Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

[AdamSmith]

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

• • 
    Glenn Greenwald
  • guardian.co.uk,
    
    Saturday 4 May 2013 08.22 EDT

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente, on CNN, discussing government's surveillance capabilities Photograph: CNN screegrab

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN's Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored:

Let's repeat that last part: "no digital communication is secure", by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained "that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T" and that "contrary to the government's depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic." But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein's claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.



Strangely, back in 2002 - when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak - the Pentagon's attempt to implement what it called the "Total Information Awareness" program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted - without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo - with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

"'In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance - and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight - that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,' [uAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. 'Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'"

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That's why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter's TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one's views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston

[RA1]

I need a server like that so I can store my billions and billions of aviation memorabilia.

I know for sure that the IRS can look into anyone's bank account while talking to you across his or her desk.

I have not doubted for a long time that US communications could be recorded but have found solace in the fact that who can listen to all that?

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest rimchair]

But do people support this recording?

[Guest hitoallusa]

The government could record everything but finding a meaning lead out of millions of phone calls is still challenging a taunting test. Look at the Boston bombing. The suspect was on the terrorist list yet the FBI failed to monitor him and prevent the bombing.

Greenwald writes his article in a very unique perspective. He is passionate but lacks balance. I don't understand why the government is an enemy to him rather an entity he needs to work with.

As soon as new super quantum computers or a highly compact computer chip grid based on pencil carbon particles gets introduced, the government will be able to cover more communications with less manpower and resources. Furthermore the government might be able to do it without actually listening in all the calls made inside and out in the US as new cutting edge technologies are added to their surveillance system.

[lookin]

In September, the National Security Agency's new Utah Data Center will come on line.

[Guest hitoallusa]

More jobs and more investment in technology.. A data center like that isn't bad and even janitors who work there get paid well.. Maybe something close to what we see in Minority Report will be possible such as stopping a murder just in time before it happens.. This kind of investment in survelliance technology will help us. I welcome it.

[RA1]

In September, the National Security Agency's new Utah Data Center will come on line.

At a first causal glance this pic looks like it could be Gort who you will remember had the authority to do whatever necessary to preserve peace.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest rimchair]

Some us do watch something beside Faux News! Frontline on PBS did a story on exactly what the Government is doing with everything they 'collect':

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/

[ihpguy]

After just viewing ZERO DARK THIRTY, this is wonderful reading. Thanks.

[AdamSmith]

What if Nixon Could Read Your Emails?

In Enemies: A History of the FBI, Tim Weiner says the bureau has changed since Nixon and Hoover. But some practices have endured.

—By Adam Serwer | Wed Apr. 18, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Mother Jones

Oliver F. Atkins/National Archives

On the heels of a 1939 Supreme Court decision outlawing wiretapping, President Franklin Roosevelt handed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover secret authorization to spy on Americans, telling himself that the high court couldn't have meant to extend the prohibition to matters of national security. In 2005, FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-acting Attorney General James Comey led a small rebellion against George W. Bush's warrantless spying. Their defiance culminated in a confrontation in John Ashcroft's hospital room, as Bush's White House counsel and chief of staff, Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card, attempted to get around Comey by pushing Ashcroft, then recovering from surgery, to reauthorize the program from his sickbed.

The contrast, highlighted in Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and author Tim Weiner's recent book Enemies: A History of the FBI, leaves one with the impression that the arc of history bends towards a more lawful and accountable national security state, and the hope that, Weiner writes, "in a time of continual danger Americans might be safe and free." As FDR's attorney general Francis Biddle once wrote, however, "the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president," and just about every president since has found himself at war, if only against an abstract concept like crime or terrorism.

Still, Weiner has a point. Much of what the FBI does is no longer secret, though how it performs some of its duties remains so. The FBI director no longer gathers intelligence on a president's political enemies, a practice that reached its zenith during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations. In response to the Watergate scandal, the Senate Church Committee of the 1970s established congressional oversight concerning the activities of America's national security agencies. The bureau no longer contains a section that works to purge gays and lesbians from government positions—state, local, and federal. An attorney general like the Theodore Roosevelt administration's Charles Bonaparte, who thought vigilante mobs were an appropriate check on labor protests, probably couldn't make it through a Senate confirmation hearing. Probably.

The bureau's history, though, is riven with lawlessness, and that is a legacy it has not entirely shed. Though a civilian agency, the history of the FBI is intimately tied to the American habit of declaring war on nouns. The forerunner of the bureau was created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1908, who acceded to the presidency after William McKinley was assassinated in broad daylight by an anarchist. He established this forerunner to the FBI in defiance of Congress, which initially said no because lawmakers feared the establishment of an American secret police. Yet Roosevelt bragged to a British politician in 1908 that as president he possessed more power than "any great republic or constitutional monarchy of modern times."

