractive option in a context in which we clearly know that the NSA has been telling us complete lies. So, I’m wondering is that a qualification?

NSA_F: I don’t believe the NSA is telling complete lies. And I do believe that you know, people can, you can read a lot of different things that are portrayed as fact and that doesn’t make them fact just because they’re in newspapers.

Student A: Or intelligence reports.

NSA_F: That’s not really our purpose here today and I think if you’re not interested in that. There are people here who are probably interested in a language career.

Me: The trouble is we can’t opt out of NSA surveillance and we don’t get answers. It’s not an option. You’re posing it as a choice like ‘oh you know people who are interested can just sit here and those of us who are not interested can just leave.’ If I could opt out of NSA surveillance and it was no longer my business, that would be fine. But it is my business because all of us are being surveilled so we’re here.

NSA_F: That is incorrect. That is not our job. That is not our business.

Me: That doesn’t seem to be incorrect given the leaks. Right, and the NSA has not been able to actually put out anything that is convincing or contrary to that.

[pause]

Student A: I don’t understand what’s wrong with having some accountability.

NSA_F: We have complete accountability and there is absolutely nothing that we can or have done without approval of the 3 branches of the government. The programs that we’re enacting–

Student B: Did you read the NY Times? Did you read about the illegal wiretapping? Why are you lying?

NSA_M: Did you read the Senate judiciary report that said there have only been 15 (?) instances, and they were all documented and done correctly by the FISA courts–

Student B: I’d love to read the opinion of the FISA court that says that this program one of the NSA’s programs was violating the 4th amendment right of massive amounts of Americans, but it’s a big ‘ol secret and only people like you who will not talk with their wives when they get home about what they do all day are able to…[garbled]…protecting us from the ‘terrorist threat’, but let’s let everyone here hear more information about karaoke.

[chump]

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/ ... rsal-mind/

Jul3 by Jon Rappoport

Surveillance State: 1st step to creating a single universal mind

“Technical barriers to grafting one person’s head onto another person’s body can now be overcome, says Dr. Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group.” (Quartz.com July 2)

So…imagine we were living in that kind of society 50 years up the road. We might get something like the following:

Finally…

Your job at the Central General Corporation brings you a longed-for special perk.

You can sign up and get on the list for a new mind.

The technical description of the surgery is over your head, but the basics are thrilling.

Two solid improvements are speed and accuracy. You will think 20 times faster, and your rate of mistakes will drop to .01%. Your IQ will rise by a minimum of 50 points.

There is also an automatic signal when a problem you’re working on won’t resolve. Your left ear lobe burns. This informs you that, no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to come to a useful conclusion.

You’ll save a great deal of time.

The new mind you’re getting contains several basic elements:
157,893 generalizations (or premises) deemed to be truthful;
a deductive logic program that is ironclad;
and an instantly accessible technical library adjusted to your job.

The library automatically generates, collates, and summarizes the best available information re the problem you’re working on, in line with the previously installed generalizations (premises) and the logic program.

For an additional fee, you can opt for a social program that will enable you to shift out of work-mode and communicate effectively with colleagues, friends, and family.

The left-ear-lobe burn signal will go live whenever social conversations touch on controversial issues. This is your cue to back away and seek other company.

Your new mind will be monitored 24/7 from a combined NSA-DHS node that ensures proper functioning. If repairs are needed, a partial shutdown will deploy. Corrections will normally take less than three hours.

There is also a bullpen function. Persistent questions for which there is no available answer; personal reflections and contemplations; and any instance of social, political, financial, or existential claustrophobia will all be funneled to a dead space where they will linger and progressively fade.

A tiny but important Grand Slam Package will translate any thoughts once deemed to be creative into a sludge-mesh, where the velocity of transmission will slow to one synaptic flash per hour. In other words, you’ll achieve close to a zero rate on imagination.

At the perimeter of your new mind is the Cattle Farm. Slow moving, meaningless, and random tautologies circulate there, efficiently blocking exit from the space of consciousness.

You’re centered where you’re most needed, where you can perform usefully and swiftly.

The most delicate aspect of the new-mind surgery involves connecting programmed thought-impulses with neurotransmitters and hormones.

Throughout the day, you’ll think thoughts that trigger a carefully groomed and modulated pleasure-quotient. The overall effect will stimulate you to conclude you are satisfied.

A leak-proof algorithm will regulate the interplay of this satisfaction with the delight of being able to think faster. The consequent sum will define that elusive quality called happiness.

Thought-forms called Border Collies will continuously roam the space of your mind and organize stray electrical effects, bringing them into symmetrical globular wholes. These wholes will automatically constitute your “aesthetic sense.”

At night, while you sleep, regions of mind unreachable by the surgery will naturally expend extraordinary energies of outrage, resentment, resistance, and pure hatred. This is quite normal.

Scooper Drones will siphon off those energies and their attendant emotional wildfires into Sponge Wardens at seven key National Institutes of Health laboratories, where researchers will utilize them to build Strategic “Arab Spring” Platforms.

NASA is preparing to launch the Platforms. They will circle the Earth and beam wide-spectrum rage at key sites where wars, revolutions, and inciting events are deemed necessary to update mega-corporate healing enterprises.

Further specific information on these corporate operations is, at present, classified.

But know you are contributing to a higher-order resolution of planetary conflict.

It’s estimated that, with your new mind in tow, you’ll require full overhauls every three years. During these periods of hospitalization, you’ll experience total shutdown.

Your families, friends, and co-workers will be notified in advance.

As an historical note of interest, you recall, I’m sure, the so-called spying, the so-called Surveillance State, back in the old days. Yes?

Most people didn’t realize the program was the first attempt to create a single Universal Mind.

It’s about feedback:

When people know their every action and thought is monitored and watched, they naturally decide to change their thoughts, trim them down, make them more simple and lucid…so there is no misunderstanding.

You see?

The Surveillance State was really the first crude new-mind surgery that we have today.

But now we can guarantee the result. The science has advanced majestically. The surgery is extremely specific and comprehensive.

Fifty years ago, people didn’t understand why the NSA and other organizations were spying on everybody all the time. It wasn’t merely to stop terrorist attacks. So why?

Now it’s all clear. It was step one in a lengthy process of coordinating and manufacturing all minds to move as One.

Central Planning for Planet Earth must restructure brains so they perform, in various ways, to produce what we call The Whole X.

What is The Whole X? It’s the meshing of all human thought and function that will indeed produce the greatest good for the greatest number.

Whole X is the plan from above.

It calculates every move and every thought-pattern the billions of Earth inhabitants undertake, during every hour of every day.

Whole X dispenses justice and goods and services and sustainability from Nome to Tierra Del Fuego.

How can these four elements be parceled out unless, at the level of mind, the rational processes of every human are coordinated?

Yes, we’ve come a long way from Spy Headquarters. That was then; this is now.

We’ve walked the path from the Bill of Rights to the Bill of the Mind.

Use your gifts wisely.

To those who lament the loss of freedom, privacy, and imagination, consider that those qualities led us to the brink of extinction. We turned the corner and found enduring peace in our time.

For more information, log on to The Church of Absolute Inescapable Unity.

Jon Rappoport

http://www.nomorefakenews.com/

[seemslikeadream]

A Case of Kid Glove Journalism
The New York Times and the NSA’s Illegal Spying
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
This article is excerpted from End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. (CounterPunch/AK Press: 2007).

The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation. The statesman collects his information secretly and by secret means; he keeps back even the current intelligence of the day with ludicrous precautions The Press lives by disclosures For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences–to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice or oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.

Robert Lowe, editorial, London Times, 1851.

Robert Lowe’s magnificent editorial was written in response to the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen”. It’s a long, sad decline from what Lowe wrote in 1851 to the disclosure by the New York Times on Friday that it sat for over a year on a story revealing that the Bush administration had sanctioned a program of secret, illegal spying on US citizens here in the Homeland, by the National Security Agency.

And when it comes to zeal in protecting the Bill of Rights, between December 22, 1974 and December 16, 2005 it’s been a steady run down hill for the New York Times. Thirty-one years ago, almost to the day, here’s how Seymour Hersh’s lead, on the front page of the NYT, began:

The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources.

And here’s the lead paragraph of the NYT’s page one story on December 16, 2006 by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau:

Months after the September 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Government illegality is the sinew of Hersh’s first sentence. He says that that what the CIA did was illegal and that it violated the CIA’s charter. What the NSA has been doing is also illegal. Its warrantless domestic eavesdropping is in direct violation of the 1978 law which came about as a direct result of Hersh’s expose and the congressional hearings that followed. The eavesdropping it also violates the NSA’s charter, which gives the Agency no mandate to conduct domestic surveillance.

Yet in Friday’s story it wasn’t until the end of the third paragraph that Risen and Lichtblau wrote timidly that “Some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.”

In the eighth paragraph of Risen and Lichtblau’s story comes the shameful disclosure alluded to above:

The White House asked the New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be understand scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Hersh put the word “massive” in his first sentence, and drew undeserved fire for exaggerating the extent of surveillance, which a presidential panel finally admitted was “considerable large-scale substantial”. Risen and Lichtblau shirk any direct estimate of how big the NSA’s domestic spying has been, though one can deduce from the ninth paragraph of the story that probably many thousands of people had their phone conversations, and emails and faxes illegally spied upon by the NSA.