The lawmakers' fears were well-founded. For 48 years, the FBI was indeed a covert police organization run by a man whose efforts were frequently focused on policing the political beliefs and private behavior of American citizens—not just busting crime or thwarting terrorism. Hoover's FBI broke the law casually and frequently; its tools of "law enforcement" routinely included warrantless wiretapping, blackmail, and burglary. Hoover's wiretaps and break-ins weren't sanctioned by law. For 50 years, Weiner notes, Hoover just turned the wiretaps off before testifying before Congress so when they asked whether he was wiretapping anyone, he could say "no" and be technically stating the truth. And Hoover protected his authority—and criminal ways—for decades by sharing the fruits of his illegal and pervasive surveillance of US citizens with presidents who craved dirt on their political foes. Hoover hunted Soviet spies (sometimes effectively and sometimes not) and big-name gangsters, but he "saw no great distinction among American radicals—Communists, Socialists, anarchists, pacifists," Weiner writes. "They were enemies of the state." Though his powers allowed Hoover to record Martin Luther King Jr. having sex in his hotel room—Hoover believed the civil rights movement was just an extension of the communist plot to subvert the United States—Weiner shows that Hoover's FBI often was inept at solving the acts of terrorism that justified the bureau's existence, like the 1920 Wall Street bombing that remained the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until Timothy McVeigh destroyed the FBI building in Oklahoma City. Hoover's FBI dismantled the Ku Klux Klan and ended its reign of terror in the South, but only after being directly ordered to do so by President Johnson. After all, it's not like they were communists.

There are major distinctions between the Hoover FBI and the Mueller FBI. The bureau is certainly no longer a tool paranoid chief executives can impulsively deploy against their political enemies. Congressional oversight exists. The bureau has developed a culture of integrity that has led officials to oppose not just Bush's warrantless wiretapping, but its use of torture. In between sensational headlines describing FBI orchestrated sting plots that were never going to come to fruition, the bureau has managed to prevent crimes in addition to investigating them.

Yet much of what the FBI once did illegally is now simply legal. The end result of Mueller and Comey's rebellion was that Congress passed a law legalizing warrantless surveillance, with the support of then-Sen. Barack Obama. Technology has made the old FBI black bag jobs an anachronism, since the Patriot Act allows its agents to acquire much of the same kind of information with less effort. Weiner quotes former FBI Director William Webster expressing concern in 1984 following a sting operation targeting an assassination plot against Indian prime minister Rajiv Ghandi; Webster was worried that stings could turn the FBI into a "Gestapo organization." Yet, as Weiner notes, such operations have become the bureau's primary weapon for fighting domestic terrorism, even to the point of infiltrating mosques absent any concrete evidence of connections to terrorism. The attorney general does set legal limits on the FBI's ability to snoop on Americans—but today those limits allow agents to consider race and religion as "factors" in beginning investigations. Peaceniks are apparently still a national security threat. Hoover drew up a secret list of "thousands" of "suspected subversives" in America who might be indefinitely detained in the event of a "national emergency." Today's Terrorist Watchlist reportedly contains over a million. Despite Congress' oversight of the bureau, not even Nixon was as adept at maintaining official secrecy as the current president, so it's hard to know how well that oversight is actually working.

Weiner's Enemies leaves the reader with the impression that today's FBI is more effective and less lawless than it's ever been. This is no doubt true. But given that once-illegal activity has become legal, it's less comforting. In the end, we didn't banish Hooverism entirely.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/04/tim-weiner-enemies-history-of-the-fbi-review

[Guest hitoallusa]

I don't like Tim Weiner's books because they are not balanced. He emphasizes in his

books that he went through numerous documents, references and interviews to write them but I don't think he didn't have enough time to analyze them thoroughly ( I don't blame him since it's too much for one person to handle). It is my speculation, I might say,

he skimmed through vast references and only looked for things that can corroborate his main theme

and concentrated on it. I think in The Legacy of Ashes he invested more time than he did for Enemies. It seems it was written in haste. I enjoyed The Legacy of Ashes but didn't for Enemies. I stopped reading it since I thought it was kind of waste of my time reading one more story with a similar theme. It's like two versions of Cinderella.

Another thing you have to remember is that books like these are written to make profits and they require a lot of money to write and publish it. They can't never be a good reference to make arguments. But a good source to find references for people to judge things for themselves.

[RA1]

Any government, and especially federal, agency is only as good as those who are charged with oversight allow it to be. I also believe that an agency is as bad as its' oversight allows it to be.

Think about this week's story of the IRS which is NOT an independent agency. I have personally seen as a happenchance insider how arrogant, insensitive and disregarding of taxpayer's rights they can be while participating in an aircraft grab.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest hitoallusa]

Well every government agency has its ups and downs. At least this kind of illegal activity got exposed and being investigated. I'm optimistic it will get better otherwise the country will fall. I don't see that happening..

[RA1]

Unfortunately the IRS "errors" being investigated are not illegal (so far) but they are VERY bad politics and shameful activity. Who knows where this will go? It indirectly led to Nixon resigning but so far as I can tell, no one wants Joe Biden to be President.

Personally I am not willing to let the government do silly things and just say, oh well, shit happens. There has to be some accountability. When I fly, if something happens I only have to look into the mirror to see who is at fault (if I am still alive). Many of these other folks hold lives in their hands also.

Best regards,

RA1

[Guest hitoallusa]

I don't think it's a simple error.. Its implication is huge and they failed to report it when they had chance. If the IRS did this to gays then it would be discrimination and hate crime. No one needs to be treated unfairly because of their political belief. Now who ordered this is my question? There must be someone who set this guideline...

I have seen many democrats who don't help the poor but wants government to help them. Fight for gay marriage but abuse their spouses and don't respect their marriage. Wants immigration reform but treat minorities as lower human beings, only befriends those who can be benefit to them and stop communicating once someone is no use. Still government runs and the world keeps going although there are problems... Either there are much more good people quietly doing their job or there must be God's intervention. Maybe both...

[RA1]

_{I am willing to believe in God's intervention but I think many liberals believe in using other people's money to accomplish their stated goals. That is the bottom line you are suggesting and I think it correct. Good for you.}

_{Best regards,}

_RA1