The Times suggests that it held up the story for a year partly to do “additional reporting”. This “additional reporting” seems to have yielded sparse results. Friday’s story was extremely long, but pretty thin, once the basic fact of NSA eavesdropping had been presented. The year’s work doesn’t seem taken the reporters beyond what was urgently leaked to them in 2004 by twelve different government officials concerned about the illegality of what the NSA was doing and the lack of congressional oversight.

Indeed, the Washington Post featured a much more compact story by Dan Eggan that not only stressed the illegality in its first paragraph but had material that Risen and Lichtblau missed, namely that the NSA had begun its illegal program right after 9/11, even before Bush signed the executive order okaying the surveillance, some time in 2002. It was Eggan who reported that faxes had also been spied upon by the NSA.

And again, it was Eggan in the Post who put the NSA story in a larger context, namely the fact that in the past week the Pentagon has been forced to admit that military intelligence agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency have also been illegally surveilling US citizens within the US.

In the TALON Program (Threat and Local Observation Notice) a Pentagon unit called Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CEFA) has been amassing thousands of files on potential threats to US military installations. Many of the subjects of these files have turned out to be antiwar groups and anti-recruiting activists. For example, when CIA director George Tenet visited as campus and encountered protests, the CEFA unit would immediately open files on the protesters. The unit was supposed to purge its files of all names and organizations caught in its drift nets that failed to meet the test of being any form of threat. But of course no such purge took place.

Eggan also reported that “Teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel stationed in major US cities [have been] conducting the type of surveillance typically performed by the FBI: monitoring the movements and activities — through high tech equipment of individuals and vehicles.”

The impression one gets from the Washington Post story is that the Bush administration had given the green light to a truly massive program of warrantless domestic surveillance by the NSA and military agencies. The New York Times reporters suggested no such context, setting the spying activities in a more forgiving light, as part of the war on terror.

Who designed this policy? Deep in the Times’ story hardy readers trudging through Risen and Lichtblau’s leaden prose would have tripped over vice president Cheney’s name in the twenty-fifth paragraph where he is described as bringing congressional leaders to his office to brief them on the program. Only at the very end of the story, in the forty-eighth paragraph do such readers as have survived the trek learn that the legal brief justifying this onslaught on the US Constitution was written by Professor John Yoo, at that time at the Department of Justice. Such readers would not have learned — as they did from the Washington Post — that Yoo had written the notorious memos justifying torture. The Times didn’t make it clear that Cheney and Yoo were key players in the Administration’s insistence that the Executive Branch has the inherent powers to sanction domestic spying without oversight from either of the other two branches of the government.

In fact members of Congress, aside from Senator Jay Rockefeller, raised no demur. It was the judiciary, in the form of the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding over the secret intelligence court established by FISA, who reprimanded Justice Department lawyers for trying to get legal warrants from her, using as “probable cause” data from the illegal surveillance, although not admitting this.

In fact it’s something of a puzzle why the Times finally did publish the story, after sitting the information leaked to it by the NSA officials worried that they might get prosecuted for illegal surveillance. It is true that Friday’s publication came in the closing hours of the battle in the US Senate over reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And its probably true that the publication of the story pushed enough wavering senators into the ranks of those who on Friday successfully fought to get the bill shelved, in a major defeat for the White House.

It’s also true that all year Risen has been hard at work on a book about the conduct of US intelligence agencies in the “war on terror” after 9/11, slated for release next spring. The book’s launch will no doubt be accompanied by some new disclosure by Risen, designed to give the book lift up the charts. Perhaps that too will be a story he’s been keeping in the larder for months.

This lamentable synergy featured in Bob Woodward’s journalistic calculations and also in the promotional circumstances of the book written by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War. The Times front-paged her stories in the paper in a manner designed to push the book up into Bestseller status. It was a clear conflict of interest that earned the paper plenty of money. This was when Miller was sent that envelope of white powder that turned out not to be anthrax spores, which gave the book yet another boost.

Risen, we should remind our readers, is one of the reporters who smeared the late Gary Webb with the charge that Webb had overhyped his 1996 San Jose Mercury News series on the CIA/contra/cocaine connections. Webb didn’t pace his disclosures to suit a book-writing schedule. He only wrote his book after he’d been forced out of his job.

Risen was also one of the New York Times reporters, along with Jeff Gerth, who raced into print with baseless smears that cost Wen Ho Lee almost a year of his life in solitary confinement, being threatened with the death penalty by FBI interrogators. On that occasion Risen and Gerth didn’t wait a year to do additional reporting and fact checking. They rushed to do the government’s bidding (relaying the smears of an Energy Department official who had it in for Wen Ho Lee) just as Risen and the New York Times clicked their heels in the NSA case, sitting on an explosive story through the 2004 election and for months thereafter, and even then agreeing to withhold certain facts.

Such submissiveness on the part of the Times harks back to self censorship by the paper in the early 1950s, covering up CIA plans for coups in Guatemala and Iran; also to the paper’s behavior in 1966 when it had information about IA shenanigans in Singapore and through south-east Asia. The editors submitted the story for review by CIA director John McCone, who made editorial deletions.

In its NSA story, the New York Times meekly agreed not to identify the “senior White House official” who successfully petitioned them to spike the story for a year. The fact that no one was specifically named allowed Bush to discount the entire story when he went the Lehrer News Hour on the next Friday evening.

[seemslikeadream]

Pentagon wanted searchable database of people’s lives in 2003

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/01/penta ... z2YBPktlM7

[seemslikeadream]

Latin American nations fuming over NSA spying allegations

By Anthony Boadle
BRASILIA | Tue Jul 9, 2013 8:41pm EDT
(Reuters) - Irate Latin American nations are demanding explanations from the United States about new allegations that it spied on both allies and foes in the region with secret surveillance programs.

A leading Brazilian newspaper reported on Tuesday that the U.S. National Security Agency targeted most Latin American countries with spying programs that monitored Internet traffic, especially in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico.

Citing documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. intelligence contractor, O Globo newspaper said the NSA programs went beyond military affairs to what it termed "commercial secrets," including oil and energy resources.

Regional leaders called for a tough response to the alleged espionage that O Globo said included a satellite monitoring stations based in Brazil's capital.

"A shiver ran down my back when I learned that they are spying on all of us," Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said in a speech on Tuesday.

She called on the Mercosur bloc of South American nations, due to meet on Friday, to issue a strong statement and demand explanations from Washington. "More than revelations, these are confirmations of what we thought was happening," she said.

Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, who has emerged as a close U.S. ally, said the reported spying was worrisome.

"We are against these kinds of espionage activities," he said in a televised interview. "It would be good for (Peru's) Congress to look with concern at privacy issues related to personal information."

Brazil's government said it set up a task force of its defense, communications, justice and foreign affairs ministries to investigate the alleged espionage and establish whether the privacy of Brazilian citizens had been violated.

The Brazilian Senate's foreign relations committee has asked U.S. ambassador Thomas Shannon to testify on the allegations. It is unclear whether Shannon, who is not obliged to testify, will do so.

Gilberto Carvalho, a top aide to President Dilma Rousseff, said a "very hard" response to the United States was needed. "If we lower our heads, they will trample all over us tomorrow," he said.

The espionage allegations surfaced one week after South American nations were outraged by the diversion of Bolivian President Evo Morales' plane in Europe because of the suspicion that Snowden was on board. {ID:nL5N0F937I]

U.S. ALLY PRIME TARGET

O Globo said a main NSA surveillance target was Colombia, the United States' top military ally in the region, where drug trafficking and movements by the FARC guerrilla group were monitored.

It said the NSA spied on military procurement and the oil industry in Venezuela, and in Mexico it gathered information on the drug trade, the energy sector and political affairs.

Also swept up in what O Globo termed as U.S. spying were Argentina, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay, Chile and El Salvador.

The article was written by Glenn Greenwald, Roberto Kaz and José Casado.

An American citizen who works for Britain's Guardian newspaper and lives in Rio de Janeiro, Greenwald was the journalist who first revealed classified documents provided by Snowden that outlined the extent of U.S. communications monitoring activity at home and abroad.

Greenwald said on Sunday in a Twitter message that he had worked with O Globo on the reports to relay more quickly the scope and reach of the alleged surveillance. The bulk of Greenwald's stories thus far have appeared in the Guardian.

As disclosed by Snowden to the Guardian, the NSA's "Prism" program collated mail, Internet chat and files directly from the servers of companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Skype.

O Globo cited documents saying that NSA agents carried out "spying actions" via "Boundless Informant," which it said cataloged telephone calls and access to the Internet.

The newspaper reported on Sunday that the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency had gathered telephone and email data in Brazil, based on documents Snowden provided to Greenwald.

Brazil's telecommunications agency said on Monday it would investigate whether local operators had violated customer privacy rules in alleged surveillance of Brazilian telecommunications data by the U.S. spy agencies.

According to O Globo, access to Brazilian communications was obtained through U.S. companies that were partners with Brazilian telecommunications firms. The report did not identify any of the companies but said an NSA program called Silverzephyr was used to access phone calls, faxes and emails.

O Globo also reported this week that the CIA and the NSA jointly ran monitoring stations to gather information from foreign satellites in 65 countries, including five in Latin America, citing documents dating from 2002 leaked by Snowden.

The so-called Special Collection Service operated from the capitals of Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Brazil. The newspaper said it was not known whether the alleged satellite espionage continued after 2002.

(Additional reporting by Jeferson Ribeiro in Brasilia, Terry Wade in Lima, Hugh Bronstein in Buenos Aires and Pablo Garibian in Mexico City; Editing by W Simon, Kieran Murray and Philip Barbara)

[seemslikeadream]

Snowden reveals Australia's links to US spy web
Date
July 8, 2013


Part 2 of Edward Snowden interview
In early June, Edward Snowden revealed himself to the world in a Guardian video interview. The second part to that interview has now been published online.

United States intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has provided his first disclosure of Australian involvement in US global surveillance, identifying four facilities in the country that contribute to a key American intelligence collection program.

Classified US National Security Agency maps leaked by Mr Snowden and published by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Brazilian O Globo newspaper reveal the locations of dozens of US and allied signals intelligence collection sites that contribute to interception of telecommunications and internet traffic worldwide.

The US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs and three Australian Signals Directorate facilities: the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Facility at Geraldton and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra are among contributors to the NSA's collection program codenamed X-Keyscore.


HMAS Harman is well connected. Photo: Andrew Meares
The New Zealand Government Security Communications Bureau facility at Waihopai near Blenheim also contributes to the program.

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X-Keyscore reportedly processes all signals before they are shunted off to various "production lines" that deal with specific issues and the exploitation of different data types for analysis - variously code-named Nucleon (voice), Pinwale (video), Mainway (call records) and Marina (internet records). US intelligence expert William Arkin describes X-Keyscore as a “national Intelligence collection mission system”.

Worldwide web


Pine Gap is part of the network.
The documents published by O Globo show that US and allied signals intelligence collection facilities are distributed worldwide, located at US and allied military and other facilities as well as US embassies and consulates.

Fairfax Media recently reported the construction of a new state-of-the-art data storage facility at HMAS Harman to support the Australian signals directorate and other Australian intelligence agencies.

In an interview published in the German Der Spiegel magazine on Sunday, Mr Snowden said the NSA operates broad secret intelligence partnerships with other western governments, some of which are now complaining about its programs.

Mr Snowden said that the other partners in the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance of the US, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand “sometimes go even further than the [National Security Agency] people themselves.”

He highlighted the British Government Communications Headquarters “Tempora” program as an example:

“Tempora is the first 'I save everything' approach ('full take') in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it. ... Right now, the system is capable of saving three days' worth of traffic, but that will be optimised. Three days may perhaps not sound like a lot, but it's not just about connection metadata. 'Full take' means that the system saves everything. If you send a data packet and if makes its way through the UK, we will get it. If you download anything, and the server is in the UK, then we get it.”

Mr Snowden also argued that the “Five eyes” partnerships are organised so that authorities in each country can "insulate their political leaders from the backlash" when it became public "how grievously they're violating global privacy".

The Der Spiegel interview was conducted by US cryptography expert Jacob Appelbaum and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras via encrypted emails shortly before Mr Snowden revealed himself publicly as the source of leaks of highly classified information on US signals intelligence and surveillance programs.

Another US NSA whistle-blower William Binney also recently disclosed that Australia was involved in the trial of an earlier US-designed Internet traffic interception and analysis program codenamed "ThinThread".

Other countries involved in the trials were the UK, Australia and Germany a decade ago. ThinThread was not adopted but Australia has also been directly involved with later collection programs codenamed "Trailblazer", "Turbulence" and "Trafficthief".

Stranded

The US government has charged Mr Snowden with offences including espionage and revoked his passport.

He has been stranded at a Moscow airport for two weeks after leaving Hong Kong where the US Government has sought his extradition.

Three Latin American countries, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, have now offered Mr Snowden political asylum after European Governments last week denied their airspace to a plane carrying the Bolivian president Evo Morales home from a conference in Moscow after the US State Department alleged that the former US intelligence contractor was on board.

Russian officials have publicly urged Mr Snowden to take up Venezuela's asylum offer. Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elias Jaua said on Sunday that his government had not yet been in contact with Mr Snowden.

Mr Jaua said he expected to consult on Monday with Russian officials. Mr Snowden is being assisted by the anti-secrecy organisation, WikiLeaks.